Blog About Photography

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Tomorrow, we’re going to play the Charleston on Bedford and N. 7th St, so come out! It’s gonna be bitchin. I can tell you about all the things that have happened in person and meet the Jonbenet, and we can drink beer, eat free pizza and watch the dudes rock the fuck out. Show’s at 9pm! Here’s the facebook event page and here’s the lineup:

wetnurse (http://www. myspace. com/wetnursenyc)
the jonbenet (http://www. myspace. com/thejonbenet)
welcome home (http://www. myspace. com/welcomearewelcomehome)
pollution (http://www. myspace. com/pollutionpollutionpollution)

Team Gallery, April 2008

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:

© Greg Wasserstrom

Today was a beautiful day, the first real “winter day” of the winter – cold and white, with huge snowflakes drifting down from a gray sky. Today is disgusting. It’s about 20º warmer, which means all the snow on the ground has turned into disgusting slush and it’s raining. It makes me realize how much I love the summer. I’ve been thinking a lot about this past summer, my last in DC and getting nostalgic. I didn’t actually think I would miss anything about that place once I got to Brooklyn, but it turns out I miss everything. I wouldn’t want to live their again - it’s way too small - but I definitely miss the people, the scenery, and, this summer, the weather.

DC’s got horrible summers. It gets to be about 95º, it’s unbelievably muggy and the mosquitoes are like a scourge - they’re everywhere, and I happened to get these disgusting, enormous welts when they bite me. But I love it. It’s just like Houston, where I grew up; a town that gets even hotter and muggier and has even worse mosquitoes than DC. Now, for the first time, I’m living in a city that wasn’t built in a swamp. Houston and Washington were both built on land nobody wanted; DC because it was donated to by Maryland to be the Capital, and Houston because it was essentially where Galveston picked up and moved after being devastated by a Hurricane in 1900.

My point is this. I was walking down Flushing Ave in Brooklyn on a freezing night a couple weeks ago, wishing it was summer. And it hit me, as so many things have since moving here, that a lot of the atmospheric things I associate with the summer - the humidity, giant oak trees full with leaves and breeding mosquitoes, my friends standing around in somebody’s overgrown backyard wearing cutoffs and drinking beer, secadas chirping so loudly you almost can’t hear anything else - those things are all going to be different here, for the first time ever. Twenty-three years having one kind of experience is a long time. It’s a big change.

The hottest summer I’ve ever experienced was the one spent in New York in 2005. Even though Houston gets to be 108º at the peak of the heat in August, everywhere you actually go is so heavily air conditioned that you pretty much have to wear a hoodie indoors. Here, there’s no escaping the heat most of the time. There are parties on rooftops, bands playing in Prospect Park, trips to Brighton Beach and Coney Island. It’s great, but obviously there’s nothing Southern it. It’s a whole new way of living.

This is a funny thing to be thinking about on such a slushy day in February. In Houston, I would complain about living in such a boring place that doesn’t have seasons. Now that I am, I can’t wait for them to change.

Nan Goldin, Rise and Monty on the lounge chair, NYC, 1988, from the Ballad of Sexual Dependency.

I was in Houston almost a week before I bothered to see what was going on there in terms of art. It happened that Nan Goldin has a large show up at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. I went to see it with Bryan Schutmaat and it was terrific. The Ballad was there, playing every hour on the hour, along with galleries full of grids of Goldin photographs, classic and recent.

Goldin is perhaps enjoying a second Golden Age. Her influence can be seen everywhere from a Wolfgang Tillmans show to an American Apparel ad. Bryan noted at one point that Goldin’s work, a highly auto-biographical document of the seedy Downtown scene of the 1980s, comes across in the Ballad as something of a cautionary tale. Conversely, much of the contemporary work it has inspired is far more celebratory of the lifestyle depicted. I seem to remember reading something about Dash Snow that described his work as “Nan Goldin hit with a happy wand.”

And when you’re doing a line of coke of somebody’s dick, why would you want to stop to think about what that actually means? These are the times we live in. Goldin’s New York was a much more menacing place than ours. For all the camaraderie and intimacy on display in her work, danger, death, were lurking everywhere. AIDS claimed many of her closest friends and she struggled with addiction, all fully documented in here work and on display in the Houston exhibition. These themes are largely absent from the work of her twenty-something disciples. We live in a low-risk environment and we know how to have a good time.

Early New Years resolution: more dick in my pictures.

Her hair is up, tied up somehow, I can’t really describe it, but it’s like a little girl’s might be. It’s this kind of muddy, indecisive shade of brown. White wires come down from the earbuds she’s got in her ears, her head bobs, her body sways back and forth, lightly, completely asynchronously with the rhythemless flute music drifting across the subway platform. Her coat is white even though it’s the first day of fall and she has a scarf tossed around her neck, its white and black and fuzzy, like TV static. She looks down at her feet, her toes pointed inward and maybe wriggling a bit in her black on black canvass shoes.

Another time I fell in love on the subway, I was coming up out of the station in a part of town I only visit when I need to buy something for the apartment. A girl was walking ahead of me, there was a certain something to her stride, and again those black canvass shoes. It was still warm then, or I should say, much warmer than it is now, and her skin shimmered slightly. On the street we went different directions. I turned around to watch her round the corner. How pleasant that she’d done the same.

Back on the platform, the girl in the white coat she steps forward, peering down the track, checking for the train. It’s coming, and then it arrives. I loose sight of her. I write about her from memory.

Phew! Here’s a newsflash: moving to New York isn’t really that easy! Even so, I managed to get moved into a pretty sweet loft in Bushwick - Stockholm right off Knickerbocker. It’s a phenomenal neighborhood, bustling and busy, and will soon be the subject of extensive photographic documentation. I’m realizing how much I love to focus on describing neighborhoods or parts of places that somehow relate to my life - this is what I did with La Brea, my upcoming project, The Honorable Parts does this also and now I can’t wait to start shooting Bushwick. Anywho, my roommate Will and I are all moved in and now I’m ready to start participating in my life again.

Another reason why I’ve been so slow to blog - I’m still working for Wonkette and I picked up another blogging gig for Raw Story, which is about 30 hours per week. That’s a lot of blogging! So after I’ve done that for 8 or 9 hours, it’s tough to sit down and write my own blog, but I’ll try to get better at it. This, after all, is important.

Anyway, more will trickle out about my life soo, I’m sure, but for now I have a couple of other posts to write!

A full 24 hours after leaving Houston, I walked in the door of my friend Emily’s Bushwick apartment, she’s been nice enough to let me stay here while she’s out of town in exchange for feeding the cat. Emily and I went to the same prep school through eighth grade and then both left to go to the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (The magnet school proudly issues 3 foot-long, white on black Helvetica emblazoned bumper stickers to its students, one still situated proudly on the rear end of my mother’s Rav 4. We’ve known each other a long time, is my point. Check out her work, she’s one of the most exuberantly creative people I know).

So what took so long to get here? Well, I will tell you. The trip stated smoothly. I made it to Houston’s Bush intercontinental Airport with plenty of time to get through security and take it easy on the other side. No searches, thankfully, though I did have to explain that my Hasselblad was not capable of making video, which somehow ruled it out as a likely host for an explosive*. I ran into another former HSPVA student, Jordan Hunt, who has just been cast in his first professional show in Boston. We talked about people we used to go to school with and teachers that were crazy.

In Chicago things began to go awry. We sat on the tarmac forever. The plane was enormous, the kind with three rows of seats across the cabin, each row equipped with its own screaming baby. I happen to be a fan of babies, and at first the screaming infant factor didn’t bother me. It’s pretty hilarious how distraught these little people get over nothing at all, and also funny how the fits come in predictable cycles, and their chubby little faces, etc. Equally adorable are the nervous parents, frantically looking to connect with whoever may be scowling with them, to diffuse the situation with an eye roll as to indicate, “Hey, man, It’s a baby. What’re ya gonna do?” I was mentally congratulating myself as we sat there, motionless at the gate, for being such a loving, empathic and generally wonderful human being. Forty minutes later though, as we were finally taking off, I was pretty much ready to start smacking some of these self-absorbed little bastards around.

There was a storm over Chicago, and flying around it added an hour to the flight, landing at Dulles almost two hours late. You might be saying at this point, “But Greg, Dulles is not an airport that serves the Tri-State area,” and you would be correct. A round trip ticket from Washington was far cheaper than two one-ways, ending in New York. Round trip tickets are far cheaper than two one-way tickets, and since I departed from DC after moving all my stuff into storage last week, I came thru Washington with the intent to take a shuttle to another area airport, BWI, to get on the 10:30pm regional AmTrak train (the last one of the night) up to the city, putting me in Brooklyn at around 3am.

There still seemed to be enough time to make the train if everyone in the van was going to Baltimore and we left relatively quickly. They weren’t and we didn’t, and I arrived at the main terminal at BWI 20 minutes after the train had departed, the next one scheduled to leave at 4:30 am. The ride to BWI was $75, clearly worth every penny.

But I’m flexible. I’m spontaneous. I’m young and energetic. I can roll with the punches. I sat on down in a row of airport chairs, my feet resting on my baggage stacked on a SmartCarte. My headphones in (though not playing any music) and my immersion in an intense text-message conversation prompted a man passing by to comment to his wife, “Hey, that guy’s really got it made.”

I slept on the floor for a couple of hours in the darkest hallway I could find, hidden behind my SmartCarte, various gadgets charging from a nearby power outlet. I woke up at 3:45 and headed out to the completely desolate ground transportation area to catch the shuttle to the AmTrak station, 5 minutes away. At about 4:20, with not even the suggestion of an appearance by the shuttle despite a sign boasting it’s regularity 24 hours a day, I got in a cab. After two minutes explaining to him why I wasn’t taking the shuttle and agreeing on an exploitive price of $15 for the drive around the block. got the station two minutes after the train had left, according to a guy who as apparently just hanging out on the rainy platform. I called up AmTrak (the actual station itself was still closed) and they happily put me on the next train, a 5:30, as my $60 ticket became a $100 one. It was time to switch from debit to credit.

I spent a very moist 45 minutes speaking extensively about Las Vegas with the guy on the platform and explaining to a police officer as non-chalantly as possible what I’d been doing in the bushes when he pulled up if not peeing (I had been peeing).

At 5:15 the station opened. I ate a danish. At 5:30 the train came. I got on it. I read the New York Times front to back, which felt pretty good, and then got to work on this post before some of the funnier details slipped my mind. I made a to-do list. I took a nap.

Then we got into Penn Station. Another pricey cab ride because fuck the subway right now. A key exchange with the neighbor who had my key, she was about ready to go to work without leaving it for me. I opened Emily’s door and went in, put my stuff down, said hello to the cat.

Ok. I’m here.

*Due to a recent terrorist surveillance overhaul recently passed by Congress, I’m compelled to indicate at this point that in no way is my camera rigged to detonate, nor do I possess an ideology compatible with such an action.

It would be a lie to say that I wasn’t thrilled to meet so many of the people I admire in New York over the weekend. I would recount the whole thing blow by blow but my good friend Shane Lavalette has already beaten me to the punch. He has been far more thorough is his recounting of Friday night than I ever could be. I will say though that among the folks I got a chance to hang out with were Jen Bekman, Eric William Carrol,  Joerg Colberg, Amy Elkins, Shane Lavalette, Christian Patterson, Richard Renaldi (guy’s got serious muscles, by the way), Amy Stein, Alec Soth, Brian Ulrich, Zoe Strauss and Shen Wei. All the photographers and bloggers from all over the country in New York for the same bunch of events made this one of the most exciting weekends I’ve had in a long time.

It’s hard to have any regrets about a weekend like this one, but I do wish I had been able to talk more with Christian Patterson, Richard Renaldi and Joerg Colberg. I also didn’t even get a chance to say hello to Edward Winkleman, Lesley Martin, Paddy Johnson and Martin Parr. Even so though, I can’t say that I have any real complaints. I was amazed that everyone I met was so incredibly nice - it was practically like being with family. I also want to say that Amy Stein is just about the sweetest person on earth.

I also got to spend a good chunk of my weekend apartment hunting in various Brooklyn neighborhoods. It’s still just a little too early to really get serious since I’m not moving until mid-August, but it was really helpful to get a feel for how much you get for your money in the various places. And since I have no money (checking account: $133.60, savings account: $43.60) it looks like Bushwick is my best bet. Luckily, it seems like it’s a terrific neighborhood. It’s a quick shot to Williamsburg and into Manhattan an I particularly like the Puerto Rican flags that fly over many of the blocks I wandered down - it will be like living inside a Winogrand photograph. My friend Emily and her boyfriend Ian were kind enough to let me crash with them for a night at their place in Bushwick and I had a great time.

Now I’m back in D.C., and it’s time to run to the grocery store to get stuff for dinner. Then, I’m going to hit the books. Tomorrow is my last day of Biology.

This weekend turned out to be well worth the trip to New York.  A New American Portrait at Jen Bekman is an absolute must-see - a terrific set of images from some of the most influential folks in contemporary photography. Before seeing the show, I was most interested in seeing Alec Soth and Brian Ulrich’s images - I admire both of those photographers a great deal, obviously, and both are pretty much household names. Their work, of course, was terrific to see. I’ve never viewed anything by either of those guys in person before and that was great. I have to say though that I think Christine Collins and Amy Elkins kind of stole the show. I wasn’t that familiar with the work of either of those gals before this weekend and they rock. I know that’s not the most high-minded discussion of their work but hey, it’s the truth. If I had a few thousand extra dollars to put towards buying art, I would buy one of Christine’s images from the show - I’ll certainly be jealous of the people who end up with any of those images on their walls. So, congrats Jen and Joer for putting up such an incredible show.