This morning, I received an email from someone who purchased one of my photographs at the Goodwill store on South Van Ness. She wanted to let me know that there were three more, in case I wanted to buy them.
Flash back to 1997. After seeing my solo show The Night of the Hunter, my first body of work based on the theme of the voluptuous bear body, a big downtown gallery dealer offered me a solo show. She took four pieces from the Hunter show, after it came down, to have in the gallery’s back room prior to my solo show with her, and promptly sold them the next day. My first big sale. And to an important photo collector in Marin! I thought I was finally on the way.
Fast forward a decade. Perusing the personal ads on Bear411, I came across some scantily clad fellow in clumsy contrapposto with the same four photos in the background!
“They were from my first show, my passion for the hirsute rendered as both a quest for beauty and a place to live: I the artist/hunter, and the hairy bear my subject/trophy!” I frantically messaged to the bear, exclamation points and all.
How they got from Big Photo Collector in Marin to Scantily Clad Bear Guy in San Francisco is anybody’s guess. He didn’t seem interested in conversing about the aesthetic context of his pictures, so I said bye-bye and that was that.
Until this morning’s email. Those same photos had somehow made their way to Goodwill. I thought about leaving them there, hoping that someone would buy them because they actually liked them, like the sender of the email, but I was suddenly seized by a fear that they wouldn’t sell at Goodwill, or worse, someone would buy them for the frames and trash my photos. Maybe I could at least give them away. I also happened to be working in the neighborhood and couldn’t resist. $6.99 each. With tax, $20.97.
Just last week I decided to move away from work engaged with beauty to art culled from real life, photos about our time, my time, my experience. How completely wonderful to have those images come back to me at this time, at the end of this cycle that began with them. We’ll see where they end up next.