photo of the month from randy kato I recently had the pleasure to see The Polaroid Collection - 1200 pieces by dozens of well-known artists - while it was on pre-auction exhibition at Sotheby's. While there were incredible and varied works by Andy Warhol, Dorothea Lange, Chuck Close, Walker Evans, William Wegman, Robert Mapplethorpe, David Hockney, Robert Rauschenberg and many many others, the artist most well represented in the collection was of course Ansel Adams. Adams' work intrigued me the most. There were huge mural prints that become extraordinarily engaging at that size - in fact one of those large prints sold the first day for a record high price for an Ansel Adams photo ($722,500). But there were almost equally enchanting little treasures of his like an original Polaroid instant print with deckled edges like you might find in a shoe box in grandma's closet. So this month's photo is kind of a tip o' the hat to Ansel Adams. This is El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, a frequent favorite subject of Adams. I shot it black & white, but when I scanned the negatives I had the software set for color. The accidental result was this nice sort of sepia tone. I took this photo exactly 10.5 years ago in the first light of the first day of the year 2000. With all the hype and hysteria surrounding Y2K, I just wanted to be far far away from it all, unaware and unaffected by whatever did or didn't happen at the stroke of midnight. I chose to wilderness camp in Yosemite. Feel free to check out a little photo story I made of that trip. Enjoy! Randy Photo of the Month archive