over the years i've been asked a time or two about how the everyman photo contest got started. just about every time i've recounted the tale i've told a highly abbreviated version. now, as it's more than a decade mature and the memories are in peril of being handed their walking papers, i thought i should capture the history as i recall it before my brittle synapses lose the ability to recall it. so, this week, in honor of the 13th public opening of the galleries, i will recount how my 2nd most prized digital creation came into being. the first soil got turned ...
after marty and i moved from our apartment into our house. once settled, my single largest complaint about home ownership did not deal in lawn-care, failed wiring, or leaky faucets but with empty walls. the apartment we had just left had a ridiculous number of windows with essentially three of the four walls consisting of nothing but window after window, the only plastered wall in the 1920's structure being the one running down the middle of the building separating the side by side apartments. so after years of a windowed apartment, the unexpected sprawl of bland, soulless walls made our first home not warm and inviting as i'd hoped for but sad and bleak. when i asked marty about it, she gazed about as if seeing it for the first time and confessed she hadn't noticed, not one bit. at the time, i still possessed enough youthful marital optimism that i thought by simply raising the point i planted a seed of discontent in my wife but the green stalk never broke ground. even today, marty could care less if our walls and halls were as stark as they were in our first twenty four hours of possession. i reckon this adds to why marriage will always hold an element of unpredictability.
as you'd expect, just as my zeal did not move her, her lack of interest did not sway me from my vision (e.g. marital deadlock) so when i saw the flyer for an art fair in a nearby huey-huey suburb, i pitched it to marty as a way to get out on a nice day. after walking the tents on blocked-off streets, i brought marty back to my favorite display and began talking up the work. with her prior zeal she said the photos were 'nice'. sensing no love-affair on the horizon i told her i thought we should get a couple images for the house. being an understanding partner, she agreed. so i procured two large images for a startling sum of five hundred dollars and left feeling like i was about to repair the struggling mood of my house forever.
moments after walking through the door i set to finding the perfect spot for my grandiose exhibit. i found it and immediately moved to the framing and hanging and when complete stood back and took it in. the wall was spectacular, alive even. but as i turned and surveyed the surrounding space, which is another way of saying 'the rest of the house', the message stood every bit as bleak as before my renovation. as i walked the rooms and hallways and contemplated how much i just spent to cover the one little nook, and did the quick math of what it would take to cover all the other little nooks, the reality of my bland and boring house set in. unhealthy as the confession sounds, i found the situation surprisingly unsettling.
part 2. conception
