Dad Show and Tell

In March of 1991, I visited my son's First Grade class at Gier Park Elementary in Lansing, Michigan, to do a show and tell of sorts. As I recall, it was supposed to be job related, but as I was supervising a photographic services unit at the time, that job would have been a bit difficult to explain, much less demonstrate, especially since so much of what we did wasn't quite in keeping with what five- and six-year-olds understood about photography, if they understood much about it at all. So I went as a photographer. Cameras and pictures, they probably could understand.

I brought in my Mamiya RB67 medium-format camera, with both my Polaroid back and a film back, along with one of my studio flash units with its umbrella. I also brought in an air shutter release bulb with twenty-foot-long tube so that the kids, along with their teacher, Mrs. Madeleine Shanahan, could each take a self-portrait using Polaroid 669 instant film.

The kids seemed to really enjoy the magic of it all. When everyone was done taking turns, I did a group photograph of the class and Mrs. Shanahan.

It might have dissapointed them slightly, but I took all the Polaroids home with me so that I could create the above assemblage, but I gave them all to Zachary (in the red striped shirt at the back) the next day so that he could distribute them to everyone. (All these years later, I wish I'd taken the picture from directly above the assemblage.) I recently got in touch with the mother of one of Zachary's classmates and she told me that her daughter still has her Polaroid. You can't believe how happy that made me.

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did we almost kiss

you'd think
we would have

we were married
after all

but no
you turned away

i wish
i could recall
which film we had just seen
at that theatre
that no longer exists

something tells me
it was
the war of the roses
which was all too
predictive
of our lives to come

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Unless otherwise noted, all writings on this blog are copyright Patrick T. Power. All rights reserved.

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Sandy

Sandy — ©2025 Patrick T. Power

As I was going through my piles of negatives, deciding which ones to start scanning, I came across this one, which was the first frame of a series of photographs I'd taken of dried flowers, none of which are really any good.

Sandy, so named by my daughter, I believe, was a kitten we'd agreed to take in from our babysitter, whose cat had recently had a litter. We already had an eleven-year old cat at the time, but she was a bit on the ornery side most of the time. Sandy was playful and seemed to like our company.

I'm guessing that this photo was taken in August or so of 1990. I had recently purchased a used medium format camera, a Mamiya RB67 (which I still have), with the notion of doing some freelance work with it on the side. I also had purchased a lighting kit, and set up a makeshift studio in our basement, if for no other reason than to practice. Several times, the kids modeled for me, but in this case, as I noted, I was photographing a dried bouquet of flowers, which might have been from Penny's and my recent wedding anniversary, when Sandy decided to check things out.

Anyway, had I chosen some other day to scan the negatives, it probably wouldn't have hit me as hard, but as the image of Sandy came up on my screen during the preview scan, it occurred to me that it was Christmas Eve of that year that Sandy took to the back of our bedroom closet and died. It's certainly not the happiest of Christmas memories, but this picture brought it all back.

EDIT TO ADD (13 January 2026): Scanning some photographs from Christmas Day, 1991, I came across a couple of photographs of Sandy, so it must have been New Year's Eve that she died.

Older Sandy — ©2025 Patrick T. Power

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The Artist Project, Part II

So, I did a thing.

This is something I should have done a long time ago, back when digital online publishing became a thing, but I'd never forced myself to design it much less go through with the preparation of the files necessary to produce it. Another factor has been that I didn't care for Blurb's templates, and instead of figuring out a workaround at the time, I put it on the back burner. The back back burner!

As I was scanning old negatives last month, however, I came across the thirty-year-old negatives from this series of portraits, and went back to the scans I'd made of them probably three years ago, not long after having acquired a scanner that could handle medium format negatives. It was yet another of my false-starts to get this thing moving. This time, though, I'd made up my mind to bring this to completion, so I retouched all the images, which was a painstaking process in and of itself (see below), looked at Blurb's BookWright Online interface, and decided how I could avoid using the available templates.

Feeling a bit of a breeze at my back, and with a determination to finally get it done, I trusted somewhat in my ability to work around the template limitations. I stuck to working on it for a solid week. I dropped pretty much everything else I've been working on, primarily my research/writing projects, and concentrated on creating something I believe has a place in this world.

As I alluded to last month, I've done this primarily with one person in mind, Karen Stock. At the time my exhibition went up at the Lansing Art Gallery (which I only recently discovered no longer exists), I was totally out of my league. I didn't know the first thing about having a show of this nature, much less the duties that came with it, so this book is more than just a thank you to Karen, it's an apology for my inexperienced mindlessness at the time.

But now, it's done, and the book should be in Karen's hands by now. While she and I are connected on Facebook, we don't interact very much, but I've been hesitant to let on that I've been doing this other than with a close friend who also knows Karen. I've planned on and hoped for the book to be total surprise to her. I also had a copy printed for Bill Harrison, who so graciously allowed me to use his darkroom at Custom Photographic all those years ago so that I could get a big chunk of the prints done in time for matting, framing, and mounting at the gallery. He should have his copy by now as well.

While I have zero expectations that anyone else would be interested in having a copy, especially since they're not exactly cheap, it's currently available both in hardcover and softcover at Blurb's base prices. It's also available as a PDF.

So, once I got that ball rolling, it turned out to not be very difficult to complete, and I'm quite pleased with the quality of the book. So, with that little bit of tailwind, I dove right into another book project, yet another one I've imagined for almost twenty years. In fact, I had actually gotten quite a ways into that project at one time, but I've since trashed that design for a new one, and have processed and re-processed gobs of photographs for it. Again, while it's not something I expect anyone to buy, I feel compelled to assemble the photographs in a non-online form as a kind of permanent record.

Side note: I selected the cover photograph—which is not amongst the photos that were included in the gallery show—because I felt that since hands were essential to all of the artists' work, I wanted something that highlighted that aspect.

A limited preview of the book here.

Part I

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