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")