garrison beau scott

I can get as frustrated with humanity as the next guy. Not Unabomber frustrated mind you, though I often fantasize about having rocket launchers affixed to the hood of my car. Some people just don’t seem to understand the concept of Slower Traffic Keep Right.

But I digress.

Humanity. Sometimes frustrated with. But not all the time, in fact more often than not, usually with camera in hand, I rejoice over humanity’s simple touch in the things I find myself gazing upon. And I like to consider myself a person who can see the big picture, so my mind wanders to this child, and the parents who were able to put a smile on that face. And what of the person who turned the photograph into this. Did someone else staple it to this post…and so on, all the way to the guys who laid the bricks for the building in the background and the family dinners that were paid for and laughed over from their efforts.

Put a stone in my head and I might start thinking about the various (perhaps nefarious???) activities that go on in that building today.

But again, I am straying from the point.

I had the amazing opportunity to work for Michael Kenna during 2001 and 2002. He was definitely not the photographer mentioned in the earlier post. As beautiful as his images are, they’re nothing compared to the man who takes them. Michael is an amazing person and if you subscribe to the adage that good things happen to good people, Michael is the only proof you’ll need to state your case.

I mostly worked on Michael’s prints, getting them ready for sale or exhibition. Michael does all his own printing. And it is his fine art black and white prints that have brought him world wide recognition. And I can’t say this enough, deservedly so.

But occasionally, Michael has been know to take on a commercial job, mostly for the auto industry. And as it so happened, he was doing a job for Mercedes-Benz and needed a second assistant. Here’s where the story gets better, his first assistant was one of my dearest and closest friends, Rolfe Horn. So I’m working with Rolfe for Michael shooting a Benz out in the middle of the Tehachapi Desert. One day we finish pretty early and Rolfe makes the suggestion we take the cameras out and take some of our own images. I was all in until I remembered I left my camera bag back at the hotel.

Michael reaches into his camera bag, pulls out one of his Hassey’s and says, “Need some film?”

This was taken that night, with Michael’s camera.

I used to work for a photographer, well I’ve worked for a number of photographers, but oh man was this one different. Great subject matter, for starters. I had the opportunity to handle and work with ancient and antique textiles, some dating as far back as 2,500 b.c.e. During my time in the studio I grew to admire and even develop a love affair with Turkoman rugs.

The thing was though, as cool as it was to be around Chinese burial robes from the seventh century, woven from golden thread, and still smelling of the death it had contained for hundreds of years, the photographer himself was, well to put it nicely, not as cool.

So just about every lunch hour, I had to escape and walk with the camera to maintain some of my sanity. The blessing was that the studio was located in a very cool section of industrial area bordering on Oakland, so the opportunities to find some great snaps were there for me. The downside was that an hour can go very quickly. Still, I did my best, and managed to hold on to enough shards of my mind so as to still be able to form complete sentences.

San Francisco is an amazing city. Unless you’re looking for a parking spot. I didn’t live in the city, so I didn’t have to endure the sometimes endless search for a place to put my car on a daily basis, but I did go into the city enough to develop a real disdain for driving there.

Fortunately, San Francisco, much like NYC, is a town you can get to, and around in, without a car. And as a photographer who likes to walk, and walk, and walk, well a car only gets in the way. When this was taken, sometime in 2000, I was living in Marin, which is north of the Golden Gate. There are two options for mass transit for getting into S.F. One is the bus, which takes forever, and the other is the ferry. Which is a 45 minute bit of heaven. Awesome views, wind in your face observation decks, warm and toasty inside seating, AND they serve beer and wine.

Suffice to say, I took the ferry. Which is how and why I got this shot. After a day in the city, I was on my way back to catch the boat home, walking up Market Street. The building in the lower left is the clock tower at the Ferry Building, and the spotlights that run up the center originate at The Embarcadero.

Today we took the offspring out for a walk along the Charles River. There’s a great path that winds its way behind Newton and Watertown, perfect for a lazy afternoon stroll. My daughter, Emmy, saw the Polaroid camera in the car, and asked if she could take some pictures.

She might as well have asked me if it was okay to breathe.

In the past, when we’ve gone out like that, I would always gently remind her that she had a camera along for the trip and ask if there was anything she wanted to take pictures of. But then I remembered my unspoken promise to my children to never push them in any direction. So today I said nothing, and was pleasantly surprised when of her own accord, she began asking if she could use it.

Not just hold it, or have it, but actually use it. So when she spotted something, she asked for it, and then magic. Here’s her favorite, which just so happens to be mine as well.

That smudge in the lower left of the white border is peanut butter. Kids… God love ‘em.