"DEAR LEADER"

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My son Raphael and his brother Gabriel went back to their yankee grandmother’s home in Virginia and found old college work of mine somewhere in the basement……Raphael shoveled snow from a christmas winter storm and gave my ex-brother in law the cash to ship a box full of 25 year old work back to me, which I just received.

Back in 84,’ I was, as I am still, extremely fond of any kind of natural history displays and one of the first thing I do whenever I fly into a new city is seek out their natural history museum…
I remember calling the a biologist or zoologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City who cordially invited to come down and peruse their collection both back stage and in the Museum’s galleries without as much as checking my credentials (whatever a 19 year old might have had at the time).

At the time I thought that photographing dioramas as well as storage units in the museum’s research facilities was a swell and brilliant idea, not realizing that Hiroshi Sugimoto had beaten me to the punch…..
Intelligence I gathered, a few months later while visiting a camera store (whose name escapes me at the moment) in mid-town Manhattan, by gazing disappointedly at a beautifully printed large print of an ostrich and it’s chicks, hanging over the counter…. A diorama I had also photographed a few months back at the Museum…..

These Polaroids were used as reference shots to guide me in my selection of future large format black and whites…. To be continued…I have to pick someone downtown.

A little Malagasy pop culture….and those Malagasy girls…..eesh….!!!!.. Yeahkka..! Like catnip.