Friday, February 24, 2012

Unseen Mabel













A couple of years ago I wrote about a clever publication called Unseen Vogue. It was a coffee table fashion book of shots taken for British Vogue by famous photographers of famous models in gowns by famous couturiers, but none of the pictures had been published at the time they were taken because they were rejected in favor of other shots. Enterprising souls at Conde Nast dug through the archives and put together something great and original out of material that had been sitting around doing nothing for decades.

My analogy is already beginning to wear thin though, because the pictures gathered together here of Mabel Watson Payne at Huntington Park were only rejected yesterday. I chose other shots taken at the same time (Thursday afternoon) in preference to these, and the preferred ones went up last night. But then today I looked again at all these un-preferred ones (equally full of the neon-glowing presence of my angel-granddaughter like some Visiting Fairy from Another & Better Planet). So now here they are and I have done the right thing and I feel better.