20 november

I got some help from an independent curator who happened to have some laying around. I scheduled my birthday for around this time. Hooray!

Frank was one of my first slides. There are actually two of him. I mean, two slides of him. Two slides to every story, you know.

What I love about Frank – beyond the fact that this most wonderful curator just had him laying around, through some sort of bizarre confluence of findings and keepings and kindly givings (thanks, you!)—What I love about Frank is how unapologetic he is. Maybe he’s just finished mowing the lawn. Maybe he’s just always like that.

In one slide, Frank is standing with his arms at his sides. His eyes are squinted closed against the sun glare, and the bright shine reflects off of his sweaty forehead and cheeks. He’s smiling, but it’s hard to say much about the smile with his eyes closed. He is shirtless, with long brown shorts pulled up high – probably a good four inches above his belly button, it looks like. He wears taupe socks and slip-on sandals – what I might otherwise call shower shoes, if he were at a camp or something in a different decade. He gives the feeling of the 1950s. He stands on a sidewalk, feet shoulder-width apart, with a giant wall of shrubbery behind him. Is this his handiwork? Hard to tell. He’s just posing. The slide says Aug 72, but yeah, 1950s.

Slide two, also Frank in front of the wall o’ shrubbery. This time, however, we can see over the top of the shrubbery behind him instead of his feet. The lighting is different, too, even though it’s still outside, clearly. The most important difference, though, is that all of Frank’s attention, and subsequently our attention, focuses on his left index finger, placed on the top of the tip of his nose. Unless I have the slide flipped and it’s his right index finger. Anyway. His finger’s on the tip of his nose. Why? He’s not looking at us, delivering any sort of answer. His eyes are cast down, possibly closed, possibly because of the glare. Maybe he has a slight smile on his lips, but it’s hard to tell, mostly because his hand obscures his mouth.

When I first saw slide two, I was totally sure that Frank was picking his nose. Totally sure. My curator (you know I mean this in a lovingly joking way, and not in a fancy-pants fashion, right?) had actually sent me a picture of the slide before I had the real slide itself, and so I spent a good amount of time trying to check out the right angle to get it just right and be able to tell– just like when you’re watching something on TV or on a movie and you lean to one side to see if you can see behind a character onscreen or to see something from a different angle-? What, you don’t do that? Right.

Frank is probably in his late fifties, early sixties. He has his own hair, though the color looks somewhat questionably genuine in slide one. Slide two seems real. Slide two seems really real, actually – maybe too real? Why would there be a picture of some shirtless, 60-year-old man poking at his own nose?

Why do we take pictures of anything?