Blog About Photography

The green arrow is me

Soo, I know you’re all just dying to know what it is I’m doing here in the Big Bad City. So far, aside from see­ing the big Stephen Shore exhibit at ICP and spend­ing an after­noon at Dash­wood Books with Chris­t­ian, I’ve done absolutely noth­ing photography-​​related. Shen Wei and Amy Elkins both have had an open­ing and clos­ing respec­tively, and I was unable to go to either and I still haven’t seen the Nina Berman show at jb, let along the thou­sands of other things there are to do and see in this place every sin­gle week. I’ve also flaked on Eliz­a­beth Wein­berg twice.

So what have I been doing? Well. After stay­ing at Emily Grenader’s aparment for a lit­tle over a week (the cat and I are best friends), I finally moved into this ridicu­lous build­ing called “The Tea Fac­tory,” (because it used to be one, the land­lord told me) on Stock­holm in Bush­wick. I wouldn’t have named it that and also I’m sort of like the very poster­boy of gen­tri­fi­ca­tion, but these are the things I’m going to try not to think too much about. But any­way, the place is awe­some and my room­mate (I brought him with me from DC) is awe­some and I’m pretty happy with it. Pic­tures will come as soon as it’s not such a ridicu­lous fuck­ing mess.

I’m still work­ing for Won­kette, I may have a monthly fea­ture there pretty soon, which would be pretty excit­ing and hope­fully hilar­i­ous. I also picked up a sec­ond and more lucra­tive but per­haps lessed prized blog­ging gig for the polit­i­cal news site Raw Story. What’s cool about that one is I get bylines from time to time and can do some free­lance report­ing for extra money. Most sig­nif­i­cantly though, I was just hired as an assis­tant for Katie Brown, pub­lic television’s home and gar­den­ing empress. This is a semi-​​creative posi­tion that going to involve a lot of writ­ing and pro­duc­tion work, some pho­tog­ra­phy and prob­a­bly a whole lot get­ting cof­fee and stuff. Most impor­tantly: salary and benefits.

I’m not any less com­mit­ted to pho­tog­ra­phy. I’m still tak­ing pic­tures con­stantly, my new series is almost finished.

Hav­ing spent 4 years in the Dis­trict of Colum­bia, I feel almost imme­di­ate kin­ship with other artists hail­ing from the Mid-​​Atlantic region (par­tic­u­larly if they’re doing inter­est­ing work, though the shitty work can be pretty engag­ing also). Work of the for­mer cat­e­gory that has recently caught my atten­tion, the SAME TIME Project is a col­lab­o­ra­tion between Brad Walker (Bal­ti­more, Md.), a graphic designer, and Michael Lease (Rich­mond, Va.). For a year, the two take a pho­to­graph every night at 7:15 pm. They are paired side by side, and the rather exten­sive gallery, divided month by month, yields some gems. I might sug­gest los­ing the cap­tions or turn­ing them into roll-​​over image descrip­tions instead, but on the whole the project works well, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing the size of the undertaking.

Well, so I’m a lit­tle late to game writ­ing about Fjord, but I have to check in on this one because I’m so excited to be a part of it. Fjord is a book project spear­headed by Grant Will­ing and Alana Celii, which they describe this way:

The dras­tic shift in the way work is being pre­sented today has become espe­cially notice­able in the more tech­no­log­i­cally adept gen­er­a­tion. Fjord’s goal is to bring together a col­lec­tion of notable pho­tog­ra­phers from the inter­net and show­case their work in book form. This tran­si­tion from inter­net to book will allow a dif­fer­ent audi­ence to expe­ri­ence the work thus bring­ing emerg­ing artists into the public’s view.

As we all know, pho­tog­ra­phy lends itself rather well to inter­net and, as a result, there’s a rather vibrant com­mu­nity of young pho­tog­ra­phers here. There’s no argu­ing the fact that our dia­logue is hav­ing an impact on they way images are cre­ated. Fjord will be a beau­ti­ful cat­a­log of this tran­si­tional moment. Though we are con­tem­po­raries, I have viewed many of these artists as men­tors as my pas­sion for pho­tog­ra­phy has grown over the past few years. I’m exceed­ingly proud to be included with them in these pages!

Be sure to peruse the gallery. There are famil­iar names in there and also less famil­iar ones, but all the work is absolutely wonderful!

Lastly, get­tingFjord to book­shelves is a is a grass­roots effort. If you can help us pro­mote the book in any way pos­si­bly, from send­ing some cash to link­ing to the web­site to sim­ply dis­trib­ut­ing some post­cards, we’d really appre­ci­ate it. Any extra dol­lars you might have can be sent to Alana thru pay­pal at sail­bel­lyup at gmail dot com.

Phew! Here’s a news­flash: mov­ing to New York isn’t really that easy! Even so, I man­aged to get moved into a pretty sweet loft in Bush­wick — Stock­holm right off Knicker­bocker. It’s a phe­nom­e­nal neigh­bor­hood, bustling and busy, and will soon be the sub­ject of exten­sive pho­to­graphic doc­u­men­ta­tion. I’m real­iz­ing how much I love to focus on describ­ing neigh­bor­hoods or parts of places that some­how relate to my life — this is what I did with La Brea, my upcom­ing project, The Hon­or­able Parts does this also and now I can’t wait to start shoot­ing Bush­wick. Any­who, my room­mate Will and I are all moved in and now I’m ready to start par­tic­i­pat­ing in my life again.

Another rea­son why I’ve been so slow to blog — I’m still work­ing for Won­kette and I picked up another blog­ging gig for Raw Story, which is about 30 hours per week. That’s a lot of blog­ging! So after I’ve done that for 8 or 9 hours, it’s tough to sit down and write my own blog, but I’ll try to get bet­ter at it. This, after all, is important.

Any­way, more will trickle out about my life soo, I’m sure, but for now I have a cou­ple of other posts to write!