Qctober 2004
Queridos Patrones,
TALK about ICING on the cake! San Antonio's PBS affiliate,
KLRN, has expressed serious interest in producing perhaps as
long as
a 90 minute, nationally
televised documentary "video component" of our project and its' exhibition at
the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, which is now "on the
schedule" to open October 2, 2006 - coincidentally, my 65th birthday!
ALL things considered, it's going to take us that long (including finishing
Phase
II, the production of a major catalogue and now a PBS documentary), to
make it as GOOD as it can be!
KLRN is interested in developing a concept surrounding the
most extraordinary cultural activity encountered during
my project, which would include
going to Mexico to film some of the festivals in high-definition video.
We have our choice of halls at the National Museum of Natural
History, between #30 next door to the Hope diamond,
or #11 just below on the ground
floor, where
they are currently hosting the baseball exhibition. I told them that
either will be swell!
Another "pop-up" exhibition of 60 or so "day of the dead" images
is scheduled to open 28 days later on the 30th, at the beautiful
Mexican Cultural Institute mansion on Embassy Row. There is also
the possibility
of exhibiting
my Mexican fireworks suite at the InterAmerican Development Bank
at the same time!
While we were in Washington, the museum's curator of anthropology
(who will also curate our exhibition), Bill Merrill, hosted
a beautiful
dinner in my honor which
was attended by amoung others, the NMNH's dynamic new young
director, Cristian Samper, and his beautiful wife Adriana,
who said they
might be visiting
Texas one of these days.
We continue to make slow but steady progress on our Phase II
editing, cataloguing and archiving of The Essence of Mexico
Collection, which has twice as many
slides (now estimated by the Benson Library archivist to
be some 75,000) as we had previously
estimated. We have so far identified and selected 12,566
images out of 345 festivals (totaling 155,818 gigabytes
at 12.4mb
each, scans
so far)
for the
Rockefeller
Center (remember, we had only projected a maximum of some
5,000 at the outset!), and we are barely through July!
I am making
a "fat" selection
of what I consider to be the best photography, so that anyone who
would like
to publish
something from it in the future will have an ample selection of
the best photography in the collection.
I have learned through this experience the VALUE of smart
assistance to help me restore the rest of the estimated
75,000 images
in the Collection back into
the specific order in which they were shot, the NEED for
a full-time professional
editor, who could be another assistant while learning the
collection (increasing my output a hundredfold), cast a
critical eye on
my SAMA selection, take
charge, coordinate and supervise the entire team. With
such a team in place, we should
be able to finish within a year. Without it, it will take
MORE time as my having to do ALL of the organizing back
into sequence,
editing
the
SAMA selection, then
having to reorganize the resulting dupes back into the
Benson Library's archive and being LIMITED by the amount
of time
that ANY human being
can work closely
with images in a single sitting and still remain lucid.
KEEP the faith, though. One thing that I CAN guarantee
is that we have something that we will be VERY proud
of. I'll
keep
you posted!
Con abrazos y agradecimiento,
gojjr.