I took Summer Release Time during the summer of 2012 primarily to go to the Tenth International Symposium on Display Holography, hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But that would only occupy the first half of the summer, so I planned a secondary trip to Condon, Montana, home of (Photography) Workshops in Montana, hosted by PhotographersÕ Formulary, to take classes in the art of two antique photographic processes, wet plate collodion and daguerreotypes, so that HCD could have bragging rights to a photo history teacher who not only describes and collects these types of photographic incunabula, but also has made them! And in between these two excursions to institutions of higher education, I took a refresher class in motorcycle riding from Ride Chicago.
I had been asked by my former boss and mentor who started me on the road to ruin in holography, Dr. Tung Jeong, (who introduces himself as TJ, unless you are older than him then you can call him Sonny), Professor Emeritus at Lake Forest College (LFC), to co-author a paper with him on the history of these Holographic Symposia (abbreviated as ISDH from now on), as I had worked for him and attended all the ISDHÕs when they were held at LFC from 1982 to 1997[*]. It did not turn out to be a paper, but rather an extremely large PowerPoint Presentation.
My release time started on May 15th, but I visited the Harrington College of Design (HCD) campus quite a few times before departing to the East Coast, like once or twice a week, to scan in images for the history presentation that I had taken in the pre-digital age. (These Symposia started in 1982, with the last one at LFC in 1997, so it was definitely pre-digital!) I brought in literally hundreds of slides, prints, plus B & W and color negatives, keeping the mighty Epson scanner in Room 504 busy. Plus I was scanning photographic prints, catalogs, proceedings, and newspaper clipping at home with my own flatbed scanner, which doesnÕt scan transparencies.
Although I am one of the hardest working faculty members at the College, (one doesnÕt get to be a Finalist in the Educator of the Year Awards Competition on good looks alone!) I worked insanely hard on my Summer Release Time, which might be construed as vacation to some, but not for me, as it seemed like I had bitten off more than I could chew.
I would wake up at approximately 6:00 AM, when daylight would light up my bedroom, brush my teeth and take care of other bathroom business, and sit down at the computer in my air-conditioned room and work on my papers and presentations. I had no time to work either in the photo darkroom or the holography studio to make samples to give away along the way! Hundreds of non-billable hours were put into both of the presentations.
In addition to the co-authored presentation, I had my own paper to write, entitled ÒQUANTITATIVE MEASUREMENT OF HOLOGRAPHIC IMAGING QUALITY USING ADOBE PHOTOSHOPÓ. This was to be a technical paper, on a sorely needed topic in the craft of holography, as to how to quantify the comparison between the qualities of different holographic recording materials. Here is an excerpt from the paper[ ]:
7. Acknowledgements
I would like to send a shout out to Stas at Geola for sending me samples of the Sphere-S GEO-3 emulsion; Stephen Brierley of Harman Technology for sending me samples of their holographic emulsion; Arturo Perez Mulas from the holography forum for gifting me with an Ultimate Sampler pack; and Jesus Lopez who lent me some of the best PFG-03C that he ever used. And of course the krewe at Harrington College of Design, especially Joe Byrnes who let me take home one of the most expensive cameras in the Digital Photography DepartmentÕs Cage; Photoshop guru extraordinaire Tim Arroyo, who contributed significant discussions and shortcuts in the understanding of the numbers; and, Dirk Fletcher, just because he was the first Department Chair to be wise enough to hire me full-time.
This paper was finished by the deadline, and e-mailed to the conference organizers and published in an on-line proceedings. Here it is on this web site.
After posting the paper, I had to put some time in on my vintage 1999 Dodge Neon, like rotating the tires, changing oil, checking fluids, etc., so it was good to go. This may be the last long-distance trip it might be able to take! I packed a nice collection of tools, for just in case!
I also packed my computer, scanner, and external hard drive plus some catalogs and proceedings from the previous symposia, because although I was putting in 12 hour plus days I still wouldnÕt have my presentations finished! And I would be getting more material from some of my other unindicted co-conspirators or collaborators to flesh out the historical PowerPoint when I got to MIT.
I departed from Chicago on Tuesday, June 19th, and stopped off to visit my friend Scott Lloyd, and his wife, outside of Pittsburgh, PA. Both of them had worked at the Museum of Holography in New York City, and he was the managing editor of their publication, holosphere, the Advocate of Holographic Art, Science and Technology, when I was the technical editor of the same. We had a great time hanging out, and went to the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. The Lloyds contributed to the collection of three-dimensional kitsch I bring to the Photo-History class with some Compact Discs they had found with lenticular photographs and artwork.
Then on Friday I drove to Allentown, PA, to visit another holographer, Frank deFreitas, who I have known since the Ô80Õs. We had a nice visit, discussing the state of the art of holography, and then I stayed with a different friend in Allentown, Tom Amico, who I had worked with in a camera store before I had the divine revelation of holography at that Society for Photographic Education convention way back in 1978. He reminisced on how he helped me and my partner in crime, Jay Sebastian, set up our first holography lab in the latterÕs basement.
We discussed the state of the photographic art, and he was weathering the transition to digital as he had gotten on that bandwagon almost at the beginning, but he still longs for the good old days when he was depositing $30-35k a month from his photo business! He never had to buy anything on credit, the only thing he owes on is his mortgage for a 1920Õs mansion, but he just put in a gigantic new kitchen with cash!
Leaving Allentown on Saturday I got into Cambridge after a storm that made me pull the sick little Neon off the road it was so bad. Finally checked into the dorm, and ran into some friends and had dinner, and after that I sat down in the dorm to work on my papers.
Sunday I hung out with more holographic friends, and after those festivities I returned to the task of the presentations. Got up at 6:00 AM to work some more, then went to the conference room.
It was a really swell set up at the MIT Media Lab building. The conference room was set up theatre style for the 100+ attendees. Outside of that were a dozen or so round tables for meals! The conference fee included 3 meals a day, plus open bar at the end of the papers sessions! The food was surprisingly extremely good! And there were post-dinner activities planned most every day, a full twelve hours of holographic ecstasy! And after thatÉ
During the Monday morning sessions I didnÕt really listen to the Reports from the Nations, traditionally the first session at these Symposia, as I was editing and cutting and pasting my ass off on the last legs laptop. Kind of like the naughty students I like to bust in my classroom for not paying attention.
At lunch I found my friend Mark Diamond from Miami, and uploaded his images onto my laptop. He had some really great portraits of all the holographic stars taken with a Polaroid SX-70 camera, which he called Holoroids.
Went back to the dorm after lunch with my friend Bob Hess, borrowed his computer, and I ended up staying behind at the dorm to finish the presentation which was due in less than 4 hours! Actually I was in pretty good shape at that time, closing the file at 5:23 PM, and zipping back to the Media lab, finding the AV guy, hooking up BobÕs computer to the Jumbotron in the dining area, and getting it launched on time! This presentation ran continuously at mealtime for the rest of the conference, 760+ images, taking up almost a half a Gigabyte of storage space! It was a big hit, needless to say, with fond memories of absent friends and images of those present from as long as 30 years ago! I had scanned in the images of all of the artwork at the conferences, also, so it was a very comprehensive compendium![à]
There was a downside to this presentation however. It was being run on a nine monitor array, the Jumbotron I mentioned above, but the J-Tron driver I plugged the computer into wouldnÕt let me retain the original proportions of the slides, so everyone looked 20 pounds heavier! I asked the MIT IT geeks who were running the projectors and sound in the conference room if they could fix it, but they said the Jumbotron belonged to a different department, and they couldnÕt figure it out. I even bugged the conference hall facilities director on a daily basis if he could get someone from that other department in there, but no one lost any weight during the week! I would dare to say that this problem would have been fixed up quickly on the HCD campus!
I might just get my cat claws out and mention that there was a sort of lackadaisical attitude permeating the MIT Campus. It was sort of like ÒWe are so cool and smart to be here, why bother with you!Ó
So I breathed a sigh of relief after that was launched, but I still had to finish my PowerPoint for my technical talk. I had completed the written part by the deadline, but I was still taking pictures of the lab and the experimental apparatus up until the time I left Chicago! I did get that PowerPoint finalized on Wednesday morning, so I was in great shape for the talk on that afternoon after lunch.
Since I must have put in over a hundred hours on this project I was ready to rock. It was being perfected up until the last minute, and I had no reservations about its quality. But of course even in the best-laid plans of mice and men, the PowerPoint got out of sync with what I was saying, Òthis could only happen to me,Ó and as it got worse, I asked Òwhere was the f-off and die button,Ó and I brought down the house!
I gave a super presentation, as there were some intelligent questions and people were complimenting me on my scholarship after the talk, even going so far to say that they had not seen as many attendees take as many notes during any of the other talks!
But I was still not done with my chores for the Symposium, as I was throwing a big bash in my dorm room that evening! Got a couple of hundred dollars in donations to the beer fund, found a Trader JoeÕs down the street to spend it on, and put on such a party that the MIT Campus Police came! The big complaint (from a student, no less!) was that it was too noisy, plus there were over 50 people in the dorm suite! (There were 5 bedrooms, a shared shower/bathroom, and a common cooking area in this dorm cluster, one of many in the building.)
The rest of the week I enjoyed the conference and campus. There was an art exhibit associated with the symposium, and I heard from one of the judges that they had voted my piece into the show, but at the last minute the holography show had to give up space to another exhibit, so it was decimated. I did exhibit my entries informally at a show and tell at the conference center.[¤]
I left MIT on Saturday, and drove to Providence Rhode Island to visit a friend who was a holography student of mine at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, (SAIC), and when he graduated he became another adjunct colleague of mine. He is now a full-timer at Brown University, so I got an after hours tour of that campus, and we talked about the state of the art of higher art education.
From there I drove to Baltimore, Maryland, to visit a new holography friend I had made over the Internet, John Pecora. We talked holography shop over that most Baltimore of delicacies, steamed crabs.
Since the Neon was acting weird, I left it at JohnÕs and hopped on an Amtrak to go to South Beach in Miami to hang out with more holographers! Besides catching the sights, I learned yet another imaging technique, how my friend Jeff Weil in Miami coats plates with photo-resist for holography. I am no stranger to this operation, as I had done it on plates up to 42Ó square at the job I held prior to HCD at CFC/NBN. But it never hurts to see how anyone else does stuff!
But due to an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) I cannot divulge his technique. Not really a legally binding NDA, but just a gentlemenÕs agreement to preserve his privacy, plus it might be boring to the current reader.
Took the Amtrak back to Baltimore, and continued writing up my ISDH experiences to take advantage of the much more comfortable than an airplane environment.
When I got back to MD, I stayed another night in Baltimore, got the Neon fired up for the trip back to Pittsburgh, a nice halfway spot, and hung out with Scott Lloyd some more, giving him a de-briefing on the wonderful conference he had missed. He gave me an anaglyphic Star Wars tee shirt as yet another addition to my 3-D collection! Went to check out a photography museum there, but it was not open that day, but went to the Pittsburg Science Museum and took some interesting pictures of stuff to add to the PHY 201 PowerPoints. Then finally, home sweet home after almost 3 weeks on the road.
But I still had the westbound trip to make! When I tried to extort funds from the Digital Photography Department Chair, Dirk Fletcher, I came up with the screwball idea of riding my motorcycle to the Daguerreotype workshop to make a 19th century image of a 21st century machine. Now I had to follow through on it.
La machine is a 2000 BMW R1100R that I purchased used in 2004, when I had plenty of disposable income, with only 1837 miles on it. It is the 5th motorcycle I have owned.
I got it at the behest of a girlfriend who thought it would be fun to tour on it, as she had seen lots of bikes on the road while on a trip to New Zealand. But as usual that didnÕt work out the way I had imagined it.
The bike needed tires and a tune up. I also got it a windscreen and another piece of luggage for the big ride. I had two different dealers do the tires and tune up, but I put on the accessories with my son, Edward. We put the bike in front of my garage, and I set up a DP department Canon 40D on a tripod next to one of my trusty Nikon FÕs, loaded with color print film. This was an experiment I had been wanting to do for years, taking images of the same scene with digital and chemical photography, to have side-by-side comparisons for my classes at HCD. Samples of the fruits of this labor are in Appendix A of this report.
Besides prepping the bike, the driver needed to be prepared. I took the SRT class (what an acronym coincidence! Street Rider Training) from Ride Chicago.
I had taken their beginnersÕ class a couple of years ago, even though I have been riding for decades. It never hurts to have someone like a maniacal gym teacher put your through your paces and critique what you are doing wrong and right, especially when your life could depend on it.
They have a classroom in an industrial building on Ravenswood Avenue on the North Side of Chicago, but this class was held in the parking lot of Toyota Park in the Southwest suburb of Bridgeview. They set up cones, had a variety of exercises for us to do, kept an eye on us, videotaped us, and we put on 40 miles in the parking lot in a 4 hour session! It helped me overcome my fear of leaning in the curves.
Looking at this operation from an educatorÕs viewpoint, this school is well prepared with time proven drills and instructors who take their job seriously. I would heartily recommend to anyone considering buying a motorcycle to take their classes.
Even with the brush up motorcycle training, I still estimated that there was a double-digit probability of me not returning. I wrote out a sort of last will and testament, probably not legal, sealed it in an envelope, with the names and addresses of who to contact like our attorney if my boys wanted to keep the house, who might buy all the holography crap, etc. I tore it up upon my return, but there were some reminders of Òthou art mortalÓ during my trip.
My friend that I stayed with in Colorado on the return trip, George Garklavs, whom I had known since 5th grade (his father was a Russian Orthodox priest, and he worked out an arrangement with the nuns of my Catholic grade school to let his family come to St. Blase, as GeorgeÕs older brother Alex was getting beaten up by the public school kids), had a zero mile per hour accident with his bike the weekend I was coming to visit; he was taking an off-road motorcycle class, and his instructor was evidently not as capable as Ride ChicagoÕs, as the group ended up on a path not suitable for the beginners. While he was just standing and waiting, the ground under him was too steep and full of gravel, so his BMW adventure bike fell on him! While not even moving, a couple of hundred dollars worth of parts needed to be ordered, bruises and pride needed to be mended. Needless to say we did not go joy riding on his day off.
But even worse, when I got off the turnpike to check in to the last motel on the return trip, I saw a bunch of cop cars at the other entrance ramp. I checked in to the hotel, and went to dinner. There was still a lot of evidence of police activity. And it was continuing even after dinner, but I was too tired to walk the extra half-mile to investigate.
But when I was watching the local news in the hotel room before crashing, I found out what all the hubbub was about; a local police officer on his motorcycle was wiped out by a couple of knuckleheads in pickup trucks, one of whom was turning without turn signals and the other changed lanes without signals and ran into the officer! Could have been me!
The preferred pants for the ride were my Cargo pants. With their buttoned thigh pockets, I could put my phone, maps, etc. in them and have them handy without having to get off the bike. I bought some steel-toed work boots for just in case I took a spill.
I allowed myself 4 days to get to Montana, although I had estimated 3 with Google Maps, leaving an extra day early just in case the rain gods looked down upon me with disfavor.
I departed the Home + Studio of E. Wesly & Sons at 10:00 AM on Wednesday, July 25th. It was hard work riding that long! My hands became numb; my legs were cramped. I got into the routine of stopping for a stretch after about an hourÕs worth of driving to get some feeling back in my hands. After another hour it was time for another break to get gas, as the 4.5 gallon tank would only last for 140 – 160 miles at the calculated 39 – 40 miles per gallon. So I would usually end up re-passing vehicles that I had passed before the stops.
I drove until the sun was setting, on the other side of Minneapolis-St. Paul, and checked into a motel. I took my boots off and laid down on the bed, and the next thing I knew it was 6:00 AM! Got back on the road at 7:00 and continued that pattern for the next two days.
I got the craziest tan on the trip. When I would blast off at around 7:00 AM, I would wear my totally butch leather jacket that my kids bought me to keep me warm from the built-in wind chill of driving at 70+ mph. But the jacket sleeve would blow up to the halfway point of my sleeve, and only the front half of my arm would get sun.
After the early morning break, I would take off the jacket and drive in shirt sleeves. So the rest of my arm would get tanned. But my fingers, holding on to the handlebars in a death grip, would be under the throttle grip and not get any tan, as shown in this picture.
Figure 1: Wild hand tan gradient.
I arrived in Condon, Montana, on Saturday afternoon. This last leg was the scariest of the whole trip, as I was crossing the Continental Divide and was being tailgated by truck drivers who knew all the bends and twists of the road. It was like the scariest rollercoaster ride ever! I would crest a ridge and not see if the road ahead was going to lead me straight, or left or right, and to what radius! So I just tailgated a truck that seemed to know what he was doing.
While stopped for lunch on my last day of the westbound journey, I picked up a copy of the local free weekly and read an interesting article by the governor of Montana, Brian Schweitzer. He was against the Citizens United ruling of the Supreme Court, and wanted his state to be exempt from it, as there were laws on the Montana books that limited campaign contributions, keeping in the spirit of the state. Unfortunately he was overridden, much to his and my chagrin. But his article did shed some light onto the character of the state and its people.
Like Bud Wilson, the proprietor of PhotographersÕ Formulary and Workshops in Montana and Standing Stones Bed and Breakfast. If there ever were a call for someone to narrate the story of the wet plate collodion photographers of the Wild West like Timothy H. OÕSullivan or Alexander Gardner or Peter Henry Jackson, his voice and accent would be absolutely perfect.
When I introduced myself, Bud thought my name was familiar, even though we had never met. I reminded him that I had introduced his father to the world of holography, by getting him to advertise in holosphere, The Advocate of Holographic Science, Art and Technology, when I was its technical editor in the mid 1980Õs. (The trademarked name of the magazine is not capitalized.)
What had transpired since then was that my old friend Dr. Jeong had capitalized on this connection and had the Wilsons sell package kits of chemicals for processing holographic films and plates, which TJ was selling through his own familyÕs business. (For more details on where those formulas came from, see http://nlutie.com/ewesly/CWC2g.pdf)
He was selling 500 – 800 of these holography kits per year, which accounted for ½ of his business! Which was quite a surprise, since I didnÕt think there were that many consumers of holographic goods in the world! But this was split between the Formulary selling direct and Integraf selling through their site.
His father had passed away years ago, and they bought this tract of land in Condon, MT, and moved the operation from Missoula. It is very much a family owned and operated business, with BudÕs wife and daughters making up the work crew.
Their campus had a variety of buildings, all built by Bud; the warehouse, where the backbone of the business is conducted; their home and dorm; plus the cafeteria, darkroom and classroom building. There was also a horse barn and corral, whose door was where my images of the motorcycle were taken; and an in-law cabin, where BudÕs step-daughter and son lived. See Appendix B for a photographic tour of his empire. (Selling the big stones seen in the pictures of the site is another one of his businesses!)
The instructor for the class was Jerry Spagnoli, the premier contemporary daguerreotypist. (See http://www.jerryspagnoli.com/) This daguerreotype workshop has been running for a dozen years in a row with the exception of one when Jerry was in Italy. (The Wet Plate Collodion class I had been enrolled in for the previous week had been cancelled due to not hitting the numbers!)
Some of the other students were heavy hitters in the world of photo-history; Dusan Stulik, originally from the Czech Republic, but now a photo-physicist at the Getty Museum; Sharon Petrillo, from Italy, who restores photographs, and showed some incredible examples of an album she had just rehabbed.
Since the backbone of BudÕs business was in chemical photography, there was not much in the way of a digital infrastructure. I had to be the IT crew for the presentations by Dusan and Sharon. I finally succeeded in hooking up my last legs laptop to one of the televisions from a room in the bed and breakfast dorm, and the class saw the results of DusanÕs latest researches.
He had access to two recently unearthed images by Nicephore Niepce, who is credited with creating the earliest surviving photographs. One of these images was a photographic copy of a drawing from his partner, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, inventor of the first practical photographic process, the daguerreotype, which we were making. Besides looking at the technical aspects of these images, Dusan contended that there really was a friendly collaboration between these two peres[**] of photography. He graciously let me copy his PowerPoint, and I integrated some of those slides into my HST 118 presentations.
After spending all week Òdaguerreotyping like lionsÓ[ ] and enjoying the excellent cuisine that was part of the dorm package, it was time to climb back on the bike and blast off for home sweet home. I stopped off to visit one of my oldest friends, the previously mentioned George Garklavs in Loveland Colorado in the middle of the trip, so it took 4 days to return.
More than once I was asked by some loser on a Harley if I knew the way to Sturgis, the home of the big motorcycle get together. I had no intention to going to such an event, and was not even sure what state it was in. The reason I use the epitaph loser is not because they were on Harleys, but why would you have to ask directions? How could you not know how to use Google Maps or MapQuest, or even the old-fashioned way, an actual printed page map! To retain my ignorance, I havenÕt used the above to find out what state the darned orgy is in, although I suspect North or South Dakota! If I were a real jerk, I could have told them to follow me, as I was heading south, not north, where the action was.
And I did return in one piece, after 3800 miles on my gentlemanÕs express, with 9 daguerreotypes, (examples of my plates are in Appendix C) although the last 100 miles were the slowest, due to a slight drizzle. At the last stop for gas, in Morris, Illinois, I paid $1 more per gallon than I had paid anywhere else on the trip, on the roads that were the worst of any I had ridden on anywhere else on the trip.
The boys and cats were glad to see me back, and we went to the Chinese restaurant at the end of my block, and when we got back, I hopped in to bed and got up when I damned well pleased.
Summary:
This Summer Release Time was one to remember. There were many interesting learning experiences along the road that contributed to making me more valuable to Harrington College of Design. Was the trip worthwhile?
It proved that I am one of the leading holographic historians with my PowerPoint presentation that consisted mainly of gleanings from my own archives. Although it might be debated whether or not holography is a branch of photography[àà], it shows that I am practicing historian.
I gathered samples of things for the HST 118 and PHY 201 classes from friends and pictures to add to my presentations from exhibits that I had visited on the trip. Plus I had daguerreotypes whose provenance I know exactly. And the only thing that keeps me from making more is in acquiring more of the silver on copper plates.
Would I do something like this again? Certainly, even on the motorcycle again! Who wouldnÕt want to enjoy the beauty of Workshops in Montana! But I would have to have better funding. I had to pay for the travel on both trips, the preparation of the vehicles, and it drained my financial cushion in the bank. Hopefully the connections I made in the holography and photography worlds might pay off with some financial rewards.
