$800

M.R. has been selling my images for the last ten years. She called me last week and told me she had sold the last couple of prints I had given her. And she wanted to know what I was working on.

I haven't put a negative in an enlarger for four years. I have nothing to sell.

I told her I was making a DVD of my photos that she could show potential buyers and they could shop with the pause control on their player but I honestly don't think people buy photographs without seeing the actual print.

20 years worth of negatives in boxes and no one to love them but me...and I am such a bad parent. If my negatives were children I wouldn't know any of their names. I was always too busy making more. My negatives are like dried snakeskins to me. The interesting part is somewhere else. And therefore some of those negatives have not seen the light of day or an enlarger light in 20 years.

All I want to do is direct...somebody slap me.

And now the Canon 5D is out with a 13 million pixel sensor which is definitely film quality and the Epson 2400 printer is making "spectacular, archival" black and white prints. I could shoot images to sell to collectors. It isn't too hard to figure out what they want. (Nudes. Solemn Children. Moving Water. Lonely Trees) Can I bring a dispassionate, clinical, commercial approach to something I always did for the...I don't know how to finish that sentence. I have no idea why I have been throwing film in a camera for over twenty years. I picked some subjects, threw it in gear and never looked back.

Slap me again for living a life without a single second of introspection.

I don't even know what those last images were.

Boy I hope skiing starts soon. This is painful.