I had expected to be doing this clawing and sorting through boxes of old negatives and slides and a lot of whatever during the upcoming winter. But unexpectedly losing the use of my main camera has led me to this alternative. And something of at least minor interest is coming up every day.
This morning I find negatives, previously thought to be lost forever, that further document an infamous road trip in 1977. Three photographers, Lee, Maureen and myself, left Venice, California in a Volkswagen bug, bound for the tiny almost-ghost-town of Bisbee, Arizona, to meet up with bartender/writer/philosopher Harold and join him and his girlfriend to press on into Mexico.
Lee was a photographer in the employ of the Los Angeles Times and had hatched this plan that we would combine our shooting results from the trip and present in a group show, and he would develop all the negs in the Times darkroom. While the show did in fact later materialize, some rolls of film were thought to have been lost, so their prints never were exhibited. But, somehow — I found at least some of the negatives buried in an unmarked box within a box within a box. Here is a sampling. (And if you want to learn more about the Bisbee/Naco road trip, I am adding some more of the new finds to my own existing record of the trip at HHR.)
