It's not that I've been less disciplined when it comes to sharing here,

but yeah, I've been less disciplined.

It's reductive to write that it's a lessened discipline only.
In fact, I'd guess my discipline has merely adjusted the direction of its mast.

I've been busy with. Busy With.
Moving. Making things with my hands. Building bookshelves and going to sleep by ten (okay, nine).
Busy with a new project I hope to tell you about tomorrow(?).

Busy with getting to know my new neighbors and walking every block in my neighborhood (without a camera).

*

Three days ago I had an hour and a half to work in the darkroom.
After drying a few contact sheets, I picked a fairly random negative to print.

What I choose is hardly arbitrary, but it is impulsive. And having only seen the images for mere moments, this negative was by no means a safe choice (meaning: it wasn't obviously beautiful or perfectly exposed).

I put the negative in the carrier, slipped the carrier under the light, focused the grain, printed test strips for the time and finally made a full-size print on a single piece of fiber paper.


I was alone in the darkroom by this time. I'd forgotten my headphones, so there was no sound but the mechanized white noise.
When I slipped the paper in the developer, I looked at the clock on the wall.


At one minute exactly I flipped over the print so I could watch the image appear.
The image's form begins to show its structure about a minute in, but it's the second minute that does the real legwork, the part that makes a print look like a photograph.


But. After I flipped over my print, I could see only shapes.
An image, yes -- but no definable, recognizable, material form.

I stared at the print for its entire length in the developer.
Three minutes total!


I knew it was a double exposure of something and a self-portrait.
I "knew" because I remembered -- most certainly not because I could recognize myself.
I couldn't recognize anything! It was like looking at organized but meaningless inkblots.

Having chosen the negative by impulse alone, I had given it no weight of expectation.
I was in such a weird place (my hands were not cooperating with me) that I hadn't attempted to visualize what a good print of this negative would look like (something I very much enjoy doing on a more successful day).

Three minutes in the developer. Thirty seconds in the stop. Three minutes in the fixer.
And then I put the print into a viewing tray, walked through the black-out door into the white light of the dry lab and then...
still recognized nothing.

It literally took me returning to the contact sheet (for contextual reference) to figure out (with certainty) what I had printed.

*

And today, I received my second piece of good mail in the post.
A fellowship offer to the museum's art school. To which I had applied with no hope but all trust.
It's small. It's pebbles to someone else. But it's so rare for me to Want something and then to Try for it.

I was as happy for the attempt as the award. That the attempt has tangible fruition?

This is a letter about that feeling, I guess.
Wanting, working with a flexible goal. Wanting, working as the goal.

That the last image I printed before this letter was reluctant to be seen. That I picked it and then could not see it.
Nothing feels better than this combination.

*

To all of you who have encouraged me, directly and indirectly,
this is one drop in the well of my deep & tender thanks.