February’s Print of the Month (or Thereabouts) is from 1995’s Bumbershoot festival. The notion for Bumbershoot was pretty much hatched by Anne Focke — an arts administrator for the City of Seattle — during the “Last Person Out of Seattle Please Turn Out the Lights” days of the late 60s as the City Arts Festival. By 1971 it had evolved into Bumbershoot, a goofy, community event with free admission that featured mostly local music in a wide variety of styles, an extensive visual arts exhibition, and a steady stream of impromtu performances. Each day of the festival there was at least one ad hoc parade of some kind, often accompanied by a lusty if inept brass band. “The Big Naso” was leading
My portfolio of portraits is now up and running. In my lexicon a portrait is an image made with the cooperation or at least consent of the subject and is intended to represent and identify that person as an individual. Portraits can be as mundane as yearbook mug shots, as contrived and expressive as Arnold Newman's "Stravinsky", as formal and elegant is Karsh's "Pablo Casals", as cool and intellectual as Cartier-Bresson's "Jean-Paul Sartre, or as personal and connected as Renate Ponsold's "Hedda Sterne" or (I hope) my own. Frank Horvat, one of the better photographers of which you have likely never heard, said that he regretted that he had not done more portraits in his long career. Me,
