Still Mining the Negative Archive
I've been plodding through my 50,000 or so negatives looking for ones that I should have printed -- or did print and now can't stand to look at the prints I made back then. What I call my metaproject, "Spying on a Memory" is a collection of prints from 18 different projects. I'm printing them small so they will mat on 11x14 boards. I started out expecting perhaps 300 prints but I'm currently up to nearly 600. It's a good thing I'm up to 2013. Because I have been printing so regularly for the past decade or so I'm not finding as many in the recent contact sheets that I want to print.
In "Diana and Nikon" Janet Malcolm notes that "Many good photographers would be elevated to great if they destroyed most of their work." In printing roughly one out of every 100 negatives I'm on my way to great -- or maybe to good rather than "meh!". It would be an interesting exercise to go through the 600 or so prints and winnow it down to 100.
January's Print of the Month (or thereabouts) is from my "Hangouts" project -- Ristoranti Tiffany is an upscale Italian Cafe along Hamburg's "Collonade", a very upscale shopping area in the heart of the city. Apart from liking this print a lot I had to smile more than a bit at it thinking about at least three other prints from the same project:
I'm still working on the design of my upcoming exhibit at the Highline Heritage Museum in Burien that is scheduled for March/April/May. It's an unusual space -- not as simple as putting a bunch of prints on the wall in a row. My best guess as of today is that it will be about 45 prints drawn from five different projects.
Happy new year, by the way.
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