Vanity Scare

One of my Polaroid Ju-Ju process things. The film is all old now and has crazy color casts, so it is getting harder to work with, harder to do the things I have been doing. I will not order any more of it from the remaining out of date stock. I have only been putting off the inevitable anyway. I will begin working with Fuji film and giving that my all. And anyway, I've been doing some interesting transfer work and encaustic things that are too big to scan, so I can't show them here. I am going to begin to work at selling images so that I can pay for my studio. $450 for a 20x16 print? Cheap, I think, but who the hell am I. Maybe I will do portraits in my way. What to charge for that? The Thousand Dollar Portrait? I've never taken money for anything before. I give it all away. But times being what they are, as they say. . . . And like Miss Emily, I too "know the old thrill of a penny more or less" (Faulkner, "A Rose for Emily").

Last night, I bought a copy of Vanity Fair at Whole Foods. That's weird enough. I haven't bought one for a long time. It was a thick issue, though, and the magazine used to have some good articles. I paged through it after dinner. The first quarter of the magazine was all ads. I'm OK with that. I looked at the photography closely and concluded that it was all pretty unimaginative. How much are those companies paying for that? I know that everyone is using high end equipment, big digital Hasselblads, etc, but none of it does much. I'm offering my low end specialties to any company that wants beautiful grunge.

Then I read the Editor's Letter, and I realized why the magazine has taken a nosedive. You can probably read it online. Far too much self there. Let him start a blog and write under a pseudonym and see how long he lasts.

I'm hoping there is something good inside.

But so much for that. The photo here isn't really top notch, but it is current, and after looking at V.F., I'm not going to worry.