Walking home from my office one mild October evening...and passing the northeast corner of Jonquil Playlot Park with Richard Hunt’s homage to John Peter Altgeld...(one Illinois Governor who actually deserved some genuine praise) it began raining like hell...
But the cool thing was, that there was heavy thunder with lightning flashing practically non-stop...and despite the rain (and possible danger), I stopped to watch...knowing that somehow this was a show that just shouldn’t be missed...
Fortunately for me, I was carrying my plastic Arrow camera...
My Arrow was a cheapo Diana clone whose shutter spring had finally given up the ghost after way too few rolls of film...leaving me with a toy camera that was pretty much useless except in two very particular situations.
One of those situations was meant for the near future, as I had decided to turn it into a pinhole camera. The shutter could be held open by tape...and closed whenever I figured I'd waited long enough for a decent exposure...
(and boy oh boy...did that ever get me into trouble...but that's another cool image and story for another day...)
So this other ideal situation for my poor, overworked Arrow...was staring me right in the face...
First of all...rain couldn't hurt my plastic camera in the least...
and second...holding the shutter open in the near pitch dark of the night would produce no image until one of those bolts of lightning would enter the frame...
I can't even describe to you how excited I was to be standing there and catching lightning on film...while that same lightning was actually illuminating something way more extraordinary than the night sky...
I just stood there with my heart pounding and tried to calmly frame my shots...focusing on those sculptures I respected and knew so nearly intimately...
and let the lightning (like some fantastic, sublime strobe light) do the rest...
And I use that word sublime maybe because I felt kinda like the way Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings look/ed to me...
and when I finally ran out of film...I was so excited and happy I was shaking inside...and so maybe those paintings really do come closest to describing the way I felt...
As if I had just been in one...
And I sure as hell just knew that some of those negatives were gonna turn out well and maybe show something of what had just happened to me...
I suppose the concept of a "peak experience" makes sense in this context...
But all I knew was that I felt more alive than ever...
Even if all I was doing was standing out in the rain with a toy camera, looking at some mildly abstract sculpture...
That October night was back in 1992...
about 4 years after the sculptures were created...but only 3 months after I had first studied Richard Hunt’s work...and I found that work to be maybe not so aesthetically beautiful...but conceptually, his work is always born of absolute artistic and human integrity...and his work easily and generously shares that integrity with whomever has any time at all to spend with it...
Richard Hunt doesn’t create meaningless abstraction.... Far from it...
And he doesn’t pose some emasculated, intellectual conundrums for only cognoscenti to enjoy...
But (for now) I digress...
It has taken me all these years to get back to the task of scanning those negatives of that wild and happy night...
and now I have hopes of producing something more polished, coherent, satisfying and communicative than the many workprints of them I had produced so sporadically...
and so these negatives...which I hope to do some real digital justice to, constitute yet another important piece of my beloved, but terribly piecemeal photo portfolio...
Now that it’s nearly impossible for me to return to a darkroom...doing the best I can with whatever digital equipment I’ve got has suddenly taken a real shot in the arm...
and Richard Hunt’s late / latest show here in Chicago seems to have provided that boost of energy and enthusiasm....
I'm currently working on my notes and images from the show...and will soon have plenty more to say about Richard Hunt’s marvelous work...but getting back to these images after 17 years...i.e. my own work...is just a pleasure, despite the time devouring horrors of digital techno-hell and steep, slippery learning curves for this hard-and-soft-ware impaired photo geek / art critic....
Man...! I really was old school 35 mm, you know...? Doing my own color film and print processing... (that Jobo processor with the lift was a dream!)
and for sure...color was, and still is my favorite medium... thanks to some timely, perceptive, and sage advice from Robert Clarke-Davis...
The other half of his seriously helpful advice was to work harder and build up my portfolio...
so...despite the many unphotogenic detours I’ve often taken...I'm actually doing just that...
now I have to figure out why photoshop is taking so damn long to scan my second Richard Hunt Eagle negative...
At this distinctly Capricornian rate, my best work is all gonna find itself called Posthumous...
