Blog About Photography

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

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.

A few of my friends in DC have got­ten caught up in some pretty scary drama: the Secret Ser­vice is going after them for protest­ing a Karl Rove speech! Four months ago! Arrest war­rants and every­thing. Crazy!

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.

© 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.