"There are no small roles…"

Bon Air Hotel
View On White

Out of nowhere, H.o.p. said, “There are no small roles, only small actors, right?”

I don’t know what he had been thinking about that led up to this question/announcement this afternoon. But he was checking with me to make sure this philosophy was right, which one could tell from his voice he was certain was right but he was wanting to hear what I’d to say anyway.

It’s like wading through mud around here these days. Has been for a while. Speaking only for myself.

This is a kind of disgruntled posting.

One thing I’ve been doing is slowly adding to Gallery 4 in the art section of Idyllopuspress. That Gallery (now here at Flicker) is exclusively some old black and white and hand-tinted (some digital now) photos I did back in the late 70s of some of the older sections of Augusta, such as the Bon Air hotel which had been a resort and then was a retirement home in a state of ill repair. I have only a few photos that I took hanging about. And I’ve put them up on the web because I’ve looked around and I don’t think there’s any photography of the Bon Air and some of these places from that time period. Have yet a few more pics of some of the old Broad St. junk shops to add and a few of the houses and Old Medical College. If digital didn’t exist there’d be no saving most of them as they were stored in cardboard boxes and time didn’t work so well with these unprotected hand-colored photos. A lot of dust collected in them. Colors changed. Cleaning fluids that were used on them turned them yellow in the ensuing years. So I’ve had to do a bit of restoration work on each one of them.

And am slowly adding to Gallery 5 some of the very very few inks and acrylics I saved over the years, and most that I didn’t save, that I only have photos of. A lot of art is spread around god knows where, I don’t recollect, that I don’t have images of, and a lot of it too met the roadside, either because I was going through one of my purges, was moving and didn’t have room, or was damaged by the elements in places we’d lived in where there was a lot of mildew, or maybe a tree falling through the roof after a storm, things like that. It’s not a big loss because most of it was not very good art, everything I did in my teens and up to my late twenties was on its way to nowhere, but there are a few canvases that I regret having purged. Have some from later periods that I did keep and are down at the studio but I don’t have pics of and then a couple of the larger ones are in storage and don’t have pics of them either.

I realize that I somehow have deleted a post up last week in which I mentioned Operation Photo Rescue, which has a considerable, worldwide number of volunteers upon which they draw to restore photos damaged by Hurricane Katrina. The success of the project is really quite something with the organizing of the volunteers and the trips made to scan and catalogue photos for restoration work.

Since last week I’ve worked on two wedding photos from the same family, two studio photos that were perhaps for high school yearbooks, a photo of a person standing beside a chopper in probably Vietnam, and most recently an older studio photo of a woman. I think that’s it so far.

Photo restoration can be frustrating, especially with such heavily damaged photos. You don’t want to make up something which isn’t there and in a sense there is no “right” way to restore a photo, in that even when one is trying to be true as possible there’s a lot of personal aesthetics still at play that determine what you’re going to get as far as tones and contrasts and preservation of grain or artificial restoration of grain etc. Hand someone a screw and there’s a right way to screw it in and you know when it’s right. Photo restoration, there’s no “right” way. Plenty of wrong ways but no absolutely right way.

And of course when there’s heavy heavy damage, as with flood, there’s only so much one can do and then you simply have to let it go.

A lot of people choose to work clean and use filters to clear away grain but I tend to work “dirty” and don’t use filters, don’t blur, selectively go through and get rid of dust and scratches with tool tips trying to preserve and duplicate grain etc.

The one of the chopper in Vietnam, I looked all over for a photo of a similar chopper to help with the restoration since the part where the body of the chopper met the prop was almost entirely gone and I wanted to make sure I was getting it right. I wrote a couple of veteran’s websites, which might know about such things, asking where I might find a photo of a similar chopper but got no response…

Which is how it is.

Makes me crankier with the historical projects I work on when I contact libraries that I know have critical materials, and get no response even after several inquiries. One that particularly irked was when I contacted a library that had made available on the internet a treasure trove of photos and I informed them they had incorrect IDs, had misspelled the Indian Agency (not a matter of there being many ways to spell it, they had simply reversed syllables and spelled it quite wrong), and they never responded or altered the ID. Namely the Tryiptych digital initiative of the Bryn Mawr, Haverford and Swathmore College Libraries. They even have a pic right there, in their collection, that states “Great Nemaha Indian Agency”. Seriously, it is the Great Nemaha. It is not Nehama. But they have catalogued all the images as Nehama. And I wrote them several times over the past six months–wrote several different people concerning this. And I never received a response. And they never changed it. And they never responded to me on my inquiry on their collection of Nemaha photos.

Which is how it is.

Though I was quite amiable.

You’d hope a library/academic institution would care a bit more. Especially about getting something right. I’m supposing if I was writing them with an academic title from an academic institution then I might get some response.

And now I need to go dig up a few emails that were sent me several weeks ago when my computer was down and write them back.