A week and a half seems forever ago, as the rush of excitement dissipates. I was knee deep in preparations for weeks counting up to Underground 4. (The pre-show was a blast and the art looked ridiculously awesome, for the record.) But the night of the event itself was a glorious, hectic blur of people, energy, and art. The most rewarding aspect of the whole Underground experience, by far, was actively working with someone I love to create something entirely new. It was one of the most fulfilling creative experiences of my life. I’ve never been much of a collaborator in this way, but I found this an enlivening adventure and am looking forward to more of its kind.

For well over a year, I’ve been kicking around this idea for an outside-the-box approach to melding an artistic presentation with the precise, unforgiving nature of photography. The vision is a photograph seemingly floating, carelessly nailed to a board, with a protective sealant “spilled” across the image. It sounds simpler to achieve than it is and I am unwilling to sacrifice archival care of the piece in quest of the carefully sloppy look. As Brian, (who’s been my sounding board and partner in crime,) will attest, it’s an incredible amount of work. The sealant is exceedingly difficult to work with–obstinate and highly disrespectful. But! it can be done! After some minor finishing work, the prototype of this method is complete, with tremendous creative collaboration and assistance from Brian. (Thank you!!) And we have lots of ideas for how to improve on this and get better results in the future. I’m looking forward to making more.

Here’s a sneak peak of the not-quite-finished piece:

While I’m at it, I’ll take this opportunity to share a sneak peak behind the curtain: After working with this piece, I decided the image still needed some attention. So I dug up the original file and meticulously removed some distracting artifacts, as well as tweaking the overall image enhancement.

Here’s the black & white as it was before:

And this is the new, improved version:

Every time I show this image people ask where it was taken and seem surprised by the answer: This building is on South State Street in Salt Lake City. (I like to refer to this image as WTF SLC. There are so many easter eggs in the face of this building, I keep finding new things two years later!) In the process of digging up the file, I came across the other images I took of the barber shop and pulled out this one to work on. Here’s a never-before-seen angle of WTF SLC, and presented for the first time in color: