Anything that you’ve shot that is essentially symmetrical will become somewhat evocative as a palindrome – especially if it’s French. This would make an incredible poster, since it’s basically two medium format negatives side by side (although they’re the same one). In other words, this would easily go to 10 x 10 feet.

In other words, when I have my exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum (after I’m long gone) this should be done as large as possible before grain shows up, and be at the center of the show. Then all around it, the show could be setup like an old fashioned French Salon, with prints all over the place, practically on top of each other, and a place for people to sit and eat and drink in the midst of it all.

Artists of any type would be admitted for free. Photography, even flash photography, would be welcome. And anyone with money would be charged a hefty fee. Poets Walk, should not be done large, but buried in a corner for only the most devout to find. And the floor would have plush rugs; windows would be covered with dusty velvet curtains with sashes. You get the idea. Oh, and it should be dusty, so that when the curtains are pulled open, you get shafts of dusty, twinkling light. And of course smoking will be welcome. If you have a problem with second hand smoke, you can go next door where the exhibit is shown on film or whatever recording device they’re using at the time.

Why don’t you try a few?  Let me see what you come up with.  The secret, if there is one, is to simply look at the image and imagine what it will look like, and how it will line up flipped.

Wherever you went – there was this juxtaposition of old and new art. Of course, coming from the U.S. I found the new things disturbing. I wanted to walk through places that were hundreds or thousands of years old and hadn’t been disturbed by time. I wonder, if when Europeans come to the states, they feel how “new” everything is.

Rollei TLR, 1992. My second trip to Europe, this time I went with my friend to Belgium for a few days (by train).

Paris, Rollei TLR, TMY 1991

Like many photographic enigmas, is there any way to tell whether this was moving or not?  The moving stairs, invented in the late 1900’s were originally run by steam driven engines.  This shot, was taken in Paris, during the autumn (leaves are all dead) and that may give a clue.  Whether it matters or not; that is up to you.

I tested it here first — you’ll see the tweet in the upper right corner of post…

But now for the first time I put the ability to tweet in the PHOTOGRAPHY STORE.  You can now TWEET an individual image from the store.  This is of course useful to me for obvious reasons.

Here’s an example from the store – what it looks like IN ACTION.

I’ve done enough today; and it’s hot enough outside; that I think I deserve my afternoon nap.

Oh, there’s what tweet looks like in the store…  LET’S PICK A GOOD ONE.  Oh, yeah, this one from France is my current “make me happy” print.

THE STORE TWEET WIDGET ON ONE POST

It just is.  It reminds me of a painting from my old psychiatrist’s office that I’d stare at for the fifteen minutes I’d spend waiting for him.  He was always late.  But it was worth it.

Those were in the days when I could afford an east side psychiatrist (I was in el corporate world).  I used to go twice a week ($175 ea).

All artists should be able to see psychiatrists at least once a week.

Now I can only afford to see him every few months.  He was especially good, I think, with creative people.  How many hours we spent as I was trying to get myself ready to leave the safety of the big corporate job.  How many metaphors.  How much pain and fear about being poverty stricken.  And then when I was able (with his help) to make the leap – I could no longer – irony of ironies – no longer afford him; but I also didn’t need him, at least not in the crisis mode way.

I gave him a print of Night Storm the last time I saw him on a regular basis.  I should have charged him $175 for it. (Just kidding… I think).

But seeing a shrink quite often helped me open up; And now you can tweet this blog post, if you want to about photographers and the need for them to see shrinks.  Now on the other hand -  if I was devotedly religious, I might have seen a priest, or a rabbi or a zen master for substantially less money; though they usually want donations, don’t they?

Also known as Heart of Paris. I began flipping images and lining them up like this a long time ago. Sort of along the lines of what you might see in a kaleidoscope. Do they even make kaleidoscopes anymore for kids. The one I had, had three mirrors, but also little flakes of glittery things and a frosted lens that you looked through.

Okay, just made quick movie with Canon 500D (cat – what else) and posted to YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=beckermanphoto#p/a

Uhm… you don’t need to watch the movie unless you’re really bored, but how do I get the code to embed it in my wordpress (self-hosted) blog?

Well, maybe you might watch a little bit of it, if you want to see my big toe.

DB

oops… okay, I got it:

Which won’t matter much now; but it will soon (when holiday time comes around).

Anyway, I have 30 prints to get out, and they are all due by end of next week.  No, only one of them is from an individual.  The rest are from art buyers, interior designers, and architects.

Good stuff.  I like to have a stack of prints to get through.  It means for now I can put aside looking through all these negatives from 20 years ago; and in fact, I can begin to put some of the better ones into the store.  The little fine art photography store in a corner of the world wide web.  The kind that you find when you make a wrong turn on a night rainy night on a country lane.

There’s that sign swinging in the rain; a little creaky.  And you go in and find five lanky farmers with their feet up on the pot-bellied stove.  (That’s this blog).  And you look around and see prints that you’ve never seen before; and curious, they’re pretty good for a country store.  You begin to wonder what it’s all about; and your shaking your umbrella out, when a guy that seems to be the proprietor approaches.

“Can I help you with anything?”

You tell him that you’re lost.  You must’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere.

And he tells you that most of the people that stop by have taken a wrong turn.  But unlike the scene from Psycho – this place isn’t scary, and the guy you’re talking to is friendly.  He invites you to look around while you dry out; and to your surprise, you find a gallery of black and white photographs that look like they were taken in the late 50’s.  And they’re all signed by the same guy: Beckerman.

You find yourself staring at one picture, bare trees in Central Park.  It draws you in.  And you are about to ask the price when the guy who you talked to approaches and tells you that he took the picture about ten years ago.

Wow.  Pretty good.  You’ve seen the shot before, but this one is really good.  He holds it up so you can see it in the light of the potbelly stove – and now you are both glowing nicely.  Instead of offering you wine and cheese, he asks if you’d like a slug of moonshine…

My FB PO-hem

You say you wanna be my friend on facebook

But why?

I swear, I don’t know you.  And I can’t imagine you know me.

So how can we be friends.

On Twitter I can see what in the world you’ve been tweeting about

And what sorts of things you are into and maybe we can become better tweeters

With each other’s help

But how can I be your friend if I don’t have anything to go on?

How can I?

Is the idea just to see how many friends I can get?

Please.  Be my friend.  I want to have more friends than you.

Although as I say, I don’t know you.

Well I don’t want to be left out in the cold.

I want to be where the hip people learn to be hip.

I want to be where the hip people learn to do back flips.

I want to be here and there and where the hip people walk on ships

And ocean liners

And pretend to be kinder

But as I remind ya

I don’t know ya

And so

I can’t

Ex-

Spect

to throw this speck

Your request

With all the rest.

Then I pressed the MOVIE button on the camera

And took clips of me walking around the house looking at negatives

and then put them into iMovie

Which I hadn’t used before

And then I added Bob Dylan’s

THUNDER ON THE MOUNTAIN!

and I had a movie video, ready for YOU TUBE or YOU ANYTHING or I-ANYTHING

and thought I’d sit myself down and write out a poem

that had no form or structure that was in any sense

classical or had any real theme other than

that I don’t know you from Adam or Eve and you

want to be my friend…

Which reminds me of the Dylan song:

You’ve got a lot of nerve

To say you are MY FRIEND

And so dylan, facebook, and movies and clips all wind up together in one bit of verbiage.

Plus-X, Pentax 67, 1993, Central Park

Probably tonight:

8 x 12 no mat goes from $95 to $115 (so that it’s the same pricing as 11 x 14)

8 x 122 mat goes from $120 to $140 (same reason.  Don’t want too many different prices)

15 x 23 goes from $195 to $250 (Again, bringing the rectangle prints to same prices as square-ish prints) Also I simply have more orders than I can comfortably do without way too much printing.  These are all projects from corporations, condos, etc. and the small differences in pricing (to those who have money) are a big deal to me.

18 x 23 from $250 $275

19 x 23 From $245 to $250

Alright.  That’s boring stuff if you aren’t thinking about picking up a print.  But if you have been thinking about it, I like to make the announcement before raising the prices.

Already totally wise to the ways of the street.  First he pushed his younger sister before me, but she was too shy; and then he negotiated
a price for posing.  Mostly in French.  It was like running into a French version of the Bowery Boys.

As we made our way around France, I had to force Dirk to detour to Arles for obvious reasons.  [I have been told that this is prob. not Arles and I'll go along with that, and just say it was on the way...]

Where exactly…?  Dunno.  I remember seeing fields where there were lots of nuclear reactors off in the backgroud.

Yes, the light was the same light as Vincent saw, and I could really understand what got him so excited, though my friend Dirk was in a hurry to get to the next spot, where that was, I have no idea now. This entire trip was done with the Rollei TLR. My main mistake was not bringing a tripod, but I ended up buying one during my first week in Paris.

So I don’t know where this was… which is usual.  It is somewhere in France.  And the time was / is 1991 (Sept).

how would you feel if I added one of those VERIFY THESE WORDS, or HOW MUCH IS 2 PLUS 2 widgets to the blog?

Then I think I could stop having to approve / moderate the comments.

And if some commercial type wants to sit there all day and post stuff with links to their site, I can individually block them.

Now if you say: NO!  DAVE!  Don’t do it.  We hate having to type that stuff, and besides most of us are going blind and can’t read those letters.  Personally, I don’t like ‘em and many times if I see that please type the letters you see thing, I’ll just skip it.

I know what Matt will say: JUST LEAVE THE WHOLE THING OPEN AND DON’T MODERATE ANYTHING.

No.  I don’t like the spam crap I get.  I really don’t, and I don’t want to let them win.  It’s as simple as that.  It has nothing to do with content.  Well, maybe it does a little.  If you write something really nasty – and ill-informed – and let’s say anti-some group; I’ll probably zap it.  Free speech?  No.  Go out on your corner and scream that racial crap if you want, but I’m not that far gone yet that I’ll allow it to piss me off in my own blog.

Those are the two issues I have to deal with:

1) Vile stuff (and believe me, people do write some vile stuff that I zap, along the lines of denigrating some group)

2) Links (not in the comment itself usually) but as the person who did the posting, that is misleading, and ends up taking you to porn, or even worse, sites pretending to be a legitimate site like Paypal or Yahoo where they would just love to get you to login.

I think the owner of a site, if they know how, should protect their users as much as possible.  Not from controversy – but from thieves and cut-throats as well.

It’s a few years ago that I tried to do shots from the parts of the Bronx that had meaning to me; from where I grew up. This was one of them, as there’s a long story connected with it. I don’t think it’s on Fordham Road any longer, but in a nutshell, when I was about eight years old, my father smacked me around real good for scratching my name into my sister’s dresser.

Turned out that she had scratched my name into her own dresser to get me into trouble, which it did.

My father was prone to fits of anger, especially after World War II – and in this case – he picked me up under the arms and slammed me a few times against my bedroom wall, asking whether I thought that money grew on trees.

With me telling him that I wouldn’t scratch my name in my dresser; and my younger sister, seeing how this whole thing had blown up, and now being scared herself, wouldn’t confess and hid in her room. And so when my dad was through with me, I climbed out my bedroom window (on the first floor) and walked all the way to this recruiting center on Fordham Road.

I didn’t really think I was old enough to enlist. But that was about as far as I could go, and the Marines took me in, and gave me lunch, trying to get my name out of me which eventually they did; and my parents were called, and my father and mother arrived by car and picked me up. My father was even more angry now, since I had embarrassed him in front of the Marines. Anyway – that’s why this is one of those touchstones of my youth. Places I could visit that would bring back memories – both good and bad.