I didn’t know who Nadler was when I took this shot way back when – well let’s just say it was before he had the weight reduction surgery.

But he was at a press conference and I happened to walk by with the Rollei TLR, and this made me feel like a real old time press guy.  He was larger than life; and I was pretending to be a guy with a press badge sticking out of my hat, maybe back in the 40’s.

He’s a smart guy, and usually on the “right” i.e. “my side” of the political spectrum.

From his site: “He began his political career in 1976 in the New York State Assembly, where he served for 16 years. In 1992, following the death of Congressman Ted Weiss, Nadler was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in a special election and has served in Congress ever since. He was re-elected to his ninth full term in 2008, receiving 80 percent of the vote.”

Upper East Side. 1991. Pentax 6 x 7. Hard to believe, but in those days – I belonged to this crowd.  I never had to wear a suit, which was a nice thing about being a programmer.  During those days I would usually walk to work (about four miles) unless I was carrying a heavy camera, or lugging a tripod (as I was this day).  It was always the #6 train.  Narrow.  Crowded.  Disgusting during the summer.  And how much shooting I did on and about the subway; and never to have put it together.  Well maybe I feel it has been properly covered by others; or that I simply don’t have the attention span to stick with one project for a long time.

You can see how I’ve veered off from the Paris stuff because I ran into medium format and large format negatives.  But I am also close to finishing up the European work.  Maybe one more day.  Then I can either get back to shooting (I miss my HDR experiments); or head towards the Southwest.  I don’t think I’ll do that.  No, maybe there are a few very good shots from the Southwest, but I’m not going to go trolling for more.  France was enough for now.  I already’ve put more in the French section than I thought I would, and I have about five more to scan tomorrow…

I remember walking along near the West Side highway, back in 1991 with a 645 camera, and I found this lonesome tree which I never posted (until now).

If you think I have a hard time remembering where photos were taken in France – it’s even worse in our own Southwest. But this I do remember was on a highway on the way from Sedona to Flagstaff. The elevation was getting higher, and although it wasn’t early early morning, there was still frost in the air. Oh, the year. That I know since I was brilliant enough to mark it on the neg. sleeve: 1990. And this was my first trip to Sedona. I don’t have a lot from this first trip… but will scan them as I come across the ones I like.

Slight detour as I scan some view camera work from 1991. I’m using the Epson 4990 which is a flatbed with transparency cover. It can scan optically at 4800 dpi. Frankly, these are too large for my purposes, so I’m scanning to 20 x 24 at 300 dpi without any interpolation. As I go over each bit of the photograph removing bits of hair from the scan, and even some things that left a black line / scratch on the negative, I admit to myself, if I ever were to go back to film – the view camera would be the reason. The detail really is that much fun for me to look at.

Thank you black feral cat for letting me get this close with the lumbering view camera, and allowing me to put a new holder in, and waiting for the click of the plunger, before darting back into your home.

Most of my sales, whether for large amounts or small are straightforward.  The person adds items to the cart; pays for them; gets them; and usually that’s that unless they write a note to thank me for the pictures.

The next level, may involve say 6 emails back and forth:   how soon can they get it since they need the print for a special occasion; or is it possible to get a discount; or how much will it cost to ship prints to Afghanistan.  Whatever.  Again, these are normal inquiries and they almost always end up with a completed sale.

But, there are several elongated threads that seem to go on forever, and end with nada.  And this year,  the winner of THE RETAIL ANNOYANCE CONTEST will be announced.  Winners are judged in the following areas:

1) The number of replies, i.e. how long the email thread is

2) Whether there was any extra sort of work involved, such as figuring out what an image will look like blown up to 5 x 6 feet; or if I were to do it in sepia, could they see an actual sample.

3) And the overall quality of how the process finally dissolved into wasted time.

This year’s winner are Steve and Ellen R. from the great state of Wyoming

The first thread began with the usual opening:

“Dear Dave,

I would just like to tell you how much I have enjoyed your photography.  My husband and I have found one of your pictures (Chess Table in Rain) that we just love.  We would like to know whether it is possible to print this at a larger size than what you show on your site.”

And that was the beginning of a thread that eventually reached 42 emails (that includes my replies and their emails) and that went on for a period of four months.

During this process, I sent out several samples, showing what the print would look like blown up (yes, 35mm film will be grainy when you get up to 6 feet long) and a sample showing what the paper was like.

For every response, on my part, there was a reply asking another question.  Eventually, I began to believe that the couple from Wyoming were simply bored, and out to torment me.

The process devolved when I pointed out that I would have to send the print rolled in a big tube, because it couldn’t be shipped flat.  That was the beginning of the end.  They wanted to know the diameter of the tube; how long it would take to flatten out; and whether this wouldn’t be ruining the print.

I didn’t answer this e-mail.  I couldn’t take it anymore.  They wrote back again, with similar questions, and again, I simply didn’t answer.  It was my turn to torment them.

Eventually (I waited a full month) – I wrote back that this was a normal way to send large prints, and that it wouldn’t damage the print.  I didn’t get any reply to that, and didn’t expect to.  My guess was that they had found someone else to question by then.

Now, I don’t want to be sexist, but men and women are absolutely different when it comes to making a purchase – whether on the web – or in any retail situation.  Yes, I am about to generalize:

So, for example, when I was selling photography on the street (yes, I was once one of those street vendors outside the Metropolitan Museum) – I can’t tell you how many times a couple would stop by.  It was almost always the woman who noticed the photography and stopped.  She would ask a few questions, but reasonable ones; and while she was admiring the photograph, half the time the husband, or boyfriend would step in, whisper something to her, and she’d tell you apologetically that she’d be back the next day, which meant the deal was over.

Every vendor who had been doing this for a while knew that the man had to be kept out of the transaction.  There were even schemes, if you had two buyers selling next to each other, where one seller would help out the other by trying to distract the husband if it looked like he was going to spoil the sale.

You could imagine the conversation: “Do we really need another piece of art in the house?”

“But it’s beautiful.  It would go perfectly by the sofa.”

“Maybe some other time honey.  It’s okay, but I think the price is high.”

Or whatever reason.

But I will tell you this.  Selling through the web may have it’s issues; but compared to standing on the street in all sorts of weather; and lugging the stand around; and going through 12 plus hour days where you didn’t make a dime — no comparison.  One other thing you should know.  Most of the photographs you see on the street have been copied in China from large format art books; reproduced for pennies and put into frames that cost a few cents.  Only a few of the vendors are selling original photography, and they usually don’t last very long since they are competing with mass produced junk and most people simply cannot tell the difference; though every once in a while you do run into someone who knows something about photography and is willing to pay for quality.  But they are rare and far apart.

I do need to trust my own images to convey what I felt at the time. When I put the site up, I thought that I should carve out the New York black and white niche. How else could I make a spot for myself on the web? But after many years of concentrating on New York, I began to tire of it, and switch to different media. First was infrared film. No one would want these, but I’ll do them anyway. They turned out to sell briskly. And then I switched to digital infrared. These also sold well. And then I fooled around with HDR, and these also sold. When I say, sold well, what I mean is that they had the same or maybe slightly better rate of sale then what I had been doing.

So now I find myself expanding to Paris. And I have tons of work from my Ansel days in the Southwest. I begin to have more trust in myself – and that my niche may always be mainly New York – but not to limit myself anymore to this, and to have some trust that good images will sell, no matter where they were taken. (Not this one – because pictures of cemeteries rarely sell for obvious reasons – but I think the idea of expanding the site is a good one).

Besides gaining confidence in my own work – I’m also at a point where images that were very difficult to print in the darkroom – can be brought back to life fairly easily in the digital post-processing age.

If you read the blog regularly – you’ll remember lots of complaining on my part about sales being slow, or if sales are brisk, not having time to shoot.  But lately, sales are coming in regularly – many are from the art buyers, and these might be for twenty or thirty at a time.  And I’m having a much easier time getting them out.  I think what changed was switching to the mac.  Yes – the money I put into buying a high-powered mac, has simply cut the amount of time I’ve spent doing the processing and printing dramatically.  Thank you everyone that convinced me to make the move.  I haven’t dipped into the PC parallel Windows version that’s installed for any reason since getting the mac.  The only times I’ve had to reboot were when new OS software was installed.  And I remember how scared I used to be everytime I had to do this with the PC.  Would it boot again?  What was going to go wrong this time.

I simply haven’t had any glitches with the Operating System and have been able to spend my time working on the prints.  Quite a revelation.

And so we circled the outskirts of France. Dirk and I spent one or two nights in quaint motels where the big event was which wine to have with dinner; and then off to the next point which usually was just as far as we could go before getting tired.

Dirk was always in a hurry to get somewhere, but I don’t know where. I always wanted to stop and take pictures. It was a small car, but the seats could fold backwards and that was how we usually slept. Dirk had a very bad snoring problem; so most of the time I took my sleeping bag and found some place quiet in the woods to sleep. One morning, I woke up to see that we were parked near what looked like a house from an old (and this is an obscure association) British Dracula movie – from the Hammer series. You know, maybe you know the ones with Christopher Lee and… Peter Cushings?

But they appealed to me because there was usually a buxom girl, usually backlit, and well – generally what nowadays you’d call a hot babe. But almost all of these movies took place in a haunted run-down house, or castle; they took the classic Poe stories, and turned them into hip well-lit movies.. Not only couldn’t I tell if anyone was living there; but there was even this tar-colored moat that encircled the place.

Dirk was still asleep in the car while I wandered around looking for a good spot… and all these years later… that morning feeling of something spooky going on, with Dirk snoring in the car, and thinking I might have seen a glint through one of the windows… and after taking the shot I made enough noise (on purpose) to wake Dirk up… so we could get on our way.

Seems like a good time to post this shot. Four years ago, I began to watch soccer during the world cup, mostly because the Mexican who owns the bodega where I get my breakfast every morning always had moved a t.v. out behind the counter, and since we had always been friendly, he began to explain how the world cup worked, and I started to get into it.

And then this year, I went full-hog into following the games. For those of you who haven’t followed it, or don’t care about soccer, one thing I’ll say is that it is great to watch on t.v. for one reason – no commercials. And when you begin to see how damned good these guy are – I mean any player that’s made it to this level – it is amazing. The whole thing has become very exciting for me, especially since I sort of gave up on baseball for a number of reasons.

I also like the idea that the players in the World Cup are actually from the countries they play for. I realize that during the rest of the year they play for whoever pays the most; or whatever their reasons are – but it’s been hard for me to get into baseball as much as I did as a kid because it seems to be simply a game based on who can pay the most; and every season the players just switch from one team to another. I know this is sacrilegious – but I enjoyed baseball much more as a kid when players stayed with a team for a few years at least before they got traded.

Anyway – I don’t really have a team to root for. I rooted for the US, and then for Mexico, and now I don’t know who to root for.

Annie pulls this wonderful quote from a book she’s reading: Soccer in Sun and Shadow by Eduardo Galeano

Eduardo writes, “Years have gone by and I’ve finally learned to accept myself for who I am: a beggar for good soccer. I go about the world, hand outstretched, and in the stadiums I plead: ‘A pretty move, for the love of God.’ And when good soccer happens, I give thanks for the miracle and I don’t give a damn which team or country performs it.”

“The history of soccer is a sad voyage from beauty to duty.”

Dipping into medium format scans now from my first trip, which was all shot with the Rollei TLR, i.e. one camera, one lens. We went through the famous spots along the cote d’Asur; and there were these windy narrow roads that would lead up to a bluff where you could park and overlook harbors, yachts etc.

I remember this shot like it was yesterday, because of that bird by the tree.

I got the name from an engraving above a clock in the center of the building above the archway, that says: Pavillion Sully, but of course it must have a better name then that. I believe if you walked through the archway you came to the courtyard of the Louvre with the crazy glass pyramid.

That pyramid caused a big controversy and I can see why. I don’t care what people say, they don’t go to Paris to see contemporary art. They go to see art that was once contemporary. In other words, they (myself included) would like to see a great building in honor or Van Gogh. Possibly a buildig that brings back the feeling of the night pool hall – all hallucinogenic yellows and greens and probably the result of too much drink, or was he eating his paints. Whatever. The world that people come to see wasn’t about angles, pyramids, or modern statements. And on top of all that, not even an original idea.

But, I lived around the corned from the Pavillion Sully, and got there early, several times, hoping to find it empty. You could do it if you arrived a bit before sunrise. Why I should even want to find it empty – that I don’t remember – but the building is lined with larger than life statues – and that seemed to be all it needed at the time.

And twenty plus years later, scanning the empty courtyard – with the memories of seeing the glass pyramid on the other side – and waiting there while the sun came up and tourists began to line up; and I would soon be one of those tourists.

Just like New York. Hard to know which is the most photographed city in the world, Paris or New York (probably New York) but the issues for the photographer are the same: make this shot that has been done a million times (literally) different; somehow – different. And even harder, don’t make it look like it was different for the sake of being different. That it is just a very simple picture that didn’t have any planning. A picture of a building that I’m not even sure I know the real exact name of. But it feels right to me. Yes – it does.

One of the primary techniques of the surrealist is the shadow, and/or the reflection. Both are ways of transforming ordinary object, or extraordinary objects into distortions of themselves, or to have the realistic subjects resemble something coming up from the so-called sub-consciousness (as it was called then); but which is really just a form of thought that will come to the tip of the tongue if we can talk without censorship. — Dave Beckerman from the new online book, Wiki-Dave.

It was the best of times.  It was the worst of times.  That’s a good opening line for just about any story, so I thought I’d use it for:  A Tale of Two Closets.

There are two closets in this studio apartment which is a fancy name for no-bedroom, stand-up only kitchen – apartment.  This size apartment is mostly occupied by the 20- and 30- somethings that have popped into the big apple to make their fortune before moving out to the burbs or, if they really make it big, the multi-bedroom suites on Park or Central Park West.  Or maybe waiting and hoping that a relative, or lost friend will kick the bucket and bequeath a multi-roomed apartment.  Don’t laugh, it happens.

That’s the background for this story.  In the foreground, I am wearing shorts, standing in front of a partial-length mirror which is glued to the closet at the end of the hallway, and banging all around it, either with my fists; or with my bare feet, my heels to be exact.  When this futile exercise is finished, I turn the closet knob, first one way (clock-wise) then the other way (counter-clockwise) while pulling at the same time, either up or down.  The closet hold a file cabinet which holds my medium format negatives from Paris, and while I pull and twist the knob, I feel a twinge in the lower back, which brings me back to the first paragraph where I mention that the apartments are mostly filled with 20- and 30-somethings, and that here I am, a 50-something that should have long ago found a place somewhere else where doors don’t swell up every summer, and where there are people around to fix that.

And how awful and pathetic to have to ask the super, or the super’s assistant if he can please open my closet for me.  Have I become an old lady?

But I say a tale of two closets because while this closet, which holds a file cabinet with negatives from Paris that I was looking for, the other closet holds a stack of dirty laundry, and if you even touch the door lightly, the door will drop down, like the gate of a moat across an invisible river.  The hinges are gone.  I have two pieces of tape at the top to keep it from lowering itself onto the cat or onto my head.

Now it’s not that I don’t know how to fix it.  I do.  And I understand the laws of chaos enough to understand that at some point, these two closets are going to exchange attributes.  It may take a few million years, but if I can wait long enough, the door that sticks will fall off it’s hinges, and the door that wants to drop on your head, will stick.  And for a brief amount of time, possible 30 years, both doors will act as they were supposed to when they were installed that first day.

But at this point, I am afraid to get my laundry (though it must be done); and can’t get my medium format negatives (without help from the super) or the supernatural.

I’ll leave it at that, and send up a prayer to the Goddess of Doors (G-O-D) and await good door tidings.  May the doors in your life only lead to perception, and not to dirty laundry or old negatives of Paris.