"Age cannot wither her, nor
custom stale Her infinite variety: other women cloy The appetites they feed:
but she makes hungry Where most she satisfies" Antony and Cleopatra (Act
II, Scene II) William Shakespeare
As the
portrait photographer that I am I can assert that hundreds of persons have
faced my camera since I started taking photographs in Austin, Texas in 1959. As inspiration, I had all the family albums that my mother kept and often showed me.
It is
difficult to figure out (unless you quote Shakespeare) the infinite variety
that two eyes, one nose, one mouth and two ears are able to display.
This last
month, with the use of my newish 28 inch wide Acer monitor, I have been
exploring my many files. I am now standardizing their names as some of them
have their first name and others their surname. I am now using surname followed
by a comma and the first name.
I will be
buying exterior hard drives and will be transferring those files, so should my
computer do what so many computers eventually do, they will be in a safe place.
Because of
my advanced age, I find myself meticulously fine tuning these file images. Some
had dust I did not see the first time, others need more contrast or to be
darker. When I am gone, these files will be some sort of legacy.
Best of all I
am finding with the help of the wide screen, gems that I overlooked with my old
Dell CRT monitor.
Case in
point for today’s blog are some photographs of jeweller Susan Fiedler. My files
(no digital pictures) are in envelopes with no date. I must have taken these in
the beginning of this century. I met her at an exhibition at the Exposure
Gallery, a photo gallery now sadly gone.
Because I
was subjected to pushy magazine art directors and editors to do stuff
differently (I am the photographer that I am today because of them), I discovered
in Fiedler’s file some photographs that I have no idea how I did them. If asked
I doubt I could repeat the look.
As for Susan
Fiedler, when she faced my camera, she was my Cleopatra.
