Photographer Arnold Gassan and Gus Blaisdell 1962-63 in Denver, Colorado Stockyard Earth 
Photograph by Robert Voy Stark
NOTES ON THE FILM (GASSAN-BLAISDELL)
Tenative title: DOORS OF MEMORY AND DESIRE.
Chippewa Poem:
You are Walking around
Trying to remember
What you promised.
But you can’t remember.
I am walking around, trying to remember what I promised, but I can’t remember.
Can the narration run in a kind of counter-point to the images: first as, say, a description of what will happen next visually; then as a description of what is or has just happened– but always keeping to the tone of a specious present.
Camera catches M putting on cracked and broken shoes,
lacing them slowly, hastily, angrily. The laces break.
The foot kicks the shoes off. A hand reaches into the frame,
picks between the toes, moves out of frame.
“I have been walking, too long, too swiftly, sometimes much too swiftly
and much too slowly.”
Camera catches man as he moves towards table.
I have been walking around, trying to remember what I promised, but I can’t remember…can’t remember what I desired, what I promised…what it was that I desired so much that it made me promise…whatever it was I did promise.
Perhaps this is because I’m not used to promising,
to desiring, to remembering even.
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I was surprised to see a photograph that I had taken in the 60’s of a pair of boots that I had worn out to the point of their falling apart and then photographed them. I was in the Minor White workshop with Arnold and a friend of Gus’s from the early 60’s until his death.
Robert Voy Stark, Susquehanna Studio PA
Wonderful to know that you are the photographer Robert. I love that photograph.
One that Gus kept these many years.