Blog About Photography

Bill Poplack, 1982

My Grand­fa­ther, William J. Poplack, died yes­ter­day at around 4:45 in the after­noon. He was incred­i­bly car­ing and gen­er­ous human being, and, at 88, he’d lost absolutely none of the wit that made him so much fun to spend time with. Grandpa stayed with us through more than 10 years of his declin­ing health  he was also a fighter with an iron will. He sur­vived a Nazi P.O.W. camp after his plane was shot down over occu­pied Hol­land dur­ing World War II, and then, forty years later, bested a gun­shot to the heart dur­ing a mug­ging right here in New York City. When his time finally came, he was sur­rounded by fam­ily in Birm­ing­ham, MI, the place he lived all his life. Every one who knew him and was close to him will cer­tainly miss him very much.

thLast year I went on the road with The Jon­benét, a hard­core band from Hous­ton, Tex. It was loads of fun and I had the oppor­tu­nity to try to make pho­tographs in a com­pletely dif­fer­ent way than I ever have before. I nar­rowed the hun­dreds of pho­tos that I took over those three weeks down to the hand­ful I’ve had up on my site for a year. Most of the edit­ing wasn’t that hard – I took a lot of shitty pic­tures. But I was look­ing back at the scans tonight and there were I few things that I thought would be worth post­ing and writ­ing a sen­tence or two about.

This is one of the hand­ful of pho­tographs I made on tour that I con­sciously antic­i­pated until I was able to get it processed and take a look. I ended up a bit dis­ap­pointed in the final result because, if you look too quickly, you’ll totally miss just how young this kid is. I kind of for­get what I didn’t like about it now though. Read the rest of this entry »