Trey,
Thank you for your kind words about my WH project. I have never been quite sure what people might think of these photos. Panoramic images can hard to look at, with the distortion and all. It has never bothered me, I embraced the look years ago. But I often wondered with this work, would one see it as a travesty to portray this national treasure in such a manner? Was I being disrespectful. Or worse yet, would people think they were just bad photos. And years ago when I tried to work with the original film, it was just so hard. The software wasn’t there, my skill level wasn’t there and since I was hung up on some idea of perfection, it was taking forever to get anywhere. So I floundered, really. But in the past few weeks I can see a lot has changed over the years. The software is now there, my skill level is now there and most importantly, I now have a vision for how these images can look, and it doesn’t involve perfection any more. Not that I really knew what perfection was, but I had to come to grips with the fact the original film is badly damaged and while the original Kodak scans aren’t the best quality, they are pretty clean and ready to use. Which has greatly sped up my work flow. I have accomplished more in the past 3 weeks than I have in the past 19 years. I am not sure where it will lead too, but for now I am just enjoying the process and feeling creative again. I was working with a guy yesterday who works for Google and I showed him some test prints and he thought they were pretty cool and maybe Google might want to use them somehow. I know at some point I need to reach out to the White House Historical Association and see what they think. They have a new president/executive director, so maybe I can start fresh with them, since unfortunately my past history was rather tainted, through no fault of my own. But I don’t know to best approach them now, or what kind of presentation to make. Is it an email with a single attached image, re introducing myself? Or a big beautiful print in the mail, and a note saying…Hi, I’m bacckkkk… And what would my objective be? A book? An exhibit? Both? I suppose I would like to sell prints and pursue licensing deals. I would also like to share with the design team who I worked with on this project in the first place, as they are the ones who got involved in the first place. And they lost a lot of money on this job and I was the only to came away with something to show for our efforts…my film and my copyrights. And even that only came about because the people we worked with were too lax to sign me to a work for hire contract, which meant giving over everything and I would have had nothing, not even the right to claim authorship. And frankly, that was always the most important issue to me…the right to say I did this. Even if nobody cared. So wish me luck. And I will see where this goes. Maybe I will be back in DC sooner than I think. I guess time will tell.
