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