City of Monterey – California

As usual, Russ Widstrand is a tough act to follow.  Especially as Russ has a bent for surrealistic conceptual photography, it’s a problem for me being a location photographer without a studio.  I can’t simply conceptualize and whip up an image in my studio the way Russ can. Well, actually, I have a 5,490,383,247,360,000 square foot studio, I call it Earth.  So I spent the better part of the day puttering around in a small corner of my studio… Chicago… trying to photograph things that would dovetail with his theme anyway.  I was looking for a fish market  but I wasn’t in the right neighborhood, I was downtown.  Lots of skyscrapers, though.  As I wandered the streets of Chicago I kept thinking about a snapshot I’d made about seven or eight years ago of the seafood department manager at a King’s supermarket in Short Hills, NJ.  That was no help, either. So, I spent the day wandering aimlessly thinking of  pink cats and fish.  All that meandering made me hungry because pink and fish kinda reminded me of canned salmon and I hadn’t eaten lunch, so I went home and made myself a sandwich.  A late lunch it was, but being properly fed and while free-associating, I recalled an image I’d made in California, at the Monterey Aquarium, a pink jellyfish!  You might think that pulling an image from my files is easy, but not this time.  It was pretty hard to find, a fairly unusual occurrence, I had to sweat to come-up with this one.  I think it’s Miller Time.