Debí tirar más fotos
Take more photos, make more art, make more things that are messy and severe and personal
Well, we are here.
We’re in so-called Los Angeles running a pay-what-you-can fine art print shop, making meticulous prints. We have been pay-what-you-can because we believe that there are too many gates up for making art, and we have this one way we can open the gate, so we do. We're always printing pay-what-you-can for artists and individuals (we think anyone who makes art is an artist, but not everyone agrees yet to that about themselves), even if that is free. We’re reprinting work for artists who lost their work in the fires and artists who are making new work, and maybe also you, sometime soon.
If you don’t have anything to print, but want to contribute to the pay-what-you-can fund, you can donate here.
Among the prints we worked on this month, we made a 60” x 72” print of the border communities showing naval bases, schools with “military-adjacent” recruitment programs, and military logistics and weapons manufacturers. It was so meaningful to scroll through photos and watch a recording of the event, that in one way Los Angeles Print Shop helped support that.
We also made a really tall stack of 12” x 12” prints for artist Aiden Berglund for a donations sale. We have been so grateful to talk to so many artists (more than we thought would even be possible) this month that are helping to create the community of Los Angeles artists helping each other via their own art.
We’re making art, printing art and looking at art. We hope you are, too.
Part of us wants to stop here, and just say that and nothing else. But, that’s not the promise we’ve made to you, to us. We said we’d be talking about it — as artists who run a print shop, Andy and I turn to making art as a survival tool and a form of resistance. It’s how we affirm our existence and make meaning. It’s how we live in unlivable times.
So, hi, we’re wondering how you’re doing. We’re doing ok. Our house is standing and the print shop, too. Thank you for checking on us. We felt your care and love. Andy’s book is coming out in something like 9 weeks, it’s off at the printer, and completely preorderable, and the endpapers are going to be cerulean. So now the book moves through all of the stages of art production — the printing press, the marketing, the event planning, the talking about it to other people as shamelessly as possible because what else are we doing here if not trying to share it once we’ve made it the best we can. Andy is writing new things and thinking and talking about her art. Her uncle called to check on us about the evacuations and the fires and he asked, Did you take your book? And with a feeling that is so big, we said yes, knowing that no we did not even grab the drafts because the book doesn’t just live with us now. It’s at someone else’s computer, out in the world, advance copies on the night stands of other writers we admire.
And I’m photographing. Today I photographed and yesterday too.
There are parts of this album that feel like I am waking up on a small boat, arriving to a place I didn’t know could really exist.
The whole album carries a narrative, from its song titles though also from the way the instruments feel as if you are walking by when they start a story and are welcomed over and so you stay, then at the end you continue on to hear about something else that you did not know about yet. I feel like I learn something about history, transdimensionally. I want to know more.
We read Ashley M. Jones’s HOLYHEADHARRIET, which we read out loud as a retelling, read in our minds as a caring touch, and to each other as a promise.
In between we are doing the business of the living. We have gotten groceries, sent emails, replied to emails, we have scheduled and misscheduled things, sent this thing to that person, it is true. We haven’t renewed our car registration but we have removed dust and ash from the print shop. The sound of blades trimming glassine and paper, printheads moving back and forth. The print shop apprentice Justin and I quiet and our tools making the sounds.
For years, YEARS, my sister has told me to listen to Bad Bunny. That it wasn’t just catchy, and didn’t totally get it until now this month when she, having not given up, (thank you for that Laura) told me to listen to this album, Debi TiRar MaS FoToS. Bad Bunny wrote most of the songs. And I heard NUEVAYoL which starts off as true salsa as anything I heard when I was growing up (partially because it is, it takes from Un Verano en Nueva York by El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico).
But it wasn’t just a sample, the song is a cutting straight from the root. It felt like how music would sound like today if it was made then. Not too different from closing up the blacks in a file to reduce the tonal range so that the print feels like it came from film without being about film photography.
Then there is the song LO QUE PASÓ A HAWAii where he pleads for what happened to Hawaii to not happen to Puerto Rico.
Quieren quitarme el río y también la playa
Quieren al barrio mío y que abuelita se vaya
No, no suelte' la bandera ni olvide' el lelolai
Que no quiero que hagan contigo lo que le pasó a Hawái
But listening to it it’s not just about Puerto Rico or Hawaii, it’s here in Los Angeles, at the edge of major change and anywhere where the empire asserts itself. Colonized territories that despite it all continue to be themselves and I hope continue to continue.
We watched this short film by Bad Bunny about Puerto Rico and photography and love and remembering and food and being with your community. A character in it says, remembering isn’t that easy, I should have taken more photos, I should have lived more.
Last night, sitting on the floor we made up a story about a rock that is one million years old, a feeling rock. It is a place people have gone to sit and feel their feelings. People can cry there and scream, they can laugh. They can be as loud as they want. They can cry loudly and cry quietly and they can come back tomorrow, too. Then we told more of the story, the story of the rock.
At Los Angeles Print Shop we make meticulous fine art prints with a pay-what-you-can model.
If you’ve lost art and need it reprinted, or know someone who has, we’re here. You or they may not be ready yet and that’s okay. Take the time it takes. We are pay-what-you-can, even if that amount is zero. You might not have anything to print today, but want to contribute to the pay-what-you-can fund, you can donate here.
It’s also true for new art, art that hadn’t yet existed. We hope you make some. I know we want to see it, we always have, always will.
💗