- What I'm thinking, Barry, is maybe we get started just in a conversation with, okay, we'll, making sure the date today is November 19th, is that right, 2015? I'm Alex Harris, and I'm here with Barry Norris, who printed an exhibition that is now in the Rubenstein Library for the book, "Gertrude Blom: Bearing Witness". I was thinking about these prints this morning and seeing them again now, recognizing that Barry was and is one of the great master printers in this country and maybe in the world, and this is a unique collection. So Barry, where do we start in terms of this group of prints? How was it made, where was it made? What type of prints are these, just kind of basic information? - We we want to talk about how the selection was made also and where this all came from. - Sure. What, see, I realize that a lot of that information is in this book. - Right. - But let's start there at least to orient ourselves. - Sure. And so you had first seen the work of Gertrude Blom at ICP prior to a show of your own work, I'd left a portfolio with one of the people that worked there, I can't remember his name now, but I think maybe Bill Ewing or something like that. And he had shown it to you as you were looking for other photographers to perhaps do a book, unknown photographers who you might use for publication- - We had just formed the Center for Documentary Photography, and we had a book publishing program, which meant we were looking for unique bodies of work to print that said something about photography, documentary- - Right. Yeah. And the, so that's where it all began, I think. And you, very shortly after that came down to Mexico, you visited Na Bolom and looked at, looked at the archive, and then later came back with Margaret to do the selection, which was a pretty long and arduous process going through all of the negatives, making you actually, you actually had contact prints made of all of the negatives, which hadn't been done up to that time, which was also a unique part of this process of documenting Trudi's work and gave you the ability to make this selection. So yeah, and I was only partially involved in that part of it, I think. - As I remember, there was a volcanic eruption in the middle of this thing that we sent down, a photographer, Tim Burns, to do all the contact printing. - Right. And then you had inches of dust on everywhere- - Right. Yeah. That was a major pyroclastic eruption in the state of Chiapas and whatever that year was. It must have been 1982,- - Yeah. - I believe. - But yeah we set the scene for Na Bolom. What, you know, why would you have an archive at Na Bolom, but have thousands of negatives that had never been contacted. What was the archive like? What was the darkroom like? Why was it there? Why was the archive there? - Well, it's, it was the home of Gertrude Blom, and so all of her work was naturally stored in her home. But being a provincial city in southern Mexico, quite difficult to get the materials to make photographic prints or to even to develop film. And I think earlier in Trudi's work, she had sent off her film to Mexico City to have it developed. And there were people in Mexico City who helped with printing. And I'm not sure if anyone was making actual contact sheets at that time. Eventually, Na Bolom, which was the name of Trudi's home, they put in a small dark room, were able to buy some equipment, a small and larger that was capable of printing medium format, black and white negatives. And they began to do some of that work. But by that time, there had been a large body of black and white film that had been exposed and developed and was being stored there at Na Bolom that didn't really have contact prints, but they began to keep up with the newer film that was being shot by Trudi. So when I arrived, the archive was, you know, there were, it had been organized to some degree and there were some contact prints, but many of the negatives were just sitting in sleeves. They might have been assigned a number, they might have had some information connected to them or maybe not. And so I began working on that process, so trying to keep up with the process of contact printing the film and organizing it and putting it away. - So take us back to your, not a lot of the history, but your arrival with Joan to Na Bolom and what your jobs were, and then how you got into this job as, as what were, what was your job title there, if you had one? - Well, I think the reason for us going was to work in the, for me to work in the dark room. And the year prior to our arrival there, which was 1977, in 1976, we had come down and visited Na Bolom, had a tour, realized that there was a dark room, that there was this amazing archive of photographic material and that Trudi might need a printer, someone to work in her archive. So thinking about it later, we wrote to Na Bolom, and then, and I proposed myself as a, as somebody who could do that work for her. And they accepted us, and Joan came along. She, we were worried at first that she wouldn't have a place, but there, as it turns out, that there was a volunteer program where people came from all over the world and did all kinds of different work. So Joan immediately fell into work in the library. And then within a year we were both doing administrative work and, and each in our own separate areas of specialty within the house. But we were just young people looking for a place, wanting to learn to speak Spanish and find some opportunity to get outta the United States. That's how we made it there. - So you were already a photographer, already a printer? - Yes. Yeah. I had gotten interested in photo, well, actually been interested in photography from a pretty early age. Had a small camera, learned to process black and white film as a teenager. And when I went to college, I took a couple of courses in photography that were available at Trinity University and got more involved in the whole printmaking process. And after leaving college, I got a job as a custom black and white printer in San Antonio for a commercial photographic company. So it was a mostly portraiture. - But you know, getting back to this collection of photographs. So we had thousands of contact images made. Margaret and I came down, I think there were two visits where one, where I was on my own, one where we were together to look at a hundred, I mean, you helped us sort of find the core images, but I think we uncovered a lot of other things. And we came up with a selection both for the book and for the exhibit that was gonna be at ICP. So just take us back to after that, once we decided on the images, these are two and a quarter negatives. - Yes. Mostly they're two and a quarter square negatives shot with a Rolleiflex twin lens, reflex camera. Prior to her getting that camera, which I think was around 1950, she had been using another camera, an Agfa Camera that, I don't even know the name of the model, but it shot two and a quarter by three and a quarter, I think. And there are some images in this collection that were shot with that camera. So that was during the 1940's probably, that camera was purchased in maybe 1941 or something like that, right after Trudi arrived in Mexico. But she had been with the media, that medium format since the beginning, never used a 35 millimeter camera. And in later years, she actually shot everything with two cameras, two twin lens reflex cameras, one loaded with black and white film, and one loaded with color transparency film, so. - Something that I, and I know I'm interrupting you to answer the question I asked, but I'm just, I think it would be interesting to, for people who are looking at this print, these prints to know about her mastery of knowledge of photography itself, the technical side, the cameras. Where was she as a photographer in that regard? - Well, I think she just had a very basic knowledge about photography. She knew how to pair shutter speeds and F stops and was able to read light. But she largely relied on assistants over the years to come up with an exposure for her, and then set the exposure. She did the focusing and framing of the image, but very little interest in the technical side of photography. Never processed film herself, never did any printing, but was just an avid photographer in that she did it everywhere that she went. She always had her cameras with her. She did it pretty consistently for many, many years and developed this enormous archive of work. But she was also someone who didn't really, I think, seek perfection in her work. She just did it. She just walked up to her subjects, aimed the camera, and took a picture. And one of the things you'll notice in a lot of these photographs, especially when she's photographing people, is the angle of view, because it's a waist level finder. And she was a very short person, about five feet or five feet one, all, a lot of the pictures are kind of looking up at the people that she's photographing. I don't know if I answered that question. - No, you did. And I, but I, I interrupted you about the earlier question I asked, which was essentially how were these prints made? Just sort of take us through the people looking at these prints. It'd be interesting to know something about your process. And these are silver prints- - Right. Well, you mean my particular technique of printing black and white, how I approach black and white photography? - Well, I think photographic, I think some people looking at these won't really have had any experience in the dark room. But what I remember about you, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I was one of those people who would probably take sometimes 10 to 20 minutes with an image under the enlarger where I would burn and dodge. And these were negatives that were sometimes badly exposed, unevenly exposed. And what I remember about you is that you had this theory that you carried out, which was, if you could find the right exposure, the right paper, the right sequence of developers and timing, that you would not need to do any burning and dodging. - Well, yes. And it is true that I tried to avoid using that technique for the most part. Whenever there were areas of a negative that had problems that might require like dodging or burning, like uneven development of the negative, I would do it. But I didn't feel that I needed to work on individual areas of the image, that I would try to interpret the density of the negative, the relative densities of a negative into the range of dark to light in the print, so that the very thinnest areas of the negative would be allowed to print as near too black as possible, but without losing some, any of the detail in there as, as much as it was possible. And it is true that oftentimes Trudi's negatives were underexposed, so they would be very thin, difficult to draw an image out that had any kind of contrast to it. So I try to find the perfect balance of exposure and development, the right developer, the right amount of time in the developer so that the tones would fall into place as much as I could make them do, so that when the blacks fell into place, also the highlights would be just coming in. - See, I remember you using often two developers, and I believe the first developer was the faster, harder developer, the more contrasty one, and then when the blacks came in, you would put it in the second, softer developer that would allow the grays and the other tones to come in. - Yeah, something like that. And I'm, it's been so long actually, right, since I've been in the dark room and that I've used that kind of technique. But yes, one developer, which was a lower contrast developer, and I'm not sure if it was the way you said or- - The other way around- - Opposite, so that we, I started out mm, That could have been doing the lower contrast developer so that we, I would know that I was going to get the highlights brought in without having burned out highlights. And then from there, drop it into a more high contrast developer that would, because what happens in a higher contrast developer, of course, is it works on the darkest areas first. And the longer you leave it in, the more, the more they drop down the, and then the higher, the lighter tones come in later. So I tried to find some balance there between the exposure, the kinds of developers, and the amount of time that the paper was left in the developer. - I guess I'm smiling now because I'm thinking about the level of artifice in any book or exhibition. And here you have a woman who, I don't know, made 80,000, I can't remember the number, but she made a lot of photographs in her lifetime. We went in and chose a hundred extraordinary images. You went in and made these prints that look, they are master prints, and in a way we, she realized her vision through our interpretation, yours as a printer, mine and Margaret's as editors. And I bring that up, I think because one sees a book like this and one imagines in a body of work, one imagines a photographer with a particular vision. And I see this as more like a film that she shot over a lifetime. And then we came in as editors and really helped her realize that vision. - Yeah. To show the work in a beautiful way so that it wouldn't just be lost in some file cabinet somewhere. It is interesting though that there, you know, there's a, there was another, there fine art photographer in, in San Cristobal de las Casas. Well, actually there was a couple, but the one I'm thinking of is Marcy Jacobson, an older Jewish woman from New York who had moved to San Cristobal in the '50's and was also very involved in shooting what amounts to documentary photography at the time. She had maybe a little bit more bent towards an artistic vision of her work, but, and she worked very hard to achieve beautiful prints in her own dark room. She was very interested in the technical process herself. But when it came to making her book finally in the end, it fell apart in a way because whoever was responsible for the publication and the overseeing, the printing of the book failed in the end. And so somehow the work was kind of lost in a way. It wasn't represented in a way that would over, you know, live over time. And she was very disappointed by that. - Right. - Which was, you know, really- - Oh, I can imagine. - I don't know if you ever saw that book. - No. - But they, Trudi and Marcy were kind of competitors in a way over the years there. But I feel like we also, we managed to do something really beautiful with her work, make a wonderful selection, and then take it all the way through to making the exhibition prints and finally publishing a book, which is what really is gonna live on and be seen by more people. - You know, sitting here with you, I'm thinking that we could spend the next 30 minutes talking about prints and printing, and I do wanna get back to that because that's what's sitting in front of us and your achievement in making these prints. I'm just thrilled that this body of work is not in some humid environment somewhere in Mexico or wherever in the world, or being dispersed and sold that it's here, it's intact. And as a photographer myself, the ultimate realization of my work and of any work has, from my point of view, is the photographic print. And so this is, this is an amazing collection, but that's a preface to saying that I, I find myself wanting to talk about Trudi, Gertrude Blom as a woman, as a person. And I'm thinking about the way in which certain people I've known over a lifetime have personalities, have a private life that's quite distinct from their voice and their work. And there was something that drew you and Joan to Trudi from the beginning and something that drew me to her. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit and then maybe we can talk about the other side. - Trudi was a difficult person. I mean, people were attracted to her, who just initially, because she presented such a dramatic public presence, she was an unusual looking person. She was an eccentric in many ways. She lived her whole life as an eccentric. So that came out immediately as soon as you met her. But she had a hard time with people, I think, was difficult for many of us. The young people who came to work with her, to put up with this kind of character that she had, which was extremely demanding, very judgmental. I mean, I can use a lot of adjectives to describe her in her way that she related to all of us. And then she had her public persona too, which was also very forceful and dynamic. And that's where people oftentimes who didn't know her initially became attracted to her was through her activism. Because in her later life, especially in the years after we arrived, what she was really interested in was environmentalism. She had become a real advocate for saving the tropical rainforest, one of the very, very strong voices. And so a lot of us, as young people, a lot of people were attracted to her for that reason. That's not why Joan and I showed up in Na Bolom. We came because of the wanting to be in Mexico and wanting to find a place where we could live and work and learn to speak Spanish, but also for me to be involved in photography, to continue my printmaking work and to continue my work as a photographer and have some space to do that. But Trudi became just a very important part of our lives. She was our family for many years. But as with a lot of family members, you struggle. You love them and you, and you hate them sometimes and vice versa. But you always seem to be able to come back to that place where you, you find what it is that you care about. So, I mean, what, what do you remember? I mean, you must remember also her difficult nature. - Well, you know, in some ways I hesitate to talk about this because I think the point I really wanna make is that I feel like there is an essential intuitive side to her work that connects with the best part of her. And that that's what we were able to bring out. It's like she said in one of our interviews, Orchan Keen said about her, her heart is good. There's a, at some level, at which she was really trying to do something important and good. And I think- - Well always. - Yeah. - I mean, she was always working for some greater good. In Europe, it was the anti-fascist movement, you know, as a young leader of the women's socialist movement in Europe when she was still a teenager. I mean, she spent her time since the very earliest years struggling against what she saw as wrong in the world. So however that actually happened, there are many stories that have been told, that was the thrust of her life. So wherever she went, she was trying to do something like that. - So I- - And I think it comes out in the photographs and in the book, because you, you know, you do have the essays that were written about who she is and what she was trying to do. - Yes. But I guess I'm just struck by her very difficult personality. She treated me and Margaret well, she treated me maybe better than Margaret, but she was, she was very happy to have the attention. She was very happy to tell her story and have us focused on her work. And I think that, you know, there's a way in which, where I was in my life, where you were in yours and Margaret and Joan, we were prepared to deal with someone like that because we really believed in the project and in the work. - Oh yeah. Well, it, it became clear to me after just a year or so in Na Bolom that my work was gonna be about trying to bring her work more to a broader public. So, and we were lucky enough to be able to do that through contacts with all kinds of people. And you know, to this day, actually, I still am involved with this in one way or another. We just got back from New York where there's a show of Trudi's photographs at the Girls' Club on the lower east side of Manhattan. So we had a, you know, we had a panel discussing Trudi and her work, and there must have been, I don't know, maybe 40 prints, digital prints that have been made in recent years, which were in the show. So it continues. I mean, there's this, Na Bolom still continues to try to, you know, put her work out there and have it be seen. So again, in New York at this stage, which is interesting. - I want to talk with you about that digital versus scanning negatives and printing them versus the way you worked in the dark room. But I guess I just want to go on record for the fact that you flew up from Mexico with all the negatives. You stayed at our house for a couple of months. We had a dark room upstairs, and I remember you toiling away up there during the day. But what was great was at the end of the day, you had these prints in the washer and we'd put them on the drying rack, and the next morning we'd see what the dry down factor was. - Right. - 'Cause they looked great in the water. They would dry down. You had to, you had to compensate. But we were all part of this process, I think, in the sense that we were responding to what you were doing. You were here to do this particular job. And we talked earlier off mic about the tonality of these prints, which is really unique. It looks like what people used to call gold toning, but in fact, it's, these are silver prints on Portriga Rapid Paper with selenium toning and the very hard water we had at our house. There was iron in the water somehow that all combined to give it- - To give it a special tonality. - Yeah. - A kind of a warmness to it. Right. Which is what you had used also in your exhibition. Yeah, and I loved it. I mean, I had been using a more cold tone paper for Trudi's prints in Mexico, which was kind of the standard. I mean, I think for a lot of people that were doing exhibition prints, that kind of cold tone Ilford Galerie you know, sort of with selenium toner, which made it even a little colder still. But this was a, a new twist to printing her work, which I love. - Well, there's a, there's a generation now, and it'll probably go on for a long time because of places like the Rubenstein that's gonna have these negatives that's taking these silver negatives and scanning them, and which is what you do for a living in your, with your own work. - Yeah. - And I wondered if you've ever printed any of these images digitally in that way, where you scan with a high resolution scanner and use Photoshop to adjust it and then print digitally. - Very little of Trudi's work. I haven't really had the opportunity to do any scanning myself. And I think the, the art today is in the scan to begin with. So I mean, if you're gonna do a digital reproduction from black and white negative or color negative, you want that original scan to be, to hold as much information as you possibly can and to, and make some adjustments in the scanning that will improve your ability to make the print. So, you know, for my own work, for my own black and white photography, yes, I've been able to go back and scan negatives that I've printed in the dark room as silver prints and do them again as digital prints. And it's pretty amazing what you can do in digitizing film. - This is like using this opportunity of to proselytize a little bit for digital printing. But I, I have to say that I've reprinted images of mine that I printed in this same manner that were in an ICP show- - Right. - Digitally now. And I think the digital print is actually better because I've been able to just bring out so many qualities in the negative that were hidden there in Photoshop. And then the papers and inks are wonderful now. So I'm not saying it's always, I think it can be as good or better. - Well, it gives you tools that you just didn't have in the dark room. I mean, we tried to develop tools in the dark room that allowed us to achieve as much as we could. Some people use dodging and burning, some people use the kinds of techniques that I used with different developers and time and exposure and all of that to achieve the range of tones that we were looking for, the relationship of tones. But Photoshop and digital manipulation of images just gives you many more tools. And then speaking about dodging and burning, of course, when you're dodging under an enlarger, all the light that you allow to fall through your hands or through a cut in a piece of paper hit or if you're burning, they're all burning light and dark. But in Photoshop you can select a range of tones that you burn and it won't burn anything else, even though you touch those other tones with your burn. So that's something that just couldn't be done at all in the dark room with the process of dodging and burning. So you can select shadows, mid tones or highlights and only burn or dodge those areas. - I'm thinking we should take a break and look at the prints and then come back. - I have a question. - Yes. - Can you, do you mind? Not at all, please. - No. - Can you unpack, like you just said, the art today is in the scan. Can you unpack what you mean? Like what are you doing in the scanning process that is giving you a scan that's like, that you want to work with in the first place? - Well, you can, you know, you can do just a straight scan. And so you, you know, you do a pre-scan and you pull it up and you have a histogram that you, you're looking at that shows that you're not clipping anything on the, on the top end or the bottom end. And you've got basically all the information there. Today there's a lot, I mean, there, scanning technology is changing all the time. And the software that control scanning is changing. And there's different ways, there's different software that allows you to do different things. You can do HDR scanning, you can do all kinds of stuff. But in looking at a negative that let's say has some, is has a, is very contrasty, some very dense highlights and some very thin shadows. There is detail in both areas, but you're trying to, you're trying to bring out the detail in both areas. And so in the scan you can do a lot of that before you actually then go from there to work with that and turn it into a print. So you can open up the shadows in a way that you wouldn't- - This is color and black and white you're talking about. - Color and black and white. But I'm particularly thinking of black and white- - Right. - Because in black and white, everything is about the range of tones from dark to light. So that's what the whole image is about. Color is different in that you can see detail based on the juxtaposition of different colors, but in black and white, it's all about the relationship of tones and how well you can see things happening, how long of a tonal range you have. And so you can, beginning with the scan, you can do a lot of the work there. The better job of scanning you do, the better final result you'll get in the print. So, and there's a lot that you can do. I, and I'm no great expert on all of this, but you know, I found it, I found that I'm able to do things that I was not able to do in the dark room. - The thing that that strikes me as you're talking is this idea of the Ansel Adams zone system and the fact that certain information in the world in terms of the amount of light reflecting on it, is beyond the range of that particular piece of film to capture unless you do certain things in the exposure and the processing so that you bring all that information into a certain number of zones. And that's really, I think, what's happening in scanning, what you're attempting in scanning. And then it's similar to what happens in camera RAW, where you see there's information in the highlights and information in the shadows that's lost unless you bring those in. And when you open it up in Photoshop, you've essentially done what Adams was trying to tell you to do with a negative. - Sure, and I was very much inspired by the whole zone system- - As bizarre- - Mostly people thought of the zone system as a technique that that had to do with the exposure and development of film. - Right. - And that's kind of what I'm talking about here in that you're trying to do that with the negative. So I'm trying to apply the zone system in a way to the negatives in getting the scan. Like that's the first step. It's getting the digital negative is the scan. And then from there, but when I was, but when I was working as a printer, I was trying to apply those same ideas to the printmaking process in terms of finding the right exposure and the right development- - In the dark room. - In the dark room for the paper print. So it might be that you needed a longer exposure under the enlarger to be able to get those highlights to contain detail, but then that might require a much shorter development time. So it's kind of like what you would do in a, - With a, with a - Negative, with a negative when you're shooting it, you might you know, overexpose and under develop or underexpose and overdevelop, which did two kind of opposite things. One of them compresses the range of tones and the other pulls it apart. But there's limitations there, of course. And even Ansel Adams in his life as a printer, you'll see, if you look at his history of printing certain images, the one that I always bring to mind is "Moonrise over Hernandez New Mexico", Hernandez's, New Mexico, that the early prints of that are very light by comparison to the much later prints. So whatever he thought he was doing with the zone system, he just did what pleased him aesthetically in the end. - And I think this really is a lot of the answer to Kathy's question, which is that there is a, there's a technical, there's a capability now of the equipment and the software that allows you to do certain things. But it's really no different than years ago before those tools existed of using your experience, your intuition. I laugh at the idea that digital prints are always the same. And so, you know, you can just push a button. Every time I make a digital print of an image I've printed before I'm looking at it, I'm thinking, well, I think I made a little bit of a mistake- - Totally. - I think I'll change it this way. - Sure. - All my, all those prints are different. - Exactly. You might come up with something that is very satisfying and save it in that form, but you might come back to it later like Ansel Adams did and say, you know what? I really want this to be a little bit different. I really want to change the relationship of these values. And, and that's what we do as artist, photographers. - What I noticed is I see young people now, students, who are very facile in Photoshop. They, I'll go in and I'll be teaching certain tools and they'll say, well, you can do it this way or that way. And they'll have other ways to do it that I'll never, I'm not, I'm probably not gonna go there, but I think we are of a generation that spans light falling on film, film in the, processing that film, film in the enlarger, thinking about photography in that way, and then translating those sensibilities to now to digital printing. But I bring it up mostly because the sensibilities that you used to do this weren't purely looking at some book and following Ansel Adams' zone system. This is really an aesthetic personal achievement. And I think the same way that a, a writer has a particular consistent voice, a consistent way of seeing things. So you believe in that voice and you can kind of relax and listen to it. That's what, that's the way I feel about these prints. Let's take a little break and then we'll look at some prints and come back. - Okay. Sip of coffee, - Sip of coffee. - Being in the rivers and sitting on the ground or sitting on a box. - Yeah. - It was a tough lady. Yeah, she was really, she was really tough. She did it. And then after that, very soon after that, by 86, 87, she was already beginning to decline. And I don't think that she did any other horseback expeditions after 1986. - Let's sit back down just for a few more minutes with these other mics. Let's see what time we've got here. We're sort of about out of time already, huh? - No, but I want you to finish what, what you want to say. So. - Maybe just five more minutes or so I'm gonna switch back. - Yeah. Okay. - Barry, can you think of work or anything that you would want people to know about Trudi as a photographer? I mean, I think maybe one question I'll ask and then I'll, I'll let you think about that. Is the kind of photographer Trudi imagined herself to be, the purpose of her photography, how that may be changed over the years? Because my understanding is that she went in the jungle with her husband, Franz, who was an anthropologist, that she thought of this early on. Well, you, why don't you pick up from this first expedition? Like how did she evolve in terms of thinking about herself as a photographer? - You know, I, Trudi always said that she wasn't a photographer. That she didn't consider herself to be a really a, a technician of photography. She considered herself, I think, to be a photojournalist largely. She considered herself to be a journalist, a documentarian. She was somebody who used photography as a tool to show something to the world. And I'm not sure that that changed much when she became more recognized in a way as what might be considered a fine art photographer, where people were buying her original prints. She just spoke about her love of light, really. That was something that she brought up. It kind of mystified me because I never saw her in that way of like being someone who really considered the lighting of a photograph in deciding what to do. But she always said that. She said, oh, she, she loved to play with light, but I think she was just trying, grasping at a way to say something about her photography when people were demanding that she do that somehow. Do you know what I mean? - I do. And Margaret and I spent, you know, a couple of weeks asking her questions and trying to pull out what it meant for her to be a photographer. And she had a tough time talking about it. And often she would say, if she'd look at a picture, she'd say, I think about the person. I don't think about the print, or I don't think about the photograph. I think about the person. And then she said, I'm always frustrated by my photographs because it never comes out the way I want, or it never says everything I feel. - Right. And I think that's common for all of us as photographers or artists. There's always kind of a, there can be a sense of disappointment in the end that what we did didn't really achieve what we had hoped or what we envisioned somehow. - But you and I, and I think so many other people who are different kind of photographer will look at a picture and will think, okay, this isn't maybe what I saw or felt, but this is something in and of itself that's, that's telling me something I didn't already know or see. And that there's value in that. I don't think Trudi went there. - No, I don't think she really did either. She didn't really consider any of it very much. She just did it. She just was a person that was always being impulsed to do the work that she did. She got up every day with a determination to do, and that went on until the end of her life pretty much. So, you know, we never really got the answers to these questions from Trudi. - I guess I want to end this by just remembering what she said to me, and I put it at the end of my text, but I think it's really, it's the reason that people like us put up with people like Trudi is that it has to do with what you're saying right now. That she had a kind of belief in what she was doing and despite and the cause that she was fighting for, despite her narcissism, despite her difficult personality, she basically said, I fought some of the great battles of the 20th century. I fought against the Nazis and we lost that. I mean, she lost that her part of that battle. I fought to save the rainforest, and I think we're losing that, but you've got to keep fighting. - Yeah. - And there was a way in which I think it's so easy now to think there's so many problems and how can I possibly, she was really a fighter. - She was, but I don't really see her as a failure. I see that actually in the end, those fights will be successful, at least on some level. I think more and more people are realizing today in terms of the loss of the tropical rainforest, which was her last great fight, that it's something that we need to address, that everyone in the world needs to address. And more and more, it's becoming something that people are aware of throughout the world, the danger that we face if we allow the remaining rainforest of the world to just be torn down. So, you know, she was successful in her fights. She was, she'd not personally successful in her fight against Nazis, but the Nazis lost, they lost in the end. And it's universally considered the greatest evil of our times, don't you think? - Yes. - Pretty important. - And yeah, she was, she was disappointed in many ways with her life, but she also had a lot of successes. She really did. And she was a loving person. As difficult as she was, we loved her and she loved us. And and she was able to communicate that. - Yes. - As difficult as she was, as hard as, you know, as mean-spirited as she could be on many occasions, she was always, she was a person who was always able to apologize and seek forgiveness. So, and there's a lot of people who can't do that, but Trudi could. - Yeah. - So we loved her. - I think that's a really appropriate place to end. And we really appreciate you being here today and just giving us your perspective on Trudi and the prints in this collection. Thank you, Barry. - Okay. Thanks for inviting me.