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.