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© Greg Wasserstrom

Perhaps you’ve noticed the silence emanating from my particular corner of the internet. This isn’t meant to be a complaint, but this is turning out to be something of stagnant summer for me. I’m here in D.C. finishing the last class for my BA and while I have been shooting like crazy, the film has been collecting in a B&H box under my desk for more than two months due to lack of funds. But! I sent the box off yesterday and I am looking forward to the results. Snapshot stuff, mostly.

I’ve also been working on a zine which is sort of a new thing for me. I’ll make it available through Etsy as soon as it’s ready - it’s about sex, I think.

There’s plenty of exciting news about the the fall, though: The Must Warn Others kick off show has been slated for October 13 and should have a book to accompany it. In addition to yours truly, the show will include Greg Lutze, Bryan Schutmaat, Ian Whitmore, Jerad Knudson, Christina Mei Lutze and Leif Anderson.

I am also going to have the opportunity to travel through Europe for a hefty chunk of time (to be determined). A seperate post on this will follow.

So, that’s the deal on this end. I hate it when I don’t post, so I’ll try and be better about it. Alec and Joerg and Shane have it so well covered sometimes, and who can say things better than they can?

Now that I have a little bit of money, I’m going to get the 30+ rolls of spent film sitting in a box under my desk developed. I’m not even sure what’s down there anymore - especially since I shot most of with Lori, and I have no idea if she even works or not. Also, since I don’t have a light meter and have gotten tired of carrying my 35 around, everything I shot thru the Hasselblad I pretty much just eyeballed. Who knows what’s going to come out. I used to be meticulous about this stuff, taking meter readings 50 times before making an exposure. Now I’m just leaving it all to chance. I’ll send this stuff off tomorrow. We’ll see what happens - maybe I’ll have something to use for Grant’s book and the summer Hot Shot.

Make yours. 

© Christian Patterson

Another post about my favorite subject: me. I’m awfully sorry about this. Amy Stein wrote a great post a couple of months back about how the readership of her blog expanded so much when she stopped writing so much about herself and more about photography. I hope to soon follow her example, but apparently not today. An entry over at Conscientious just got me thinking about how I define myself. Joerg said:

A couple of days ago, Ed Winkleman posted about a scientist who produces beautiful images, but who refuses to consider herself an artist. As always at his blog, the discussion that followed is quite interesting. Needless to say, part of my interest stems from the fact that in my day job I am a scientist myself, and I keep running into people who just can’t comprehend how a scientist would know something about photography. So when people ask me what I “do”, I’m always a bit of a loss what to say, since I don’t want to define myself through any single activity.

I sort of feel the same way as Joerg does and I too often have trouble answering this question. Clearly, photography is a serious pursuit of mine; but I’m also finishing a degree in political science. As we finished out senior year, we were all asking each other what our plans were. Acquaintences were surprised to hear I’m planning on an artistic career instead of a political one, “wow, that’s a big a change,” etc. And since I’m not trying to get a job covering politics as a photojournalist for the Washington Post, I guess it would seem that my passions of mine are unrelated.

To me, of course, political and social, critical writing and photography are not at all unrelated and each are tools I can use to put forth a cohesive view of American culture. My work is not inherently political because often times I find art with too heavy-handed a message off-putting. We live in an era where we let viewers interpret what we make for themselves so I by no means want to advance any kind of agenda or anything like that. But I am looking to bring all the things I do together and put forth complementary projects of all kinds encouraging, and hopefully stimulating, critical thought.

I’m an aspiring pointer-outer-of-things.

© Greg Wasserstrom

© Greg Wasserstrom

I shot a funny event at the Kennedy center yesterday, the above picture is my favorite from the shoot. It’s insane that I’ve lived in Washington for four years and last night was the first time I set foot in there… The picture above is my favorite from the event, but I haven’t seen the ones from my new little Ricoh point and shoot that I’ve been using a whole ton lately.

Everything seems to be status quo at the moment and I have very little to write about it seems! Last night I started looking for places in Bushwick and it was encouraging to see such good stuff listen on CL. I’m writing two posts a day for Wonkette and I see that I’ve made it into their Wikipedia entry. My roommates and I are also planning a vcast sit-com based on our living situation and we hope it will be funny to people other than us (more on this soon).

On Sunday I have a ticket to see a screening of Helvetica at Silverdocs and I’m totally stoked about it. I’ve been jazzed to see this film for months.

And, lastly, I haven’t been able to talk my partner Britt out of moving to Vermont for the summer and she’s leaving today. So that sucks. But I’ve never been to Vermont and it’ll be fun to visit her.

I’m worried that something really terrible is about to happen to me. Let me briefly recount the events of the past six days (I am leaving out the horrible, crushing weight that is the end of the semester, which has been horrible and crushing, to focus entirely on the positive. and for some reason my bullets arent working but i’m not fucking with it now):

• Wednesday I was offered a position at Wonkette, which has brought me instant fame and fortune to the tune of an email from a newspaper editor and an additional $200 per month.
• Given the use of an totally rad moped for the summer months with no essentially no strings attached.
• Sold 2 prints.
• Have a job that is interesting, flexible, pays well, and, most importantly, is relevant to my life.
• Jackass who runs a certain camera store that shall not be named just called me to tell me that, at long, long last, my Hasselblad is ready to be picked up.
• First gallery show is on track.

So what horrible inevitability awaits me? Was this the karmic counter-weight to how shitty the past couple of years have been? Or is my balance now so completely out of whack that I should expect to be crushed by a falling piano or something like that? What the fuck is going on?

How about that?

© Greg Wasserstrom

I have added the final edit of La Brea to the main section of this site. The project was an foray into something new and I’m proud of the results. Now if only I could get my Hasselblad out of the shop…

Shane Lavalette made a post earlier today about plotting photographs on Google Earth and encouraged other photographers to follow suit.

© Greg Wasserstrom

This was a pretty interesting exercise. I took this photograph almost two years ago on a day that was easily one of the best of that summer. Will and I borrowed a car (a 1980s Bronco bought at a police auction) and crossed the Potomac (visible in the lower right of the Google Earth image) into Virginia to make a trip to the Pentagon. I think maybe I wanted to take pictures or something, but the real goal was to see what kind of trouble we could get into. We had hardly pulled into the parking lot when we were told rather firmly by the police that we needed to leave.

Not wanting our outing to end on such an anticlimactic note, we went to check out this large abandoned building we found on a previous night about 100 yards from the Pentagon complex. This was not as easy as it would seem though. As we were pulling out of the parking lot at the Pentagon, there was this torrential downpour of rain and wind, hurricane like, eliminated visibility, flooded the roads, caused dozens of accidents and pulled trees out of the ground. It lasted about 25 minutes.

When it stopped we got out of the car and I took this photograph of Will. It’s still one of my favorites.