well, its 2018 ..
and i have gone back to my roots, sort of. for a handful of years i did my best to become a better printer
by printing virtually anything i could find. i would expose film at the wrong shutter speeds and exposure settings
and process in a variety of different ways. there was a liquor store box i found on the street, all in tatters and it had handles and it became
a reservoir for all the negatives i had to print. i filled it to the top with this processed film, as well as anything and everythng else i cold find and
was translucent enough that i could get an image on paper with it. lids from take out containers found on the street ( litter ) junk i just collected .. like
shards of broken glass, things i coated with fiberglass resin, plexiglass i heated with a blowdryer and let cool in weird shapes anyhow the images made
had a certain look to them.
(rewind ) as a kid i was given a microscope. it was a lot of fun seeing how things looked enlarged in an eyepiece. i had premade slides gotten from
the hobby shop, bug parts plant parts to0. i took tweezers and rubbed plant parts on slides to look at the pollen sometimes and was taught how to do a
blood smear ( i think that is what it is called ). i got a telescope a few years later. it was a 3″ reflector gotten from edmond scientific ( i still have it )
nothing extremely fancy but it was fun to look at the moon and once in a while get a chance to find a planet to look at.
( fast forward a little bit ) i’ve always been a cloud gazer so looking at coffee grinds or coffee foam became a fun distraction. friends would say
“whats my coffee say” and it was fun to tell people random stuff i saw in the coffee. its just like looking at clouds, and if you have an active imagination you can
see just about anything.
(2018 ) well its 2018 and i have come full circle back to where i started but not really. i’ve used up all the mistreated film and rubbish i printed years ago, and while i could
revisit my past directly i found it more fun to revisit it indirectly. lately i’ve been using my iphone a bit more and having a lot of fun making other worldly photographs. ive combined
my interests in stargazing and gazing into my morning coffee ( and apple cider and pint ) and found the same sorts of things i used to find in the darkroom. im reminded
how everythng is the same but different, and how somethimes things that are different might be the same.
i don’t have much of the imagery from the 90s scanned / digitized. they were what i referred to as “hybrid prints” singular images, from a series that has been part of my
method, with and without a camera. the images i have started to make these days rhyme well with those and hand colored film work ive done the past few years
