AN HOMAGE TO SPENCER'S GIFTS.

So, I’ll be honest with you, I think these doors look best when you pick twelve of your favorites, then frame each one individually, in mix-matched, antique frames.

What's up with twelve, you ask?

Why, it's so you’ll buy more of my photography, of course!

Ha, no, the number twelve is because when hung on the wall in a configuration of three across and four down, the whole installation then takes on the approximate shape of a door itself, which I find aesthetically pleasing in a wonderfully smug and meta sort of way.

However, the poster you see here is also great, it comes in two DIFFERENT VERSIONS, and it is my homage to Spencer’s Gifts.

When I was editing all these doors and compiling them, my inner child couldn’t resist making a poster that resembled something they would have sold there. Notice I didn’t say I would have bought there, because to my knowledge, not one person ever bought anything at Spencer's in the history of ever.

For those of you who don’t know Spencer’s Gifts, let me first give you a bit of backstory. In the 1990s, when children reached an age where they were extraordinarily petulant and irritating -- but slightly too old for a babysitter, and slightly too irresponsible to be left alone -- if you were a parent, you were probably still pretty young yourself, and so you did what all young, cool, hip parents did at the time, you simply dumped your kids at The Mall. You gave them enough money for lunch and maybe a CD (if they were lucky), and then went and did whatever cool, hip, parents did in the 90s. Maybe you drove yourself to a different, better, mall? There were lots of malls.

I can testify from experience that the money we were given as tweens was usually gone within about the first twenty minutes of being at the mall. But then, you might ask, what we were we supposed to do for the next two hours and forty minutes before our arranged pick-up time?

Enter Spencer’s Gifts. This was a store of irresistible novelty items, most of which featured sexual innuendos and crass sentiments that we were old enough to know were naughty, but still too young to completely comprehend the nuances of why. The store also had posters and t-shirts and such, but the main attraction of Spencer's Gifts was this block of metal pins that you could smash up against your face. It would retain its shape after you peeled it off your face, it felt super cool, and it was probably responsible for the transmission of 95% of all communicable diseases in the early 1990s.

I often think about the employees who worked at Spencer’s Gifts, and in retrospect, I feel very sorry for them. In fact, I apologize. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for you guys, I suspect it was sort of like working at a daycare center? What I saw was a store consistently full of snarky teenagers, touching everything and buying nothing.

Seriously, I feel like there were some days when I might have touched, messed with, or pressed my face against every single piece of merchandise in that entire store. Just because an item wasn’t intended for that purpose, doesn’t mean you still can’t press your pimply teenage face against it, am I right? It’s a miracle we were never asked to leave. But then again, they would have probably liked to ask every single kid in that store to leave and never return.

Anyways, as the mall's clock ticked slowly by, one of the most harmless time-wasters we would engage in was flipping through all the posters at Spencer’s and critiquing/admiring the merits of each and every one. Then we'd do it a second, maybe a third time. Three hours is a long time to spend in a mall with no money.

This poster that I’ve created above, of Moroccan doors, is one that I know I for a fact I would have desperately wanted as a kid, and one that I would have thought really, really, long and hard about actually buying.

Right before going and pressing my face against those metal pins one last time and then going across to Sam Goody and buying a Madonna CD.