Blog About Photography

I’ve been plan­ning to move to New York as soon as grad­u­a­tion rolls around and start my life. I’ve been look­ing for­ward to this for about two years and now grad­u­a­tion is jsut a cou­ple weeks away. I have an oppor­tu­nity to spend a month or two trav­el­ing across Europe. As soon as I found out, I fig­ured I would just put New York off for a cou­ple of months or what­ever and do it because it would be an amaz­ing time. That was like three days ago, and now I’m begin­ning to think I don’t really want to go!

Europe’s not going any­where and I’m dying to, you know, get it going, not that I have any par­tic­u­lar plan for that per se. I think it would be a ter­rific time to see all these amaz­ing places I’ve never seen and take a mil­lion pic­tures and meet tons of peo­ple, etc., but I’ve got myself going in a cer­tain direc­tion and I don’t really feel like chang­ing it at the moment — espe­cially after my week­end in the city last month. I’m sure a trip like this would be for­ma­tive, etc., but mostly it would be fuck­ing around.

So, I’m decid­ing this in the next week or so. I’d love for you guys to weigh in.

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.

GWB Oper­a­tive Josh just sent me this dis­patch from London:

For­mer Vice Mag­a­zine Photo Edi­tor and Tiny Vices pro­pri­etor Tim Bar­ber opened a new exhi­bi­tion at the Gallery Soho in Lon­don tonight. Because I love my friend Greg a great deal, I flew out to see it (don’t worry, he promised he’d pay me back for the ticket). The exhi­bi­tion is set over two floors in London’s Covent Gar­den neigh­bor­hood, not in Soho as the name of the Gallery sug­gests. Despite this seman­tic dis­tur­bance, the show is pretty inter­est­ing. The first floor is about what you’d expect at some­thing curated by Tim Bar­ber: lots of bright, punchy shots of young peo­ple in vary­ing lev­els of naked­ness, plus a few draw­ings and a badass pic­ture of a van on fire.

The sec­ond floor, though, is where the action is. The uncred­ited photo series appears to have been taken almost entirely in Ger­many onboard sub­ways or on their plat­forms. The pho­tos are arranged either alone or in groups of two or three, in neat rows con­trast­ing the scrap­book feel of the first floor. This ordered style gives the impres­sion that the entire scene is vis­i­ble from within one train car, and what a scene it is. A few large, cen­tral fig­ures — mostly locked in embrace with a loved one — cap­ture the atten­tion of the peo­ple in the images around them. A cov­etous feel­ing exists within the exhi­bi­tion, as though every­one in the smaller images wants to be the peo­ple in the big­ger ones. Or maybe I just wanted another one of the free canapes.

There you have it, sounds like a great time. Thanks, Josh; I feel like I was there. And your check is in the mail.

I for­got to post about this before. But. I was on the early morn­ing train from San Diego to LA yes­ter­day try­ing to sleep of course. This old guy who’s prob­a­bly like 4’9″ get’s on at like Santa Ana or some­where, seri­ous Scot­tish accent, bald, big glasses, brown suit wear­ing a Dal­las cow­boys ski cap, talk­ing all the time. He sits down across from me (the seats face eachother, or course) and con­tin­ues talk­ing, even though my eyes are obvi­ously closed.

So. These are the things he tells me.

1. His name is Ger­ald Scott. He is 82. He is Jewish.
2. He is on his way to make an Aliyah to Israel which means that he’s becom­ing a cit­i­zen there.
3. He used to be the head engi­neer (i.e. “Scot­tie”) on British Naval vessles.
4. His wife just died, handed me her death certificate.
5. He scat­tered her ashes from a Israeli bat­tle­ship off the coast of Haifa.
6. He spied on Arab states for Israel through­out his career in the Britsh navy.
7. He recently had a doc­tor check his sperm count dis­cov­er­ing he’s fit to have children.
8. He plans to “arrange a mar­riage” between him­self and “a young, 18, 20 year old Israeli sol­dier” and he intends to “pro­duce” his own babies.
9. He is com­pletely fit. He “wakes up every morn­ing with an erec­tion” and “mas­tur­bates twice a week”.
10. Since his wife was ill for a long time, he hasn’t “had sex in 22 years.”
11. His new job in Israel will allow him to carry a machine gun with which he intends to bag him­self a few Hezbol­lah before he dies.

This man asked me for my phone num­ber so that we could keep in touch.

New York was a blast, as always, though I didn’t get to do as much as I wanted to since I slept so god damn late every day. The biggest bum­mer is that I didn’t get a chance to even call Kata­rina. So that was a bum­mer. But focus­ing on the pos­i­tive I got to go to this crazy party after the open­ing of “The Fever,” (David Byrne, Parker Posey, Sam Rock­well, Alan Cum­ming were all there) and I met the famed and won­der­ful Jen Bek­man, who gave me lots of, well, encour­ag­ing advice about grad school. Sigh. And then Josh Lehrer took pic­tures of me naked.