Blog About Photography

This is great. Chris­t­ian Pat­ter­son posted a link to this HOW TO a few days ago. It goes step by step and shows you how to hack a CVS one-​​time-​​use video camera.

Pre­sent­ing the all new grad school score­card. I thought that since I’m now in the run­ning for an Ivy League pro­gram, I should make the score­card a lit­tle more mature.

I got a call from the esteemed Thomas Roma from Colum­bia this after­noon, and he asked me for an inter­view the third week of March. He also asked me what all the laugh­ing in the back­ground was about. I was sit­ting on the quad with my jack­ass friends and not expect­ing his call. Oops.

I inter­viewed at ICP over the week­end, and it was a really great expe­ri­ence. They had a bunch of their first year grad stu­dents there to kind of chat with us as we waited to go in, and they were all really friendly, they all wanted to see my port­fo­lio and they all said nice things about it. It was sort of the same vibe in the actual inter­view, which was great. Nay­land Blake, David Deichter and Nancy Dav­en­port. They were pretty wel­com­ing and warm, and it seemed like a very close-​​knit place.

So here is the updated Score­card. And I also want to send a shout out to all the British authors who seem to find their way to this blog. It’s a funny pat­tern that seems to be emerg­ing, but a ter­rific one. Thanks, girls.

Today, I received a let­ter from the Yale School of Art that said this:

Dear Gre­gory,

Happy Birth­day! And fuck you.

Sin­cerely,
Yale

That’s not really what it said. But looks like I won’t be going there in the fall just the same. So it’s time to intro­duce the Greg Wasserstrom/​Blog Grad­u­ate School Score­card:

I just learned to use Illus­tra­tor, obvi­ously. As always, I’ll keep you updated, who­ever you are.

I’m writ­ing this later paper on Maya Deren’s 1943 exper­i­men­tal film, “Meshes of the After­noon,” and I thought I’d post it here for any­one who hasn’t see it or would like to see it again. It’s unfor­tu­nately in two parts and the pic­ture isn’t quite true to the orig­i­nal 16mm. But you’ll still get the idea.

So I guess I really only decided to pur­sue a career as an artist pretty recently. I’ve been study­ing polit­i­cal sci­ence for four years, writ­ing papers elec­toral pat­terns and vot­ing behav­ior the like, and as fed up with that as I’ve been for the past cou­ple years, it wasn’t really until I went to the Whit­ney Bien­niel in March that it became so totally clear to me. So since then, I’ve been so focused on get­ting to New York that it didn’t even fuck­ing dawn on me that there is a lot hap­pen­ing here in DC and that I should be get­ting involved with it. Maybe because it’s that I’m so revolted with pol­i­tics and work­ing in pol­i­tics and think­ing about pol­i­tics that I felt that DC no longer had any­thing to offer me. But that’s pretty dumb.

So last week­end I went to the open­ing of “Punk Love,” Susie Horgan’s show of pho­tographs from the birth of the DC punk scene. I wouldn’t have even known about it (which is crazy) if my friend Aley hadn’t told me she wanted to go when she came to visit from Kansas. So how ridicu­lous is it that it took some­one com­ing into town from Wichita to get me out to a gallery open­ing? Any­way, the work was amaz­ing and the open­ing was just about as fun as it pos­si­bly could have been. All of Fugazi was in atten­dance as was Henry Rollins and all the folks from Dischord and all of that.

Then, Sat­ur­day night, we went to Anto­nia Tri­carico and Lely Con­stan­tino­ple’s dou­ble open­ing at Trans­former. It was packed since it’s a tiny space, and the Dischord crew was there again and it was as much as fun as Punk Love. I finally met Cyn­thia Con­nely, whose show also at Trans­former had quite an impact on me in April ’05, and she had seen the pho­to­graph I had taken of the open­ing (the only other DC open­ing I’d ever attended) that ran in the Wash­ing­ton Post Mag­a­zine. Ok, so any­way, she was hand­ing our post­cards for a new show of her own, which opened this past Fri­day at the Arling­ton Arts Cen­ter.

I love Cynthia’s work and went to her open­ing two days ago. She has 15 images of road­side arrow signs hang­ing there, with their titles pressed right on top of the image in red block let­ters (I wrote an exten­sive review of Cynthia’s ’05 Trans­former show where I talked about her inven­tive and charm­ing ways of pre­sent­ing her work) and she had chairs set up to kind of hang out. Her open­ing was either part of are going on at the same time as a larger one, but her lit­tle gallery was the only one that had the feel of like, a fam­ily reunion or some­thing. And I met Anto­nia, who rec­og­nized me from the other two open­ings the week before. She invtied me to yet another open­ing at the Cor­co­ran on the 22^nd.

So. All of this is really to say that there is a small and lively com­mu­nity of very tal­ented pho­tog­ra­phers here in town, and I’ve been kind of a moron to get involved. All I have to do is go, and I haven’t been! At a party Sat­ur­day night, I ran into an artist who I know from my short stit at the Cor­co­ran a cou­ple of years ago who told me about her involve­ment in the WPA/​C anony­mous show that’s com­ing up. I’ve lived here for four years and I’m still not even a mem­ber of WPA/​C! I’ve never been to Artomatic. I’ve missed huge shows that have come through the National Gallery and the Phillips Col­lec­tion. I’ve been to Trans­former twice. I almost never go to the Cor­co­ran. When I go to New York, I do and see every­thing I pos­si­bly can, from like Reena Spaul­ings to MoMA and in my own fuck­ing town I’m totally detached. I mean, I’m more con­nected to the art scene in Houston.

So that’s ridicu­lous. I’m going to live here for like a less than six more months, so I have to get moving.