Salish Park

Sometimes while going along in life I come across an aphorism that sticks despite my best efforts. Jean-Paul Sartre: “Hell is other people.” John Steinbeck: “You can boast about anything if it’s all you have.” When I’m walking into a pro lab with my measly one or two rolls of unprocessed Tri-X, the one that pops into my mind is, “it sucks being a nobody.”

Labs, especially in New York, often have client lists of photographers you read about in magazines and who have books and exhibitions. But the level of service those photographers receive and the one a schmuck like me gets are usually two different things. Over the years I’ve had labs misplace my film, be late with it, scratch it; slides have come back imprinted with someone else’s copyright—stuff that never happened with the film on shoots I was assisting on. In a way, I have to ask myself, well, what can I expect. It would take years for me to represent the kind of revenue a typical fashion shoot can generate for a lab in one day. It makes sense for a lab to give priority to the big jobs and big photographers can rightly expect attention for taking their business there. Still I think it would be nice to walk out of a lab without having been reminded once again that I’m a nobody.

So discovering Panopticon, located in Waltham just a few minutes’ drive from here, was a great thing. They’ve been around since 1970 and I’d visited their gallery a bunch of times—they represent Bradford Washburn, Ernest C. Withers, and Constantine Manos, among others—but I didn’t know they worked as a b/w processing lab as well. Last week I took my one roll of Tri-X and went over there, asked if they could process and contact my film. Really you wouldn’t think they would. You walk in the doors and it looks like a gallery and at the rear is an office where that day a woman was spotting a black and white print.

I’d read that they have a three-day turnaround so after she took my roll of film and my information I asked if I should just come back on Friday to pick it up and she said that if it was ready before then she would give me a call. Then on Thursday I received a call and she said my film was ready to be picked up and also they were open on Saturday until 6. This was a new experience for me and all backwards. That other lab I’d gone to before—their website says they have a two-day turnaround but when I’d go to drop off my film they’d say it would be ready in three days and I should call before coming in to make sure it was ready. And the last two times the negatives came back with streaks on them.

So it appears that Panopticon is the place to go. I just wish I could give them more business.

Waltham, Mass. Above: Waltham Watch Company (1854-1957), first company to make watches on an assembly line, invented the “transfer machine” in 1888. Henry Ford adopted the moving assembly line concept to make Model Ts in 1913. Below: Waltham along the Charles River. Over there it’s the Boston Manufacturing Company (1813-1930), operator of the first power loom in America; also America’s first capitalized corporation.

Settled and incorporated in 1635: where the American Revolution started; where Hawthorne, Emerson and Thoreau went ice skating together; where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women; where the Concord grape was developed.

Old North Bridge, site of “the shot heard ’round the world,” the original one.

British troops retreated 22 miles from here to Boston while getting shot at along what’s now known as Battle Road. Written on a monument:

HERE
On the 19 of April
1775
was made
the first forcible resistance
to British aggression
On the opposite Bank
stood the American Militia
Here stood the Invading Army
and on this spot
the first of the Enemy fell
in the War of that Revolution
which gave
Independence to these United States

In gratitude to GOD
and
In the love of Freedom
this Monument
was erected
AD 1836

Rev. William Emerson, grandfather of Ralph Waldo Emerson, watched the battle at Old North Bridge from the Old Manse 100 yards away. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote Nature here; Hawthorne lived here later with his wife, Sophia. On a window pane on the second floor is an inscription written with Sophia’s diamond ring. At right: Sleepy Hollow Cemetery; buried on the hill known as Author’s Ridge are Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

On the campus at Brandeis University, founded 1948, in Waltham, Mass.; Usen Castle was originally the main building of Middlesex University, which used to be here.

From wikipedia.org: From its inception, Middlesex University was one of the few schools in the U.S. that did not impose a Jewish quota. Harvard University under A. Lawrence Lowell, for example, held its admissions examination on Rosh Hashanah. Then Middlesex got shut down when, after its medical school failed to secure AMA accreditation, it became untenable.

Jack Abramoff, Ha Jin and Debra Messing were students here. Morrie Schwartz taught in the sociology department, before Tuesdays with Morrie, by Mitch Albom, another alumnus.

1969

The charge-coupled device (CCD) is invented by Willard Boyle and George Smith at AT&T Bell Labs.

1974

Someone at Kodak wonders if they could build a camera using a CCD.

1975

The world’s first digital photograph is taken by a Kodak engineer named Steve Sasson at the company’s Applied Electronics Research Center in Rochester, NY. Sasson used an 8.5 pound, toaster-sized prototype to capture a black and white image at a resolution of .01 megapixels. Today Kodak owns more than 1,000 digital imaging patents—”almost all digital cameras rely on those inventions“—but curiously there is no mention of this event on the company’s website.

1990

The world’s first commercially available digital camera, the Kodak DCS 100, is introduced at Photokina. The camera produced 1.3 megapixel (1280×1024) images, consisted of a Nikon F3 with a digital back tethered to an 11 pound shoulder pack housing the battery and hard drive and cost $30,000.

2004

Nikon introduces the 6.1 megapixel D70, 1.3 pounds w/o batteries, price around $975.

David Alan Harvey uses a D70 to shoot for National Geographic.

The Onion writes, Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades.

2005

Nikon introduces the 6.1 megapixel D70s, 1.3 pounds w/o batteries, price around $900.

2006

Nikon introduces the 10.2 megapixel D80, 1.5 pounds w/o batteries, price around $1000.

While picking up pictures at CVS today I saw that they were having a promotion on Polaroid film: buy a twin pack of Spectra and get a pack of 600 film for free.

To be fair Petters Group Worldwide, which now owns Polaroid, had nothing to do with thinking up this particular promotion but still it reminded me about the thoughts I was having about that company.

I asked a finance guy once, here are these executives of a company in bankruptcy and they’re giving themselves fat bonuses, consulting fees and pension payouts, all while screwing the employees. Is this as evil as it sounds? Was I missing something? He said, no, I wasn’t missing anything: generally executives do it because they can but really it’s kind of a weird thing to have affective feelings about Polaroid et al. anyway, as if they were people.

Corporations will do what they will. As illustrated in the documentary film The Corporation, if they were people, if you took that idea to its logical conclusion, their embodiment would meet “the diagnostic criteria of a ‘psychopath.’” And nobody ought to expect much from a psychopath.

Yet we do, as suggested by studies like Energy BBDO’s on brand “likeability,” as reported in Adbusters.

In an article entitled Acquiring Minds from the Washington Post Magazine: “Consumerism was the triumphant winner of the ideological wars of the 20th century, beating out both religion and politics as the path millions of Americans follow to find purpose, meaning, order and transcendent exaltation in their lives.”

Roger Ebert uses a Mac and wrote this for Macworld: “Since any reasonable person would choose a Mac over a PC, Apple’s market share does provide us with an accurate reading of the percentage of reasonable people in our society.”

Here’s a comment from ask.metafilter.com by mojohand: “While Montblancs don’t suck… when you pull one out you risk looking like some wanker displaying a status marker. Owners of a Pelikan, on the other hand, reveals [sic] themselves as persons who know pens, quality and real value.”

According to chronocentric.com James Bond used to wear a Rolex; now he wears an Omega: “Many Bond afficionados believe that the Omega Seamaster is closer in spirit to what Fleming would choose for Bond today.”

Coke v. Pepsi, Ford v. Chevy, Canon v. Nikon: As they say if you do the Google search, you are what you buy and like Calvin says “endorsing products is the American way to express individuality.”

In Canada they use real sugar to make Coke. Other things you can get here: Bick’s pickles, ketchup-flavored chips, Western Pizza, Thrills gum (tastes like soap).

Albert Memorial Bridge, reputedly the world’s longest bridge over the shortest span of water; it was completed in 1930 as part of a Public Works project that also included draining and dredging Wascana Lake and building two islands in it.

24-acre campus of the Getty Center, tied for number two behind Disneyland on Citysearch’s “Best of” list of L.A. attractions.

The museum’s permanent collection contains a load of William Eggleston photographs, which I’d been hoping to see, but when we went a Robert Adams exhibition was up. Adams was awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2006 for his project Turning Back (also shortlisted for the prize was Alec Soth for Sleeping by the Mississippi). At Adams’ request the prize of more than $50,000 was given to the charity Human Rights Watch.

In 2004 when I was living in Brooklyn my cousin came into town for a visit and one of the things she wanted to do was check out the Whitney Biennial, something I’d wanted to see but wasn’t going to because I was broke. She has a rich boyfriend and paid for the both of us so I got to see Alec Soth’s work there. It was displayed in a room that also contained some photographs by Katy Grannan, whose rep at the time also represented a photographer I was assisting (actually that photographer was who first recommended I see Sleeping by the Mississippi). Also there was a sculpture by an artist whom as it turns out Alec Soth once happened upon on the banks of the Mississippi River while taking pictures and there was a series of photographs of surfers. Curiously that room and a wall with a bunch of lightbulbs on it are pretty much the only things I remember from that visit.

So it was a neat thing to find that Alec Soth has started a blog. In one of his earlier entries he writes “a large percentage of the photography audience is other photographers—and a large percentage of photographers are nerds.” I’m part of that photography audience and I am a nerd, that’s for sure. It’s fascinating for me to read some of the things that artists, writers, musicians think about. Sometimes that would be nothing, as described in a recent article in the New Yorker on Bob Dylan: “I wanted to meet the mind that created all those beautiful words,” Judy Collins told David Hajdu for “Positively 4th Street.”… “We set something up, and we had coffee, and when it was over, I walked away, thinking, ‘The guy’s an idiot. He can’t make a coherent sentence.’ ”

But sometimes there are some interesting insights. The New Yorker article also quotes David Van Ronk (I’d never heard of him but the article says Dylan swiped his arrangement of House of the Rising Sun): “We were professional performers, and while we liked a lot of folk music, we all liked a lot of other things as well. Working musicians are very rarely purists. The purists are out in the audience kibitzing, not onstage trying to make a living.”

And later: “Musicians… Most of them have much more eclectic musical interests than their fans do. Elijah Wald (Van Ronk’s co-author), in his indispensable revisionist history of the blues, ‘Escaping the Delta,’ points out that Muddy Waters had more songs in his repertoire by Gene Autry, the Singing Cowboy, than by any blues musician; that Louis Armstrong’s favorite band was Guy Lombardo’s Royal Canadians; and that Robert Johnson played Bing Crosby songs. ‘If I had only one artist to listen to through eternity,’ Chuck Berry said, ‘it would be Nat Cole.’”

It’s interesting to read that Alec Soth is a fan of Christian Patterson, who also has a blog, and Christopher Anderson, among others, many of whom I’d never heard of before. Also I read that he used a Mamiya 6 for Dog Days, Bogota.