Earlier this fall I agreed (or welcomed the opportunity!) to participate in Jim Goldstein’s project about Buying Prints from Your Favorite Photographers. This seems to have turned into something of a work in progress for me, in that I have not completed my own little adventure in acquiring prints from other photographers quite yet.

My thinking was that I’d go about this in two ways. I do have a plan to purchase some photographs, though I won’t mention the photographers by name quite yet. In one case I’m looking to purchase a small folio but I haven’t quite decided yet from whom. I’m not quite ready to mention the other purchase yet.

However, for some time I’ve felt that there would be real benefits to trading prints with other photographers. I mentioned this to Jim and he incorporated this concept into his project. I picked three photographers with whom I wanted to work out a trade – in each of the three cases for somewhat different reasons.

I’ve followed the developing work of Edie Howe for some time. (The link takes you to her blog, “Fro the Little Red Tent”.) Edie has lived in and about Yosemite Valley for some time, and she and I had exchanged emails about various photography topics, and I have regularly read her reports of Valley conditions – especially last winter when I decided it was about time to take my turn to photograph Horsetail Falls in the winter when the sun lights the falling water at sunset for a few weeks. Edie has a special knowledge of The Valley, and it shows in the range of her photographs and her approach to making them.

I’ve watched a certain evolution in her photography over the past couple of years and was interested in supporting Edie’s work, so I proposed an exchange with her. We met on a very rainy morning in November when I was in the Valley to shoot for a couple of days. I traded her a print of one of my recent aspen photographs in exchange for a poster of one of her black and white photographs of Mono Lake that now hangs in my office.

My next two trades have been a bit more complicated to work out.

Jim Goldstein and I agreed to trade prints, but even though we both live in the Bay Area we’ve had a hard time getting to the same place at the same time with prints in hand. I think this will be the week since I’m off for a few weeks and it sounds like he’ll be around. He first approached me and asked about a photograph of Precipice Lake I made last summer. The fact that he picked the photograph of mine that is almost certain to be my favorite of the year certainly makes me respect his most excellent good taste and judgment! I’ll soon write about his photograph – hopefully later this week!

If you don’t know about Jim, you should. Not only is he a fine photographer of a variety of subjects who seems to share some of my tastes in subject and location, but he also an active photography writer in print and at his blog, and he has developed a very interesting photography podcast series, “EXIF and Beyond.” As Jim has noted, he and I seem to share some sort of strange connection in that quite a few times we’ve found that we were both photographing virtually the same subjects in the same places at almost the same time – to an extent that it is hard to understand how we haven’t actually bumped tripods while on location.

Trade #3 is going to be with my brother Richard Mitchell, a fine photographer from the Pacific Northwest. It is no accident that he and I share photographic interests and approaches. (In fact, we even use a lot of the same equipment!) We both got our first introduction to serious photography from our father, Richard S. Mitchell, who loaned us kids a variety of film cameras from his collection – but not his precious Retina Reflex, which we probably all lusted after – and introduced us to chemical photography in his improvised home darkroom while we were all quite young. I wonder if Richard remembers as well Dad’s advice to “take two steps closer!”? Oddly, while Richard and I often discuss photography and have inspected and discussed one another’s work a lot… neither of us owns a print by the other! We’re now going to rectify this very, very soon.