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.