Blog About Photography

© 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.

On a day that has taken both Ingmar Bergman and Tom Snyder from us, I want to make note of the passing of Marvin Zindler, a commentator on ABC 13 Eyewitness News in Houston, TX. Regularly contributing to the newscast since 1973, Zindler was a local personality rivaled in ubiquity only by Furniture tycoon Mattress Max. Zindler’s crusading weekly report “Slime in the Ice Machine,” had such credibility as to decided the fate of dining establishments who failed to ensure they were up to snuff. Zindler was certainly feared by some, by respected – nay – adored, by most. The vacuum he leaves in Houston’s broadcasting community is undeniable but he will continue to live on in our hearts and, of course, in our ice machines.

Full Coverage

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.