Reading Lost Times Gazette

My Pandemic Project

Like many creatives, the Pandemic along with the horrors, gave us time to dive into new projects, revisit old ones to fix and setting goals to guide us forward. My Pandemic Project was the making of
The Lost Times Gazette. The idea was to get back to a body of work that was neglected for too many years. Putting to rest the promise of I'll get to later, at some point, in the future.

The photos of those early years haunted me, I always felt guilty that I didn't give the work the respect it deserved. I liked the photos but I didn't know how to make sense of it as I was rushing forward with my life. I never forgot them and used some at various times for long forgotten opportunities to show them but never in a unified way.

I challenged myself to present the work in a different way then work is shown to an audience, curators, influencer gallerists and reviewers. I always loved the presentation of photos in special inserts in the big newspapers. Newsprint was the choice, then came the name, the design, the many mistakes in layout, font size and selection, the trials and tribulations of the proof reading, working with professionals. The scanning of negatives and making proof prints was tedious but a necessary part which allowed me to get the feedback from photographers whose opinions I respected. I needed to get down to the right number for the page limitations so the editing had to be precise and coherent.

The text was one of the biggest challenges but I went with my recollection of how I felt then, a big challenge when the lens is a few decades long. But it also gave me the chance to align the images with a more mature understanding of the process. So the "promo" piece took the form of a gazette; future issues will be made and a new way of presenting my work will always be there waiting for me.