#I have those big fucking watermarks all over my art now because s o m e o n e has been stealing my art

[gaslampsglow]

(Pictured: 1/30th of a rough weekend.)

So saturday afternoon, my boss (supervisor? team lead? superior officer? that weird nebulous stage between “coworker charged with keeping the group in line” and “Manager with capital M”) wheeled a massive skid of boxes over to my workspace and asked if I could take on a special project.  We had a massive batch of lots from the same sake to shoot and document, and it needed to be done by someone with neurotic attention to detail.  Obviously I said yes.

Each of the boxes on that skid were, like the one pictured above, stuffed to the brim with hundreds of photos.  And I mean hundreds.  There were photos from every decade since the 1890s, there were black and whites, postcards, color prints, slides.  Kodachrome, Ektachrome, Polaroids, negatives pulled from positives, newspaper clippings copied and imaged with an enlarger. Contact sheets, proof pages, negative images of halftone screens, all the hallmarks of an absolute darkroom wizard.

All trains.

Thousands of photographs of trains.

And behind that first skid he wheeled another skid, loaded with even more.

Marketing felt that these were dump lots, that no one would spend any money on them, based on a few test lots that had been up for sale for a few days.  Several other people, my boss included, felt that the product was great but the documentation was poor.  Whoever shot the test sales had clearly not known what they were holding, nor did they seem to care, as they took four or five photos of piles of photos and called the whole thing done.  For most items we sell, thats not a bad way of doing it.  After all, to hit our daily numbers, most lots need to be shot in less than ten minutes, preferably six.  You take a master shot illustrating the item, you take three to four angles or closeups showing details, then you document any damage or irregularity.  Minimum four photos, usually about eight or nine, try not to shoot more than twelve.  And if you’re shooting something that feels too niche or junky or tacky to make money, you spend less time with it so you have more of a buffer when trying to capture the tiny fucking watermarks on stupid crystal glasses.  And a good general rule is that the more items are in a lot, the less they’re worth.

But all of these rules fly out the window when you are selling to Train People.  You may have known a few.  The ones with the model railroads in their basements, exactingly crafted to perfectly represent a particular rail line, or period, or place.  The history buffs that out-obsess all other history buffs.  No special interest is more granular, or more specific, or more seemingly mercurial to the untrained eye.  They’ll fork over good money for a piece of rail history, but no one wants to buy blind boxes of photos sight unseen, hoping that they represent whatever line or time or place they’re looking for.  And this treasure trove not only was astoundingly well organized, but almost every single photo was labelled with information, frequently detailing the make and model of the train as well as the time and place the photo was taken.

So my boss told me to sift through, document anything that seemed important, spend as much time as I needed and take as many photos as I want.  I shot nothing but photos of trains from 1:30 to 7:30pm, taking about 40 minutes per box (each box being sold as a separate lot.)

Get in the next morning at 7:00am, keep going.  At around 10, while I’m grabbing the next pile, a woman stops me and introduces herself as one of the Editors.  We normally don’t see editors, as they’re four or five rungs up the ladder from photography, and most of their work is digital.  They curate the overall estates and sales, revise and correct the research cataloguing does, order photo reshoots when necessary, and generally have the final say on many pieces of what hits the site.

This particular Editor is the one overseeing this sale, and was friends with the man who owned all of this stuff.  So I get a little more background: all of these photos were from a Rail-spotting magazine run for 25 years by a local Cincinnati man.  Train Fans would send in photos from all over the world to be featured, and this collection was essentially the man’s life’s work.  The proceeds from selling all of this (and the piles and piles and piles and piles of other items) go to supporting the hospitalized mother he left behind after his death.  So The Editor is deeply invested in making sure that not only is the work well represented, but that it makes top dollar, so that her friend’s work is sold to collectors rather than junk dealers, and that his mom gets a big check to pay for medical care.

Which means that she is profoundly unhappy with the performance of those earlier-mentioned test lots, and livid that attribution fobbed the whole thing off without doing much documentation, and that marketing thinks this all is worthless, and came hunting my boss to make sure that these photos are being shot properly.  To say that she seemed skeptical of my care and attention to detail is an understatement.

“Well, I do want you to know that I’m putting a lot of time into these.  I’m looking at every photo, pulling all that are in color, pulling any that are photographically impressive with high contrast, and paying particular attention to local lines.”

“You mean the ones marked as being shot here?”

“Well, sure, but also the rail lines that I know pass through Cincinnati.  The next box I’m shooting I know is a bunch of B&O so I’m excited for that, since I drive under an old B&O bridge as I leave my neighborhood.”

“B&O?”

“You know, Baltimore and Ohio.  Its the oldest full service rail line in the country.”

“...I guess you are the right one to do these.”

Which is about when the other player enters the scene, one of the two company Founders.  She and the Editor had both been on this sale for months, starting at the house packing and organizing this estate, which was so cluttered and filthy and untamed that the Founder called in a personal favor and flew her pal Matt Paxton (one of the Professional Cleaners from the show Hoarders) out to help cut through the muck.  So now, months later, in the final hours of a giant project, the presentation of the whole thing is on me.  And the decision makers for the whole company are standing around my workspace while my boss shows the work I’d been doing so far.

I was a little stressed.

But as they flipped through, I could see everyone become visibly less tense.  My boss explained, “If I had given this to any other photographer in the building, they would have grabbed the first ten photos out of the box, shot just those, then moved on to the next one.  I picked Corey because he loves history, and he’s willing to do the work.  He’s shooting sixty and seventy photos for each of these lots.”

Which, uh, was a pretty great feeling, not gonna lie.  I’m not used to receiving kudos, even just verbally, from bosses, let alone people that high up the food chain.

Of course this was tempered by finding out that this whole sale was going live that night.  

This meant that I had about 20 more lots to shoot by 3 in order to give cataloguing enough time to write descriptions and hit complete.  It was, at this point, 11:15.  The race to finish was not fun, with my boss jumping on the sweep next to mine for the last two hours, as we steamed across the finish line around 4:30.  At that point, I was kaput.  Completely finished.  I spent the last three hours at work sleepwalking, came home, and melted into my chair.  I told Jo it was an incredibly stressful day.

And it was.

(Hey look, its Cincinnati!  Back when the Inclines were running.)

But I keep thinking about that feeling.  Because this isn’t the same stress I’m used to.  And I know this seems so obvious or blase, but every job I’ve had has been stressful.  I mean, every job is stressful in its own way.  But I’m not used to that stress being...rewarding?  In the same way that art or film or woodworking, creation for my own purposes, is stressful.

I know I’m saying “the sky is blue” as if it were a new discovery I’d made, but I’m so unused to feeling job pressure that resolves not as misery but as accomplishment.  Three years at Lowe’s and every day was “oh no, I have to do this again tomorrow?  How!?” and finding victory in the tiny little footholds of humanity that I got from one customer out of a hundred.  I emotionally have no idea how to process “my boss and my boss’s boss and their boss are all impressed with my random assortment of knowledge and ability to organize information.”

This is not a complaint, mind you.  Not even a little bit.  Just a very gratified confusion.

Anyway, if you’ve read this far, thanks.  As reward, have a photo taken sometime in the 70′s about a block away from my house.

#Wyrd Mysteries #cincinnati #ohio #railroad #my job is weird