About These Cards
This is me and my nephew Kyle in 2000 (who was 2 at the time and is now 27!) as I hand-colored the Mannequin Store Window card with Marshall's Photo Oils, Marshall's photo pencils, q-tips and cotton balls while Kyle happily played along.
Each year making my holiday cards is my artistic endeavor for the year. From idea to execution is one phase, and next comes the printing, handcoloring, mounting, stamping the inside, and writing each one out.
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From 1992 to 2004, I printed each photograph individually in a darkroom (there were no digital cameras then! it was all film, baby!!). Using black and white film, I then hand-colored each photo with Marshall’s Photo Oils. The hand-coloring is a slow and painstaking process and is a big part of why someone might get their card in March (if I’m lucky), July and in this year’s case, improbably, December (there's always a holiday about to happen!). As a result, for many years, I have brought the cards to color wherever I went - one year I colored them in April in Tortola when visiting Murray and Gail Bruce, one year I colored them in the Adirondacks when visiting Loring (that was the July year), and often I conscripted whoever was with me to hand-color too. If you helped me out any of those years, I thank you deeply!!
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As of 2022, when I restarted making these cards again after an 18 year pause, film cameras were mostly a thing of the past and digital cameras were the new norm. Instead of having to find a darkroom to make my black and white prints from a roll of film, I now have digital images in need of a printer. It took me numerous attempts before I finally found someone to work with me to print the photos to my liking. I found that person in Jack at Quick Color Custom Photo Lab in New York City. He helps me turn the color digital photos into black and white, optimize the images for printing, and then make all the prints. They specialize in printing actors’ and musicians' headshots and resumes and they are non-stop. Located on the 5th floor of a nondescript office building on 14th Street, there is an astoundlngly constant flow of actors, musicians, and dancers who are coming in all day long to pick up their orders. When I’m there, I feel like I’ve dropped into a hidden New York City subculture.
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For the 2024 e-bike delivery card, I worked with Jack in January 2025 and again in March 2025 and then I lost my momentum so he didn’t hear from me for a few months. In July, I showed up at his office to work with him again and he said he had deleted my images because he thought we were done. I said, “Jack, we are not done until you have received a card in the mail!” In September, Jack made headshots for my friend’s Daran’s musician husband and when Daran came to Jack’s office to pick them up, she tried to get him to show her a sneak peek of these not-yet-sent-out holiday cards and Jack just laughed and said, “Long term project.”
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I still hand-paint the cards, though I’m starting to use some technology there too. I’m starting to work with Jack to use some of the actual color in the background but at a very decreased saturation - to mimic the effect of hand-coloring - and then I can just color the foreground. My paintbrushes are q-tips, my eyes need the augmentation of a magnifying glass to see the detail in what I’m painting, and my paints are Marshall's Photo Oils and Marshall’s Photo Pencils. To make all that happen, I also need to spray the printed photos with a fixative to allow me to color on the photo paper - this is not so easy in NYC apartment living with no outdoor space of my own. So I’ve been known to bring my 100+ photos with me out of town, lay them out outside a friend’s home, and spray the photos out in someone’s empty street.
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Since I started making these cards in 1992, my tradition had also been to use a rubber stamp for the message inside the card. There used to be a tiny rubber stamp store on Hudson and West 12th Street that I’d go to each year to find a stamp that was on-theme for that year’s card. That store has long been closed. Luckily, I found John Casey who owns Casey Rubber Stamps in the East Village. Walking into this store feels like walking back in time, with floor to ceiling old-timey rubber stamps on display, a cat roaming around on the countertops, and two workers rushing about with rubber plates and molds. He still uses the same method and machinery from the 1940s and still uses real rubber. And he’ll make custom stamps - including a rubber stamp QR code (that actually works!).
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This year – due to the intricacy of the image I wanted inside the card – I couldn’t get the final rubber stamp to print to my liking so I branched out and found a company to make custom stickers instead.
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My co-conspirator all these years is my good friend and photographer Geoffrey Croft (for every year except 1996, when Rachel Elkind stepped in to fill his shoes). He was there to help me capture my initial NYC-inspired holiday-card vision back in 1992 and has continued to be there to do the same year after year since then. He likes to show up, shoot quickly, and be done. I like to sink into it, try different options, and make sure we have more choices later. He says "we've got it." I say, "let's keep shooting," It's a dance we've danced now for over 30 years and I'm so grateful for his artistic eye, his photographic expertise, his support, his friendship and his good humor all these years.