It's always so awesome going to Sylvias. Sylvia Plachy the world famous photographer (I have to remind her that often because she is so blindly humble and more concerned about all the stray cats she takes care of out in the gardens). Anyways, first thing we do when I get there on Sunday mornings is just talk and laugh in the kitchen while we are making earl grey tea with a shitload of grated fresh ginger, that I usually grate after she peels them. Elliot her husband (of now over 50 years) comes in and says hi and then I try my best to remember super bad dirty jokes so we can all laugh even more. Or he tells me equally bad dirty jokes. That's usually the first 20 minutes of every time I work w Sylvia.
I will almost always work on scanning 10-30 of her negatives and then tediously remove the dust from the scans using photoshop. Then we go print from those or others she has picked out. I am always pushing us to print from the darkrooms at the ICP because besides darkroom prints being massively better than inkjets, ICP has the best b/w darkrooms I've ever used. They even have self-rocking print washers, basically they offer the Rolls Royce of darkrooms. (Anyways we can't print there since they are moving and closed for 4 months. But as luck has it they are opening 2 blocks from where I work everyday and it's going to be so awesomely awesome). It's also so much fun to print with Sylvia in the darkroom, she knows exactly what she's doing in the darkroom, and how to achieve it --digital printing is confusing to her and I end up having to do all that.
How she edits is the best thing I have learned working for her. I don't know exactly how to explain it but she puts so much of how she looks at everything into a way that explains what she wants explained. Simple sounding but crazy hard to do. She just had a museum show in Budapest Hungary and I didn't realize until she told me but I had printed almost all of that show! And she gave me credit for it too at the museum.
How she edits is the best thing I have learned working for her. I don't know exactly how to explain it but she puts so much of how she looks at everything into a way that explains what she wants explained. Simple sounding but crazy hard to do. She just had a museum show in Budapest Hungary and I didn't realize until she told me but I had printed almost all of that show! And she gave me credit for it too at the museum.
Okay but this last Sunday, it got very cold suddenly in New York, so after earl grey tea we started by going out into the gardens to winterize 6 outside cat houses. It was pretty in-depth because we had to really insulate + rain/show proof them. It was a really fun way to start the day, I love that shit so much. And as always she is so appreciative it made me feel golden. She's not a crazy cat lady, she just loves living things and I love that. She only has one cat that lives inside, Millie. Millie was a stray kitten who was terrified of all the other stray cats and ran inside Sylvia's house one day and has never left. I think she was a kitten when I first started working w Sylvia 5 years ago so she's now probably around 6 or 7.
I pulled these from a conact sheet in 2016, again so fun to see the contact sheet. I had gone to see Radiohead at Madison Sq Garden the night before. All this makes me so glad I moved to nyc 8 years ago. xo
