This collection actually has about 20,000 images, and after almost two years now, the
more we look at and the more we see, the harder it is for us to imagine that she actually
existed.
That a single person could produce such an incredibly beautiful body of work, totally
under the radar, without any interest of sharing, to have companionship.
Even though she's in front of us, we can't see her.
It's really hard for us to imagine that she existed.
She died in 2009, in the picture, there's an auction house called RPN, her storage
lockers went into her rears, and so RPN purchased her lockers, and there were five at a public
auction, and I find this fascinating, they paid $10 a piece for two of the lockers, and
for all five they paid a total of somewhere between $250 and $280.
So they held three auctions over a three month period, one auction a month, and I didn't
attend any of those, I'm sort of one step removed from that whole process, but the material
that I have, the collection that I have, I purchased from one of the original buyers
that was at the auction.
What we do is the aspect of what she didn't do, and the aspect of what the general public,
our interest, or people interested in art, would like to see, and it's what I would
like to see, and that's the finished product of a print.
It's taking us a lot of time and energy to get out the information that we have here
in house.
We started working in Jeff's living room, starting to archive the work and really understand
what we were dealing with and what we had, and then from that point we'd like hundreds
of contact sheets, so we could really just get organized, familiarizing myself, role
by role of what she was shooting.
I really realized how remarkable she was, I mean she wasn't in one place for that long,
she waited, saw that moment, and captured it, and I realized how special she was.
The idea of her being able to get maybe two good shots out of twelve or three, and once
in a blooming maybe four on a single roll, on a hot day for her, is amazing.
She wore that camera, and she wore out the camera as well as wore it every day, but people
know from, I don't know who was telling us that, but somebody knew her at Central Camera
and she would bring her cameras in, and she would wear out the gearing mechanism and they
would have to repair them.
She had two cameras, or three probably, who knows, but she would just wear them out, and
they said they were constantly repairing our cameras, I mean she was shooting so much.
Yeah, it would have been roughly forty eight to, well actually into the eighties, something
like that.
Mid-fifties to mid-eighties, let's say three decades, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, so
fifty thousand images a year, a decade, I mean a decade, so five thousand a year.
And how many is that a day?
We don't have the math math, so why?
I have a calculator.
So five thousand divided by three sixty five, right?
Twenty something?
Twenty-fourteen images a day.
So a roll a day?
A roll a film a day.
Yeah.
Let's say a roll a film a day.
Well at an entire body of work, the two collections, there's only about four thousand
photographs that exist.
She just wasn't interested in the finished print, or there's no, there's at least no
evidence of that, there's no body of prints.
We think of the decisions that she would be making, not so much of our own sensibilities.
Everything we do ends up bubbling up to Ron Gordon and Sandy Steinbrecher, and they sweat,
they sweat a lot, they have a lot of anxiety, and ultimately, they're the ultimate decision
makers, so we just basically put everything together for them to do what they do.
And Ron is of the generation sensibility, and shot a lot of the same things Vivian
Meyer shot, where he doesn't rely on his sensibilities for the decision making process, but he kind
of goes through this commune thing with Vivian Meyer in the dark room, and Sandy does the
same thing.
So they'll ask one another, what do you think she would have done here, you know, had she
been making prints?
So there is the speculation on it, but again, we err on the side of caution, and we really
sort of glam on to the idea of Chicago-type sensibilities of that era.
So you give me a whole stop, Derrick, or it's going to be too dark.
It's great.
You know, I mean, that happens, I think, for us two working, we, you know, mentioned that
we were talking about how our process hasn't really changed, but it just kind of evolves
with each new group that we get.
You know, we kind of see another side of her, and it might inform the way the prints look,
you know, probably not to anyone else's eye, just the things that we notice.
I mean, you have to be looking at these, in some ways, entirely different than when
you first started printing.
Put it in the developer, and Sandy will be looking at it as it comes in, and I'll be
saying are the highlights coming in, and she'll be saying, yeah, I think we need a little
bit more sky here, and, you know, it's an interaction, and then I'll go back and I'll
kind of do that in the enlarger, and then we'll try and make it work.
And I don't know, I think it's pretty hard, looking at prints we made yesterday, and it's
hard to get, you know, three or four prints exactly the same, even when you're doing it
and you say, I like that print, I'm going to make another one just like it, but it's
so much involved in holding and burning and say one thing in relation to the psychoanalysis
of Vivian, that we got very early on in one of the earliest images that we did of the
little boy with the glasses, and I wanted to get this recorded, because I think that's
such a key image.
What's curious about, or what's important to me about that image is that there's one
eye clear, and the glasses are clear, and the other one, the glass is...
I think it's opaque or fawned, and so on.
Yeah, it's not opaque, it's translucent.
You can see, the light comes through it, but not image.
So the eye that can see is in deep shadow, and the blind eye is in bright sunlight, and
that's Vivian.
Vivian can see, but she's always in the shadow, and what she sees is in the light, and behind
the light.
Sometimes her subjects are in deep shadow too, often her subjects are, and the hardest
to print in the world, her subjects are in deep shadow, and then behind her is a scene
in bright sunlight.
I got drives that's crazy, I struggle with those.
Yeah, I got one that you're going to beat me for coming in.
But I think this is in some ways like archeology, and we've had to go through the process of
chronologically breaking apart all these negatives and getting them in order.
We're careful not to destroy anything or misplace anything or mislabel, because all this needs
to be accessible for research at some point.
So I think all these pictures somehow, they have psychiatrists who can read handwriting
and tell you about a person's nature and being, and I think that can be done with their photographs.
I'm not saying I'm the person who can do that, but I think over time, and with more information,
I think there will be people who can give some kind of insight and more depth in what's
present now.
I'm still in this line from a 13-year-old girl who wrote, who was an aspiring photographer.
She gives you the sense that you're standing alongside of her, and I'll just add that you're
not looking through the lens that you really are there.
This project is incredible because it has just a life of its own, and I work sometimes
almost seven days a week.
I go home and I'm tired, and I don't even know what I did.
All I know is it's been a long day, but it's like I'm running, keeping up with the project,
keeping up with what she's created.
