Evolving Projects – Insomnia: Hotel Noir

NoWhereMan, in Transit copyright 2011 Douglas Stockdale – 

It is always interesting to me when random events collide, as though the almighty has had a delicate hand in it.

For those who on occasion read this blog over the last four years will recall that off and on I have been working on a project titled Insomnia: Hotel Noir. I have thought that the project was complete, set up a separate blog dedicated to this project (since deleted), developed a book dummy, then advanced it to a Blurb printed version and subsequently have had a number of conversations with a bunch of book publishers. There has been interest, but no committment to take this project the next step, but some nice direct, as well as indirect, feedback.

So this is what I would call the advanced pasta test; I had cooked up this idea, threw it on the wall and I think it stuck. So I keep moving it ahead. Then the book publishers threw my concept up on their wall, but it did not stick; something was wrong with the recipe or the cooking. Since I was not sure what to do with this project, it went dormant, as I sure have a bunch of other projects that I am excited about developing. About a year ago, I came back to this project and after another interesting discussion with another book publisher I realized that there was one thing I needed to do to this project; delete the blue toning hue (which I now refer to as the “Blue Edition”) that I had used and return back to the basics of Black & White images. In retrospect, the blue toning was an interesting idea, but too conceptual weak. Some guy named Picasso kinda has this blue period thing nailed pretty tight. It was the immediate blue toning that caught their immediate attention, which I suspect sank the ship before it left the dock. Okay, that can be fixed, (deleting the various color layers for this hue in Photoshop) but it takes time, mean while I have other projects that are active.

I recently acquired Larry Sultan’s Katherine Avenue, which has become a retrospective book about Sultan, who recently passed away from cancer. Although Sultan developed a number of projects, he is known for three long duration projects; Pictures from Home, The Valley and Homeland. While working on a my notes for a discussion about this Sultan book review for The PhotoBook, it dawned on me that I need to continue working on and finish my earlier Insomnia: Hotel Noir project. Not sure just what the exact emotional trigger was, but the Sultan book has re-energized my earlier project.

Perhaps without really understanding why, another of my in-process projects, NoWhereMan, was digging into the same emotional and conceptual space as Insomnia: Hotel Noir. From the get-go, NoWhereMan was going to be a project completed in color. I visualized it in color and intended to complete it in color.

So with the aha! from Sultan’s book, I am starting to work on Insomnia: Hotel Noir again. I took off the conceptual blinders to NoWhereMan and tested a few images in Black & White. Hmmmm, seems to be working. Meanwhile, I also tested a number of the earlier Insomnia: Hotel Noir images in color; interesting but not the same emotional quality, as the color images were not passing my spaghetti test.

Again, I am off and running on my project Insomnia: Hotel Noir. I need to work on integrating the newer images with the old, revisualize the book dummy, and determine which publisher I want to contact again, or add to the list, while concurrently finishing the book dummy to re-engage our conversations. nice.

Best regards,

Doug

Subsequent Note: This project has morphed into my artist book The Flow of Light Brushes the Shadow, published by Singular Images Press in 2022. Book review.