Blog About Photography

View from my roof, April 2008

My loft apart­ment in scenic Bush­wick, Brook­lyn is avail­able for the sum­mer. The dates are flex­i­ble so long as you’re in by June 1. Stay a month, two months, or until the lease expires on August 30. You can use our fur­ni­ture if you don’t want to bring your own or we can throw all our crap in the base­ment and leave you with a big empty space. Wireless DSL, util­i­ties included all for a mere $2000/​mo.  

The place is located on the Dekalb Ave stop on the L or the Cen­tral Ave stop on the M. It’s a rad build­ing full of painters and drum­mers and the like.  The block is full of kids who play wif­fle ball in the street and crack open the fire hydrants when its warm out. There is a mas­sive base­ment only acces­si­ble thru this unit and roof access, per­fect for cook­outs. Just a quick walk to Life Café, the organic mar­ket and the other shops and gal­leries at Mor­gan Ave, gro­cery store and Kicker­bocker Ave shops just around the cor­ner. Maria Her­nan­dez Park two blocks away.

It’s a great spot. Bring your part­ner, bring your pet. Here are some snaps:

The won­der­ful Liz Kuball inter­viewed me and you can read it if you want to know what I think about things.

© Greg Wasserstrom

Shortly after mov­ing to New York, I came to the real­iza­tion that I know a lot less about what I’m doing than I thought. I have, for essen­tially four years been try­ing to fig­ure out how to express, in pic­tures, a par­tic­u­lar view of Amer­ica. And I don’t mean the kind of “view” you get from a road­trip across the South­west or a trek though small South­ern towns or maybe some val­ley in Yel­low­stone some­where. By “a par­tic­u­lar view of Amer­ica,” I mean my view, Amer­ica lit­er­ally as I see it, right now, from where I’m stand­ing, at this very moment. I didn’t real­ize that’s what I’ve been try­ing to do until fairly recently. I ini­ti­tally viewed pho­tog­ra­phy as a way to break away from the pol­i­tics that I’ve been immersed and fixed by since essen­tially the time I devel­oped the abil­ity to think my own thoughts. As it turns out, there’s really no doing that. If I’m going to make inter­est­ing work it needs to be about some­thing I can speak on with some author­ity. The snag here though is that even though I offer up wat I view as essen­tially same com­men­tary at least 10 times every day in words, and that those words have even attained a cer­tain mar­ket value, I haven’t yet been suc­cess­ful in doing this cohe­sively in pic­tures. It devolved to the point where I was basi­cally just post­ing things to the inter­net, and now even that has slowed to a trickle. So it’s time to start fresh and approach this thing in a whole new way. I’s so quiet over here because I’m try­ing to fig­ure out just what that’s going to be all about.

© Greg Wasser­strom

I’m sorry I’ve been neglect­ing you. It’s not because I don’t care; in fact, I think about you more than once every sin­gle day. You’re much busier now than last year, and with so much going on I’m wor­ried that you’re going to for­get about me. So here’s a tid­bit: it’s the Library of Con­gress Flickr stream, though I can’t take credit for dis­cov­er­ing it. Bryan Schut­maat left it for me in a com­ment this morn­ing. Some­times he sends me things to put up on account of he doesn’t have a blog.  Any­way, the stream it’s full of fan­tas­tic pho­tographs includ­ing mind-​​blowing color images from the home front dur­ing World War II. So take a look at that. Bryan said look­ing at them was the best part of his day. That rang true for me too. And I had a pretty good day.

In other news,  I’ll be post­ing to Gawker this com­ing Sat­ur­day and Sun­day. Come by and take a look if you have a minute.