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.