Blog About Photography

© Britt Boyd

While I’m try­ing to sort myself out, check out this new(ish) blog from Britt Boyd, a tal­ented and ver­sa­tile artist and a good friend of mine. She writes about art and design of all kinds and her blog is a great source of new and inter­est­ing things.

© Greg Wasserstrom

Shortly after mov­ing to New York, I came to the real­iza­tion that I know a lot less about what I’m doing than I thought. I have, for essen­tially four years been try­ing to fig­ure out how to express, in pic­tures, a par­tic­u­lar view of Amer­ica. And I don’t mean the kind of “view” you get from a road­trip across the South­west or a trek though small South­ern towns or maybe some val­ley in Yel­low­stone some­where. By “a par­tic­u­lar view of Amer­ica,” I mean my view, Amer­ica lit­er­ally as I see it, right now, from where I’m stand­ing, at this very moment. I didn’t real­ize that’s what I’ve been try­ing to do until fairly recently. I ini­ti­tally viewed pho­tog­ra­phy as a way to break away from the pol­i­tics that I’ve been immersed and fixed by since essen­tially the time I devel­oped the abil­ity to think my own thoughts. As it turns out, there’s really no doing that. If I’m going to make inter­est­ing work it needs to be about some­thing I can speak on with some author­ity. The snag here though is that even though I offer up wat I view as essen­tially same com­men­tary at least 10 times every day in words, and that those words have even attained a cer­tain mar­ket value, I haven’t yet been suc­cess­ful in doing this cohe­sively in pic­tures. It devolved to the point where I was basi­cally just post­ing things to the inter­net, and now even that has slowed to a trickle. So it’s time to start fresh and approach this thing in a whole new way. I’s so quiet over here because I’m try­ing to fig­ure out just what that’s going to be all about.

© Greg Wasser­strom

I’m sorry I’ve been neglect­ing you. It’s not because I don’t care; in fact, I think about you more than once every sin­gle day. You’re much busier now than last year, and with so much going on I’m wor­ried that you’re going to for­get about me. So here’s a tid­bit: it’s the Library of Con­gress Flickr stream, though I can’t take credit for dis­cov­er­ing it. Bryan Schut­maat left it for me in a com­ment this morn­ing. Some­times he sends me things to put up on account of he doesn’t have a blog.  Any­way, the stream it’s full of fan­tas­tic pho­tographs includ­ing mind-​​blowing color images from the home front dur­ing World War II. So take a look at that. Bryan said look­ing at them was the best part of his day. That rang true for me too. And I had a pretty good day.

In other news,  I’ll be post­ing to Gawker this com­ing Sat­ur­day and Sun­day. Come by and take a look if you have a minute.

© Greg Wasserstrom

The other night I was on the sub­way with a bunch of my friends, we were on our way to the Ange­lika to see Perse­po­lis (Incred­i­ble, by the way. See it!). The train was packed so we were crammed in and I was stand­ing above a cou­ple, prob­a­bly in their late fifties, the man was wear­ing a heavy wool pon­cho. The woman had a dig­i­tal cam­era and took a pic­ture of the man, then they hud­dled together to look at the lit­tle screen. They laughed. The man said, “You can air­brush that out.” I thought to myself that that was pretty quaint that he still says air­brush, but then he cor­rected him­self. “Pho­to­shop it. You can Pho­to­shop it.”

He said the words like he was han­dling a some novel new gad­get. And then he repeated the them, only this time with a melody. He sang the them, like this:

“PHO-​​TO SHOP IT,” four syl­la­bles, four notes: F, F, E, D flat.

Pho­to­shop didn’t have a jin­gle — until now.