Well, that's done. Spent three intense days cleaning up a 27-year-old photo of Brownie Mary Rathbun for a traveling show. On its way to the Weedmaps Weed Museum where it will tour for three years. I scanned it in 24-bit color at 800dpi, so I could capture all the greyscale range, and to properly clone out the artifacts....all those slubs on her sweater had what looked like lint, OMG!
And I was aghast by all the embedded artifacts and surface scratches. I don't like DigitalIce, it softens the image. Ah, the joys of Tri-X, pushed. My trusty old Pentax K1000 with a Vivitar zoom lens. Good glass. Not that I know much about PS, but after I cleaned it up, I did a sharpen layer, for her face, then a Gaussian blur layer, sans her face, to soften the clone clean up (even tho the print looked fine, it was a mess!) I also scanned the negatives later. They came out better than expected.
We met Brownie Mary at SF General Hospital's AIDS ward, as she was making her volunteer nurse rounds delivering respite to her AIDS patients. Her boys,, she said. I first met her at the Sonoma County Jail where she was arrested for buying pot in Cazadero. I covered the story for The Paper. Tony Serra took on the feds and won. I coordinated a photography expedition for Dutch photographer Jan Bogaaerts who was doing a story on the AIDS crisis for Granta Magazine. It was a heart-wrenching time. The frailness of mortality.
FWIW, I ate some of those brownies, but I may, or may not have swallowed. Mary and I had an Irish heart connection that went deep. In the process of working on the photo, I just found out my aunt Jane used to make travel arrangements for Mary at Valley Travel. Small world. Of course, she never knew... Special thanks to Jerry Downs for contract advice.
Museum of Weed coming to Los Angeles in early 2019
Que Sera, Serra: Remembering Tony Serra
Brownie Mary
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