In 2000 LML Payments Sytems, an international cheque cashing
software company based in Vancouver sent me to the US to photograph people in
the organization for their 2001 Annual Report. I had to go to Washington DC,
Phoenix and Dallas.
I decided that to properly shoot this I would take my medium
format camera (and a second one as backup) plus my almost compact studio
lights, a powerful (then) flash unit (a Norman 200B) for on location shooting,
plus the necessary light stands and heavy duty tripod. To carry all this I
brought a collapsible two-wheeled cart.
Perhaps it was the stress of the logistics but before I left
for the US I developed shingles around my waist. It was painful for me to even
sit in my airplane seat. In Phoenix it was 117 Fahrenheit. Between Dallas and
Washington DC I realized I had left my Norman 200B (battery operated) in a
Dallas office. I needed it for Washington DC where I was to photograph four
lawyers in front of the US Supreme
Court. They were to be the daunting faces of the company should anybody want to
infringe on their patents.
The Norman was shipped to DC by courier and I got it in
time. By then I was suffering excruciating pain.
With the relief of having successfully finished my job I decided I wanted to see some of the local galleries. Two of them were the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the National Gallery.
I decided to go to the Corcoran first. I entered the gallery
with all my equipment. I told the guards of my mission to go to the National
Gallery and I asked them if I could store my equipment. Without even inspecting
it they smiled at me and allowed me to wheel my stuff into a room.
I remember all kinds of Singer Sargents but the painting to
remember was Frederic Edwin Church’s 1857 Niagara (7½-foot-wide) painting.
From the Corcoran with my equipment safely in storage I
stopped at the American Institute of Architects. On an inner wall I was looking
for the posted Gold Medal Award winners, for 1986 the winner was our very own
Arthur Erickson. There was something curious here. Thomas Jefferson had been
given his award posthumously in 1993. When I returned to Vancouver I ran into
Erickson and told him that his name was over Jefferson’s. With a wink he told
me, “I am on top of him and that’s the way it should be.”
A few days ago I read in my NY Times that the Corcoran
Gallery is closing and most of its collection is going to the National Gallery.
On Thursday, the
National Gallery announced that almost 6,500 works had been taken into the
overall collection so far. The museum’s holdings of 1,215 American paintings
alone will grow by 226, including beloved works like Frederic Edwin Church’s
1857 “Niagara,” a 7 ½-foot-wide blockbuster that Nancy Kay Anderson, the
curator of American and British paintings at the National Gallery, refers to as
“our ‘Niagara problem” because it is so important and so large that paintings
at her museum will almost certainly have to move or go into storage to
accommodate it. The process that has been underway behind closed doors at the
National Gallery — one large museum essentially digesting another of
considerable size — is, in its scope and particulars, unlike anything an American
museum has undertaken before.
Chances are that I will never ever get shingles again. But my troubles had not ended. Once on the airplane ready to return to Vancouver a storm started. We stayed on the tarmac for five hours (we had to help ourselves to water as by some strange law the flight attendants could not serve us while on the ground). The airplane finally returned to the terminal and I slept the night on a long seat. Everybody was shouting and clamoring for attention. I decided that would not help. The woman behind the desk agreed and rapidly got me a seat in the first plane out. Unfortunately I did not make in time to Vancouver when the folks of the US magazine Better Homes and Gardens was going to shoot our garden for a spread. The spread did appear. But I felt a bit left out!