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Homage to Ken Josephson

Ken Josephson is a very cool photogapher, who also has happened to be an influential photographer and important educator.

                               The photo of Denali (below) is an homage to a series of works that he made in which he held postcard views against the site of the original place (as it was, the "new view" did not necessarily match that reality of the postcard - he made photographs of "images within images" for over fifteen years).

                                                                         
Denali, 2010
Ken was a long-time professor at the Art Institute of Chicago; sometime in the mid-1980s (I'm forgetting the actual year) he did a visiting professor stint at UCLA.

                                                                                 From the early 1980s, for about ten years, there was a group of us in LA - photographers, artists, filmmakers - who met regularly to play poker from early evening until sometime near dawn the next day (for about ten years afterwards, it became an annual poker game during the day of the Super Bowl - rotating houses, where the host would make chili - and we could all return home while it was still light).

                               Ken got invited to one of the poker evenings, which happened to be at my studio in downtown Inglewood (Los Angeles), and a group of six or seven of us played into the early/late morning hours. Ken left somewhere around 4 AM and, unfortunately, drove the wrong way down the alley behind my building onto a main thoroughfare - and had the unpleasant experience of spending the next few hours of an early Sunday morning at the police station.

I've always felt badly about that.
                                                       So Ken, if you ever happen to read this - I'm sorry about that, and wish you could have been in Alaska with us.
                                                       

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