No Jpegs

I shot with a model today, but you will never see the photos.  I agreed to only show them in print.  The model just got a license with the county to be a substitute teacher.  She wants a full-time job, so she can't have images on the internet, she says.  She just changed her mind today.  "Holy shit!" I exclaimed.  "Not today!  Jesus Christ!  Look at you!  No!  No!"

She spent the first half of our shoot texting her friend who she made a point of saying was an attorney.  "What's your last name?" she asked in a prosecutorial manner.  She typed it madly on the keys of her phone.

I was O.K. with this at first, but it went on and on.  "My friend just wants to make certain I'm safe," she said.

"Fuck, tell him I just stuck some Molly in your ass and am making you drink straight bourbon!  That should get him going.  C'mon, let's shoot."

Her body was a marvel.  She wasn't beautiful, but she was perfectly proportioned, more so than anyone I've seen.  Late in the shoot, I realized something.

"You don't have any tan lines.  That's why you look so different.  You've never been in the sun."

It was true, I think.  There wasn't a line on her body.  But it was more than that.  She was long.  Every bone ran on and on.  I looked at her hands, long-boned, fabulous.

The only way you can see her is to view a print.  Hey--wait a minute!  I can sell them to you.  Let me think. . . an 8x12 inch print?  How much?  I'll sell you one for. . . fifty dollars.  No. . . seventy-five.  Wait. . . I don't know.  That seems way too cheap.  But you should see them, really.  She is crazy looking like a Etruscan statue in the Met.

Today was gorgeous again, like pearls in a perfect strand.  Cliched, but true.  But it was a day when I made plenty of mistakes.  After my shoot with Ms. Mystery this morning, I was antsy, so I cleaned up the studio and began setting up the 8x10 camera.  My god, there are at least twenty controls on the thing.  You can tilt and shift every part of the camera you can imagine.  I found an old strobe cable I had made for another camera lens that works on my new/old Ektar lens for the 8x10 camera.  The flash fires.  All there was to do was to get a model.  As often I do, I went out back and pulled in my friend The Real Artist.  I was nervous framing him in the ground glass of the big camera.  I didn't know where any of the controls were.  I was looking goofy, I thought.  But I managed to get him into what I hoped was focus on the big, upside down image on the ground glass back.  Then, hoping,  I loaded some of the new Impossible film and shot.  Seemed good, so we took it to the new/old processor that arrived this week, he and I.  There are many things to do in loading it, and I did most of them wrong so that the negative I'd just shot went awry.  I spent the next thirty minutes cleaning up the mess I'd made.  I hoped the smoke I'd smelled hadn't killed the very expensive purchase.  The Real Artist didn't have time to wait around, so I told him we would try another time.  Then, without a picture, I went shopping for dinner with mom.

Mother came over and we cooked and drank some wine and then dished up our meals and I turned on a movie, "The Bang Bang Club." It was about photographers in Africa in the 1990s.  How do you go wrong?  It was a romantic movie shot and told through the male lens from an ideal of manhood. . . and I loved it.  It was hideously perverse in its presentation.  But it was the photography story that made it for me.  That and the over-the-top adventurism. It is what drove me most my life.

Then another mistake.  Kit Kat was happy to lie between the two of us on the couch.  Meal over, I chopped up my meat and spread it around the rice and put the bowl on the floor for the cat to eat.  She poked around with the leftovers, licking this and spitting that out, and in a while, I put the bowl on the kitchen counter.  A little bit after this, while cleaning up, I saw the half-eaten bowl of food and decided to eat some before. . . uh-oh.  I was eating after the cat.  I could feel the bad infections beginning.  Whiskey was called for.  Whiskey to the rescue.

So now I'm buzzed looking out to a clear blue sky in the dark hoping I get no viruses from the cat's filthy mouth.  That seems impossible, though.

But oh. . . those pictures. . . if you could only see them.