As part of the Diesel Day celebration, my male person had an opening of a show of photographs from his new book, Keeping Time in Sag Harbor. All week long, he’s been scurrying about getting prints ready, finishing frames, thinking about programs for the show, and doing interviews with local journalists. I’ve lent a paw whenever I can.On Thursday, the book arrived from the printer in Singapore, unbound. It was beautiful. We had a local bookbinder sew up a copy so people could see it during the opening. It will be a week or two before the first copies of the bound book arrive.
Honestly, this whole thing was planned separately from my own celebration, but I do think it is serendipitous that Diesel Day and my person’s opening fell on the same day.
We all had a lot of work to do to get ready for the show at the Whaling Museum. My role was to assist in the installation. I joined the museum director and my person yesterday morning to supervise the hanging. (For those of you wondering what Alex’s role was, she personally sat on every matted piece prior to
framing, ensuring it had the cat-stamp of approval and just the right amount of fur inside the frame.)The book itself was three years in the making. Alex and I spent many a late night up with Stephen, assisting with phrasing, providing comments and ideas, and generally supporting the writing of the book, planning of pictures, loading of film.
What you see here are the first images of the show, albeit as the installation was being finalized. Here I am overseeing the hanging of one wall.
I spent a lot of time eyeballing the images, making sure they were hanging straight – cats are
experts at balance, you know, and we have a much finer sense of a horizontal plane than humans. Think about all that jumping, balancing, walking on backs of chairs we do. It involves a complex calculus that is simply innate to our species.You can learn more about the show at the museum’s website; look to the right in my links section. The book – which has 94 of my male person’s photographs in it – is being distributed by the University of Chicago Press and will be in bookstores by mid-summer. If you are interested, go to your local bookseller and ask them to carry it.
E.L. Doctorow, writing about the book, said that my person “has an eye for the glories of an historic village – the way its past endures in its doorways, its gravestones, its fences, its finials. This lovely and loving book, attesting to the unorganized acts of preservation that have maintained the truth of a place for 300 years, is itself a scrupulous act of preservation.”
I couldn’t agree more.
