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.