Blog About Photography

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Having spent 4 years in the District of Columbia, I feel almost immediate kinship with other artists hailing from the Mid-Atlantic region (particularly if they’re doing interesting work, though the shitty work can be pretty engaging also). Work of the former category that has recently caught my attention, the SAME TIME Project is a collaboration between Brad Walker (Baltimore, Md.), a graphic designer, and Michael Lease (Richmond, Va.). For a year, the two take a photograph every night at 7:15 pm. They are paired side by side, and the rather extensive gallery, divided month by month, yields some gems. I might suggest losing the captions or turning them into roll-over image descriptions instead, but on the whole the project works well, especially considering the size of the undertaking.

Well, so I’m a little late to game writing about Fjord, but I have to check in on this one because I’m so excited to be a part of it. Fjord is a book project spearheaded by Grant Willing and Alana Celii, which they describe this way:

The drastic shift in the way work is being presented today has become especially noticeable in the more technologically adept generation. Fjord’s goal is to bring together a collection of notable photographers from the internet and showcase their work in book form. This transition from internet to book will allow a different audience to experience the work thus bringing emerging artists into the public’s view.

As we all know, photography lends itself rather well to internet and, as a result, there’s a rather vibrant community of young photographers here. There’s no arguing the fact that our dialogue is having an impact on they way images are created. Fjord will be a beautiful catalog of this transitional moment. Though we are contemporaries, I have viewed many of these artists as mentors as my passion for photography has grown over the past few years. I’m exceedingly proud to be included with them in these pages!

Be sure to peruse the gallery. There are familiar names in there and also less familiar ones, but all the work is absolutely wonderful!

Lastly, gettingFjord to bookshelves is a is a grassroots effort. If you can help us promote the book in any way possibly, from sending some cash to linking to the website to simply distributing some postcards, we’d really appreciate it. Any extra dollars you might have can be sent to Alana thru paypal at sailbellyup at gmail dot com.

© Greg Wasserstrom

Hello New Yorkers, tomorrow I’ll finally be one you. I’ve been yearning to live in New York since I was about 14 years now It’s finally time, though it’s true that I don’t have a job or an apartment lined up, I’m going more or less blind. I do have a place to stay for a little while thanks to my friend Emily who is so graciously allowing me to stay at her apartment to feed her cat. It’s funny; thanks to this little publication right here there’s a long list of people I’m looking forward to hanging out with that I’ve never met or met only briefly - people I’m as excited to see as I would be family members I’ve been away from for a long time. I’m resisting the temptation to list everyone because that’s tactless and sort of bizarre, but I think a lot of you reading this can expect a phone call in the next week or two. I just have to overcome one minor setback, which is that I dropped my cell phone in a puddle a couple hours ago and it’s most certainly not working any more.

I’ll also say that in light of having spent the last two weeks doing all kinds of end-of-college bullshit, I haven’t been able to get as far along on my current project, The Honorable Parts, as I’d hoped. My negatives, along with everything else I own, besides the few things I have with me while I’m here in Houston, are in a storage unit on New York Ave. in Washington and will remain there until I have a place to live, which is as of now an indeterminable length of time. I have been quite happy with what I’ve looked at and have a few images that might end up as part of the book in my flickr stream. I’m looking forward to pulling more from the pages and pages of negatives I got back last week, but too late to avoid having to pack them away.

Also, I used some of my graduation money to finally replace the light meter that was stolen a year ago, though I’ll say I have greatly improved my exposure guessing abilities - it’s like I am a fucking light meter. But the spot meter I picked up is a great one. It’s about 30 years old and shaped sort of like a laser gun. I was looking through it in the parking lot of the hospital where my mother works on Friday, and a security a guard came over to the car to ask me what I was doing, probably thinking I’m some kind of terrorist. Nonetheless, I feel ready for anything.

Not really noteworthy but I’ll tell you anyway: I was at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston the other day and came across a copy of Niagara in their bookstore. What’s the deal, Alec? Is this thing out of print or not? I spent like two months (here, here and here) trying to track down a copy, and then I come across one in my own backyard. Anyway, I bought it sort of on principle so, fine, now I have two. I’m pretty much like one of those crazy people who compulsively buy Catcher in the Rye whenever they’re in a bookstore. I own several copies of the entire Hitchhikers Guide series for the same reason that reason being that I guess I’m a little unhinged. I shared my story with the cashier at the museum store and she did not care.

You may also have noticed by now that I can’t spell to save my life. I like to think that it’s part of my charm. And I promise my next post will be something substantive, maybe even something about photography.

So here we go, the biggest adventure of my life.

© Alec Soth

What a pleasing end to today. I’ve been applying to jobs in New York non-stop over the weekend and all day again today. Trying to find work and an apartment in a city I don’t live in yet has been stressful to say the least. I got a treat in the mail though. My copy of Alec Soth’s Niagara arrived from Germany today - I followed a hot tip from some helpful commenters to get a copy of this thing because it went out of print probably the day I ordered it from Amazon the first time.

As far as the job thing goes, my best lead so far is with a company that makes school portraits! This might not be glamorous work but it actually sounds pretty great to me. I love things bizarre, campy and awkward and school portraits are all three. I’ve also applied to several journalism-oriented jobs because on paper I’m probably more qualified to do something like that than take pictures for money. In any event, I’m still at the beginning of this process so we’ll see what turns up.

So anyway, that’s what’s going on over here. If anybody out there wants to employ me just give a holler.

My next project should be finished around mid-August and it’s comprised of snapshots I’ve made in the past couple of months. My idea is to make it a highly personal document of this period of my life that’s coming to a close. As boring as that might sound, I have the first half of it laid out in InDesign and I’m very excited about it. I hope to make enough copies to send one to whoever is interested in seeing it rather than looking at it on the internet.

I was in New Jersey with Britt in May and I bought a Lori, a cheap Ricoh point and shoot camera from the early 80’s (the name comes from the sticker stuck to the camera by whoever owned it before I did), and I’ve carried this little camera with me literally everywhere since then. I’ve been resistant to working this way for the past couple of years because it’s so similar to the way I thought about photography when I first began doing it, before I know anything about anything. But for the kind of document I want to make, there’s really no better way to go about it. I’m really pleased with the images that are coming out of Lori. It’s been liberating to shoot without thinking, running to CVS to buy more Kodak Gold when I run out.

The only thing though is that the pictures aren’t nearly as crisp as they are coming out of my Nikon or Hasselblad, obviously. I’ve tried to let go of this go just like I let go of aperture and shutter speed and manual flash control but it hasn’t been working.

Because the nature of this project is so personal the photographs have a more direct connection to my life than the stuff I’ve done previously. Ridiculously, I’ve developed this kind of connection with the camera as well - i named it even - and this isn’t the first post I’ve made about the little camera. Soo, I’m feeling a little guilty, but today I replaced Lori with a Contax T2, an early 90s point and shoot with a Zeiss T* lens. It’s quite an amazing camera, we’ll call her Coni, and I’m pretty excited.

Lori’s not permanently on the bench, though. She’ll still see action when there’s lots of water around - I know she can take it.

As you may know if you regularly read photography-related blogs, the city of New York is planning on treating any group of *two or more* people filming or photographing on city streets to get a permit from the Office of Film and Television and also *$1 million* worth of liability insurance. In the age of democratized creative production, the City intends to treat everyone as though they have the financial backing of major studios and production houses.  This is an outrageous proposition in conflict with a century and a half of precedent - social and, eventually, legal.

Here is a petition that has been created to demonstrate to the City the extent of the opposition to this proposal. Even if you don’t live in New York you should still sign it because it’s the kind of thing that will eventually effect everyone.

 Picture New York Petition

Faith Ringgold’s The Flag is Bleeding deals more with race and Vietnam but, you know. Whatever.

Joerg has linked to an article from my hometown paper, The Washington Post, discussing what happens to photographers who happen to snap a picture of a building they’re not supposed to. The Washington area is littered with these types of locations as the headline of the article, “Secret Buildings You May Not Photograph, Part 643,” would suggest. This has happened to me, but in not such a secret location. I was in the parking lot of the Pentagon in August of 2004 and had make a trip out there with the express purpose of provoking this kind of confrontation just to see what would happen.

What happened, of course, was my film was confiscated after I even go to the middle of the parking lot, in fact, before and I had even taken a photograph and I was asked told to provide identification. I asked the officer what would happen to me if I refused to provide my ID to the officer - he told me I would be detained. I showed him my ID and he copied the information from it into his notebook. He told me to leave the same way I came with haste. I did.

I went looking for this experience because I have a problem authority. And it’s not exactly as if photographs of the outside of the Pentagon would yield anything surprising. But there are plenty of law-abiding individuals, often tourists, who unwittingly bring about encounters with the secret service similar to those of people who get pushed around by the mobsters on The Sopranos. It’s not fun, and even if the person does not undergo an ordeal like that described in the Post piece, they will always walk away shaken.

It would seem to that a tourist or photographer unknowingly photographing a secret building that is effectively kept a secret is no kind of threat. Further, even someone with more violent intentions knowingly photographing something secret is not much of a threat if our government were taking the threat of violence due to terror seriously. Instead, it seems to me that the executive branch in particular has used this opportunity handed to it by terrorists to expand its authority to bully and intimidate its own population.

I try to keep politics out of the discussions on this blog, but in a case like this it’s simply not possible to separate the political from the day-to-day of being a photographer. Don’t take me for a conspiracy theorist or some kind of lefty wingnut, but I think the deterioration of civil liberties seen in this decade is unprecedented in American history. Perhaps the ability to take a photograph isn’t the most important of these liberties to be effected, but I certainly think situations like the one written about in the post are symptoms of a very grave problem.

I’m not entirely sure how I came across this but the Checkerboard Film Foundation has been making documentaries about artists, composers and writers for 30 years. They produced a documentary on John Szarkowski in 1998. There is also another film called Szarkowski on Eugene Atget and one called Szarkowski on Szarkowski. They’re all available for sale on DVD for the bargain price of $45. I searched Google Video and YouTube for all or part of these guys to no avail. Please let me know if you’ve seen any of them, I emailed and asked if there was a student rate.

Read more: John Szarkowski

© Christian Patterson

I’m a big fan of Christian’s work and was thrilled to see some of his new work alongside his interview in Making Room. Christian talks in some depth about his ongoing project “Out There,” an exploration of the landscape connected with a series of murders committed by a Nebraska teenager in the 1950s.

When I started following my map, I found things that I never imagined I would find nearly fifty years after the murders took place. There are very few things that remain, and they are very hard to find, but I found some very interesting things that will show up in the photographs. My research and imagination are helping me to fill in the blanks.

I had sort of assumed that “Out There” was sort of just what it sounded like - I had no idea that Christian had plotted out a very specific course based on the route the killer and his girlfriend took while on the lamb. I can’t really overstate power this concept lends to what are already incredibly rich images - one in particular reminds me of a famous Robert Frost poem. I’m sure you know the one.

© 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?