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.