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.