More Crass Manipulative A.I.

A couple of days ago a friend re-posted another's Bluesky post which linked to a song on YouTube. The song is obstenibly an Irish interpretation of Bruce Springsteen's "Streets of Minneapolis." The above image, which serves as the thumbnail for the video, suggested to me that I was going to hear two guys from Ireland. Realizing it was a still image and not a video, I listened to the song while doing something else. I even kind of liked the version more than the original Springsteen version, and I was just about to share it on Facebook when I noticed on the page's sidebar recommendations that there was a "France version," which I also clicked on and listened to for a few seconds.

That's when I noticed that there were even more versions, none of which I'm providing links for, only screenshots.

Along the way, I found another account which appears to be posting the same kind of slop.

And another.

And another.

As regards the first handful above, I did a web search to see if Ethan Gontar was an actual person. At the moment, I'm not sure I can say so for sure. I found a website as well as social media sites using that name, but "his" website looks very much like it could be AI-produced. If indeed Gontar is a real person, it seems that video production—not music—is his thing.

I found an interview with what initially appears to be a legitimate news site, but neither the interview nor any of the other stories I've clicked through to on the site have bylines. They're all attributed to Ldn-Post... all 22,624 of them, which suggests to me that the entire site is AI-generated. I mean... the opening paragraph:

Ethan Gontar is an Israel-based musician, composer, producer, and a singer-songwriter. We’ve been trusting that Ethan will enlighten us additional regarding his work strategies, what moves him, his opinion on thoughts, and whether he jumps at the chance to work alone or in a gathering for quite a while. We visited with Ethan for some time and got to hear some interesting things from him.

What reasonably intelligent journalist writes like this?!?

"We’ve been trusting that Ethan will enlighten us additional"?

"his opinion on thoughts"?

"jumps at the chance to work alone or in a gathering"?

So this is where we are. YouTube accounts which are full of artificially produced music, likely being mass-produced with very little effort, all for the purpose of monetizing off the music of others. And in the case of Springsteen's "Streets of Minneapolis", capitalizing on a highly emotional moment in time.

Currently, the "Irish Folk Version" has over 120 thousand views; the "Irish Female Duet" (which features a trio in the photo!) has over 57K views; the "Rock Version" has over 33K; the "Live Version" has over 16K. The other versions are in the thousands. Two more "covers" were added to the page today: What if "Here Comes The Sun" were an Irish folk song? and What If 'Yellow Submarine' Was a Country Song? While the view counts on those is rather low at the moment, no doubt thousands of Facebook users will be clicking on them and sharing them, completely unaware of what's going on.

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Toledo Window Box

George Carlin's Toledo Window Box

Note: I originally wrote this to describe a "date from hell," but the more I thought about it, I decided that it was unfair for me to pin such a mean sounding label on that evening since ultimately, it was just about two very different people with very different interests who spent a few hours together under circumstances that for both of us were—at the very least—uncomfortable. And comical.

I was not yet 20, and at the time was pretty green in the world of dating. Nonetheless, I confidently bought two tickets to see George Carlin in Toledo, Ohio for his Toledo Window Box tour at Toledo's Masonic Auditorium on 2 March 1975. I was working at Commercial Aluminum Cookware (now Calphalon) in downtown Toledo at the time, and the first woman I'd asked to accompany me—Valerie Bennett, who worked at National Super Service in the same building and whose brother worked with me—turned me down. My across-the-street neighbour, Tina Estrada (whose given name, I just discovered, was Caroline), had introduced me to a friend of hers, a beautician, I think, and very possibly had suggested we go out, so in somewhat of a moment of desperation, and a desire to not waste the ticket, I asked her to go with me.

At the time, I was driving an AMC Gremlin X, and just about everything on the car was falling apart at the same time. Both the driver-side door latch and the rear window latch had broken and as a tentative fix while I searched for a new car, I held them both shut with one of those orange-brown canvas straps typically used to secure a refrigerator to a two-wheel cart, or hold furniture in place inside of a moving van. I had to get in and out via the passenger side door. It was quite the sight to see.

When I arrived at her house to pick her up, she wasn't ready, and, in fact, had forgotten about the date entirely, but to her credit, instead of blowing me off, she went upstairs to get ready. I waited patiently and chatted with her mother in the duration, and when she came down the stairs, I was a bit... shocked? She was dressed in a sparkly silvery lamé big-bells pantsuit and wore matching sparkly silver four- or five-inch platform shoes. This was topped off with a fur coat.

For George Carlin.

I was wearing a regular shirt and jeans.

Maybe, maybe, maybe she had no idea who George Carlin was. Maybe she was expecting a rock concert. I can't recall how it came to be that I invited her, actually. Did Tina give me her phone number and I called her? Did I ask her while she and Tina were hanging out one day? Regardless, I'm certain that we didn't talk much about the show in advance other than my asking her, and telling her where and when it would be. I guess I assumed she'd remember.

I have no real memory about the rest of the night except that the opening musical comedy duo was pretty funny, as was Carlin, of course. I can't recall if she laughed a single time throughout the show because I was still somewhat in a state of shock. I have no idea if she enjoyed herself.

After the show, I climbed back into my side of the car, and I took her home. I don't even recall if we talked much about the show or anything else. It was the last time I saw her, and I can only imagine that she probably does consider that night as her date from hell.

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vanity plates

RJ-44 (courtesy of Christine Power)

my mom's brother
tells the story
of his father
my grandfather
who had vanity plates

rj-44

his initials
plus the year
he regained his
drivers license
after having it
taken away
likely for
drunk driving

rj lived in manhattan
and the story goes
that one day
while stopped
at a red light
someone came up
to his window
and asked him
if he could buy
the rights
to rj-44

that someone
was reggie jackson
number 44
of the
new york yankees

he was refused

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I originally wrote the above poem (or whatever you'd like to call it) based on a prompt I saw on a website I frequently visit, then thought I'd post it here as well, along with a photo of the license plate which my brother Jim obtained after our grandfather, Roy Newton Jones, died in November of 1980. As noted above, we learned about the supposed encounter between Reggie Jackson and grandpa from my mom's brother, Skip, who I can only assume learned about it from grandpa. The story is the reason Jim came home from the funeral in New York with the plate.

A few years ago, I contacted a friend of mine in New York City who used to work for Major League Baseball to see if there might be a way to contact Reggie Jackson to check on whether or not the story was true, but all she could suggest was that I try his Instagram account, which I did, but I got no response.

True or not, it's a great story.

Edit to add: I found an email address on Jackson's Instagram bio website and have sent a query, so perhaps I'll update this soon.

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6 January 2001

Windows
Ducks still gather
not far from the bridge
at the river’s bend.

Snow and frigid air
have narrowed
their hole
in the
ice.

I pass by
as they huddle
and wonder
where they’ll go
when that window
finally
closes.

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Collage

Penny Collage, ©2026 Patrick T. Power

I scanned the negatives for this today. I took the photographs used in this collage in either the summer of 1991 or 1992... leaning towards the latter. They were taken one weekend that Penny and I took the kids to Grand Haven State Park, which runs along the shore of Lake Michigan, about twenty minutes south of Muskegon, Michigan. It's probably the earliest example of my creating not-so-typical "panoramas" with my picture taking. Aside from possibly laying the original prints on top of each other way back then, I'd not thought about creating an actual collage out of them until today.

Penny Collage II, ©2026 Patrick T. Power

This second version includes our son, Zachary, but he got up while I was taking the series of photographs, so that's why he appears somewhat to be floating mid-air. Penny also moved a bit during the sequence, as she lowered her left arm and rested it across her right arm before raising it back to her chin. I like them both for different reasons.

At that time in my life, I mostly took pictures of the kids or Penny, or documented family gatherings, which, of course, is why I appear in so few of our family's photographs. I wasn't much of a photographer, really, despite that I had a 35mm camera and had photographed a few weddings. At best, I was a picture taker. Which is not to say that I didn't have ideas about being a photographer. (Many a set of negatives has a frame or two in which I attempted something "artsy"... something that caught my eye for one reason or another.)

In fact, it was about this time that I purchased a used medium format camera, a Mamiya RB67, and shortly after that, an auto-focus Nikon N90, along with a couple of lenses. While the N90 was sort of classified as a serious hobbyist or just-short-of-professional camera, the lenses were adequate only in their combined ability to cover a range from 28mm to 300mm: a Nikkor AF 28-85mm f/3.5-4.5 and a Nikkor AF 75mm-300mm f/4.5-5.6. Neither lens was very fast so therefore not ideal for doing professional work, but I wasn't as informed as I should have been about camera gear when I bought it all.

While writing this, it occured to me that chances are high that I had the N90 by this time as one of the photographs on the same set of negatives was taken by my daughter, and I suspect that since it's in focus, it was the N90. The Nikkormat FTN I'd had been using since 1979 or so (and which I still have) likely would have been a struggle for her to use with her four- or five-year-old hands, especially since it was manual focus.

From the Back Seat

There's a chance, too, that the photographs were taken with Penny's point-and-shoot camera, but judging from the shallow-ish depth-of-field on several other frames (including those which make up the collage), it's not likely.

These negatives have been tucked away in boxes for nearly thirty years—so long that while I recognized the images in the collage, the photograph of me and Penny took me completely by surprise. Mainly because I just have no memory of it, but also because there are so few photographs with both of us in them.

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The Last Christmas

Christmas, 1994 — ©2026 Patrick T. Power

You couldn't possibly tell from the looks on our faces that this would be our last Christmas together as a family. But less than two months later, just before Zachary's tenth birthday, it all would come to a screeching halt.

As I continue to scan negatives from that period in my life—our lives—it is quite difficult to not also continue to process all that happened in the fifteen years leading up to that moment. I recall so many of my own missteps and misdeeds along the way, but mostly, I focus on the lack of real conversation about our marriage. I was, as Maggie Estep has so eloquently put it, an emotional idiot. I was unable to speak to Penny about the things that troubled me, whether it be about work or our relationship. Maybe because I was afraid to appear weak or fragile. Maybe because I was weak. Conversely, she chose not to talk to me, and instead talked to her friends, to an astrologer, and to her therapist. ("My therapist feels sorry for you.") I think she even might have talked to my older brother, who coincidentally left his wife not long before our split.

Anyway, I have been going down this little trip down memory lane for maybe a month or two. It's pretty inevitable, I suppose, to dwell on that period of time as the images appear on my screen, and to think about them and feel something, but instead of continuing to bottle up the thoughts and feelings I've held onto for so many years, I've decided to write about them. I've chosen, however, to not really promote these posts via Facebook... I'll just post and move on. If someone stumbles upon them and reads them, fine, but I'm not going to try to attract eyeballs. These posts are mostly intended for me to put into written form things I perhaps should have been saying with my mouth many years ago.

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28 October 1991

You kissed me this morning
on the lips
I didn't know how to react to that
I would have liked to kiss you too
and hold you
and kiss you again
but I didn't
I couldn't
yes, my feelings (as you say) have been hurt
I feel no different
than a stranger
in this bed
in your life
(hurt feelings indeed!)
"dropped like a tool no longer required"
is more like it
I don't expect that anything I feel
that anything I write or say
has much effect on your life
(but I write and sometimes speak)
I think of you
and us
and this thing we loosely call marriage
I wonder
what do I do?
what can I do to convince you
that I have made changes
significant ones
that I have recognized
things I blinded myself to before
(I think a lot)
then
it hits me
(it always hits me with a clarity
I have never known)
that it
really
really
really doesn't matter
what changes I make
(significant or otherwise)
what feelings I have
what thoughts I conjure
what words I utter—
you will do
what you will do
you will rely on the stars
intellectuals
and counselors
you will believe what they say
because you want to believe them
they will feel sorry for me
you will feel sorry for me
and you will kiss me

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12 October 1991

I am alone in this bed
I touch you with the trepidation
with which one might put a hand
(or head)
'neath a guillotine knife blade

I am alone in this bed
where once souls danced
now only bodies lie

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The Digitization of Memory

Penny, December 1980 — ©2025 Patrick T. Power

Sometimes I wonder how it is I recall the things I recall. Some of the oddest memories pop into my head when I least suspect them. Case in point: this past week, I recalled a day I had ridden my bike to visit a high school classmate either the summer following our Junior year or possibly the following year. So... either 1972 or 1973. The memory that remains pretty vivid with me is that at some point, we left his house to go to his older brother's place not all that far away. I don't recall the reason we went there as his brother wasn't home, so maybe it was to take his mail in or water plants or something. But while I sat in one of the chairs in the living room, he picked up and showed me a small spray can of mace, the type that postal carriers are known to keep on them in the event of a dog attack. He squirted just a minute amount into the air and it had me gagging. It was amazing how so little could spread so quickly.

I have lots of little memories like that stored in the crevasses of my brain, and they randomly come to the surface for almost no reason at the oddest times.

Another is one that I sort of documented in the above diptych. Because lately I've been doing so much scanning of negatives from photographs taken during the time I was married—mostly of the kids or my used-to-be-wife Penny or family get-togethers—the photographs have spurred memories from those times. But I didn't need to see these two photographs to recall the moment. In fact, it was as I was scanning other negatives that I wondered where this set of negatives were because I had yet to come across them. These two photographs of Penny specifically came to mind, and along with them, the memory of the moment that I long have thought I'd fallen completely in love with her.

Penny and I had just gotten back to her place in Lansing from her parents' house in Laingsburg, which other photographs from that roll reminded me that we had attended her youngest sister's annual Christmas Pageant, a play she put on using her dolls and stuffed animals (featuring Kermit the Frog and Mrs. Beasley). For reasons I can't recall, I wanted to take Penny's picture before she entered the apartment. Maybe it was just how great she looked in her hooded coat against the backdrop of a snowy evening. It might have been that she asked me to. The skirt she wore that night, if memory serves, was one she had recently purchased at a small boutique in Lansing called Kilamanjaro. Again, if memory serves, she had done some artwork for the owner of the boutique, Mattie Robinson, so maybe the skirt was her payment.

What I do recall about the moment was such a small thing, really. Just as I raised the camera to my eye, she told me to hold on. She wanted the dress to be in the photo, so reached down (despite all she was holding) and pulled a small section of it out from under her coat. The photographs memorialized it.

So, I guess that's what I'm referring to as the digitization of memory. Not only am I scanning photographs that are historical visual records of fractions of moments in time, I'm scanning memories of those moments. I could have told this story without the photographs. That is, I didn't need the photographs to recall that moment. But I do like knowing that there is photographic evidence of it.

And now that I'm thinking about it, that moment was also the inspiration for a song I would write many years later:

We were married on a Christmas Day
A very long time ago, I must say
We walked through the snow
And we talked 'til the day turned to night

Time was not friendly, it went too fast
Our future too quickly became our past
It caught me off guard, I thought it would last
That it might

I guess I assumed that you felt the same
It seemed like you could, it seemed you became
A star I could follow, a treasure to claim
As my own

But somehow something clouded my view
I turned my head 'round and I lost track of you
A storm navigated by only a few
Hit my home

So now here we stand at the threshold again
Looking behind us and forward and then
Knowing too well that this might be the end
Of the light

We were married on a Christmas day
A very long time ago, I must say
We walked through the snow and we talked 'til the day
Turned to night

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Past Is Present

...or something

The City — ©2026 Patrick T. Power

Last week, I dusted off and fired up my old Nikon CoolPix 8800 to take it out during what I expected would be a quick trip to the post office, but which ended up being a longer jaunt up to Corona Heights.

It's funny how operating the camera—after having used dSLRs and now my Nikon Z6—was so clunky. First, the screen is about a third of the size of my Z6's and less than a quarter the size of my phone's. Second, it takes so long to write an image to the Compact Flash card—several seconds depending upon the quality of image chosen in settings. I looked at the time stamps of the individual images for the above panorama to find that it took me five minutes to make the sixteen exposures in RAW file mode!

That said, my phone can't zoom in like this (it's a 10x zoom, or 11.8mm to 89mm). I'm guessing that with the fairly small sensor, the 89mm works out to be an equivalent to something like 300mm.

Anyway... I've got but one battery for the camera, so I don't expect I'll be taking it with me when I go out for hours at a time, but I'm considering it for short walks as it's more versatile than the phone, and it's less unwieldy than carrying around the Z6 with several lenses, or one, for that matter. While it doesn't have the fastest of lenses (f/2.8 to f/5.2), it's more than adequate for most stuff I photograph while out on walks anyway. In fact, since I've been working on a couple of projects which involve photographs I took from 2005 to 2007 with the camera, and I wanted to see if it were still viable as an everyday picture-taking device.

Puddle Play — ©2026 Patrick T. Power

Also contributing to this nostalgic bent, I suppose, has been the scanning of negatives and transparencies I've been immersed in for the last several weeks. For a while, many of the pictures I took from day to day were on film, whether with a Rolleicord, a Holga, a couple of Kodak box cameras, or a handful of other vintage cameras I've acquired over the last sixteen years. So many of the photographs I'd taken with the film cameras had floated from my consciousness if I didn't immediately see value in them when I got the film back from the lab, so seeing the images coming up on the screen as I scan them has almost been like seeing them for the first time. And I'm actually pleased with a number of them.

Photo Spot — ©2026 Patrick T. Power

Because I'm nothing if not totally drawn to panoramic images, I even created one with the Holga, likely sometime in 2010. I'm glad I have a record of what that scene looked like before the statue of Christopher Columbus was (rightly) removed.

From Coit Tower — ©2026 Patrick T. Power

I took so many photographs with my Rolleicord during the first couple of years I had it that I hadn't spent a whole lot of time looking at them once I got the film back. In many instances, I was most excited to look at only a frame or two at the time, particularly if it was one of my (mostly) street portraits. But now that I've been scanning them and seeing them sort of "up close and personal," I'm re-evaluating their value, and finding more in them than at first glance.

Peter — ©2026 Patrick T. Power

In the first year or so after I received the Rolleicord as a gift from an online friend (whom I later would meet and photograph with the camera—see above photo), I amassed a bunch of expired film to run through it. But the Rolleicord had issues with the film advance mechanism, so I took it to a local camera repair person and for a while, all was well. Then all of a sudden the problem returned. I had a similar problem with a Rolleiflex that I bought on eBay and had that fixed as well, but it also began fouling up shortly afterward, so both cameras fell out of disuse. Since then, the film has gone unused as well, stashed away in the cold confines of the refrigerator.

But... feeling a little bit of a breeze at my back with all the scanning I've been doing, I'm planning to start going out with film again soon. I've had a Holga pinhole camera sitting my my bookshelf for almost as long as I've lived in San Francisco, and I've decided it's time to put a roll in that and give it a try. I also found what looks like a good, working Rolleicord at eBay and I purchased it. I also keep looking at my Nikkormat FTN and my Nikon N90.

So maybe, just maybe, it's out with the new and in with the old!

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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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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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Scan(t) Memories

Penny Reflected, 1980 — ©2025 Patrick T. Power

I have been spending a lot of time scanning old negatives lately for archival purposes. A LOT of time. I'm not totally sure if ultimately it will be worth it to anyone, but if nothing else, it's a mostly nice walk down memory lane. I say mostly because there are quite a few photographs of the woman to whom I was once married, Penny, so it's inevitable that my mind goes back to those days when I thought the relationship was good; that it would last. What tends to hurt most about the fact that it didn't last is recalling—knowing—how completely in love I was with her. The problem, though, was that I did a shit job of showing it. I was pretty good at falling in love, I guess, but knew nada-zip-zilch about what to do after that. Which is not to say that I was entirely responsible for the breakdown of the marriage. Our inability to earnestly communicate with one another on a level that wasn't either scoldlike or defensive was probably the biggest factor, at least as I see it. Penny could no doubt lay out loads of reasons I screwed things up, and I wouldn't dare suggest she'd be wrong, but the real answers lie in the twisted and tangled nuance.

Elk Grove Village, Illinois, 1980 — ©2025 Patrick T. Power

That I have had a relatively satisfying life post-marriage hasn't kept me from constantly analyzing those years or my behaviour (and Penny's) over the course of our fifteen-plus year relationship. We'd met on 22 June 1980, married 7 August 1982, and the divorce was final on 29 November 1995, two days before I turned 40. Specific moments—good and bad—replay in my head almost on a daily basis, without need of prompts from old photographs.

Illinois, 1984 — ©2025 Patrick T. Power

Regardless that I long ago resigned myself to the fact that the marriage was over and done and gone and never to be reconciled, I've pretty regularly thought about what might have saved it. I wonder what might have happened had Penny confronted me head on about my shortcomings; or that I had expressed myself about my own concerns much earlier than I did. I don't know, of course, if my concerns would have been heard and discussed in earnest or dismissed as they were later on, once the split occurred... who's to say?

Summer, 1986 — ©2025 Patrick T. Power

As I've mentioned before, I believe that a lot of my issues were work-related. It was only my second job out of university, and it was supervisory—my first job in that kind of position. I really had no clue about what lay ahead of me when I took the job, with a staff not much younger than I and a boss from whom I would learn the wrong way to supervise. My previous experience within the photographic industry was one of cooperation and dedication to a shared task, so I had a bit of a pie-in-the-sky attitude that my employees shared the same work ethic. I guess I hoped they would catch on. For the better part of my time in the job, I had employees—a few, not all—who seemed to take no pride in getting work done properly or on time. My problem was not being able to hold them accountable.

Red Penny, 1988 — ©2025 Patrick T. Power

Feeling that it ultimately was my responsibility that the work got out on time or done correctly, I worked long hours to cover for others or to pick up the slack, whether by going in early or staying late; often, too, by going in after hours. While this never led to arguments that I can recall, it most certainly ate at whatever affection Penny had for me. I didn't communicate the pressure I felt to Penny until—I'm quite certain—long after she'd decided she was going to move on. I was so paralyzed by my fear of failure that I couldn't even talk to her about it when I did get around to bringing it up. I wrote what I was feeling in my notebook and shared that with her four years before the divorce.

Helpless, 1991 — ©2025 Patrick T. Power

Her response was decidedly and rather shockingly dispassionate. Nothing was likely to change her path, I guess. But weirdly, the topic of divorce never came up, nor do I recall that she complained to me about the depth of her unhappiness. Check that... divorce did come up one time, before we decided to buy a house a couple of streets up from the rental we'd lived in for a few years. With my ongoing stress over work, I wasn't feeling compelled to commit myself to the kind of debt a house would force upon us—me, really, since my income made up the overwhelming share of our income. Discussing it one night, she said that the house was one she felt she could afford in the event we got divorced. I guess an alarm should have gone off at the mention of it but it didn't. I guess, too, that I hadn't considered divorce even a remote possibility. I often think, though, that Penny had been considering divorce not long after our son Zachary had been born in February of 1985—maybe even before that—but had decided to soldier on. What wasn't spoken, though, showed up in her lack of affection. Of course, I was too foolish to realize that her coldness had anything to do with me. It didn't occur to me to ask what was wrong.

In August of 1994, A couple of years after we did buy the house, and about a week after our twelfth anniversary no less, the work situation came to a head, and without getting too deeply into the details of that, it was my inability to hold an employee accountable that put me in a situation in which I felt compelled to resign. Penny was with the kids visiting a friend in northern Michigan at the time. I don't recall much about the phone call now other than that she was furious. Weirdly, she didn't ask what had happened. Not then, not when she got home. Not since. The following February, just a few days before Zachary's tenth birthday, she informed me of her desire to split up.

March, 1995 — ©2025 Patrick T. Power

And now, as I think about and process everything for the umpteenth time, I also recall what Penny had told the minister who married us, John Carson, when we met with him about the marriage ceremony. I guess that at the time, I took it as sort of a joke and maybe it was, but 20/20 hindsight makes me wonder. She said, "None of that 'til death do us part stuff."

Occasionally, I'm asked if I would get back with Penny if I had the chance, and while years ago my answer would have been an emphatic "NO!," my heart these days is a bit softer. My head, on the other hand (hmmm... there's a phrase for you!), tells me, "You had your chance, dude." Of course, the urge is to want to make things right, to fix what I messed up the first time around, but the reality is that I'm only half of the equation... I can't imagine a scenario in which Penny would even consider such a thing.

I've long said that I miss the best parts of our time together. I suppose that to a degree, the photographs allow me to hang on to them.

I guess I never knew
What she was living without
People speak of love don't know what they're thinking of
Wait around for the one who fits just like a glove
Speak in terms of a life and the living
Try to find the word for forgiving
—Jackson Browne, "In The Shape Of A Heart"

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Cat's Early Morning Surprise

Cat in the Window — ©2025 Patrick T. Power.

When my former wife, Penny, and I were still rather early in our relationship—I'm guessing sometime in 1980—we went out to her mother's adoptive parents' home on Woodbury Road in Laingsburg, Michigan to get a cat. Actually, I don't recall now if we went out there specifically to get a cat, but while we were there, we made the decision to bring one home to her place. The cat that lived on the Criders' farm had recently given birth to six or seven kittens, and with little deliberation, we brought home the runt of the litter. We had a tough time deciding upon a name, though. I recall that I thought Tuck was worthy of consideration. Ultimately, we settled on Cat, a name that later morphed into Big Fat Cat or BFC.

Like a lot of cats, Cat wasn't much into being held. She would lie on our laps if we had an afghan draped over us, but didn't generally care to show much affection for us. When she was hungry, especially in the wee hours of the morning, she would chew on whatever she knew would wake us up, whether books or record album covers. Somehow, she knew it was annoying to the point to get action. And it was more than just the sound of paper tearing, it was clack-clack sound of her gums (or whatever) coming together and then separating time after time after time.

Cat's handywork (mouthy-work?)

One very early morning years later, after we'd married and moved to Lansing from Toledo, where we'd lived for about two years (and where Cat's decision to pee on a carpet cost us a rental deposit), the sound of Cat gnawing on something woke us. The sound was coming from beneath and behind Penny's drawing table which was on the opposite side of the room from the bed. We discussed what it was she was chewing at when all of a sudden, she let out a "yaoow" amongst a flurry of paper, work that Penny had tucked between the table and the wall.

We quickly surmised that she'd chewed through the electrical wire leading from the wall to the desk lamp and got shocked. After a few seconds of silence, and breaking the tension of the moment, Penny asked, "Do you think she's dead?" At which I think we both burst out laughing.

I got out of bed and went into the living room to check on her. Cat was panting heavily but she otherwise seemed fine.

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The Artist Project

Carol Wansley (outtake, crop) ©2025 Patrick T. Power

I've been on a negative scanning jag of late, gearing up to complete a project that I should have taken care of years ago, so I thought I'd write about this little project of mine back in the mid-1990s.

In late 1994, after I'd left my job at Michigan State University, I tried to make a go of freelancing as a photographer. I got hired by the Lansing Art Gallery to photograph an exhibition by Brian Whitfield in November of that year, and again to photograph items in the gallery for their upcoming Holiday Art Market. I had a conversation with the gallery director at the time, Karen Stock, and I asked about the possibility of having a show of portraits at the gallery sometime, which, as I think back on it now, I had no business suggesting such a thing as my portrait experience up until that time had been fairly limited to whatever I would have done while at MSU, along with an internship I'd done for school in the summer of 1980. But I had an idea. I don't recall now when the specifics of the idea had hatched in my mind but the plan was to photograph a number of Lansing-area visual artists in a studio setting. I had purchased a used Mamiya RB67 a few years earlier, along with a lighting kit, a softbox, and background gear, and I was champing at the bit to use it for purposes other than taking pictures of the kids and the occasional group photograph for hire.

Because my then-wife Penny was an artist, I'd become acquainted with quite a few other artists through her, so after getting the go-ahead from Karen, I made up a wish list and began making phone calls and scheduling people. At the same time, I managed to procure in-kind support from Kodak (film), John Manning at Photo Connexion (photographic paper), and Larry Carr at Photo Mart (darkroom facilities). Since I didn't have a studio per se, I had to wrangle up space somewhere. Penny had graciously (I think) agreed to let me use her ArtSpace studio/classroom when it was free of activity, but with as many classes as she was conducting, I had to work around her schedule. I also had to find an alternative for when it wasn't free.

I had volunteered a bit around that time for the Ten Pound Fiddle Coffeehouse, a local folk music and dance organization, mostly helping to set up and tear down sound equipment or re-arrange seats for their concerts, but also on several occasions to photograph the Residents Night performers. Residents Night was a concert made up of local musicians donating their time to raise funds for the organization. (For a spell, I also served as Residents Night Co-ordinator.)

Residents Night, 20 October 1993 ©2025 Patrick T. Power

Most of the Fiddle's concerts were held at the Unitarian Universalist Church in East Lansing for a more-than-reasonable fee of one dollar, if memory serves, so I checked with the church's caretaker, Regina Fry, to see if I might also be able to rent the room off the main room of the church. I got the OK, so my first bunch of photo sessions were set up, with the first one to be held at ArtSpace on 19 December 1994. Barb Morris, owner of Otherwise Gallery, which was right next door to ArtSpace on Turner Street in Lansing's Old Town area, was the first; Jill Lareaux was the second. For Barb, I had an idea of what I wanted to do and had sketched it out on paper, but with Jill, I just winged it. She appeared in a beautiful white blouse that I felt had be photographed against a dark backdrop as it seemed to shimmer.

 

The next twelve would be done at the church on three separate days:

20 December 1994 — Dennis Preston and Brian Whitfield

 

26 January 1995 — James W. McKenzie, Jane Rosemont, Carol Wansley, Paul Thornton, and Regina Fry

 

 

1 February 1995 — James Adley, Kate Darnell, Clif and Jane McChesney, Liz Wylegala, and Bruce Thayer

 

 

I did the the next five at ArtSpace on the 9th of February:

Robert Busby, Mark Beard, Jean Rooney, Mark Mahaffey, and Kelly Boyle

 

 

Larry Carr at Photo Mart provided a darkroom for me to print the 11-inch by 14-inch prints, and I pumped out two of each portrait—one for the show and one to give to each artist. I was certain that I'd properly exposed the film for everything so I decided to not use polycontrast paper (I think I used Ilford paper) for the prints. Without bogging you down with technical details, I'll just say that while that choice worked out for me for the most part, there was one portrait, Jane Rosemont's, for which I wish I'd had just a little bit more control over the final print's contrast.

Then came the second week of February, and Penny informed me she wanted out of our marriage.

I don't recall now how it came about, but in early March, I took some time off from everything and took a train to Washington, D.C., where I stayed with a friend I'd met at a biomedical photo conference in Rochester, New York about ten years earlier. So much about that trip is a blur to me now. I don't know why I chose D.C.

Distance, I guess. And time.

Upon my return, and with less than a month to take the remaining portraits, print them, and get them framed, I dove back in, scheduling the remaining nine artists, including Penny, all of which took place at ArtSpace:

18 March 1995 — Teresa Petersen and Regina Fry (re-takes)

 

19 March 1995 — Margaret Meade-Turnbull and Barbara Hodge Borbas

 

25 March 1995 — Penny Krebiehl-Power

31 March 1995 — Mark Mahaffey (re-takes)

As for the two retakes, I'd made the mistake of showing Regina Fry the proofs from her session, something I hadn't done with anyone else. She didn't like them. My feeling was (and still is) that it was my project—I wasn't Olan Mills—and therefore had the right to choose the content of my show. She would refuse to participate in the project if I used them. I didn't want to be a dick about it so I relented and did a second session. Ultimately, I'm glad I did, as I do like my final choice, but I was perfectly happy with the first set. I was not at all happy with Mark Mahaffey's, however, so I sheepishly asked him to come back for another session.

I can't recall why, but I had to find another place to print my enlargements once all the portraits had been taken. Enter Bill Harrison at Custom Photographic. Unlike Photo Mart, where I hand processed the prints in trays, I ran them through a machine at Custom, which turned out to be a blessing as it cut down considerably on the time needed to get everything printed. My preference was hand-developing as I believed it to be a more archival process, but time was of the essence. With the printing finished, it was off to see Bill Hankins at Prints, Ancient & Modern to have everything framed for the show, which had to be hung on Monday the 3rd of April. The show would open the next day, and there would be an opening reception on the Sunday the 9th, coinciding with the 14th annual Botanical Images Competition. I'd informed Bill in advance as to the number of frames and their size (they were all something like 16-inch by 20-inch) so that once all the prints were done, his team could go at it.

During one of my trips to Prints, Ancient & Modern, Judith Taran, East Lansing's communications director, and wife of Irv Taran, a professor of art at Michigan State University, informed me that my portraits should have been taken in the artists' studios or in some way with their work. I stood there rather aghast that the wife of an artist would question another artist's choices. I can't recall how I responded, but I wondered if she similarly told her husband how to paint.

Everything went off as planned. There was a pretty good turnout of friends and family (my mom and sister-in-law even made it up from Toledo), along with a number of the artists and their friends. Nothing sold, although I didn't really expect any would. It wasn't intended a money-making venture.

An interesting thing happened once the show came down. My interest in photography took a nose dive. For a good five years leading up to the show, I had immersed myself in photography books and magazines. I'd spent a lot of time working on lighting techniques at work and at home. I had the kids pose for me, and occasionally got Penny to. I thoroughly enjoyed working with the artists and getting to know them a little bit as I completed this project, but all of a sudden, my interest fell flat, thanks mostly to what was going on at home. It wouldn't rekindle for almost ten years when I discovered Flickr.

As I look back on the experience, and as I look again at the contact proofs from all the portraits, I've come to have second and third thoughts about some of the choices I made for the show. I know that at least one other person other than Regina—Liz Wyegala—wasn't pleased with my selection, but in my defense, to know Liz is to know she's an emphatic way of speaking and often uses her hands when she does. I really felt it was representative. As is clear with many of the portraits, looking at the camera wasn't a requirement.

Also in retrospect, I was a fish out of water, so to speak. I didn't know the first thing about the etiquette of art exhibitions, and I know I didn't thank Karen Stock enough, or, I suspect, in a more appropriate fashion. As I alluded to above, I did give the participating artists who attended the show a copy of their portrait. Not all attended so I still have a handful stashed in a box with the negatives. As I was preparing to move to San Francisco in January of 2010, I contacted as many of the artists as I could and gave them the framed versions of their portraits. A few went unclaimed.

And sadly, in the thirty years since I undertook this project, eight of the artists have died: James Adley, Mark Beard, Robert Busby, Barb Morris, Clif and Jane McChesney, James W. McKenzie, and Paul Thornton. As have in-kind contributors John Manning and Larry Carr, and Bill Hankins. Mark Beard and Robert Busby were the biggest shocks as Mark died because he'd accidentally been given the wrong medication while in the hospital for a minor issue; Robert was murdered by someone to whom he had been giving assistance in the form of work and housing.

Update: Part II

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