The Rehoboth Beach one has been up almost five months now and my goal since starting to work in Apple’s Aperture software was to have a new one up every quarter or so.  But what really motivated me was a conversation I had with my Friday happy hour pals in D.C. 

Jon Larimore, a dear old friend and former sysop of the Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau BBS once upon a time, had weeks earlier paid me some of the best complements I’ve ever had on my photography and my photographic eye, when he viewed the Rehoboth Beach gallery.  What made his complements especially delightful for me is that he once worked for the National Geographic Society, and all his working life there he was swimming in some of this world’s absolutely first rate photography.  He knows good photography when he sees it.  Well…last Friday some friends who’d been with us to Rehoboth Beach came to the roving happy hour and I finally had a chance to ask them about the Rehoboth gallery.  One of them took me aside during the evening, asked some questions and made some observations that really convinced me he was getting what I do, at the level of someone who is really into photography.  He saw it.  And what was more, he really liked what I was up to.  Not everyone who appreciates photography is going to like my photographic voice.  They’re just not.

Well…Jon later told me that the guy works for the Smithsonian Institute, and he knows from good photography too.  So I told them before the evening ended that I’d be putting up a new gallery soon.  This is what I’ve been working on, between weekend household chores, here at Casa del Garrett yesterday and today.

This next one is from a book I tried to do back in the mid 70s.  Back then the options for self publishing photography books were limited and you really needed money to pull it off, which I didn’t have much of.  So I devised a scheme for hand binding a book of photos that consisted basically of pages of silver paper photos (we didn’t have PCs back then. let alone photo quality ink jet printers) dry mounted on archival board.  I hand made every one, and I think I sold like about a dozen of them before giving up.  Nowadays I could use any of dozens of Internet companies that let amateur photographers create their own photo books on a limited production basis.  Even my photographer’s software, Apple’s Aperture, now has a built-in system to let you create and publish your own photo books.

But I was really proud of that first effort, vanishingly small as its print run was, and my basic style and the themes in my photography have not changed much over the years.  I called that first book, Shadows and Light.  If you saw the first gallery I put up here, the one of Philadelphia images, you saw my pure photographic voice there, as it’s matured over the years.  You can see the distance from the twenty-something photographer who did Shadows and Light back in 1975 to the Philadelphia gallery in late 2004 in the sure footed way I do it now.  I know what I’m doing.  I still don’t have words for it, but I’ve learned that a graphic artist doesn’t need words to understand themselves.  That’s why we’re graphic artists as opposed to writers or poets.  We deal in imagery.  And looking back on those early images, which is what I’ve been doing lately for my Big Scan project, I’m really pleased with how well most of them hold up.  I sure can’t say the same for my early efforts and painting and cartooning.  Those embarrass me.  But the photography I did as a young man still holds up, at least to my eye.  I know what I’m doing.  I’ve been doing it for decades now.  Mostly.

So the next gallery is going to be from the Shadows and Light sessions, circa 1973-75, when I can finish scanning enough of it in to make a decent gallery out of.  Expect it sometime this coming week.  It’s a younger me.  But the voice is there, sure and certain.  That really amazes me in retrospect.  I went through a period of time when I just put my cameras away and didn’t touch them for years because I was sick of looking at what I was seeing in my photography.  It was a bad time for me.  But time passes, the universe expands and cools, and I picked my cameras back up again, around 1998, because sooner or later I just had to. 

Hotel Windows – August 2004

Store Window – August 2004

Walnut Street – August 2004