in preparation for the future

i will be continuing my blogging efforts at a rival web-space. please refer to: http://OldObjectsNewIdeas.wordpress.com for further updates, explanations, justifications, etc...

the future is the same color as $$$

untitled, 2010

this photograph, as yet, hasn't a title. but it has a context. which is thus: this is the view from my (former) studio in Vermont. I was told VT is the Green State & almost everything out my window corroborated this story. this image is my attempt to keep VT green. anything aside from the approved hue was covered up with pieces of photographs of grass - the dark squares are the tape adhering the trapezoids to the glass. there are so many moments in so many days, i wish to relocate to VT.

Thanks Bernie Sanders. i'm sorry that the next half-century (+) will be something to fear. fare-thee-well 20th century American-Liberal idealism SLASH common-empathic-sense: you were shortly lived, but deeply felt.

long island city & eternal return

10th street & 44th road. Long Island City, 2010.

upon a recent rescreening of Joe Versus the Volcano, i realize that i may have been fated to work in this most centrally located neighborhood. lic first factored into my life at some point in the 90s, when i saw this movie as an impressionable youth. one moment always stuck in my brain as a very sad, albeit very literal metaphor for urban and office life. in the very first scene, as joe makes his way to work he sees a single daisy growing from the concrete. a moment of hope soon dashed, as one of his drone-like collegues unknowingly trounces it in the long march to the office.


now, twenty years later: i work there. a stepping stone between brooklyn & manhattan that i precariously balance upon day after day. just like joe.

tivoli 2010

i am trying to make sense of the sense i make. something about 'uninhabited' landscape, language & representation. how images stand-in for 'the real' of experience, memory, place, desire. not necessarily that which is known, rather what is felt. like reading a great novel - the prison - the liberation of interiority. "tell me a story" - use photographs. text is directive, too directive. allow me to tell a story about myself.

NOSTALGIA: the comparative space between now & then. in photos, the then of history. in literature, the then of the fictive. in mind, the then yet to be. & the now? only the earth moving - each individual breath.

thanks, New York Times

you sure do know how to illustrate the obvious. seriously, this is journalism?

Long Island City, under the Queensboro Bridge, 2010

this scene i photographed last week with my cell phone, is a startlingly accurate representation of how living in new york city feels to me. (i'm second in on the right with my back to the camera.)

back in brooklyn

here's an image of johnson, vermont at night. right outside of my former studio. i'm back in the city now, which is - you know - cool. now it is fall. hopefully yr reading this at some point in the future so that won't be true anymore. possible you could be reading this in the past? well i guess now is the past to the former scenario's future - so possibly. no, not really.

here is a photograph i made yesterday. don't think i forgot about the ball. returning city-side on friday. i'm taking all these green things with me.

confused like the state

i was told by a sign on the side of the road a few weeks ago that vermont is the green state. i just googled "vermont's slogan" & "freedom & unity" popped up. these are the kind of notes i take.

digital sketch for, Useless 2010

this is a digital snap shot of a large format picture i made today. while waiting for the light to change & the wind to die down i fought a mighty battle against northern vermont's finest mosquito infantry. there were many casualties, the most painful of which was the truncating of my photographic sojourn.

perpetually ready for the country

this is the view from my studio in Vermont. it's been a week, i think. at some point in college I made it a "goal" to lead a lifestyle in which it was easy to lose track of what day it is. i can now officially say i have achieved said goal.

it's been unseasonably warm until today, so my first week was spent exploring the local underwater hot-spots. it's quite a scene, let me tell you. full of minnows, well worn stones & craw fish bouncers. i was able to find a tie-dye shirt near a waterfall in the woods. yeah, totes VT.

Equivilence Approaching

West 52nd Street, NYC, 2010

In less than a week I venture off to Vermont, a state I have never set foot in, for precisly one month. I look forward to this change of p(l)ace, for I haven't forfeited the hum-drum in nearly two years! Locally, otherwise: it has been one long, hot, monumental summer. The afternoons' heat could not contest with the midnight sweats. Leaving the last few weeks a blur of the uncomfortable, undesired & unacceptable. Yet, we negotiated it all. And, I, for one, am glad it's over.

Looking forward to printing in B&W, shooting in the color green & gazing upon a horizon further than previously imagined...

Low-Fied

Los Angeles, California, 2009

In the last two years I've been teaching quite a bit. The budgets at the orgs I'm working with are rather slim so "the perfect print" & "camera techniques" do not drive my lesson planning. My students work with novelty point & shoots or incredibly cheap digital cameras, so I suppose I've been inspired. In this same time frame, perhaps in order to better understand how to teach "good photography" with less than ideal materials I have taken to shooting with plastic film cameras.

The above image was shot with this awesome apparatus I found in a thrift store in Iowa. It cost me ten dollars! The lens cap reads "camera" in large bold letters - in case I forget what the black object hanging from my neck actually is. "Focus Free!" it proclaims on the plastic lens which has three proper f-stops. It's 35mm & the frame counter is busted. Ten dollars!? There also appears to be a hot shoe, but alas my flash is broken so I have not been able to test it.

summer means the same again!

our fort @ the beach! queens : nyc : 2010

since my last sorrow-filled post i have spent a bit of time in the atlantic ocean, the delaware river & even a hotel pool in midtown. please excuse the excessive self-pity from weeks previous. you must understand: swimming is fundamentally important to my basic physio-psychic balance... maybe even more than art making. yeah really. but don't ask me to give one up especially since i barely have time for either these days. here is a photo of my friend at aforementioned beach. s/he was upset upon finding out their person was present in the photograph. 

i can totally relate. below is a 2003 photo by one mister gregg cornish in stone harbor new jersey. 

yes, that's me. isn't she twenty years glorious? it's fitting that so many photo-dweebs (the aforementioned "i heart photoshop" subject included) have such extreme issues giving up their representation easily. nor do we attempt to seize control of the photographic moment by striking a signature pose. we fight, we hide. it's easier. it's better. it makes it incredibly difficult to figure out what we actually look like & we like it that way. mystery. avoidance. absence. 

i have a great distaste for the the moment when i'm forced to stare down the barrel of someone else's metaphor. so i run as if my life - for my representation - depend on it. 

with a word like summer, who needs a vocabulary

point & shoot to film - maine 2009

words have these inherent often uncontrollable meanings which are not always congruent with our direct use of said word. summer for instance. summer means many things, but not this summer, for me at least. i have not going swimming ONCE since the swimming season began & i'm not sure when the occasion will arise. bummer. i go to the office, i turn on my fans, i sweat the sweat. but in this city? only cold cold showers. double bummer. ice cream truck & teenagers on the streets until all hours. working around other people's vacations while the concrete stinks & you never feel clean. i used to walk barefoot through fields & lawns, swim in seas & lakes, scratch the sand out of my scalp over continental divides, breath deep the air from the tops of the tallest trees.

there was even this one time - i pushed over a fifty-foot rotten pine. it crashed to the ground with a thunderous applause. but no - not this summer. not this word. not now. not here, for me at least.

Idle Time / Busy Mind

I have three enlarger pieces in a group show opening tomorrow!


Come say hi.
NURTUREart non-profit
910 Grand Street, Brooklyn
one block from the Grand stop on the L
7-9pm

Curated by Juan Morel Campos Secondary School students:
Amanda Holmberg-Perez, Cody Castro, Danny Ortega, Fernando Reyes-Duran, Gisel Mateo, Karina Matlock, and Jeff Pauta.

the artist is absent

or at least s/he was.

so very pleased to be a part of this project: THE ARTIST IS ABSENT this past weekend at some gallery on the upper west side. truly transformational. freeing the voice? not to mention being a part of the set up & strike. truly inspirational.

this project will be extending into my summer, as one angela beallor & i will decipher how to publish this event beyond the day's events.

STAY TUNED!

Jean Baudrillard. The Ectasy of Communication. Semiotext(e). Cover

Roland Barthes. Barthes by Barthes. Translated by Richard Howard. Berkley: University of California Press, 1977. p.1. (9.5 x 6.5")

while i was shooting this:

lee was shooting this:


mexico so long ago.

old drawings new digi-tainment

crayola thin tip marker on title page of day by day planner, July 2009

half performance - all landscape

The World Spins Round (in) New Jersey, Coney Island, Pennslywaynia - all summer 2007

i have (another) ongoing project that i all but forgot about! i have a delightful beach ball which doubles as a glow-in-the-dark satellite picture of earth which i have taken to traveling with. these are documentary photographs of the ball in air - which I "placed there" all over the world (albeit these three are humbly from the mid-atlantic). i have tons of these images kicking around in the old digi-files. i'll see if i can find more come future.

Frank O'Hara, Lunch Poems. The Pocket Poets Series: Number 19. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1964. p. 58. (6 3/16 x 4 3/4")

Not just what is writ, but how it is printed. the first in the Pages Series: when i see some text looking particularly potent on a page, i'll post it.

only the most relevant medium's masters...

Earlier this week, an artist I know made an off-hand comment referring instead of Alfred, to Albert Stieglitz. Why, oh why did this infuriate me so? An excusably simple error, a personal annoyance, yet something continues to nag at my sense of stability. Proceed indulgence...

It's not that I feel as though the legend of Stieglitz was somehow besmirched, quite the contrary: as if this minor flub solidified his master's status in my unconscious. Why, in my most knee-jerk reactions am I still so wedded to authenticity & the facts I've been fed? What do I care if he goes down in one person's subjectivity as Albert? Isn't this sort of convolution something I've come to view as important: those moments that draw awareness to a form (even if that form is as banal & esoteric as the History of Photography), making us question why it is we think the things we do?

Ahh, yes so it is personal but with generational, aesthetic & polemical self-consciousness. I was angered because in my unconscious I responded: "how could one possibly mispronounce The Master's name!" While my conscious immediately re:responded to that with: "Ah jeez, Leopold! Come off it already - who gives an F? There are far more important issues to get riled about than a fleeting moment of 'disrespect' & shame on you for interpreting it as 'disrespect' to begin with, what are you a Modernist? Just gross."

And so ends another episode of: don't dish it if you can't take it.

redact : rewind it back

BIG, 2009. sharpie on magnet that came with phone book

& now? an exceptionally cute mammel...

lil' sqrrrl, 2009 & yeah, i need to take new pictures. i'm working on it...

the photograph : the status update

as proofs of existence - as means toward communication
a quiet of previous centuries, longed for.

seldom proofed?
experiential - experimental

rebsite update!

successfully updated my website, sans content however. no worries - i'll be to fixing it... soon.

Bacon for break fast

work work work work work work work office work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work office work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work office work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work office work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work office work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work office work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work office work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work office work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work office work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work office work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work office work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work office work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work office work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work office work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work office work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work office work work work work work work work work work work work work work work office (wrong! i didn't eat breakfast)

Upcoming in NYC

Untitled (Bed Stuy) 2008

this photograph was included in the inaugural group show at 25CPW & now will be shown there again. details to follow...

now that's impressive

brooklyn heights, 2010
way to go winter light - yr fleeting but there's really nothing like you.