Blog About Photography

My good friend Chester posted this to Cul­ture War­rior the other day. Nat­u­rally, I thought of you.

On a day that has taken both Ing­mar Bergman and Tom Sny­der from us, I want to make note of the pass­ing of Mar­vin Zindler, a com­men­ta­tor on ABC 13 Eye­wit­ness News in Hous­ton, TX. Reg­u­larly con­tribut­ing to the news­cast since 1973, Zindler was a local per­son­al­ity rivaled in ubiq­uity only by Fur­ni­ture tycoon Mat­tress Max. Zindler’s cru­sad­ing weekly report “Slime in the Ice Machine,” had such cred­i­bil­ity as to decided the fate of din­ing estab­lish­ments who failed to ensure they were up to snuff. Zindler was cer­tainly feared by some, by respected — nay — adored, by most. The vac­uum he leaves in Houston’s broad­cast­ing com­mu­nity is unde­ni­able but he will con­tinue to live on in our hearts and, of course, in our ice machines.

Full Cov­er­age

© 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.

Once a year, the New Yorker descends into self-​​parody in order to sell expen­sive real estate to high-​​end adver­tis­ers and bump up issue sales. They call this the style issue, and I car­ried it around for a week befor I even opened it and man oh man is it a waste of time. They con­front such com­plex prob­lems as coun­ter­feit hand­bags and where to shop in Dal­las, TX while throw­ing in a cou­ple of extra reviews of art and archi­tec­ture. Not even the first 30 or so pages are free of com­mer­cial blight; music critic Sasha Fere-​​Jones pens a few words for ‘critic’s note­book’ review­ing the viral mar­ket­ing cam­paign for the forth­com­ing Nine Inch Nails album, which he refers to as an artform.

I don’t mean to be closed minded here. My art is all about scav­eng­ing the pop cul­ture waste­land, pre­sent­ing what I find quth a mix­ture of rev­er­ence and dis­gust — that’s what I do. But where’s the disgust?

I will say though that when­ever the New Yorker does a dou­ble issue, they run some pretty hilar­i­ous cartoons.