The word itself comes from the Latin for “I will please.” In medieval times, hired mourners participating in Vespers for the Dead often chanted the ninth line of Psalm 116: “I shall please the dead in the land of the living.” Because the mourners were hired, their emotions were considered insincere. People called them “placebos.” from a 2011 New Yorker article ‘The Power of Nothing’ by Michael Specter
For almost a decade I worked as a professional ski patrolman at Kirkwood Meadows Ski Resort in Kirkwood CA.
I spent more than a decade with famille Panisse as a waiter in the downstairs restaurant of Alice Waters’s mythical Chez Panisse in my hometown of Berkeley CA.
Now in New York City, working at Griffin Editions where for the last two plus decades I’ve been making silver gelatin optically enlarged mural sized photographic prints. Focused predominantly on Hiroshi Sugimoto’s work, I’ve made more than 500 different editions of 50” x 60” prints by hand.