this pretty much sums up where i'd like to be

which is to say - sitting on an airplane headed anywhere. or perhaps it means behind the lens rather than in front of the screen. either way - not here, behind this desk.

pinhole image taken en route to philly from iowa, 2008

california: seriously, I mean for real

returned to a dreary new york & an under-finished apartment from a long weekend in los angeles. a wonderful reception & great accommodations thanks to Ali. fun adventures & this jaunt to Malibu with Sue & Eddie. can we talk about how incredible this place is? or can we talk about how lucky i am that my olympus registers lens flare so perfectly? there are lots of conversations we could have but for now i'm stuck on the fact that i always knew i'd live in new york - i just refuse to believe it.

Los Angeles Bound

Going to LA on Thursday. Moving to my new place on Tuesday. Busy week...

THURSDAY NIGHT!

25CPW opens its doors! reception 11/19 6-9 pm. show runs through dec. 13th. 25 Central Park West at 62nd Street. steps from Columbus Circle.

can't wait to see you.

city life is basically the same...

all images to be titled, 2006

i used to work in an office beyond cell phone's reach. i once drove cross state lines to my job deep in western connecticut. during the winter months my first task of the day was to gather firewood & start up the wood burning stove that would heat the office during working hours. i had other tasks but this one was probably my favorite. i had a boss & only three coworkers. this doe, this fawn & an incredibly verbal chipmonk.

my boss began buying these guys lunch & by the time spring rolled around i would be dining at this proximity to our friends. now, i do not necessarily agree with the ethics of feeding wildlife, bringing them closer & closer to our desks - so as to objectify their beauty & make oneself feel at peace with nature & old age. but he was my boss so i didn't say anything. i guess my guilt over the whole thing has kept these 4x5 negs tucked away for four years. the scans aren't great but here they are.

tiny city come dance with me

(to be titled), 2009

my friends are building a fort in deep west philly. here is a photograph from the abandon building next door. there is so much water saturating this roof that it was not unlike photographing on top of a water bed. a friend had to hold the camera steady as i carefully maneuvered so as to not get my equipment wet. my feet did not fare so well...

Introducing: 25CPW

25CPW is a diy gallery some colleagues & are starting. Please join us for our first major event on the evening of November 19th. If you can not make the opening, our work will be up through December 13th. Also the first From Here to the Corner reading is scheduled for December 8th!

Hans Solo Bear

look what i made at work today!

Objective Affection Extended!

The show in Brooklyn Heights has been extended THREE WHOLE WEEKS! That means that you have until November 20th to come see it! Isn't that great? I know: it is!

here is a photograph my father took of me

& the back of that photograph. it's a shame the date on prints only refers to when the picture was processed - not when it was taken. i wonder how much time elapsed between those events...

oh right, i'm moving again...

i am a landscape photographer & this is my favorite patch of broken glass in ALL of west philadelphia. i will miss it when i'm gone.

how far from here

Maine, 2008

then i woke up

& summer was over...



emily & i on the ferris wheel. the very top of wildwood, new jersey. july 2009.

i have work in this show!

so please by all means, GO! More info to follow... or here for now.

Also if you are in Philadelphia check out my play, Desert of Hallways which opens this Thursday September 10th! for info: WN's (my production company's) blog

(insert a clever title here)

2009

looking & listening / watching & reading

Mexico, January 2008

i would very much like to...

bring my lovely Zone VI 4x5 Field Camera with me on my jaunts around town but unfortunately it's much too much awkward weight for me & bicycle alone. methinks i need to rent a car...

i've been teaching... a lot.

this portrait was taken by Robert, a former first grade student of mine from Bryant Elementary School in West Philly. point of view (pov) is everything.

once upon a time...

i made photographs. a 2007 case-in-point:


consider this my promise to return to the ground glass. so everyone take note.

Chinatown NYC

outside
inside (the bus)

i'll repeat myself again, b/c nature does it all the time. the phenomenon brought to you by a generous donation from: SCIENCE!!

nt

pinhole image taken in my mother's front yard, 2008

also, it just occurred to me that NT (the abbreviation for "no text") is the same as the word/sound "nt" i like so much. well go figure!

nt (as defined by me) means neither not nor not not. it's a way of saying this may or may not be the case. as in "i am in new york nt." always pause before you use it though. pretty similar to "no text" which means that you are sending a correspondence without any text (pause) nt. i.e. all correspondences are a form of (con)text. phew, my brain hurts.

also i guess this means my title for this post is no longer relevant. nt.

old (spanish) objects

i took this photograph of a relief of Don Quixote at the Hispanic Society of America an awesome & under-known museum up in Harlem. Sheesh, talk about old objects! they got ancient stuff & modern stuff, paintings, crucifixes, Goyas, El Grecos, incredibly rare & beautiful maps. etc... check this place out.

usually monuments have a tendency to freak me out. it has to do with the past event & the (often) problematic aggrandization of that which is far more complex & probably offensive. but there's something so lovely about creating a monument to the fictional. a celebration of the literary, the satiric & creative forces which tend to come in second in our collective historical memory.

furthermore, i read the first third of Don Quixote last summer & was astonished that something written in a foreign tongue five hundred years ago could actually make me LOL. but it did! i never finished it, however, i mean in this day-in-age, who has the time?

the weekly commute

chinatown bus, walt whitman bridge, above the delaware river, philly bound. that's camden in case you couldn't tell. there are many cities in betwixt new york & philadelphia: houses, doors, lives. some trees too. i don't see much from the bus' window: some cars, trailers, fast food brands, a prison or two, sometimes people walk across the bridge, maybe a couple birds in the sky, a few dinosaurs & air planes of varying & incredible size. i don't think i could count the number of times i've traversed the new jersey turnpike in my lifetime - but i sure would like to try someday.

glow nation!

i've been doing some painting in the past few days & apparently so has my old chum & consistent collaborator Patrick Hebron. P paints with pixels, i paint with glow-in-the-dark goop i purchased from www.glonation.com. don't you just love the internet & it's collaboratory possibilities?

stay tuned...

HF40137066C (Abe Lincoln, U.S. Federal Reserve Series 2006), 2009

this image is from a new series i've been working on for the last few months tentatively titled, The Currency $eries. we use money everyday but very rarely make visual or mental note of the monetary notes we carry & exchange constantly. i have been using these two dimensional objects as my negative, using the color enlarger to document & emphasize the watermarks & the strange details we overlook on a daily basis. the images i create are a permanent reference to the actual bill that, after use, i put back into circulation. i think i used this $5 dollar bill to buy dinner later that day.

i'll try to get more images up on my rebsite in the near future.

(re)photographing the archive

usually any writing on the slide mount refers to medium or size, but look what i found in the files today! i wonder what REB meant to the person who wrote it...

when i undertook the study of light many many many moons ago, i was under the assumption that i would one day become a professional photographer. well, that didn't happen quite as i had anticipated & at some point i got dumped on old man archive's door. instead of taking photographs for my bread, i digitize pictures that have already been made: (mostly) anonymous photographers' documents of artworks that were produced by another person. one man's archive consists of thousands of images & i battle against time & decaying emulsions armed with only 2 sophisticated scanners, a wacom stylus, photoshop 2 & my own fastidious compulsions!

okay so let's recap: artist - makes drawing, sculpture, object, etc. at some point in the past. photographer - documents object at a date closer to the present (but still pretty far away) than the original fabrication. reb - scans 2D film object (that photographer had made of artist's rendering) into binary code, fixes up any temporal wear & tear & organizes files & objects appropriately. it's a boring, time consuming task - but somebody has to do it...

& then we didn't

back from boston.

i guess i should be writing (poetry) instead

my beloved angela beallor using my (also) beloved 4x5 in 2007. she is photographed with a cell phone in front of her former home in queens.

i blog of her this day of days because she has a show up at the border street cultural center in east boston that will be closing this saturday may 30th. to commemorate this event she's hosting a reading - of which i am one of the participants. check the details here

(formerly titled)

i hate the title i gave to this 2008 picture. so i'm not going to include it. it may have had something to do with being afraid of spiders - maybe.

photographs of photographs

Stephen Shore's Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue page 151, 2007

from an ongoing series of photographs of decaying book pages & the images that inhabit them. this project has taken a different direction in the last year, but i intend to return to these moldy texts again at some point soon. also: i hope these can read as the respectful homage which engendered them & not (only) the oedipal gesture i realize they are.

the familiar & the foreign, all together all at once.

this is an image of my old intersection in bed stuy. i walked passed it the other week, someone is building (yet) another condo on the block nxt to the pretty old building i often wished i lived in. well it's all the shame to me.

photography & new york. i'm attempting to sew together a theory of their relationship. let's take some notes, shall we?

i move past hundreds if not thousands of cameras a day - those seen & those hidden. the city as a landscape. the city as a spectacle. the city as the internet. the city as all the photographs of the city while still in the city. the city as a bar. the ongoing event, the ongoing missed moment. the ongoing shutter snap. billboards. public art. comodifiable art. the fashion world. the blog scene. the city as the offices & spaces not seen. the romance of poverty. jacob riis. diane arbus. the city as the ultimate climate for the other. exoticising just about anything except the middle class & midtown (after hours). new jersey? the light in the subways, the shadows of the buildings. the views: from brooklyn, from the bridges, from nj, from skyscrapers, from yr bedroom window. the familiar & the foreign all together all at once...

more importantly: the psychic space of the color darkroom on a slow day.

portrait of the artist (at work)

this photo was taken by one ms. brina thurston at some point in the last year. the bowl i am eating out of is probably worth more than both of our salaries combined. now isn't that just neat!?

duly noted

providence rhode island 2006

wayne train station tunnel, wayne pa

w. philly april 2k9

this phenomenon made possible by a generous donation from: SCIENCE!

revisions, restorations & rebeginings

so let's face it: i make photographs & this blog has remained dormant for over a year. so let's revise the mission: not just sporadic thoughts about photography, but why not include some photographs as well? that's what the people want, isn't it? another pretty facade to click? i thought so. shukran.