Thanks for posting this Damion... I am sensing a percolating interest in this project and had the opportunity to visit with Gita last week and gave to her a blurb book of her work. she really was touched by the making of the book as she almost cannot fathom people being interested in her photography. And she is a little bemused by the notion of just putting together one book. She kept asking me "you did this?"
Anyway, the blurb book is very cool in that it did give us the opportunity to put it into her hands and fairly quickly. But I have to say that I am not happy with the quality and am not likely to make that link public. We are discussing a publishing venture and a proper treatment for a body of work that really in its essence is about quality of printing. And we further want to see that copies get into to libraries and museums as best we can. So we will do a run of I am not sure how many just yet but enough to cover the growing interest in Gita as a photographer plus enough to contribute to various institutions and then finally enough to stoke the audience of an exhibition she will be having in NY a year or so out.
So, there will be more on this. It is taking forever and for that I am really sort of ashamed. I wish we had gotten rolling a few years earlier because we could have.
Finally, Damion, with regard to the printing from her negs. I have barely touched the conservation of the negatives. Because as the market for fine art photography places a far greater value upon vintage prints made by the artist themselves, or at their direction, these prints have the greatest collectibility and thus the greater investment potential and monetary value. There are, possibly, institutions that might be identified and that would be interested in the rest of Gita's work including the negatives in their current less than pristine state but the further expense of this additional conservation will be a costly enterprise and unlikely to have an immediate benefit to Gita directly or to the estate. Depending on time and expense and how successful a show may be and if Gita survives to see it, which seems more and more unlikely, then we'll eventually come to a decision on that issue.
But a print from a decent neg of one of the better images, perhaps made by myself or another custom printer, might be nicely added value for a deluxe edition when we release the book.
