The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men Often Go Awry

It is the merry month of May. I had great plans for May. I had signed up for a photography tour In Oaxaca with Gary Goldberg. It has been 26 years since I've been there on another photographic tour with Geoff Winningham. This year the tour included visits with Mexican photographers and artists, time to photograph but also we were going to stay at Casa Colonial which is where I had stayed 26 years ago. I loved Casa Colonial, a huge garden, comfortable rooms, delicious meals, and filled with wonderful Mexican art. 

I was planning to go a few days early and stay a few days after the workshop. Unfortunately, the Pandemic changed those plans but I was thinking about the trip this morning so I opened the Oaxaca folder that had some scans of the black and white film I shot with my Pentax medium format camera. 

Digital Photography has brought many changes to the way most photographers work so looking at the scan of a film negative was shocking. Film had grain! And to print the negative you had to go into the darkroom, mix chemicals and spend hours on one image making test strips and multiple prints until you were finally satisfied with the resulting print. Then you had to spend a few more hours washing and treating the print for archivability. If you were able to finish two prints in one day, you had accomplished something. 

Looking at these negatives brings back some wonderful memories but I don't want to go back to the darkroom although I do want to go back to Oaxaca. 

This image was made just outside the village of Tlacochohuaya where we had stopped on the side of the road to look out across this wide valley with magnificent clouds hanging in the sky. 

Twenty-two Years Ago

This week I had a panic attack. I was looking on my hard drive for a series of work I did in Pozas, the Surreal Garden. I didn't always keyword back sometime in 2000's and that was when the work was shot with a Holga camera and medium format film. So using keywords wasn't helping. Running through folder names wasn't working either. Oh, I have backup hard drives but the panic starts to set in. Could this hard drive be dying? What else could be missing? What will it cost to have it restored if it isn't on the other backup drives? That is, if it can be restored. Finally I noticed a folder name, FotoFest 2006. It was inside the folder for the year 2006. My file plan is to put images in yearly folders and then in sub-folders chronologically by date made. These images were not made in 2006 but I opened it and there were all of the images I had been searching for. I melted back into my chair.

I guess at the time when I named the folder, FotoFest 2006 and put it inside the year 2006 it seemed like a reasonable thing to do because these images made up my Goldesberry Gallery FotoFest show in 2006. But it wasn't logical in 2016. It gave me quite a scare. And it caused me to look back at old images just to be sure they were still there.

This particular scanned negative was made at a festival in Ocotlan in the State of Oaxaca in 1994. Twenty-two years ago and yet when I look at these young men running through the crowd with the fireworks exploding from the structures over them, I can still remember everything about that night.

I've been a photographer for a long time.

Twenty-two years ago. Isn't that something!