i always used to tell people the reason i never wrote down phone numbers was that i'd forget them if i knew there was a written reference somewhere. i guess the same goes for photos. details i leave to the film to tell. isn't that what a photographer is supposed to do?
actually, i'm not really sure.
the mind i think tries to make a linear order of things in this non-linear chaotic world. mind you, i'm a complete subscriber to chaos theory, and i believe there is more to chaos than the effects of a butterfly fluttering its wings in china and hurricanes in the gulf of mexico. i actually think that everything is chaos, and the whole of our lives is a way to characterize it into an order that we alone comprehend.
there. i have created chaos existentialism
give me tenure in the ivy league!
that photo is of my mother and little 2-year-old me around easter, 1960 in madrid. i know the time and place because the slide is stamped APR 1960 in that inimitable kodak imprint. i know that from 1958 - 1961, we lived in madrid, so its not really a leap for me to say we're in madrid.
of course i do not remember my father taking these photos. and i do not remember first hand the snow that fell in the winter of 1959...although it did. i know it did and i'm told it did, and somewhere, there are photos attesting to it.
so, i'm doing this book version of my photo blog, punkturns30.com and everyone interested in it is as interested in the stories behind the photos as they are in the photos themselves.
its no problem to tell a lot of the story. i remember lots of it loud and clear. but the details sometimes morph into each other...
i was pleasantly surprised to receive an email today from the wonderful and colorful local gentleman, chuck e. weiss, whose presence in and around the tropicana and other west hollywood hangs was the kind of thing we sought to find. anyway... chuck gave me some clarity on things on which i had been fuzzy...but published anyway.
and it got me to thinking about memory and what makes it work and what role photographs play in all that.
among the things chuck and i exchanged in our emails were memories of the tropicana.
i remember vaguely spending a good few months in this bungalow with stiv bators. but they're all pretty much a blur. we took tons of photos. i think that was the purpose. there was a whole day we did photos in an homage to art kane's photos of jim morrison.
frank secich, who is pictured in the bath tub with stiv bators has a fantastic memory. a couple years ago, an author asked me for the story behind a different photo from this particular day of shooting.
i honestly didn't remember a lot, but frank remembered everything. all i knew is that i had to deliver alot of shots to the european licensee of the record that stiv and frank were recording the day i was shooting. frank remembers everything about the day. thankfully, he contributed to the author!
don't get me wrong; i remember LOTS and i remember lots acurately... i kept a journal in journalism style - very factual stuff, and kept newspaper clippings. archivist? diarist? memoir-ist? its just that sometimes, i think it is so damn random that we create our dots to link the random things.... one thing chuck told me today is that duke's closed early - around 8 PM... yet i remember being in there during the dead of night... but chuck reminded me that it was more like 5:30 in the morning! and once he said that... memories all came flooding back. the race to get home and in bed, curtains closed before the sun actually rose... because then i would never be able to go to sleep. you know.... like a vampire.
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