[John Petrella]: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Method Happenings, a show for and about the city of Medford, and I am John Petrella. And the purpose of this program is to give Method citizens facts and information to help you make informed choices and to discover city services or businesses you may not have been aware of. And our guests today are Russ Kaya, and Gus K. Office. from the Palm Press Studio, which is located in Medford Square. I hope I got the names right, guys. I'm terrible with names. So anyhow, welcome to the show, and we're really happy to have you guys on. It's our pleasure. All right, we're gonna jump right in, and we'll begin by asking you both, give us a little about your background. Who is Gus? Who is Ross?
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure, happy to do that. My name is Gus Gaiffus. I started Palm Press back in 1976. I was the head of the photography department at Mass College of Art. And I got excited about photography and clear description. And I'd gone to MIT as an undergrad, so I designed and manufactured some special cameras that a lot of photographers used. I went to graduate school at RISD in Providence, and I started a program that is terrific. I left it in 1980 to incorporate Palm Press, which was a photographic atelier, a workshop. And we've continued uninterrupted since then, and I've hired almost every employee I ever had out of an internship program or out of Mass College of Art like Ross. And I sort of look at it as continuing my education and the education of the students. And we started off in the basement of my house in Concord and then we moved to Waltham and then we moved to Littleton and then Pepperell. You've been around. Yeah and each time we moved we built a darkroom. Okay. So we carried along a 14 foot tall one ton and larger that used by National Geographic. And we've had as many as 15 employees and now we have three. Okay. And we've only been open to the public because we got seduced by the public of Medford. well that's a good thing yeah no really is a good thing you know in the past we were in warehouses and we discovered as we were talking briefly earlier that you know Paul Revere rode up on his horse to welcome us we weren't expecting it now we look forward to it and it took us a year to build it out because we had we moved in the very beginning of of um kovid okay and so we just stored equipment and stacks of it everywhere and finally when we couldn't find a plumber had a couple cancel on us i have this friend this chinese guy that owns four restaurants and he said i have a really good uh but you're gonna have to talk with me so i'm on the phone The Chinese guy is, I hand him the phone, my Chinese friend explains to him from English to Chinese what to do, and we ended up with a working darkroom. We love it. And the iteration that we're sort of in the middle of, for me it was to wind down until I realized Ross's dream was to have this kind of a business, working with artists. So he basically, the last year and a half, two years, has been pointing the direction we go to. And I have to say that it's really good.
[John Petrella]: That's good to hear. Ross, yourself?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so as Gus mentioned, I went to MassArt long after he was there. I fell in love with silver printing in the darkroom and became passionate about photographic production. I worked at a frame shop in Brookline for a while after I graduated. Started very part-time with Gus and slowly picked up printing jobs. And as he mentioned, we sort of, you know, got to this point where we recognized that I wanted to continue it or, you know, transform it in a way. And the goal for me is to sort of make it a full service production studio where we can do every part of the process from the negative or the digital file to the print, to mounting it, to framing it. And then, yeah, as Gus mentioned, about a year ago, we built a new and used photo book store in the front of our studio, which has brought many, many people, many Medfordians in, and it's been wonderful.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's interesting because not only do they come in to look at books and hopefully buy books, but when they see we do framing or develop film or we end up, the bottom line gets affected in an amazingly great way.
[John Petrella]: So they come in for one thing and then they find out, oh wait a minute, you do this, this, the framing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And people will come in and spend three hours. They'll say hello, and sometimes they don't even. They sit down. MIT Museum donated us a really big table when they moved to their new facility and benches. And sometimes, two, three hours later, they say thank you and goodbye. And sometimes they buy a book, and sometimes they buy 10 books. But we're making, you know, friends in the community. That's great, yeah. One of the things that Ross didn't mention, I knew he wouldn't. He's a great bluegrass singer-songwriter. No kidding! He's got a hell of a band. They just had their second CD. He's played at Deep Cuts, at Poussin, at Notch. Have you really? Wow!
[John Petrella]: Nice!
[SPEAKER_01]: They're so good. And the music that we play in the background.
[John Petrella]: Maybe we'll bring your band here. We're looking to do a musical show.
[SPEAKER_01]: There you go.
[John Petrella]: they're really right now they're the one of the house bands for notch no kidding so that's nice yeah it's all original i mean pretty well rounded there russ yeah yeah those are my passions anyway good that's nice nice it's nice you can do that too So we got a pretty good idea how it started, why it started, but I guess there's so many communities around why Medford. Is there a certain reason, is it something you heard? I think everyone would be interested.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was luck. You know, we were in a warehouse in Chelsea on the second floor that was condemned. The foundation of this 345,000 square foot warehouse was being flooded with salt water. And slowly but surely they kicked everybody out and we were on the second floor. And we managed to stay. They actually offered the place as a training site for police, and they would blow down doors, they had flashbangs. I mean, it felt like a war with guns going off, and we put a big sign on the door saying, we're here, don't blow our door down.
[John Petrella]: You were in the middle of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. Well, we stayed as long as we possibly could. Yeah. Right. And when we finally were looking for a place, we just lucked out. We saw a sign on our door, on our window there, talked to the realtor. talked to the landlord, who, you know, talked to the optician next door, and the guy that runs the Japanese restaurant that is so good. One of my closest friends is a Japanese artist, and he said, oh, you're there? That's the best restaurant for money in the city. And he's a Japanese cook as well.
[John Petrella]: I know a lot of people go to that restaurant.
[SPEAKER_01]: We started moving in and we couldn't get anything done. We couldn't get an electrician. We found a local guy who was scary. Tattoos everywhere, dreads and stuff. And he turned out to be a master carpenter.
[John Petrella]: That's the way it happens sometimes.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's amazing. I had Ross Reed taking up a floor. Our building at one point was a bank. Okay. And the bank that Wells Fargo that took everybody's mortgages away and made a lot of poor people.
[John Petrella]: Yeah, I remember them.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in the back they had a fancy women's room and stuff and we turned that into the darkroom. Nice. And he spent two weeks removing the old floor. It was a lot more difficult than I thought it would be.
[John Petrella]: You guys put a major effort into this.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and we had... Everybody was curious and supportive, you know. The town was really helpful. Our landlord was surprisingly helpful too. He ran out of money and so the building is only half occupied and that's a pity. There's a leaky roof ceiling and stuff. But anyway, it turned out to be, you know, Ross had great ideas and I had, you know, been making mistakes for 50 years and learned from all of them. So between the two of us, we made a working place.
[John Petrella]: It's good, different generations working together, I love it. Really, it's great when you can do that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Every once in a while, I talk about it as if it were mass art, that there's learning going on here. It's been a great move and a wonderful shift for us to shift to a public. Right now, there's a show at MIT, the new MIT Museum, and I worked for many years with a guy named Doc Edgerton. He invented the high-speed photography, the milk drop, and the bullet through the apple. And I was his teaching assistant, and I became his partner. And when Doc died, he left a $100 million foundation to MIT, but he was collected by the Museum of Modern Art before Picasso. Wow, so unlike most labs Yeah, where you sort of have to have terrible situation and not good ventilation and you work people too hard We always had the support of preparing exhibits So we did an exhibit for the MIT Museum nice that by the most important international publication last week said that this show produced by Palm Press was one of the nine most important shows to see in the country.
[John Petrella]: So you guys are really, really doing some great stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, we are.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're proud of it.
[John Petrella]: And that's great. And you should be proud of it. Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're happy to work with, you know, with museums like that. And then we're also happy to work with individual artists and then also just individuals who, you know, need things printed and stuff like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Somebody came in with a framing job. Ross had on Ross's day off. And it turns out, It was the guy that influenced him to become a musician when he was in high school. That's right, yeah. Small world. Yeah, you work with a hero.
[John Petrella]: Apparently, Gus, I'm going to direct this question to you, you're well connected. to the arts. And I'm told that, you know, by people giving you a prior role, I guess you sat on the board of directors for the... DeCordova.
[SPEAKER_01]: DeCordova Museum. For 22 years.
[John Petrella]: Can you, yeah, I mean that was something.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean... Well, you know, most of the, we, we were, we lived in Concord where we were fortunate to raise our two boys and we bought probably the last $43,000 house in Concord.
[John Petrella]: Wow, that was a while ago.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I had this friend, I mean we love museums, we're deeply involved, we've donated work all over, we've published 65 portfolios. One of the shows that we did that came out of that was at the Museum of Fine Arts, a rock and roll show of the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane, portfolios we did. But the director of the Decordova, who became a dear friend, he and his wife, me and my wife, Said I'd like you on the board. I said, you know board members give $50,000 or more a year. I can't do that, right? I'm an assistant professor in an art school And he laughed and he said you don't have to he said your presence will And then I realized that I'd published a lot of very important portfolios, and many of them had become valuable. And so I would donate one of my artist's proofs. So Arlette and I ended up the largest donors to that museum. 900 pieces of work, which at the time was one third of their collection. And so it was a treat. And my wife helped start the museum store, And so it's rare that she and I got to do things together. That evolved for her into a gallery in the south end of Boston, and for 22 years was Boston's best gallery. That's amazing.
[John Petrella]: That's a great story.
[SPEAKER_01]: It helps to go to a place like MIT. I was going to be a physicist. And when that happens, you're taken seriously. And I never thought about that. But it ended up being very, very true. Doc and I were on the David Letterman show once. And I didn't even watch him. But I'll tell you, that's become the most popular video that the student fraternities and stuff would have on the show. MR. That's something to get on that show. LR. Yeah, it was cool. MR. Oh, absolutely. LR. And they had my favorite pianist, McCoy Tyner.
[John Petrella]: Oh, okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was so good. But yeah, Doc was a big sort of lift into it because I ended up representing the estate. So we had, you know, we would sell photographs that I would produce that Doc and I would share the proceeds. But it allowed us to make sure that when we built our place out, it was the very best of it. We have great equipment. Right. I can imagine. It's really good equipment. Nice. Yeah. And we did the New York Times Photo Archives. We did National Geographic Centennial Exhibit. So we ended up working for major clients.
[John Petrella]: You certainly have. National Geographic.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that was fun.
[John Petrella]: Oh, I can only imagine. National Geographic. That's a feather in the cap, as they say. It certainly is. All right, so we know you guys do much, much more than just photography, okay? You have a darkroom, okay? For photo development, and you also offer framing services.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we also have a digital lab, the modern technology that's not wet and not chemistry. For color, it's probably better than any process that's typically available now.
[John Petrella]: This is new, the process, or is it an old process? I'm trying to... 30 years, 20, 30 years, but it's gotten a whole lot better in the last 10 years. It has, so there's a lot of improvements.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Ross is an expert at the color corrections and stuff that you make. So people will come and say, you know, I got this problem, and when they're done, we almost always have people say, I never thought it could be that good. You know, the band words at Palm Press are that's good enough. So sometimes we find ourselves with really small projects spending more money than we're making. But it's a beautiful thing that we do. And there are big projects that make up for all of that.
[John Petrella]: The framing, I mean, I'm just curious now. Anything? I can walk in, you spoke earlier, I can walk in with a sports jersey that's autographed, I want to frame, you guys will do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just about anything. Artwork, anything. One thing I love about framing is there are endless solutions to anything. I mean, there's always going to be an inexpensive solution and for a lot of people, that's what you're looking for. And then it just can go anywhere from there, you know, complex solutions with various mounting and like jerseys where maybe you're going to be pinning it to something. But framing is just an endless creative solution.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is, yeah. So Ross, when he worked at the frame shop while he was going to college, he had two jobs. He was also a barista. You've been around. Yeah. Gotta make money somehow.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we all do.
[SPEAKER_01]: He upped our coffee level completely. Good. We'll actually do a shout out to Locolito. Okay. Which is a coffee shop that opened a few months ago a block and a half away from us.
[John Petrella]: Now I've heard of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: We haven't had them on the show, but maybe that's another show up the road. They do Tenoch and Tacubana. It's the same brothers, they do it all. Oh, is it real?
[John Petrella]: I didn't know that. I had no idea. Same people. I go to the restaurant.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, making coffee isn't a whole lot different than making the chemicals that we use in the darkroom. Fortunately, you know, the chemical, not doing color photography doing that with inkjet printers, we don't generate bad chemistry. I had a huge color lab in Pepperell, and we had to have reprocessors for everything that went into the water system to make sure that we weren't contaminating it all.
[John Petrella]: That's right, back in the day, yeah. A lot of that went on. So I mean, we talked about all the other things you provide. Do you also do classes?
[SPEAKER_00]: So there are sort of two sides to that. We do artist talks with artists that we like, mostly that have produced, published photography books. And we'll do a Q&A with a book signing and we'll have them talk about their process. And a lot of the guests are other photographers who are interested in publishing their own book or interested in how it was made. And those are really wonderful. We frequently do them on Thursday nights, about once a month. And then the other side of it is we've started doing one-on-one lessons in the darkroom. I work directly with somebody who maybe has printed a little bit in the darkroom or maybe never has, but they're interested in it. And I sort of work with them to make a really beautiful print of one of their photographs. And I show them how to make certain decisions about how to make it look the way you want. whether it's altering the contrast or adding or subtracting time to your exposure, and then, you know, how to process it properly so that it's going to be archival. And that's been very satisfying for me and I think for the people who have done it.
[John Petrella]: I'm sure it is. So you actually do one-on-one. So someone could call, set it up with you, and boom. It's really interesting. It's actually work in a darkroom.
[SPEAKER_01]: and we gain friends of the darkroom and friends of the community and we've actually had a marriage come about because of that. Well there you go! Wow! But no, it's really, it's, I remember I started when I was nine years old and it was my dad's hobby and once a week we turned the bathroom into a darkroom. Okay. The Jean Dark he called it.
[John Petrella]: That had to be a...
[SPEAKER_01]: It had to be quite a dark room. It was, you know, plywood on the toilet. But it worked, you know, and fortunately the houses we had were always one and a half bathrooms, so no emergencies messed up what we were doing. I would hope not, yeah. But it was like magic. You know, you put this piece of paper after you expose it to what was like a slide projector, and all of a sudden it came up. And it's still like, it's still really exciting. And so to introduce people to it, particularly when they've gone from digital, where it's just, you know, a bigger version of your printer, to actually seeing, and Ross sort of, you know, the changes that you can make with your hands and with, are so subtle, and it's kind of like, you know, tuning a guitar. At one point, it's beautiful. Before it, it's cacophonous.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then to add to that, we do offer daily rentals for our darkroom as well. We're not in the darkroom every day like Gus mentioned earlier. So people who might do a one-on-one session with me, if they you know, start to get the hang of it and they want to do more of it themselves, they can rent the darkroom for a day.
[John Petrella]: So obviously they have to know what they're doing before they rent the darkroom.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they get vetted by Ross.
[John Petrella]: I would hope so, yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: If somebody says, well, I know what to do. One of the enlargers we have, when I bought it new many years ago, it was $25,000 and they don't make it anymore.
[John Petrella]: Right, so there you go.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you don't want somebody messing that up.
[John Petrella]: No, that's what I figured, yeah. Absolutely nice. So, you know, given the advancements in technology, you know, how tough is it? You know, you're off of photography in the age of digital photos, I mean.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't even know how to ask the question. Well it's pretty easy to make a print that looks a lot like what you want it to, digitally. It may not have the richness of a fine art print made on gelatin silver paper. But you may not even give a damn about that. You may just want to see your great aunt, you know, looking good. But at some point you become, you know, I have a friend that always hated baseball. And when high def TV came, he could all of a sudden see the spin on the ball from the pitcher. And it changed it for him completely. And so when you tune people into the subtleties of what's possible, all of a sudden they become, it's like listening to your favorite song on an AM radio and then on a good stereo system. Some people don't care, some people go, whoa. We want the people to go, whoa. We've helped set up dark rooms. People are always reaching out to me. My dad had a darkroom, it's in the basement, we don't know what to do with it, and we have a list of schools that we have them donated to. They're usually not worth the kind of money they cost way back when. But it's better to pass them on than throw them in the junkyard.
[John Petrella]: Is there a lot of things involved with these old dock rooms? I'm just curious.
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of equipment, a lot of maintenance. We have a graveyard of spare parts for when things go wrong with ours.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what I was going to ask. Camera repairmen used to cost $50 to get your camera tuned up. Now it's $350. And that's more than some cameras cost. You should come by sometime and we'll put you in the dark room with us. Well, I'm gonna come by. It's absolute magic. It's so cool.
[John Petrella]: I actually found some ancient stuff from 30 years ago and I gave it to her. We're gonna process it. Yeah, I gave it to her. I don't know what's on it. I have no idea. I hope it doesn't get me in any trouble. You never know.
[SPEAKER_01]: Years ago, before I went off to college, I worked at a camera store in Washington, D.C. and we had this elderly woman come in. And she had a roll of film that she discovered from 616 film, from a camera that hadn't been made for 50 years. And she said, I don't know if it's any good. And I said, well, it's a dollar to process the film. And she clearly was well-dressed and wealthy, and she lived in a house in downtown Washington, DC. I don't want to waste the money. And I said, well, you know, I'll throw it in when I develop my own film. I don't want to accept charity. So she came in once a day for two weeks asking. And finally I said, well, where did you store it? And she said, in the attic. I said, is the attic air conditioned? She said, no. So attic in Washington, D.C. in the summer is 140 degrees and it's cooked. So finally I said, you know, I can make sure. And she said, how would you do that? I said, let me look at the film. And I opened up the film. And I said, nothing on it. It's no good. She thanked me so much. She could sleep better. And we threw the film away for her. But, you know, there's the process is weird. It's magic.
[John Petrella]: I mean, I have similar those what I gave him is a roll of film. It's been in the I'm pretty sure it's you, because it's been in the container for 30 years now. Fortunately, it was never in an attic or, you know.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, when we print it for National, that's a centennial exhibit for National Geographic. And the next time you come by, I'll show you the book we did.
[John Petrella]: Yeah, I'm definitely going to. Once he gives me a call, tells me I'm all set, I'll be in.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, they had film with negatives that were 100 years old that were anonymous that we made prints from. Part of the problem is that there was a period of time in the 30s when they made film using acetate and nitrate. And it's why there's no Hollywood films from the silent era, because they self-immolated. They would explode.
[John Petrella]: Right, I remember that, the acetate.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, Geographic. Actually, the New York Times in 1946 threw away one and a half million negatives of prints that they had published in the previous 50 years of the Times. And if the photography editor knew you, you know, hey Joe Blow, we got 20 contact sheets of your film. Do you want it or should we toss it? Most of them said toss it. And so when we ended up working for the National Geographic, we ended up making copy negatives, really high quality, very expensive, so we could reproduce those images.
[John Petrella]: You know, it's funny, I have, I think they called it Kodachrome.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, that was the best color.
[John Petrella]: Still in the box, never been used. I have a few of them. My father was big into, you know, taking pictures, photography, whatever, and I ended up with a bunch of, I don't even know where it came from, but it's all unused, original box, it's never opened.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's wonderful, but you can't process Kodachrome anymore. No more. It was a chemical process. Yeah, I figured. It read the chemistry and it changed it each time and there was two labs in the world that did it. And Kodak shot them both down.
[John Petrella]: My wife's going to be afraid now because she's going to hear what you said and she's going to think there's something on there that's going to explode in my car or something.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, that has to be a film that was made in the early 30s. Okay, well that's good. I hope this isn't the early 30s. You can tell when it goes bad because it smells like vinegar. I don't know, it's hard.
[John Petrella]: Maybe when I come pick up the other stuff, I'll show you this. You can take a look at it. There's quite a bit of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are people that collect old film rolls, but in the boxes. They don't want them opened up. These are all sealed, yeah.
[John Petrella]: That's great. When I come by. All right, so now we've got to get back to the show. I could talk to you guys for, oh boy, can you go on and on. You must tell we can talk to you. All right, so you spoke about you're also a bookstore. Can you tell us a little bit more types of books you sell? Ross would know that best because he edits in prices. And you sell used books too, correct? Mostly. And is there a certain criteria? What do you use or how do you go about getting these books?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, many of them are used books that have come from Gus's collection. He's been an avid collector for probably 50 years and hilariously bought 2, 3, 4, 5 copies of everything. So we've been carting around books in boxes for years.
[SPEAKER_01]: We've given many non-photo books to the library.
[John Petrella]: that's nice what a great library you have oh yes oh man can't say enough good about it yep yep and they did a tremendous job with that library it's it's i don't even call it a library it's a community it is center it's uh they have everything yeah
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, eventually after I recognized how many duplicate books there were, I convinced Gus that we could probably get rid of some, save some space, make a few bucks. And in doing so, he and I have both collected books from newer photo book publishers. And they've become increasingly expensive. Maybe 10 years ago, you could get a good book for $40, $45. And now a good book is $65, $70, even $75. We'd collect them and occasionally we'd get one that was really, really beautiful. But a lot of the time you'd get it and you might be a little underwhelmed by it and wish you didn't spend the 70 bucks on it. When I was in school, I was obsessed with it. I was going to the Mass Art Library all the time and looking at all the books. It was the way to see large bodies of photographs. When I got out of school, I had to buy them all and I can't really afford that. I wish that there was somewhere that I could go to just look at them and decide, this one's worth the 70 bucks. I want to keep that. So we wanted to offer a place where people could come and look at them and decide if it's worth what it costs. Or just come and look at them. If somebody comes and doesn't buy one, we're happy to have them to just look at.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a shared experience from us too because occasionally we get a book and we say, it's not as good as... our opinions, our sensibilities from music to photographers resonates. It's really, we don't have a lot of arguments about what I think is great and he thinks is crap. But what would happen is if you'd get indications of 10 new books and you could afford two. And you say, well, next month I'll do it. And they would sell out and they'd be $250. So we now carry five or six book publishers we select the best from and so we have a wall of all new books and those are the ones where we have book signings usually and those are exciting. We did them on Saturdays and nobody came because if it was a nice Saturday who wanted to go to town. We did them on Thursday nights and we had some that were standing room only.
[John Petrella]: Yes, what a difference just picking the right day.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's amazing. Not to do it in July and August.
[John Petrella]: No.
[SPEAKER_01]: We learned the hard way.
[John Petrella]: Yeah, July and August, not much goes on. A lot of people, vacation time, put it that way. A lot of us learned that the hard way in July and August. Alright, so you're brought up about the books and everything else. Are you planning, you know, Let's get into what you got planned. You got anything planned? You inviting someone to these book events? Or anyone you're excited to bring to Method?
[SPEAKER_01]: Our last one was two weeks ago. We won't do another one until the fall, but in the fall, we'll probably have three or four in September and October. And they'll all be people who've done new books. We had a wonderful book signing, our last Saturday one, that was somewhat of a success. A woman who went to MassArt, I think, 30 years ago. She's done five books about the Basque country, you know, the Spanish part of Spain. She's a great photographer. And back in the 70s, I was a fan of punk rock. And I liked Willie Loco Alexander. And I like Lou Reed and Velvet Underground.
[John Petrella]: Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground. Wow, what memories.
[SPEAKER_01]: She lives in Gloucester for the last 40 years. She comes to the opening with a bunch of her very rare books, which we sold a bunch for her. And her husband of 40 years is Willie Loco Alexander. No kidding. Who replaced Lou Reed at the Velvet Underground. with his hair still spiked up. He's six foot eight. And he's funny as hell. And he was a painter. And everyone that didn't know them was so surprised that Willie Loco, he's a foot taller than she is. And he paints wonderfully. But it's like whoever would have thought that I would get to meet Willy Loco Alexander, and that his wife would be an artist who I respect incredibly. It's a great thing. That's Ann Rierich, by the way.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's incredibly talented, incredibly kind. You meet her and you feel like you've known her for 20 years.
[SPEAKER_01]: And she teaches kids. She teaches at the high school level. And it's rare that you have someone of that caliber who shows and photographs her in major collections.
[John Petrella]: That's teaching at that level. That's a good thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that was a great benefit.
[John Petrella]: I'm sure. I like that story. That's a classic. That's a classic.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, Ross and I talk about sometimes people that we think are, you know, well, we'll work with them. They're so exciting. Right. And sometimes there are people that we work with that afterwards you say, God, I hope we don't have to do that again.
[John Petrella]: We all go through it. This is going to be the last question. I'm only asking this out of my own curiosity. I gotta ask you, alright, I know your worlds collided, whatever, but how did you guys meet?
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me take this one. When I was in school, Arlette's gallery, Gallery Kefes, was, as Gus mentioned, the best photography gallery in Boston. I went to openings there to see contemporary work and a friend of mine when I was at school became Arlette's assistant. I was envious because I wanted to be connected with that gallery. He eventually reached out to me because he said, hey, Arlette's husband needs some help with some framing jobs. And I had been working at a frame shop. I didn't know who Gus was at the time. And I said, sure, if it's at the gallery, I'm happy to get involved. I got there and immediately we left the gallery and went to the place in Chelsea, which I was like, where the hell is this guy taking me? When I get there, I recognize there's a massive darkroom in here. And I didn't have access to a darkroom at the time. I had finished school and I was looking for access to a darkroom. So I helped him with a couple of frame jobs. I was working for him maybe once a week and started trading access to the darkroom. You know, and then started working on some printing jobs for Gus. And, you know, it eventually became clear that we had a similar sensibility as to what looks great and, you know, how to do it and how to produce it efficiently. Now, you know, Gus is a well-known photographer. He has worked in many, many museums. It wasn't until after I started working for him that I really started to understand who he was. And occasionally we've started to work on some of Gus's
[SPEAKER_01]: That was always fun.
[SPEAKER_00]: Gus has a lifetime of photographs that have either not been printed or haven't been looked at in years. And part of the future of Palm Press, as I hope to take it over, is we'll be printing some- I'll be a client instead of- There you go. Printing some of Gus's work. So that's how it came to be. And yeah, we'll see. We'll see where it goes.
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the things I discovered that when you bring someone on board, usually there's a lot that they have to unlearn. bad habits. Ross, there was very, very little that Ross had to unlearn. And he is such an eager student. You know, is there a way we can do this? And I would remember some obscure chemist. And he would incorporate it into what he did. And he's come up with technical solutions for some of our clients' work, which you would think would be impossible. And they're brilliant, like the large digital negatives you made for the Iowa person.
[SPEAKER_00]: So one of the things that we've done is figured out a way to take a digital image, even sometimes iPhone images, and produce a negative by printing it on our inkjet printer. And then we use that negative to print it as a silver print in the darkroom. And they're beautiful. They're more beautiful than we thought they possibly could be.
[John Petrella]: That's a great story. But I'm sorry, you know, we got to end the show now. I don't want to end it. I don't. But, you know, time constraints, you know. But I wanna, I really thank you both. It's that time again, we have to end it. I wanna thank Ross and Gus for joining us on Method Happenings. And I wish, we really do wish continued success at Palm Press Studio. I also wanna take a minute, thank everyone who has been watching the show. Thank you for your feedback. And if you would like to appear on the show, you can contact us at MedfordHappenings02155 at gmail.com and you will be able to watch replays of this show, which I think is a great one, on Medford Community Media Access Channel, Monday, Wednesday, Friday nights, 6 p.m., 7 p.m. Also check out our website, you'll see the show there, MedfordHappenings.com. And now you can either view or listen to the podcast of this program. And you can find all of our shows on Method Happenings YouTube. Just go to the YouTube.com, search for Method Happenings. Please like and subscribe to the channel and our videos. and this is getting longer and longer you can also find us on facebook at method happenings and we also have a section on reddit which you can find us on reddit.com slash a slash method happenings Wow, that's a lot, and we just keep growing. For the Medford Happenings team, Paul Marko, Bruce James, I'm John Petrella. Thank you guys for coming. It's been a great show. I'm John Petrella, and remember, stay informed, Medford. See you next time.
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total time: 9.16 minutes total words: 992 |
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