Blog About Photography

© Greg Wasserstrom

Merry Christ­mas, every­body. I hope you’re enjoy­ing qual­ity time with your fam­ily, think­ing about the birth of Christ, etc. And if you don’t cel­e­brate Christ­mas, you know, like me, then I hope you enjoy the day, few days, off from work or school or what­ever it is that occu­pies your time. Here’s what’s been occu­py­ing mine:

• Last week, after about 9 months of “intern­ing,” I began work as a con­tribut­ing edi­tor over at Won­kette, Gawker’s polit­i­cal site. I finally have a reg­u­lar gig that also hap­pens to be sort of a dream job! So, you know, go and check out my hand­i­work and stuff, even if you hate pol­i­tics! So we do! Mine are the posts that say “Greg Wasser­strom” next to them and for the moment, I write 5 per day. To cel­e­brate, I’m writ­ing this entry in the style of one of my ubiq­ui­tous head­line roundups. [Won­kette]
• Tiny Vices included me in a recent update, took me like more than a month to find out about it. Also, I friended Tim Bar­ber on Face­book and OMG we’re totes friends now. [Tiny Vices]
• Finally stopped hold­ing up the entire Fjord project. Opps! Sorry guys! [Fjord]
• Web­site tweak and a cou­ple of new pho­tographs. [Home]

I think that’s every­thing. So, Happy Hol­i­days, Happy New Year,

There’s a new David Sedaris piece at the New Yorker web­site.

The night flight to Paris leaves J.F.K. at 7 P.M. and arrives at de Gaulle the next day at about 8:45 A.M. French time. Between take­off and land­ing, there’s a brief par­ody of an evening: din­ner is served, the trays are cleared, and four hours later it’s time for break­fast. The idea is to trick the body into believ­ing it has passed a night like any other — that your unsat­is­fy­ing lit­tle nap was actu­ally sleep and now you are rested and deserv­ing of an omelette.

Read the rest at the New Yorker website.

Nan Goldin, Rise and Monty on the lounge chair, NYC, 1988, from the Bal­lad of Sex­ual Depen­dency.

I was in Hous­ton almost a week before I both­ered to see what was going on there in terms of art. It hap­pened that Nan Goldin has a large show up at the Museum of Fine Arts, Hous­ton. I went to see it with Bryan Schut­maat and it was ter­rific. The Bal­lad was there, play­ing every hour on the hour, along with gal­leries full of grids of Goldin pho­tographs, clas­sic and recent.

Goldin is per­haps enjoy­ing a sec­ond Golden Age. Her influ­ence can be seen every­where from a Wolf­gang Till­mans show to an Amer­i­can Apparel ad. Bryan noted at one point that Goldin’s work, a highly auto-​​biographical doc­u­ment of the seedy Down­town scene of the 1980s, comes across in the Bal­lad as some­thing of a cau­tion­ary tale. Con­versely, much of the con­tem­po­rary work it has inspired is far more cel­e­bra­tory of the lifestyle depicted. I seem to remem­ber read­ing some­thing about Dash Snow that described his work as “Nan Goldin hit with a happy wand.”

And when you’re doing a line of coke of somebody’s dick, why would you want to stop to think about what that actu­ally means? These are the times we live in. Goldin’s New York was a much more men­ac­ing place than ours. For all the cama­raderie and inti­macy on dis­play in her work, dan­ger, death, were lurk­ing every­where. AIDS claimed many of her clos­est friends and she strug­gled with addic­tion, all fully doc­u­mented in here work and on dis­play in the Hous­ton exhi­bi­tion. These themes are largely absent from the work of her twenty-​​something dis­ci­ples. We live in a low-​​risk envi­ron­ment and we know how to have a good time.

Early New Years res­o­lu­tion: more dick in my pictures.

© Peter Voelker

Peter took this of Bea Frem­der­man and Andrew Lau­mann and I think that’s just swell. Check out Peter’s hot new site, also.

I’m headed back to New York some­time in the next cou­ple of days, and in a moment I’m going to the Museum of Fine Arts, Hous­ton, a dis­tin­guished insti­tu­tion, to see Nan Goldin’s Bal­lad, which is a big deal to me for obvi­ous rea­sons and I’ve never seen it in per­son. No doubt I’ll have all kinds of rev­er­ent things to say upon my return.

I hope things are going well with you. I’ll be back in the city soon and we’ll finally hang out again.

Just in case you’re won­der­ing, I went back to Hous­ton to get over bron­chi­tis that had me cough­ing so hard I actu­ally broke a rib. So now I’m sit­ting around drink­ing Robi­tussin and watch­ing TV, con­tem­plat­ing what I’m doing with my life.

Jeal­ous?