CHANGED IN BLOG POSTING: I AM CHANGING THE BLOG TO POST ONCE A MONTH RATHER THAN ONCE A WEEK – I HAVE TO MANY COMMITMENTS TO DO JUSTICE TO THE BLOG AND THE ART COMMITMENTS. So this will be the last weekly post. I will post the first Sunday of every month. So the Next Post will be Sunday, February 7 and then Sunday, March 6 and so on. I will post on the blog when my new website goes live which should be this coming week. Now onto this week’s post.
FOCUS AND OTHER SURPRISES:
As some of you know, for the first 43 years of my life, I hid my work. Most of it was stored under my bed. I never showed it to anyone and the reason was, I knew my work was not about single prints. Rather it had something to do with Time. I wasn’t sure what it had to do with Time. But I knew two things, not about single prints and, color processing was so bad it couldn’t come close to rendering my work the way I had shot it. So hiding it seemed like an excellent solution. By 1990, finally, Gieger Chiba had perfected an archival color medium in Cibachromes, that could render true whites and true blacks and a true Cibachrome has to come from a slide not a negative, and I was able to begin my public career.
“Trading News”, copyright by J. Leone, at Paul Rodgers 9W, NYC. No Reproduction allowed. As a floating installation. If you look closely at the photo you can see the slight mis-alignment.
“Trading News” is actually four pieces, in this frame they are almost perfectly lined up so the viewer does realize it a multi part installation. The photo below shows the installation hung flat so the four parts are clearly visible.
“Trading News” copyright J. Leone, at Harvard University, University Place Gallery. No reproduction allowed. The four parts hung flat on the wall.
When I opened my first show at Harvard, I introduced these installations to the art world. “Trading News” is a soft focused piece because I was riding in a small boat with a huge motor on the back and having to shoot straight into the sun. The two Thai women were angling towards one another and I knew I was only going to have once chance at the shot so I opened the lens wide and went for a softer focus because the boat speed was never going to allow for a razor sharp focus to begin with.
I got exactly the focus I wanted, it looked like a painting, soft and as if it was set back in time. When I finished the original 11 installations that I opened my show at Harvard with, I was almost certain that the women would love the softness of “Trading News” and the men would not. I could not have been more wrong! The men seemed to fall into it as if it was a painting while the women were irritated and annoyed and believe me they were pretty vocal about it at the opening. I was so stunned by this. This installation always reminded me of old Indochine even though I took it Thailand.
I have been continually surprised over the course of my public career by the differences in taste between men and women. And, I have to say I am always wrong about which sex I think will like what. There was the whole botanical series that I thought women would buy and yet 95% of the sales went to men and not women. The men bought the prints of orchids more than others. And, they didn’t buy them for women, they bought them for themselves. I never would have thought that.
Okay see Sunday February 7th.
J. Leone 