Tangible

I've been a photographer for quite some time. The days before the internet my only calling card were my portfolios. Presentation is always everything as often, I wasn't even around when my client was viewing my book. Around 1998, I posted my first website as an added addition to promote myself as a photographer. 2000, I paid more attention to updating and revising my website more so than my portfolio. By 2003, my portfolio hadn't been seen or touched. The ease at which I could update my best images only made sense to push the website.

I've sort of reached full circle. Today I started working on a portfolio, a physical entity that I have to feed and carry, again. I haven't been in the mindset of a concrete illustration of what I do for years. I purchased a portfolio box, containing empty mattes, to be filled with my photographs. While going thru images, on the computer to figure out how my presentation was going to look, I pulled out a recently printed (read hardcopy) double image of 2 women put side by side on a sheet of paper. The print itself is just a beautiful object. Seeing depth on 2 dimensions, feeling texture and just the sense that holding this object in your hand is a thing to behold. I put it in one of the mattes just to get an impression of what I was working with. Suddenly, I felt excitement. Physical beauty that you can hold in your hands. A work of art! The print itself had meaning to me, but set in a simple frame of the matte, the presentation of my image suddenly made it larger than I could have imagined. I've pulled it out several times today just to look at it, admire it and just hold and look.