Where are we now?

I see that the last post and website update was in March.  My God – that’s six months ago!  It’s obvious that I’m never going to be a Tik Tok star at this rate.

It’s been the same way with my band, Fretbox Trio.  None of us wanted to run the website or do promo or maintain a mailing list.  We just wanted to play music.  We did the world’s worst job of PR and desperately needed a manager.  Our music is cool though; check it out on Spotify, YouTube, iTunes, and other purveyors of fine music.

Back to the Goldsmith Photography Collection.  Here’s what has transpired since March.  We have been busy little beavers, me and my stellar interns, Adrian Wong, Koloris Wu, and Ogul Ozkefeli, without whom this never could have been accomplished.  We’ve digitized over 35,000 different images, hundreds of 4x5 and 8x10 prints.  I’ve found many notebooks with exhibition data and 75 small pads with detailed information about where each photo was taken, exposure details, and so forth. 

Among the biggest challenges were the 16x20 black and white prints.  About 75 were here at home, but most were in the storage facility in Burlington.  The 5-by 15-foot space started with material on both sides and a narrow corridor between. It is encouraging to see that the two 8-foot-high metal racks are now empty.  Negative space is a welcome sight. 

Many of these prints were exhibited at photographic salons around the world.  We’ve recorded the information on the back of each print, including the image number and title (because every photo had a title).  There were stickers from each place it was shown and what awards it might have won, as well as detailed information about how it was printed and perhaps retouched. 

For example: “Quarry Lift”; R-601-5; Brovera #6; f5.6/55; HBL R quarter -20; P1 ULC +12; F-P-M; 11/19/86.  No I don’t know what most of that means except that Quarry Lift is the title, R-601-5 is the image number, and Brovera is a type of photographic paper. 

Koloris and I did the first batch here at the house, which helped me work out a catalog plan.  We discovered that it’s one thing to see a 2¼ by 2¼ image that knocks your socks off, but seeing it enlarged was an entirely different experience.  As Ogul and I worked at the storage unit, we placed each print on our makeshift viewing stand (a small aluminum stepladder) and kept getting stopped in our tracks.  I’d pull out the next print and set it up and we’d both just stop and go “wow!”  We took about 1600 shots over the course of four or five sessions.

My mom was a meticulous and detail-oriented person - what else would you expect from a concert violinist?  There are two metal 3x5 card file boxes which I thought contained data from the time she was the Secretary of the Photographic Society of America (PSA).  Nope, instead there were hundreds of 3x5 cards listing each photo shown at a camera club or salon, its title, where it was shown, and who was the judge.  We’ve captured all that information, too.

So that’s a lot of progress.  I recently read Bill Bryson’s <1998> bestseller, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail.  It’s very readable and often chortlingly funny (“… a moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.”).  He speaks of the difficulty of emotionally assessing progress (“However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods.”) 

If you are a serious long-term gardener you know this feeling.  For the first 15 years you spend endless weekend hours planting some bed or wrangling an ungainly mass of wild biology into a semblance of order and feel pretty good about yourself.  Then you step back to admire your work and realize that the garden looks just as unfinished as when you started and no one but you would actually notice a change.

So you just plod on, weekend after weekend, stealing spring and summer days from your family.  Just like long-distance hiking.

“… you exist in a kind of mobile Zen mode, your brain like a balloon tethered with string, accompanying but not actually part of the body below. Walking for hours and miles becomes as automatic, as unremarkable, as breathing. At the end of the day you don’t think, “Hey, I did sixteen miles today,” any more than you think, “Hey, I took eight-thousand breaths today.” It’s just what you do.”

And then one day after you pad through the garden, noting this bit of undone work or that new area needing attention, you stand back to look.  And you realize that the garden looks finished, despite the failings you just enumerated. 

Well, from a distance, and to an untrained eye, the Goldsmith Photography Project looks finished, but I know what still needs weeding and planting and watering. 

Next blog post: What’s Next?  Coming soon: Camera Clubs and a post by Ogul.