Maria and I went out to dinner Saturday with George Forss and Donna Wynbrandt to celebrate his amazingly successful Kickstarter project “The Way We Were.” The project was launched Friday to help George raise money to publish some of his wonderful photographs of New York City taken before 911. George asked for $8,200, afraid to ask for more, this morning he had raised $11,265, and there are still 27 more days to go. Today we’re having posters made up to distribute in Cambridge, where George lives.

We cancelled a planned fund-raising evening, we’re not certain we’ll need it. George went right to work this morning in his quite spectacular bathroom/office complex, a maze of rooms in the middle of his house filled with infra-red lights and tanks of chemicals, tubes of water draining out to sinks, buzzing timers and rows of clotheslines where prints can be hung. George loves his darkroom, he is the prince and the master there. I stayed with him in the dark for an hour or so while he printed the first photographs for the book “The Way We Were,” which should be done by mid-summer, he hopes to publish it in late September or October.

George is clearly very happy and excited, he has more or less decided to buy a new computer, a laptop (he likes to make them himself out of discarded parts). His response to confusion and stress is to take photos and develop them. How exciting, such good people on the blog and out in the world. I told George the Internet has given people like him a whole new way to sell his lost photographs. He doesn’t need galleries or magazine stories or critics, he just needs to let people see his work and they will make up their own minds. Once they can see his photographs for themselves, out of the hands of middle-men and gatekeepers, they will know what to do. If you are so inclined, you can still contribute to George’s project here, he will make very good use of the money.