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Highlight: Dinner with Grant, Lana and Grady. Otherwise, it could be a blues song. My baby left me, I’m out of work, I lost my camera and my hard drive died.

Can I just say something about these hard drives? Every single one I’ve ever owned has crapped out on me. I know my friend Katsie has like bunches of them, most backing up the others, but is there a single dependable drive out there? 500GB of void, that’s what I have. Someone let me know.

I don’t like to compain. On the positive, Must Warn Others opened in Seattle, and I’m eager to get a report from Bryan Schutmaat about how that went. I wish I could have made it out too buddy, I’m sorry I couldn’t, but leave an update in the comments. I can’t want to see the book, the PDF looks terrific.

I was going to link to a breakup song I wrote once, but I can’t, because it was on that hard drive. Give it a listen on MySpace, it should autoplay.

Must Warn Others make’s it debut! A benefit show for World Vision. Exciting Stuff! Ian Whitmore, Greg Lutze, Bryan Schutmaat, Jerad Knudson, Christina Lutze, Lief Anderson and yours truly. Wish I could be there! There’s a book to accompany the show even, soon to be available thru the MWO website.

It would be a lie to say that I wasn’t thrilled to meet so many of the people I admire in New York over the weekend. I would recount the whole thing blow by blow but my good friend Shane Lavalette has already beaten me to the punch. He has been far more thorough is his recounting of Friday night than I ever could be. I will say though that among the folks I got a chance to hang out with were Jen Bekman, Eric William Carrol,  Joerg Colberg, Amy Elkins, Shane Lavalette, Christian Patterson, Richard Renaldi (guy’s got serious muscles, by the way), Amy Stein, Alec Soth, Brian Ulrich, Zoe Strauss and Shen Wei. All the photographers and bloggers from all over the country in New York for the same bunch of events made this one of the most exciting weekends I’ve had in a long time.

It’s hard to have any regrets about a weekend like this one, but I do wish I had been able to talk more with Christian Patterson, Richard Renaldi and Joerg Colberg. I also didn’t even get a chance to say hello to Edward Winkleman, Lesley Martin, Paddy Johnson and Martin Parr. Even so though, I can’t say that I have any real complaints. I was amazed that everyone I met was so incredibly nice - it was practically like being with family. I also want to say that Amy Stein is just about the sweetest person on earth.

I also got to spend a good chunk of my weekend apartment hunting in various Brooklyn neighborhoods. It’s still just a little too early to really get serious since I’m not moving until mid-August, but it was really helpful to get a feel for how much you get for your money in the various places. And since I have no money (checking account: $133.60, savings account: $43.60) it looks like Bushwick is my best bet. Luckily, it seems like it’s a terrific neighborhood. It’s a quick shot to Williamsburg and into Manhattan an I particularly like the Puerto Rican flags that fly over many of the blocks I wandered down - it will be like living inside a Winogrand photograph. My friend Emily and her boyfriend Ian were kind enough to let me crash with them for a night at their place in Bushwick and I had a great time.

Now I’m back in D.C., and it’s time to run to the grocery store to get stuff for dinner. Then, I’m going to hit the books. Tomorrow is my last day of Biology.

GWB Operative Josh just sent me this dispatch from London:

Former Vice Magazine Photo Editor and Tiny Vices proprietor Tim Barber opened a new exhibition at the Gallery Soho in London tonight. Because I love my friend Greg a great deal, I flew out to see it (don’t worry, he promised he’d pay me back for the ticket). The exhibition is set over two floors in London’s Covent Garden neighborhood, not in Soho as the name of the Gallery suggests. Despite this semantic disturbance, the show is pretty interesting. The first floor is about what you’d expect at something curated by Tim Barber: lots of bright, punchy shots of young people in varying levels of nakedness, plus a few drawings and a badass picture of a van on fire.

The second floor, though, is where the action is. The uncredited photo series appears to have been taken almost entirely in Germany onboard subways or on their platforms. The photos are arranged either alone or in groups of two or three, in neat rows contrasting the scrapbook feel of the first floor. This ordered style gives the impression that the entire scene is visible from within one train car, and what a scene it is. A few large, central figures — mostly locked in embrace with a loved one — capture the attention of the people in the images around them. A covetous feeling exists within the exhibition, as though everyone in the smaller images wants to be the people in the bigger ones. Or maybe I just wanted another one of the free canapes.

There you have it, sounds like a great time. Thanks, Josh; I feel like I was there. And your check is in the mail.

© Brian Ulrich

I’m incredibly excited about A New American Portrait, opening June 21 at the Jen Bekman gallery. Perhaps my excitement affects my perception, but I have the sense that something historical is taking place with the hanging of this show, along the same lines of the 1967 New Documents show at the Modern that introduced Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand. Thinking about MoMA these days, it’s hardly the place where cutting-edge work would be presented as it is happening. It seems to me that no group of people better understand contemporary photography than the group of people involved in this show.

Jen and Joerg Colberg have co-curated it and it will feature work from Alec Soth, Brian Ulrich, Todd Hido, Christine Collins, Jen Davis, Ben Donaldson, Amy Elkins, Shen Wei and Peter Haakon-Thompson. If this isn’t a definitive show, I don’t know what is and should probably think about finding a new way to spend my time. What’s more certain though is that it’s worth a bus trip to New York to be at the opening.

Will there be a book? I certainly hope so.

Update: The date of the opening has been moved to Friday, June 22. Anyone interested in going up to New York City with me?

© Greg Wasserstrom
This is the first opportunity I’ve had to write something about my show with Shane Lavalette and Bryan Schutmaat over the weekend. The opening went really well and Shane and Bryan were both here for a few days and we have a great time. If you’re in DC, you have a couple weeks to drop by the Warehouse Gallery, it’s going to be up until the 31st.

Take Us Anywhere, But Take Us Now from Shane Lavalette on Vimeo

If you have some time, stop by the Warehouse Gallery tonight sometime after 7pm.

Zoe just posted this on her blog, which you surely read. I am re-posting it not merely as a show of support or to show up on her referrers list but because I’m totally going to go. You should too, because Philly is just a hop, skip and a jump away and Zoe’s work is some of the most interesting that one will ever encounter underneath a freeway.

So I guess I really only decided to pursue a career as an artist pretty recently. I’ve been studying political science for four years, writing papers electoral patterns and voting behavior the like, and as fed up with that as I’ve been for the past couple years, it wasn’t really until I went to the Whitney Bienniel in March that it became so totally clear to me. So since then, I’ve been so focused on getting to New York that it didn’t even fucking dawn on me that there is a lot happening here in DC and that I should be getting involved with it. Maybe because it’s that I’m so revolted with politics and working in politics and thinking about politics that I felt that DC no longer had anything to offer me. But that’s pretty dumb.

So last weekend I went to the opening of “Punk Love,” Susie Horgan’s show of photographs from the birth of the DC punk scene. I wouldn’t have even known about it (which is crazy) if my friend Aley hadn’t told me she wanted to go when she came to visit from Kansas. So how ridiculous is it that it took someone coming into town from Wichita to get me out to a gallery opening? Anyway, the work was amazing and the opening was just about as fun as it possibly could have been. All of Fugazi was in attendance as was Henry Rollins and all the folks from Dischord and all of that.

Then, Saturday night, we went to Antonia Tricarico and Lely Constantinople’s double opening at Transformer. It was packed since it’s a tiny space, and the Dischord crew was there again and it was as much as fun as Punk Love. I finally met Cynthia Connely, whose show also at Transformer had quite an impact on me in April ‘05, and she had seen the photograph I had taken of the opening (the only other DC opening I’d ever attended) that ran in the Washington Post Magazine. Ok, so anyway, she was handing our postcards for a new show of her own, which opened this past Friday at the Arlington Arts Center.

I love Cynthia’s work and went to her opening two days ago. She has 15 images of roadside arrow signs hanging there, with their titles pressed right on top of the image in red block letters (I wrote an extensive review of Cynthia’s ‘05 Transformer show where I talked about her inventive and charming ways of presenting her work) and she had chairs set up to kind of hang out. Her opening was either part of are going on at the same time as a larger one, but her little gallery was the only one that had the feel of like, a family reunion or something. And I met Antonia, who recognized me from the other two openings the week before. She invtied me to yet another opening at the Corcoran on the 22nd.

So. All of this is really to say that there is a small and lively community of very talented photographers here in town, and I’ve been kind of a moron to get involved. All I have to do is go, and I haven’t been! At a party Saturday night, I ran into an artist who I know from my short stit at the Corcoran a couple of years ago who told me about her involvement in the WPA/C anonymous show that’s coming up. I’ve lived here for four years and I’m still not even a member of WPA/C! I’ve never been to Artomatic. I’ve missed huge shows that have come through the National Gallery and the Phillips Collection. I’ve been to Transformer twice. I almost never go to the Corcoran. When I go to New York, I do and see everything I possibly can, from like Reena Spaulings to MoMA and in my own fucking town I’m totally detached. I mean, I’m more connected to the art scene in Houston.

So that’s ridiculous. I’m going to live here for like a less than six more months, so I have to get moving.