The Newest Year

2011 now gone, we welcome 2012. We are now in our 24^th year of operation. It seems at once an impossibly long and short existence. Many of you were not yet born when we were; the rest were exponentially younger. For many in our line of work the ensuing years have not been particularly kind. In 1988 there were 13 labs in the Boston area. Now? Digital capture, post production, and online hardware, software, and consumables procurement have helped accelerate a race to the bottom. Sometimes I wonder what it will look like in another 24 years and then I realize that even 5 years out is a tough call.

In 2011 the New England Mobile Book Fair, one of the last remaining large independent bookstores, was sold. Jon Strymish, longtime friend and customer, was one of the owners. Jon seems at peace enough now with letting go but watching this from my perch here in Needham has been unsettling. Small businesses get founded and if all goes well they prosper and grow and the founders or their heirs eventually sell and move on or retire. That is just the way it is and it’s not a bad thing, but the ubiquity of Amazon et al has pretty much assured the ultimate demise of many brick and mortars. This past year saw the closing of Zeff Photo in Belmont. They had a well established longtime base of professional and amateur photographers and enthusiasts and that wasn’t enough. In the hypercompetitive world of consumer and even professional equipment things change so quickly that the only practical way to keep up is to continually research your needs online. The local brick and mortars have difficulty continually bringing in the newest and latest when there are boxes of unsold not quite the newest and latest sitting on their shelves. Faced with the choice of paying a little more for hands on real time access or clicking “add to cart” from B&H et al an ever increasing many choose the latter. The way of the world, the laws of nature, the rule of the market.

Still, we are here, now. Things are going well enough as to make any complaining seem selfish and trivial. We are and remain deeply appreciative for your support and trust. We will continue to do our best for you. For auld lang syne as well as the future our thanks best wishes for 2012.

The Great Yellow Father, 2011

I first began buying lab products directly from Eastman Kodak in 1980. Between then and 2008 when they ceased direct distribution I probably purchased close to 2 million dollars worth of paper, chemistry and film. When we started Color Services in 1988 Eastman Kodak had been the dominant supplier in the industry for nearly 90 years. It’s omnipotence was unquestioned and its technical superiority a matter of fact. Now, as 2011 winds down it seems increasingly likely that their days may be numbered. They are burning through cash reserves at a rate that is not sustainable; their stock has been downgraded to junk status, there are reports of abandoning employee pension health insurance, and increasingly the financial media mention bankruptcy as a real possibility. Suffice it to say that wherever the financial truth may lay they have lost their inimitable swagger – the kind of swagger that they historically used as a tool to keep their professional customers as well as their competitors in line.

We still make analog prints and process film. It remains a good business and it remains our industry heritage. To do these things we continue to use Kodak’s products. I still use their films in the course of making my own work, as do many of our clients. We all have a stake in their survival and ongoing viability. Over the past 31 years the quality and reliability of their products has been remarkable, even when one takes into consideration the c print stability issues that we have and continue to face. Their products have always worked reliably and understandably. At the height of their TSR field representative network days there was always an answer to any technical question one phone call away.

I have to admit to some mixed feelings about all this. Great products aside, Kodak treated us as if we were pretty inconsequential and at the tail end of their TSR days in the mid 90’s. Their reps made it clear repeatedly that they would do their best to put up with us (our standards were much higher than most commercial labs) and I often was left with the impression that we were regarded as more of an annoyance than an asset. I also remember the last order that I placed directly with them - I had always ordered by telephone, rhythmically reciting one catalog number after another to the same fellow that that I had been ordering from for several years. He had over 30 years with the company and was approaching retirement and hoped he would make it there. Eventually I came to the last cat # - C41 Final Rinse, and after making awkward small talk about the upcoming Rochester winter we both knew that it was the beginning of some sort of an end.

Judy Haberl at Gallery Kayafas

Judy Haberl at Gallery Kayafas

October 22 - November 26, 2011

gallery website

artist website

Gallery Kayafas

450 Harrison Ave

Boston, MA 02118

Victoria Sambunaris at Albright-Knox Art Gallery

Victoria Sambunaris: Taxonomy of a Landscape

Friday, October 21, 2011–Sunday, January 22, 201

Each year for the last ten years, Victoria Sambunaris (American, born 1964) has set out from her home in New York to cross the United States by car, alone with her camera. Her photographs capture the expansive American landscape and the natural and fabricated adaptations that appear throughout it. In conjunction with the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Albright-Knox will present a selection of approximately forty photographs from Sambunaris’s body of work, marking the artist’s first solo exhibition at a major American museum. Hauntingly beautiful in their documentation of the declining American terrain, Sambunaris’s images celebrate the intersection of civilization, geology, and natural history, featuring trains in Texas and Wyoming, trucks in New Jersey and Wisconsin, the oil pipeline in Alaska, uranium tailings in Utah, and a unique view of Arizona’s Petrified Forest. Together, they present a sparse and vast landscape dotted by human intervention that is distinctly American. The exhibition will also include a comprehensive archival installation featuring maps, journals, and additional records of the artist’s travels.

gallery website

Albright-Knox Art Gallery

1285 Elmwood Avenue

Buffalo, New York 14222

Laura McPhee at Carroll and Sons

Laura McPhee: Something About Love

September 7 – October 29, 2011

gallery website

Carroll and Sons

450 Harrison Ave

Boston, MA 02118

Jocelyn Lee at Rose Gallery

Jocelyn Lee

Nowhere but Here

Rose Gallery

September 24, 2011 - November 19, 2011

“Photography is not about fact or truth; but it is about a casual relationship between light, subject, and receptive material. Light reflects off an object and accumulates on a sensitized surface, marking it so as to resemble that object. Things that we see as well as things that we do not see are held in relationship to one another, and the photograph—unlike a painting or drawing becomes a mysterious but irrefutable anchor to a real event in space and time. This does not mean that the photograph cannot lie or distort; it can do both. But hidden within that illusion is always an umbilical cord to an actual moment.”

—Jocelyn Lee, nowhere but here

Rose Gallery website

Artist's website

Rose Gallery

Bergamot Station Arts Center

2525 Michigan Ave

Santa Monica, California, 90404

Willard Traub at the Danforth Museum

Recovery 1, photograph

September 11, 2011 - November 6, 2011

Members Preview Reception: Saturday, September 17, 6pm - 8pm

Poetry Reading: Sunday, September 18, 1pm

Photographer Willard Traub will read poetry and prose poems he's written to illuminate photographs in Recovery.

Exhibition catalogs available, with a portion of sale proceeds to be donated to Be the Match Foundation, the national clearinghouse for bone marrow transplant donors and recipients.

Artist Talk: Wednesday, September 21, 12:30pm

About the Exhibit

Willard Traub: Recovery is an exhibition of unique photographs that impose the lens of human experience on the healing process, Traub’s strong, emotional images directly connect us to an artist who might have been critically ill, but remained actively engaged. In her essay for the exhibition catalog, Karen Haas, The Lane Collection Curator of Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, compares Traub’s pictures to the early photographs of Alfred Stieglitz or still lifes by Josef Sudek. She also remarking on their complexity. These pictures “are political,” she observes, allowing Traub “to gain a much-needed sense of control in the face of this seemingly out-of-control disease.” And, they are “also symbolic, as he has come to see them as signifying larger issues, such as love, loss, sustenance, and healing.”

About the Artist

Willard Traub is a Massachusetts based photographer whose interests range from the commercial photography of architecture to teaching to fine art photography. Recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Photography Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a Polaroid Foundation Grant, his work is represented in private, museum and corporate collections, both nationally and abroad. The artist currently lives in Wayland, MA and works from his studio at the Saxonville Studios in Framingham.

For more information on the exhibition,

visit the Danforth Museum's website