Quana.net

So last night I showed 6 of my photos at the Snap Gallery down on W 3rd at Columbia.

It was a very interesting day for myself…

I shot the last piece for the show the night before at 2 in the morning… ahhh nothing like striving for perfection and cutting it right down to the wire! I know that if I get the photos uploaded before the place that I get them printed opens then it means that they will be ready by 12 noon, however if I wait till they open then it is next day by 12… so I managed to get home and do what I needed and get all my sellects for the show ready and uploaded by 4 am! Yeay me :)

However when is life ever so easy?

I got a phone call from the store that I sent my photos to be printed at, and the fellow told me that they were not going to print my photos as they might be offensive to someone. Huh what?

So I ask to speak to the management as that is kind of not so cool with me as I needed to have my prints ready to go and be hung by 4…

He tells me that the manager is in a meeting and that he will get him to call me… A few hours later I get an email saying that the photos had been printed. Cool I think it was resolved and I can go pick them up…

I head off to pick them up and when I get there they tell me that they are not going to release my photos to me. Again I say I would like to speak to the store manager as time is now slipping away on me and I really don’t have time to go to some other place when I know they have the prints already done for me.

The photo manager comes down and tells me that the store has a policy that states that they will not print anything that might be deemed offensive… Well I don’t know about you but I find babies offensive! I mean aside from the fact that they are ugly. You just know that even though in this day in age of In vitro fertilisation and test tube babies, most every mountain you see a photo of is the direct result of coitus. So the next time you see a cutsie picture of a drooling baby don’t just see what is there in the photo think a little further about what is being implied by such a photo. But apparently someone’s knees and feet are far more offensive even though you can’t tell if indeed there is in fact a sexual act going on… Who knew!

But get this, he had no problems if I were to take a photo of someone totally nude and exposed, so long as it was artistic… Eh what? so if I light you with a soft light and have you look at your feet and print it in black and white that is artistic and all good. but if I show a fully clothed guy on his knees in a parkade beside a car with a girls legs sticking out of it that is very offensive and as he put it “has no artistic merit”

Wow!

So after much arguing and doing my best to educate someone on the artistic merits of making someone think rather just showing them something they have already seen before. My lovely assistant (who is also working at an art gallery) put on her distressed face and convinced him that we would not do this again and that yes in fact she had taken all the photos and they were all staged and that he could rest comfortably knowing that it was going into a real gallery and that he would not have to see any other such offensive material…

Sigh

Anyway, it really was good to see the works up in a gallery and being viewed by many folks that were willing to ponder what it was that I was trying to show… 

I found if very interesting watching people look at my work and whisper to each other and point and try and figure out if it was real or not… Who these people might be and so forth. I would have really liked to have approached some of these people and asked them what they though and I don’t know I felt kind of shy about it. I am not really sure why. Maybe because I was just so dead tired from going all day and shooting all afternoon that I didn’t really have the energy to put on the bull shit face and pretend like I didn’t know what was going on and ask them what they thought was going on and see what they said. Sigh. I really wish I had now… It was fun to watch as some of the girls would whisper to each other and then measure and line up head distance and try and guess if the head was in the right place or not… and make little observations like the shoes being the same in more then one photo, does that mean it was the same guy in these two? or her belly and her belly look similar, is this the same girl?

I ended up leaving the show at around 1 ish as I was just to drained to be enjoying it and I really didn’t want to be a drag to those around me so that was that :)

So I would like to hear what you thought of the show if you were there and if you have an opinion that you would like to express :)

Next time I will do my best to be more sociable and less reclusive…

Cheers,

- Q

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Life.