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I just thought I would share part of the log of my IM conversation with Shane Lavalette from just a moment ago, regarding the most recent post to the Hey Hot Shot Blog.

1:11:27 PM Shane: http://heyhotshot.com/blog/
1:11:29 PM Shane: check it.
1:11:43 PM Greg: niiiice
1:11:46 PM Greg: congrats!
1:11:56 PM Shane: no, congrats to you ;)
1:12:01 PM Shane: read on
1:12:09 PM Greg: oh holy crap
1:12:30 PM Greg: !!!
1:12:34 PM Greg: i cant believe this
1:12:39 PM Shane: and to our show ;)
1:12:47 PM Greg: i just teared up
1:12:50 PM Greg: i’m not even kidding
1:12:51 PM Shane: haha
1:12:52 PM Shane: aww
1:13:24 PM Shane: it was funny that i found that while i was talking to you
1:13:48 PM Shane: it was posted like 15 mins ago.
1:13:53 PM Greg: its also funny because i just checked it like an hour ago,
1:14:14 PM Shane: the winners are announced tomorrow.
1:14:20 PM Greg: yeah!
1:14:23 PM Greg: omg!
1:14:27 PM Greg: holy crap!

Good luck, Shane! Good luck all you fantastic Hot Shot contenders!

© Greg Wasserstrom
This is the first opportunity I’ve had to write something about my show with Shane Lavalette and Bryan Schutmaat over the weekend. The opening went really well and Shane and Bryan were both here for a few days and we have a great time. If you’re in DC, you have a couple weeks to drop by the Warehouse Gallery, it’s going to be up until the 31st.

Take Us Anywhere, But Take Us Now from Shane Lavalette on Vimeo

If you have some time, stop by the Warehouse Gallery tonight sometime after 7pm.

I’m worried that something really terrible is about to happen to me. Let me briefly recount the events of the past six days (I am leaving out the horrible, crushing weight that is the end of the semester, which has been horrible and crushing, to focus entirely on the positive. and for some reason my bullets arent working but i’m not fucking with it now):

• Wednesday I was offered a position at Wonkette, which has brought me instant fame and fortune to the tune of an email from a newspaper editor and an additional $200 per month.
• Given the use of an totally rad moped for the summer months with no essentially no strings attached.
• Sold 2 prints.
• Have a job that is interesting, flexible, pays well, and, most importantly, is relevant to my life.
• Jackass who runs a certain camera store that shall not be named just called me to tell me that, at long, long last, my Hasselblad is ready to be picked up.
• First gallery show is on track.

So what horrible inevitability awaits me? Was this the karmic counter-weight to how shitty the past couple of years have been? Or is my balance now so completely out of whack that I should expect to be crushed by a falling piano or something like that? What the fuck is going on?

How about that?

This is kind of laying saying you get Playboy for the articles, but I have a serious passion for catalog essays. I love them for the pretty much the same reason I love the circle of photography blogs we are all reading so avidly - at their best, essays provide invaluable insight into the creative dialog artists participate in (a couple of months ago, reading once sentence about the work of Stephen Shore had a substantial impact on the fundamental way I approach photography).

The art market, of course, drives the production of books and essays and things. I moved to slowly on Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi for example, which has a woderful essay by Anne Wilkes Tucker, and it went out of print. As soon as I found out it was no longer available, I ordered Niagra that very day. That book too, has gone out of print, and I’m still waiting for my copy to arrive.

I while back, I scanned and posted James Agee’s essay from Helen Levitt’s 1946 book A Way of Seeing. John Szarkowski has said this essay is one of the best ever written about photography and the book has long been out of print. Starting as soon as I have a little more time, I’m going to start scanning essays and putting them online, and I encourage others to do the same. I’m going to do my best to collect and organize them and keep them in a central place.

I’m declaring this a life-long project. Or at least a project for the long term. I’m not going to start furiously checking out books or anything and I intend to approach this in a very leisurely way. But this is a call to action: I think that all you collectors of catalogs and monographs out there should scan your particularly interesting and out of print essays and post them on your blogs. If you don’t have a blog, send it to me and I’ll post it. Also, if you know where essays have been posted previously, please leave a link the comments.

Seriously. Do it. It’ll be awesome.

UPDATE: I have added a page called Essay Collection. Currently it has two items, but it’s going to grow explosively, I’m sure.

© Greg Wasserstrom

I have added the final edit of La Brea to the main section of this site. The project was an foray into something new and I’m proud of the results. Now if only I could get my Hasselblad out of the shop…

I have this other project I’ve been working on with some folks; it’s a pop culture blog. You may enjoy it, especially if you’re into slander and obscenity.

© Greg Wasserstrom

My very good friend Charlotte Kesl is going to have an amazing summer. She just got back from a 4-day interview in New York City for an internship at Todd Eberle’s studio and also with AFG! Congrats, Char!

Shane Lavalette made a post earlier today about plotting photographs on Google Earth and encouraged other photographers to follow suit.

© Greg Wasserstrom

This was a pretty interesting exercise. I took this photograph almost two years ago on a day that was easily one of the best of that summer. Will and I borrowed a car (a 1980s Bronco bought at a police auction) and crossed the Potomac (visible in the lower right of the Google Earth image) into Virginia to make a trip to the Pentagon. I think maybe I wanted to take pictures or something, but the real goal was to see what kind of trouble we could get into. We had hardly pulled into the parking lot when we were told rather firmly by the police that we needed to leave.

Not wanting our outing to end on such an anticlimactic note, we went to check out this large abandoned building we found on a previous night about 100 yards from the Pentagon complex. This was not as easy as it would seem though. As we were pulling out of the parking lot at the Pentagon, there was this torrential downpour of rain and wind, hurricane like, eliminated visibility, flooded the roads, caused dozens of accidents and pulled trees out of the ground. It lasted about 25 minutes.

When it stopped we got out of the car and I took this photograph of Will. It’s still one of my favorites.