ICP Studio Visit
Mission Accomplished.
It started with an email from ICP Director Lucig Kebranian. She asked if I would open my house up to some VIPs from ICP including David Campany, the Director of Creativity. The date was set for the end of October, six weeks away.
What do I know about studio visits? Nada. I've been at events at ICP since the 1980's when the C in ICP stood for Concerned. I couldn't do this alone.
I called in the big guns. Alex Paterson-Jones, book designer extraordinaire, had a vision of massive steel bolted to the studio wall. He wanted something heavy to hold the weight of my past. When he got the steel plates up on the wall, thanks to Justin and Mikey, that is when the creative fun began.
My protege, Camilla Petote, from NYU, was given the honor to document the visit.
The room in my house that Alex is drawn to is the defunct darkroom, the room I was afraid to go into.
Once a vibrant darkroom, it became a vault after the mortgage foreclosure crisis of 2008 following dark financial times. It is a room with voices shouting "Feed me Donna.” Terribly hungry and always wanting more pictures, negatives, slides, DVDs, audio tapes, equipment, relics. Alex loves digging into the corners of that room.
Gigi Stoll, my agent from Two by Two Media, helped prepare the house for the visit. Gigi represents women artists over 70. She curated a collection of vintage photographs in a black box topped with a picture of Richard B. Stolley, the founding editor of People Magazine, as he placed his 1990 marathon medal around my young daughter's neck, in the TIME/LIFE building.
The VIPs arrived. David Campany was indispensable. He helped me give Camilla, a teaching moment as part of my talk. (see behind the pay wall). And later he prompted me with questions like, “What was your first published story?” Luckily, that story, published in a Grand Junction, Colorado, newspaper in 1976, was hanging on the back door. At one point, I wanted a photograph of David, but Camilla was standing behind him. I encouraged her to give up the shyness and get in front of us to take pictures. “Make your pictures without fear”. Later she said “That was the moment I became a photographer.”
Thank you Kris Brown, Russet Ledermen, Rebecca Victor Baadarani, Debby Brown, Steven Klapisch, Jeff Gutterman, Chloe Jolly, Chirag Chotalia, Mark for being there.
Special thanks David Campany and Lucig Kebranian with love, the Squad.
