No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris ... [because] no known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping.   --Orville Wright

Don't feel foolish, Orville: I didn't think I'd ever have a show in Paris either. And you don't even know how apt your quote is.

It's just one month away now, my first exhibition in Paris, and I'm getting very excited. For years I've endured the playful teasing of friends who ask, "Why were the pictures in The Lost so small?" Now I can finally say, "Well, come to Paris in October and you can see them as they were meant to be."

The show, "Dans Les Pas Des Disparus," will run at the Mémorial de la Shoah from September 21 through January 4. I'll be speaking on October 5th. My brother Daniel will be on hand as well. Les Disparus (as it's known there) has been a huge bestseller in France. Earlier this year, Daniel was literally set upon by eager fans, all holding copies, as we entered a cafe before a reading. So I'm hopeful we'll get a nice turnout for this event.

But this exhibition is important to me for reasons outside of the subject matter itself. And if I told you that for weeks it's been conjuring the ghost of the great American folk hero John Henry, you'd think I was crazy. But, alas, this is the way my mind works. Connecting unconnectable dots.

For those of you who have long forgotten or are too young to have ever heard, the legend of John Henry was a staple of middle school life in the early 1970's. Back at the Central Park Road School,  in Plainview, New York, where I grew up, we were drilled (pun intended) with all of the legends--Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, and, of course, John Henry and his race against the steam drill. (The stories usually came in between endless renditions of "Roll On, Columbia, Roll On," a song second only on my most-hated list to Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive.")

John Henry was a mythical figure of the 1800's--the Age of Railroads--and the legend goes like this: no man was as big and strong as John Henry and no man could drive railroads spikes as fast as he. That is, until the day the railroad owner introduced that newfangled piece of technology, the  steam-powered driver, a machine that could spell doom to John Henry and his crew. Henry challenges the owner to a contest--man against machine--for ultimate bragging rights. (If this were the cafeteria at Central Park Road, kids would be circling, screaming, "Fight! Fight! Fight!")

And off they went, John Henry, that steel-drivin' man and his mechanical foe. But to this little kid, manning the movie projector in Mrs. Marianova's class, making sure the film didn't catch fire, the message was confusing. John Henry wins the contest and then promptly dies at the finish line.

Any photographer who grew up shooting and loving film will have had his own conversations with John Henry, usually late at night, alone in the basement, staring hopelessly at that spinny beach ball thingy on a frozen Mac. (Man, talk about creepy: Hurricane Hanna's remnants are pounding Washington with rain and just as I wrote that, all the power in the house went out. Save often, as they say.) As we first entered and then embraced the digital era, John Henry was an ever-present figure, confusing us as to which was the right (or nobler) way to go.  Analog versus digital, chemistry versus computer, man versus machine.

And so, when contemplating how we would print the photographs for the Paris show, the first reflexive reaction was to make fiber prints in a darkroom. That's how we've always done it. But the longer I thought about it, the more I was convinced that this show had to be done digitally, my very own John Henry challenge. Though they began as images shot on Tri-X and printed in a tray of liquid, these pictures would end in the next millennium.

After some questions for more my more digitally-savvy friends, we settled on lush, gorgeous ink jet fine art prints. All of the original Hasselblad and Leica negatives were scanned on an Imacon scanner. Maya then took each photograph and massaged the digital file until we had squeezed all the information out. Squeeze so hard, in fatc, that I think there is more information visible in these prints than in a comparable hand-printed version.

The resulting prints are amazing to look at. So amazing, we thought it a crime not to incorporate them into our line of products. We'll unveil a whole new line of these prints for our commercial work soon. We're calling them Mprints and they will available for clients who are looking for gallery quality work, large photographs that will be professionally framed and displayed. We'll have a post about the Mprints shortly. Needless to say, they are a bit more expensive than our regular prints but they're worth it.

John Henry is still a hero to me but I have to admit he lost this particular heat.

Right now, I have another race to worry about: getting ready for a wedding in a few hours in this driving rain.

Take care,

Matt