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At 08:25 PM 2/7/2005, you wrote: >Hey, Ken, I recall when there was a small flurry of notes on the list when >photographer Richard Avedon passed away. You, we, remarked that the Center >for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona here in Tucson had >483 of Avedon's photographs. As I noted at the time my daughter works for >the Avedon Collection at the CCP. Today I remarked on the number of >photographs in the collection, 483, and she replied that 483 are in the >CCP permanent collection, i.e., owned by the Center. The number of Avedon >prints my daughter oversees stored at the CCP is between 15,00 and 20,000! >Those are owned by the Richard Avedon estate. > >Trivia marches on! Hardly trivia. I can't imagine there's a mathematical ratio between what a photographer sees and photographs, perhaps even test-prints to see what it looks like, and how much is (in his opinion) crap not worth showing. I suppose that even Avedon could not make an Avedon photograph all the time and that some percentage of what he chose to print consists of real dogs that went into storage, not into exhibition. That's quite unlike the borrowed dogs his father used to get for family photographs. My GUESS is that as Avedon moved toward the 8x10 view camera, his ratio of bad to good altered in the direction of the latter because a view camera requires much more deliberation. Shooting with a Nikon or even a Rolleiflex allows you to waste film. A view camera is a lot more work and I'd imagine you allow yourself a much tighter margin for error. So we come to the same issue in what we do. Have we written poems, preserved on paper or disk, that nobody will ever see in their present state, or that become seed for other poems, because we've judged the original to be bad news? How much, for that matter, do we know about the compositional practices of earlier writers? Ken ------------------------------------------------- Kenneth Wolman www.kenwolman.com kenwolman.blogspot.com "This is the best of all possible worlds only because it is the only one that showed up."-- Russell Edson