September 11, 2009
This officially concludes a week of impatience as I waited gracelessly for my Prairie Apothecary project slide film to return from the lab in Los Angeles. These are automated lab digital scans of the original film negatives, taken at random by the computer because it cannot understand why I don’t shoot within frames. Of course, my pictures expose the entire negative, and the lab computer isn’t equipped to understand that so it goes a bit haywire as the lab techs say, and snaps images more or less at random.
According to the folks at the lab, “we have to do your scans as the last of the day, because they computer freaks out.” I felt sorry for the computer in the last few days, thinking of its rough nights after working on my pieces. But maybe – as I alway fully endorse a good shaking out of the dust from the rafters – it’s like taking mescaline for the computer, and it’s having a really wild organic experience within all its clever circuitry.
When it wasn’t raining at Ragdale (where I was artist in residency for two weeks in August), I was out in the prairie experimenting and testing various hunches and possibilities – trying out some new broken cameras, and testing out a new technique for imbedding textual elements in the photographs. Thirty rolls later, and then off they went to Eric via FedEx, then to the lab for development and negative scanning, then uploading to me and the nine hours of downloading. I will end up spending hours with Hamid at the lab with these, fiddling, which is a joy because he is a genius and I learn so much from him.
The initial proofs look promising. I think there are about 90 good images to come out of the 30 rolls. I have put a few up here – each of these photos are a random slice from a full roll of continuous panoramic image, which means one 3 ft x 21 ft print, or else what you see here – a collection of about 8-12 individual square prints.
There are so far three poem-texts that accompany these images, but that will need to slightly wait before posting some fragments from them. They will probably appear as in excerpt on my main website with sections from the sketchbook.
Regardless, they are a bit grim and sad, so let’s just enjoy the unabashed, redemptive prettiness of the pictures before they become all glued up with inferred meaning, shall we?
Speaking of glue and redemption, I’m off to the old cemetery momentarily to meet with the curator. I think it’s lovely that graves are curated there. Gives an extra motivation to make one’s life a work of art.