By: Chuck Miller
experimental photography, Photography

My entries for BUILT 2021

I’ve participated in BUILT, Historic Albany Foundation’s annual charity auction and art show, for the past 11 years. I have seven of the commemorative “artist” pins (I lost the 2013 pin last year, grr), and I also have the 2021 commemorative COVID face mask.

But I also have wonderful memories of participating in the event. Photographs, Dream Windows, crate art, all of that. I’ve submitted them, and the lion’s share of them have sold – and sold for great prices. And mind you, that money gets funneled back into Historic Albany Foundation’s mission to save as much of Albany’s local architecture as possible.

So I thought about what I would submit for BUILT 2021. Rather than go all-out with something too big to create logically, I went with simpler items this year. Starting with…

PRIDE OF THE PALACE

I figured that a print featuring different films, all combined into one image of Albany’s iconic downtown theater, would look fantastic.

This is the same print that picked up an Honorable Mention at Altamont earlier this summer.

I then went with…

DOUBLE FEATURE FAMILY FRIENDLY

Double Feature, also Family Friendly. Nikon Df camera, Irix 25mm f/2.4 lens, two images combined in PhotoShop. Photo (c) 2020 Chuck Miller, all rights reserved.

Yep. My 2020 photo of the Jericho Drive-In sign – in day and night – as printed on an aluminum substrate for BUILT.

And finally, since BUILT also requires that one entry be of 12″ x 12″ or smaller, I went with…

BOND CLOTHES

This is a 12×12 image, printed on acrylic.

Wait, what??

Chuck, weren’t you going to submit that distressed Central Warehouse picture for your third entry?

Yeah, but there was a technical issue with the print, and a replacement print wouldn’t have arrived in time for BUILT. So I went in a different direction, and pulled out this gem from 2010. Yeah, It’s an 11-year-old shot of a 30-minute exposure along State Street, with the old Bond Clothes ghost sign in the foreground.

And this was tricky. I had to pull the best copy I could from my old personal flickr account, as this was one of the images that vanished in the great external hard drive meltdown of 2020. And even then, the best image I could get for this would only have been 12×12 in size.

So here it is. 😀

Today, I’ll mail in my “call for images” to Historic Albany Foundation, and then later I’ll hear if any of these have been accepted.