My organizational skills are notoriously bad. I can't find anything in my hard drives easily. I stumbled upon this image after hours of looking through old drives. This wasn't on a drive, however, but in an email. I kind of know where the others are, but not exactly. I can't even find my old Polaroid files, the ones that made me--well, Q writes about a couple that I sent him today on his blog, and I guess that they made me a pariah, of sorts. But no worries. They may all be lost now except for the jpegs that I have sent around. Selavy, right? But this is one of the Cohen inspired photos of which I spoke a few days ago. It is not one of the ones of which I am most excited, just one that I found. I like it o.k. I mean twins are always kind of fascinating. But the flash is just flash here and not the technique about which I spoke. And this is not a real photo but the scan of an old proof sheet that was left over after my mother threw away all the negatives. That is why the quality is so terrible.
I guess in the end, everything will be lost.
I know that "lossless" is a word because I watch "Silicon Valley." I need an antonym that relates to the eventual loss of all images.
Ili doesn't like me photographing her. I try to explain to her that within a few years, all the images will be gone anyway, but she doesn't listen. It is a new for me not to be able to take photographs any time I want, but only recently have I realized that this is the first time I haven't been in a relationship with someone from the arts. Everyone else I've ever been with studied art in college. Not until today, not until just now, have I realized this. All those unflattering shot from the hip life-revealing images were just accepted as part and parcel of some larger package that is/was my psyche.
Hmmm.
We watched a great, four-hour long documentary from Channel 14 about Andy Warhol. It is on YouTube if you are interested. There is another one that is long, too, but we couldn't watch it because of the musical score. It was dreadful and unending. Too bad, for the interviews were pretty good. Ili said it all seemed like an introduction to the show. I knew what she meant.
I saw a display of Warhol's Polaroids at Country Club College a few years back. They have a marvelous little art museum and an impressive collection. I believe they owned the Warhol Polaroids. They had rooms filled with them. You know what they looked like. I'll bet Warhol never lost his. But I still have mine, too, the straight Polaroids. They take up the better part of a room. But I would have to go back and rescan them all and then do that crazy thing I invented that made them look the way they do. I might try a few one day just to see if I still remember how to do it. I'll probably have forgotten a few steps here and there. I didn't write any of it down, of course. Like the digital files, the process will be lost, too.
I still have lots of prints, though. Far too many of them, really. I destroyed a bunch of them when I left the studio. They are big and I don't really store them well. As Q says, they are too big for his living space, and that is probably true for most people by and large. I can give them away, but they never get hung. They would just lie around poorly stored in someone else's home just as they are here, never to be seen.
I do have one friend who framed the ones I gave to him. He hung them in his law office. But he is a collector and has more framed art than he can handle.
Ili's probably right. Why am I taking pictures? Often, when I want to take a picture, people ask me, "What are you going to do with them?" I know what to tell them now, I think.
"Oh, I'll keep them on a hard drive for awhile. I might try to give some away to my friends. They'll store them under a bed somewhere, and then I'll lose the files. I don't know. You shouldn't worry about it, really. Eventually, they will all be gone."
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