My Camera is Broken

My camera broke earlier this month and I haven't been able to make any new work. I was however, able to get some stuff shot for my senzaburu project around thanksgiving, thanks to my friend Billy the Kim Strong Ill. This is one of the test shots from that shoot.

It's been a while since I have been photographing portraits of other people, but I think this is probably one of my best. Most of the time you work really hard to find that one picture, out of thousands, that works the way you want it to work. Then sometimes it just drops into your lap in a single shot, making you feel kinda stupid for working so hard. This would be closer to the latter.

Seeing as it has finally snowed in Boston, I will be focusing on completing my senbazuru project for the next few months. Because of the seasonal nature of that project, if I do not finish it this winter I would have to wait another year to complete it. So if you don't see much new work from me in the next month or so, be patient, it'll come, and it'll be filled with awesome.

On Becoming an Art School Statistic

I almost didn't make a post this month. To be honest I actually haven't shot anything in over a month and have instead been taking a break from making any work until I get my life together. I have come to the very painful realization that at this point in my life, I really need a real day job to keep a roof over my head while I scrounge together enough time to make and develop my art. Thus I have enrolled in a TEFL certification program so I can teach English domestically and abroad and will be busy trying to support my broke ass for the next couple of months or so.

All that being said, I do have some projects in the works right now, and for my five loyal readers I can promise that come winter I will have some interesting work put up. But until then, this is what I've got.

I seem to have fallen into a somewhat predictable working method, I take something that I really don't like and see if I can turn it into something I do. If there is one particular genera of photography I find absolutely uninteresting or feel no connection to, it would have to be definitively landscape photography (an Ansel Adams fan, I am not). I grew up in the suburbs of Boston and have lived in cities for the last five years of my life, in short I have never really been much of a nature person. That is to say, I really didn't get the whole loving the great out doors thing until I tried it for myself.

Back in September, my family took a trip to Yellowstone national park, a time that I like to refer to as the "Tang Style Family Vacation Technique." Looking around as we touched down in Salt Lake city and prepare for the long drive into the park, things started to click for me. I had never seen a place with so much wide open space, and I started to see why some people are so crazy about spending time outside. If I were constantly surrounded by such majestic beauty, I probably wouldn't want to send much time indoors either. As I looked around and marveled at the sublime power of nature I began to understand why I once so steadfastly and ignorantly hated nature photography. Because I had never been to those kinds of majestic places that you often seen in sierra club calendars, I had no way of relating to them. However, with time and experience our tastes change, and things that once seemed so important way back when, may not seem so important now.

Spaceships

I have lost many hours of sleep recently due to my purchasing of Starcraft II. Because of this, my nocturnal status must have leveled up something like 10x. I was up around 4am the other night just as another gigantic fog rolled in through Boston. As I took a moment to step away from my computer, and commanding my masses of alien armies, I took a look outside and thought to myself "Holy crap! Boston looks like a giant spaceship!" Here, let me show you:

Photo Surrealism

Warning: lots of big words in this post.


About a year ago, while I saw a picture of Magrette's "La Reproduction Interdite" while I was at my local Border's. Upon leaving, I felt like an idea had been planted in my head that would one day want to bust out of my brain Bruce Lee style. This is what I came up with.

More recently, I have been thinking about how social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook have changed the way we use photography (or "the discursive practice of photography" as art/photo nerds call it). One of the biggest changes for me, has been the addition of the Myspace portrait into my life. That is to say that the self portrait has now become an important addition to vernacular photography, or in other words, the kind of stuff non-photo professionals take. It is now normal for people to take pictures of themselves, whereas just a few decades before, like when I was a kid, most people didn't really do that. When you needed a picture of yourself, you either got a friend to snap it of you or you had to pay someone to take your mug shot. While I am generally in support of this movement and believe it is good for the expression of humanity, my biggest pet peeve is by far, bar none, is the archetypical half naked shirtless muscle head taking a picture of himself on his cell phone in the bathroom mirror. For those of you who are confused, this is not cool, never has been, never will be anywhere near cool. Whoever decided that this was a good idea should probably be sent a box containing a bicycle kick to the face!!!

Michel Foucault, the famous 20th century postmodernist philosopher, famously described society as a panopticon (a kind of prison with a watch tower in the middle and the cells surrounding it). A prison that allows a few guards to keep an eye on many prisoners all at once, the trick being that the guards can see the prisoners, but the prisoners can't see the guards. Thereby making the prisoners act as if they are being watched at all times, despite the fact is impossible for such a thing to happen. Foucault goes on to say, that each of us play both parts, in society we are both guards and prisoners. We act in accordance to how we think our peers will judge us, because we also judge our peers.

By this logic, photography (which is often described as a mirror held up to humanity) becomes physical document of us watching each other, and a self portrait, a document of us watching ourselves. The age of Big Brother is here, and we are Big Brother, but in a good way. I still believe that photography is still an essential tool for creating empathy and helping us understand/express ourselves.

As previously stated, there are many tactless ways to express oneself. Like an annoying song played over and over again, each time I see the half naked mirror shot, it makes makes me want to break things. While I can't really break the world of this habit, what I can do through the power of imagination is take something that I hate and turn it into something that I like. What I wanted to do here was to take the half naked cell phone shot, and see if I could shoot it in a way I was ok with. I chose to make this a diptych ala David Hilliard style (whose work is amazing and far superior to mine) because I believe that when you piece the photographs together in your mind, the effect is very different from seeing the two as a single image. While I still hate the half naked cell phone shot, I am happy that I could create an image that makes me feel like I am both watching and being watched at the same time.

I Just Made This

Today, we were suppose to have a gigantic hurricane rip through Boston/the east coast in a "Godzilla vs. Cardboard Box" style match up. Instead, what we got was more like "Little Foot" which also turned out to be a lie (I have in recent days been informed that the brontosaurus never actually existed, thereby ruining many of my fond childhood memories. Thanks friends). What we did get however, was this ridiculously dense but cool looking fog. Here's a picture from my window.

I seem to be accumulating more of these kind of pictures now, as I keep coming back to this format time and time again. I should probably make a note to make more of these sometime and actually potentially develop it as a series. Ah! Looks like I just did.

World of One

I guess you know you've made something cool when you want to share it with all your friends. I have been taking a rather long and lazy break from actually shooting work since about the beginning of this summer. Instead I have focused most of my time on making paper cranes for my senzaburu project (where I'm trying to make 1000 paper cranes so I can get my wish!) and trying to find a goddamn day job (this would be my wish). The big problem with this project has been, quite simply, it's really un-fun. Every so often I will take a break (or five billion) allow myself to get distracted and go out and do other stuff. This would be one such distractions.

This picture was inspired by photographer Peter Funch's "Babel Tales" and by the work of :Phunk Studio a design group based out of Singapore. I have had the idea for this picture floating around in my head nugget for about two months now. It was ungodly humid to shoot and took me about two days to put together. I would like to say that that you can expect more work like this from me in the future, but I am kinda fresh out of ideas right now to be honest. Either way, I present to you the "first" in my "World of One" series. I titled this one "Dichotomy."

Treasure Hunting

I found this picture hidden away on my computer one afternoon while I was sorting through my old work to add to my portfolio. Sometimes I just make a picture, work on it until I'm happy with it, and then stash it away somewhere and forget about it only to rediscovered it at a later date. I call this treasure hunting. This would be a good example of such a photo.

I love this picture, which often baffles me because I don't think it's even any good. I think the subject matter is boring, and it doesn't really say anything about anything other than "look at the pretty clouds above my house." Nonetheless, every time I see this picture I always stop and stare at it for a good 30 seconds, and depending on my mood I think about how the clouds look that day.

In art school I learned about a photographer named Minor White who became the spiritual successor to Alfred Stieglitz's concept of "Equivalents." White argued that photography is like a mirror held up to humanity, a meditative object if you will which changes every time you look at it depending on your mood and how you feel about yourself that day. That is to say that White made some really abstract looking shit in the 50's and 60's which all kinda looks the same if you stare it long enough. I had a real disdain for this kind of work back then, and thought it was a sort of copout to leave the interpretation of a work completely open ended and give the viewer no direction whatsoever. To me, this was the artistic equivalent of dropping someone in the desert, kidney punching them, and then telling them to find their way home.

I have been told recently that in life "you kill what you love, and you become what you hate." I tend to really hate this kind of work, but for better or worse, I really really love this photo.

Concert Fail

Since graduating from art school a year ago this month, I have found myself completely unprepared for post graduate world. I have spent much of this past year bouncing from job to job while trying to scrap together some time and money to make more work/figure out this crazy photo business thing. I realize now that I have been going about this the wrong way, and that I should have just jumped first and asked questions later. In leaving the comforts of school, I had forgotten the most important lesson my professors had ever taught me: the road to success is paved with past failures.

When I first started photographing for Foundwaves, I was actively trying to fail. Not that I went out to actively produce shitty work, but rather I was trying to accomplish something I wasn't sure I could do. I applied for a position with Foundwaves despite very minimal experience shooting concert photography, and having next to zero exposure to it. This photo shot while on assignment for them from April, signifies my big "ah hah!" moment with concert photography. I have since then, become much more comfortable shooting shows, and will be preparing a portfolio of this work, along with other updates for my website by the end of the month.

The band featured here is called Dragonette, and this was shot during their performance at Great Scott's in Allston, MA on April 27, 2010. You can view the rest of the pics from the show on Foundwaves: here, and peep Dragonette on their site here.

Chicken and Beer 2010

This year's Chicken and Beer (a bboy jam with all you can eat chicken + all you can drink beer) was this past weekend in New York city. While I felt that this year's jam was a significant improvement over last year in terms of the logistics (bigger venue, better beer, more efficient beer distribution system). I have been told by many of the vets of the jam that the magic from the previous years seems to be gone now that people know about it. Although there were no random international bboys that showed up this year, I still had a lot of fun, both dancing and photographing the event.















My buddy Heat called out Loose Lee, a local NYC bboy. You might remember Heat from such posts as "Rolling with Heat" from my March 4, 2010 post. Heat didn't do so well here, but I tried my best to make it look like he did.

Ghost Hunting

I have started photographing for a new online music magazine called Foundwaves which covers the local music scene in Boston. I have been looking at the work of a number of Japanese photographers recently like Daido Moryiama, Ken Kitano, and Osamu Kanemura all of which will be exhibited at this year's New York Photo Festival happening in a few weeks. One thing I have noticed about the style of the Japanese photographers is that their photographs tend to have more democratic compositions, and have this feeling of vastness that is absent from western photography. I find much of western photography to be very linear, singular in focus and clear cut. My assignments at Foundwaves have given me an excuse to explore the use of long exposures in my work again, inspired by these Japanese photographers I have also found some grounding for a new direction to take my work in.

BBoy Project

This is my friend Josh, don't let the corporate getup/friendly demeanor fool you.





Josh can be pretty vicious...



...on the dance floor.

PAX East 2010

PAX was described to me as the largest video game convention in the U.S. second only to E3 (which is much more of an industry party and has a finer corporate edge to it). I love, love, love nerd culture. I grew up on video games, and have many fond memories watching my brother play Zelda 2: A Link to the Past and fail miserably at beating it (totally not made for 8-12 year olds). PAX was a great experience for me and a total nerd heaven where nerds from all around could come and feel a sense of camaraderie. At PAX we were normal, and totally in our comfort zone. One of the genius elements I found about PAX was the abundance of bean bag chairs called SUMOs sprawled around the long hallways of the Hynes Convention Center in Boston where the event was held. While originally intended for use while playing rented portable games, however one a many nerds (myself included) took the opportunity to use these bags of awesome to nurse that "video game hangover."

Rolling with Heat

This is my friend Ivan, aka Heat Rock, or just Heat. I have known this guy for years and years now and just a few weeks ago I finally found out his real name. Such is a typical story among bboys, we communicate through our shared common interest for the dance yet seldom connect beyond it. I have found that many bboys prefer not to talk about real life with each other, instead we all find solace in the act of dancing, I'm sure each bboy dances for their own reason. I have had this idea to make work on break dancing ever since I started photographing, to shoot a documentary that does breaking justice is my dream. My goal is to show the human behind the superhuman, how behind every bboy is a complex individual for whom I feel a kind of kinship towards because of our shared experiences. This picture marks the first step towards achieving my dream.

Sequence

This set of images were inspired by the work of David Hillard, and comic books. I think it's ironic that although I began practicing photography in a different city, I still feel relate more to the photographers from my city, Boston. I have been trying out different approaches to making work recently and started to make these triptychs. I feel like I am beginning to change my work and approach to art making drastically, and it's starting to feel exciting to me again.

Northern Gothic

I started my grad school applications at the beginning of December which left me with little time to make updates. I would like to say that my time was well spent slaving over my apps, but in reality I probably spent more time procrastinating and agonizing over my feelings of inadequacy than any actual work. However, I did manage to find some time to shoot. For the moment, I am dubbing this work "Northern Gothic", because it creeps me out whenever I look at it. I was "working on apps" one afternoon and I noticed the way the light was coming in through the window and promptly decided it would be the perfect time to play around for a little bit. I had to remind myself what it feels like to make something without expecting an outcome, to do for the sake of doing. When I looked down at the back of my camera I was reminded why I love photography. Because the world can be a magical place, if you let it be.

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