8:186) chris abraham 28-APR-98 13:47

My father's entire estate, his entire life, was sold in quarter bins in a garage in Manoa Valley. Expensive flashes and JOBO developers were let go for a song. The bins were full. Filled with black bellows and boxes and film canisters, large mylar sheets and silk parachute fabric. Enormous black and white construction paper seamless rolls and the eccentric Japanese men came out of the woodwork: the local amateur photographers with penchants for antique 4x5 cameras and silver oxide processes. The rank sting of blix in the trachea.

Mark and Tomas, collecting fist fulls of dollars and the odd check and it was a profitable afternoon for the salesmen, but then I found a box filled with original proofs, expensive and silvery, the smooth rubbery face of a bottlenose dolphin.

To be sold for $35 a print. Not one was sold, but my heart broke when I considered his last images passing into the homes of these nerdy little men, into their scanners, onto USENET, into any number of home pages, and then I kept them close. I wonder which was the right thing to do?