Blog About Photography

© Greg Wasserstrom

Merry Christ­mas, every­body. I hope you’re enjoy­ing qual­ity time with your fam­ily, think­ing about the birth of Christ, etc. And if you don’t cel­e­brate Christ­mas, you know, like me, then I hope you enjoy the day, few days, off from work or school or what­ever it is that occu­pies your time. Here’s what’s been occu­py­ing mine:

• Last week, after about 9 months of “intern­ing,” I began work as a con­tribut­ing edi­tor over at Won­kette, Gawker’s polit­i­cal site. I finally have a reg­u­lar gig that also hap­pens to be sort of a dream job! So, you know, go and check out my hand­i­work and stuff, even if you hate pol­i­tics! So we do! Mine are the posts that say “Greg Wasser­strom” next to them and for the moment, I write 5 per day. To cel­e­brate, I’m writ­ing this entry in the style of one of my ubiq­ui­tous head­line roundups. [Won­kette]
• Tiny Vices included me in a recent update, took me like more than a month to find out about it. Also, I friended Tim Bar­ber on Face­book and OMG we’re totes friends now. [Tiny Vices]
• Finally stopped hold­ing up the entire Fjord project. Opps! Sorry guys! [Fjord]
• Web­site tweak and a cou­ple of new pho­tographs. [Home]

I think that’s every­thing. So, Happy Hol­i­days, Happy New Year,

© Greg Wasserstrom

I tin­kered with the new look of my site a bit more as well as the pho­tographs included in The Dol­drums and I’m happy with the results. You can check that out at greg​wasser​strom​.com. Sub­tle changes, and I car­ried the pink through to the blog. Looks ok, I think though I want to redo this entire thing. At the moment I dont really have the tech­ni­cal exper­tise or the time — plus I should focus­ing on more posts!

Also, I’m going to start post­ing more of my writ­ing which hope­fully won’t bore you too much (I’ll illus­trate when­ever pos­si­ble). I’m real­iz­ing, con­trary to what I have said in the past, that my pas­sions for pho­tog­ra­phy, writ­ing and pol­i­tics are all com­ing from the same place. It’s all the same pur­suit — it’s all obser­va­tional, descrip­tive, revelatory.

And this just occurred to me. The pho­to­graph I’ve included in this post is a newish one, from The Dol­drums, and I’m quite happy with it. But a pho­to­graph as sat­is­fy­ing as this one isn’t with­out com­pli­ca­tion. When pho­tog­ra­phers take images like this one, are we not lit­er­ally tak­ing it? What I mean is, since I didn’t this scene up myself, since I came across it in some­one else’s apart­ment, was it not their cre­ative sen­si­bil­ity that makes this shot inter­est­ing? Cer­tainly, I com­posed the pho­to­graph, chose what to include and exclude, but doesn’t that make it a col­lab­o­ra­tion? Can I really take credit for it?

And finally, if i may say so: I’m very happy you’re here. Writ­ing this blog has been tremen­dously reward­ing for me in more ways that I can recount. The rea­son for this isn’t any­thing I’m doing at all — it’s you. Inter­act­ing with you is won­de­ful and I’m thrilled to get to know so many peo­ple I’ve com­mu­ni­cated with through this forum in the real world. This whole thing means a lot to me, so please don’t go away!

© Greg Wasserstrom

I just updated the long-​​neglected port­fo­lio part of this site, added a new series called The Dol­drums, the set my Fjord and Must Warn Oth­ers selec­tions came from. I guess I’m sort of still work­ing on it but at least now it’s up where it can be seen.

I’m still work­ing on my sex book, The Hon­or­able Parts. I promised it mid-​​August which was incred­i­bly pre­sump­tu­ous of me because I don’t have nearly enough pic­tures for it yet. So give me a call next time you’re about to knock boots, and I’ll come hang out. Sound good?

The green arrow is me

Soo, I know you’re all just dying to know what it is I’m doing here in the Big Bad City. So far, aside from see­ing the big Stephen Shore exhibit at ICP and spend­ing an after­noon at Dash­wood Books with Chris­t­ian, I’ve done absolutely noth­ing photography-​​related. Shen Wei and Amy Elkins both have had an open­ing and clos­ing respec­tively, and I was unable to go to either and I still haven’t seen the Nina Berman show at jb, let along the thou­sands of other things there are to do and see in this place every sin­gle week. I’ve also flaked on Eliz­a­beth Wein­berg twice.

So what have I been doing? Well. After stay­ing at Emily Grenader’s aparment for a lit­tle over a week (the cat and I are best friends), I finally moved into this ridicu­lous build­ing called “The Tea Fac­tory,” (because it used to be one, the land­lord told me) on Stock­holm in Bush­wick. I wouldn’t have named it that and also I’m sort of like the very poster­boy of gen­tri­fi­ca­tion, but these are the things I’m going to try not to think too much about. But any­way, the place is awe­some and my room­mate (I brought him with me from DC) is awe­some and I’m pretty happy with it. Pic­tures will come as soon as it’s not such a ridicu­lous fuck­ing mess.

I’m still work­ing for Won­kette, I may have a monthly fea­ture there pretty soon, which would be pretty excit­ing and hope­fully hilar­i­ous. I also picked up a sec­ond and more lucra­tive but per­haps lessed prized blog­ging gig for the polit­i­cal news site Raw Story. What’s cool about that one is I get bylines from time to time and can do some free­lance report­ing for extra money. Most sig­nif­i­cantly though, I was just hired as an assis­tant for Katie Brown, pub­lic television’s home and gar­den­ing empress. This is a semi-​​creative posi­tion that going to involve a lot of writ­ing and pro­duc­tion work, some pho­tog­ra­phy and prob­a­bly a whole lot get­ting cof­fee and stuff. Most impor­tantly: salary and benefits.

I’m not any less com­mit­ted to pho­tog­ra­phy. I’m still tak­ing pic­tures con­stantly, my new series is almost finished.