I am probably not the first person to complain about the transition from slides to digital. On the one hand, fantastic! No more slide duplicating! No more boxes & drawers full of the slippery things that I always mis-filed and had to flip through to find the ones to send out to every person requesting information. Come to think of that, talk about freedom of information! Now you can send images free over the internet — remember sending out slide sheets valued at approx. $20 apiece into the world, unsolicited, destined for trashbins? This is less painful.

But the downside is accessing images older than your digital history. I am an old person now — really. Got my MFA (high slide era) in 1982 for heaven’s sake. So when I want to put up a picture of a piece I no longer own, which I took a slide of in 1985 (like in the previous post) it’s a bit dodgy. I took a bunch of slides into Gamma, a big Chicago photo place, a number of years ago, and paid something like $1-$2 each to digitally scan them. Ouch. I have made, let’s say, a real LOT of work over the years, and it was hard enough to pay the photographer the first time around to document them.

And then I move to a small town of 850 people, and still don’t have a photographer (but at least I finally found a good doctor — today.) Hard to stay current. Which is the long way around of explaining the questionable qualtiy of the images you find here. But the Dr. seems to think I will live, so that is a start.

(you always want a picture. So here is a picture that started out the usual way, in a film camera, and may have found its way into my computer as a scan from a magazine article. The image is a detail of the Thousand Foot Garden: Harvest 1992, a set of 68 6″ square tapestry panels depicting some of the plants growing in Thomas Jefferson’s vegetable garden at Monticello, restored, in 1992)