SCOTT GORDON BLEICHER PHO(BLOG)GRAPHY

Kitchen La Bohème.

The Bohemian Kitchen.

It’s a vegan pure vegetarian food blog that I’ve been shooting for lately.

A vegan food blog, you say?

Yep.

Well, Scott, are you vegan?

Nope.

Are you, at least, vegetarian then?

Not even close.

So, a carnivore taking pictures for a vegan food blog?

That’s right.

But why?

For starters, because vegan food doesn’t taste like cardboard. Or the back of a postage stamp.

Because I’ve had soy sesame seitan that could’ve fooled any carnivore into thinking they were eating General Tso’s Chicken from Wong’s Wok (real place).

Ok, maybe not the most flattering comparison, but what I’m trying to say is that I didn’t miss the meat.

Because, although I cannot resist the temptation of the cheeseburger, it doesn’t mean that I don’t want to eat healthy.

And why the distinction between vegan and pure vegetarian?

Because the term vegan can be off-putting for some, weighed down by it’s perceived elitism and the expectation of its practitioners to be the poster children for a Birkenstock-wearing, bicycle riding, downward dogging, third eye opening, crystals on the windowsill-of-the-universe lifestyle.

Because vegan has become a collective movement as opposed to a personal choice.

Because vegan has become a stereotype.

No, you don’t have to go on Phish tour to be pure vegetarian. You don’t have to live in a Volkswagen Westfalia or make a pilgrimmage to Burning Man or burn Nag Champa or learn how to blow glass or know what your spirit animal is.

You just have to make a commitment to healthy, pure, and organic eating habits.

And you have to love cows.

You do love cows, right?

Right?

(Orecchiette with Smashed Peas, Hot Veggie Sausage and Tofu Ricotta)

The recent purchase of a two thousand gigabyte external hard drive for photo archiving purposes has lead me down the tedious road of making back ups of my back ups. A small pleasure I’ve found in this process has been the rediscovery of old images, some of which I shot while on a cross country road trip nearly a decade ago.

I found a handful of black and white film scans, ranging from Yellowstone to Yosemite, from the Badlands to Canyonlands. It is possible that these images, heavy on film grain and contrast, may have been tinted by the distorting lens of nostalgia- but coming across them again after a few years has allowed me to see them with as objective an eye as possible.

I’ve crisscrossed the country by auto and aero a number of times since (even once by train), but this inaugural expedition remains the most memorable: setting out with not much more than a paper map, a full tank of gas, and many rolls of film, intent on coaxing the ghosts of Lewis and Clark from their roadside tombs, rolling down the interstate in an old jeep like a four-ton Sacagawea with a manual transmission.

Camping out in national parks, eating at gas stations, getting rooms in cheap motels every once in a while just to take a shower; inspired equally by Jack Kerouac and John Muir.

I returned with a widened world view, or at least with wide opened eyes, amazed by the country’s sprawling geography and varied topography.

Maybe something can be said for the act of getting lost to find one’s self, of searching for a place to belong and realizing that you belong everywhere, and no where; that your place is the space in between. And that old standby about it not being the destination but the journey that holds true significance? It is tempered by more truth than I knew at the time, and still rings true to myself to this day.

Westward expansion began, in earnest, with the California Gold Rush of 1849. The first Model T Ford rolled off the assembly line in 1914, one year after the first transcontinental highway, the Lincoln Highway, was formally dedicated.

In the near-century since the age of the automobile unofficially began, the idea of the open road has become firmly entrenched in our collective pop culture subconscious- a romanticized symbol of the American Dream, synonymous with the notion of freedom and adventure, and roads leading west have held the promise of challenge and discovery, of a new life, of a second chance.

In song and cinema, in literature and legend, our highways become hallowed, the west remains wild. And upon returning east, if we do return, we realize that the true westward expansion is an expansion of the self.

It’s been a slow week here on Pho(Blog)Graphy Island, and the natives are enjoying some much deserved R & R after last month’s beachfront property overhaul, which proved to be a massive undertaking (but now my hut has wi-fi, and a mini bar!).

On days like these when the sun is high and the tide is low, I find myself gazing out at the endless blue expanse of the ocean the internet and wondering what my fellow photographers are composing and exposing back on the mainland.

With the recent reveal of this year’s PDN 30 and much of my cerebral cortex being devoted to the pre-production of a rather ambitious multimedia project coming up next week, I turn to my peers for inspiration.

So it is with a subjective eye (well it is my list) and a slightly incapacitated frame of mind (too much ‘coconut water’ from the mini bar) that I present to you the first annual (maybe) SGB 10.

Congratulations to the winners. You deserve a handshake. If ever meet you.

Josef Schulz

Kevin Cooley

Alejandra Laviada

David Emmite

Alec Soth

Edgar Martins

JJ Sulin

Kyoko Hamada

Brian Ulrich

Andrew Hetherington

A recent commercial interiors shoot for Superpages led me to the ghoulishly-named neighborhood of Gravesend in Brooklyn. Much to my masochistic dismay, Gravesend is home to more Chinese restaurants and Kosher markets than haunted houses and fog-shrouded cemeteries.

A ten-minute walk east from the Q train on Avenue U will lead you to a well hidden Brooklyn gastronomic tradition which has recently been outed on an episode of Man v. Food.

Established in 1938, Brennan & Carr is a wood-stained, brick-walled, Irish-named eatery serving up pub grub from a bare bones menu posted to the wall and printed on the placemats, doing so in the vaguely musky ambiance of a turn-of-the-century Bavarian hunting lodge.




What you come here for is the roast beef the hot beef sandwich, dunked- bun and all, in au jus. If you’d like, you can have another ladleful poured over top, at which time the sandwich becomes a soggy, beefy, salty, fork-and-knife-only affair.

I manned up for my inaugural Brennan & Carr experience and ordered the Gargulio burger- the hot beef sandwich plus hamburger patty, sauteed onions, and gooey melted cheddar cheese. And yes, the whole sandwich was dunked in it’s own broth.

The plating, the idea and the execution are simple. The resulting sandwich is an epiphany for carnivores, and for your taste buds.

Next time you find yourself in Gravesend (because I know you always go there, you know, for the Kosher markets, the Chinese takeouts, the tanning salons, and the Russian nightclubs) make sure you stop by Brennan & Carr for a hot beef sandwich. Have it dipped. If you’re daring, go for the pour.

I’m ready for seconds.

I’ve been soundtracking my end-of-the-decade tree trimming and chestnut roasting to the delightfully tipsy interpretations of holiday standards by the master craftsman, Bob Dylan.

Christmas In The Heart marks album number 47 for Dylan, and the first Christmas album of his nearly six-decade career which has seen a late renaissance of sorts since 1997’s Grammy-winning Time Out Of Mind up to last April’s Together Through Life.

And fear not, voice coaches, Christmas In The Heart features more of Dylan’s old-man-punched-in-the-throat-with-barbed-wire, tonsils-pulled-with-needle-nose-pliers, a-pack-and-a-half-a-day gargle and croon, albeit this time backed by saccharin-sweet harmonies, layers of syrupy nostalgia, and a quickly filled quota of jingling bells.

If you don’t flat out enjoy the album, you can at the very least debate with your fellow egg noggers the depth of Dylan’s objectivity during the recording process, as Christmas In The Heart continually teeters on the brink of ’so bad it’s good’ on a number of tracks that seem the result of an ill-fitting Santa suit, a half-drunk bottle of bourbon, and a late-night-on-Canal-Street karaoke machine.

It’s not until the rollicking barroom brawl/moonshine ho down of late-in-the-album track Must Be Santa that you get the idea that Dylan is in full control here, masterfully implying a measure of sly self-awareness and self-deprecating humor, as he toes it incredibly close to the line of Kmart portrait studio Santa Claus with a crying toddler up until the epiphany of this wool-pulled punch line.

As Stephen M. Deusner perfectly put it in his review of the album for Paste Magazine: “Musically, it’s wonderfully bad; conceptually, it’s just wonderful.”

This is one lump of coal that I wouldn’t mind finding at the bottom of my stocking.

I’ve been having a good time over the past month shooting, editing, and uploading snapshots from my iPhone with an app called Best Camera. After experimenting with photo apps on the iPhone, pro photographer Chase Jarvis designed Best Camera to be, well, the best camera app available.

And I have to say, he nearly got it perfect. (sliders on the app’s filters and a photog directory on the site please!)

What is probably the coolest feature of Best Camera is not it’s ability to snap and edit a pic with over a dozen photo filters like Contrast, Vignette, and Frame, not the app’s ability to automatically upload and share your pic on social networking juggernauts Facebook and Twitter, but the perpetually updating online gallery of images shot by other Best Camera photographers around the world.

At thebestcamera.com you can see a live feed of images as they are uploaded, can vote on your favorite images, and can filter images by the best of the hour, day, and month. And each Best Camera photographer gets their own gallery page which, over time, I can see building into a nice little visual diary for myself.

If you happen to not be following me on Twitter (why not?!) and are not a friend of mine on Facebook, then you can follow this link to my Best Camera portfolio. Check back often because I plan on shooting and uploading with Best Camera frequently.

Granted, the pictures in question are merely two-megapixel snapshots, most of them poorly exposed and overly noisy, but there is something honest about the imperfection of the image, the impressionistic factor, the immediacy of the moment and the ability to share it instantaneously.

Also, I like to take pictures of my food before I eat it.

I will be attending a concert this Saturday afternoon by ‘The Maverick Organist,’ Cameron Carpenter. I worked on a shoot with Cameron earlier this summer and posted about it here.

Since then, Cameron and I have completed two more photo shoots together, both with the intention of providing images for his upcoming double CD/DVD album releasing in the spring of next year.

I’ll have a few selections to show from these most recent shoots in a blog update in the not-too-distant future, as well as an update to the Musicians portfolio on my website.

Saturday’s performance will mark Cameron’s first at The Church of Saint Mary the Virgin in Times Square and will be recorded and released as the live CD portion of the aforementioned double album. All proceeds from the concert will go to benefit Cameron’s non profit Models Of Excellence musical heritage project.

…

Below is a look at the concert program, using a portrait of Cameron from our summer shoot as the main image. A full size PDF of the program can be downloaded at his website here, and tickets are still available here.

Consider it a unique opportunity to see a once in a generation performer whom has been called ‘a talent of Mozartean proportions,’ and leave your ecclesiastical-pipe-organ-funeral-dirge preconceptions at the door.

So it seems that I’ve finally jumped onto the microblogging bandwagon. I don’t know what’s next……a live streaming, real-time feed of my thoughts via USB cable coming out of my ear, posted directly to your computer monitors and smartphone screens like some ultra-personal, stream-of-consciousness infomercial?

If only I could hire Billy Mays to sell me, to package my personality and professional skills into a shrink wrapped, focus group approved, three-easy-payments product of a charming young man and creative photographer.

Rest in peace, last of the pitchmen.

…

Well, until the Matrix reveals itself, Keanu Reeves will remain more “Ted” Theodore Logan than The One, and we will continue to microblog our last lunches and LOST Season 6 theories via Twitter.

If you’re curious, you can follow mine here.

Excellent, dude.

During my recent trip to Japan, I spent some time browsing the photography aisles of a few fine art book stores in Shibuya. My knowledge of contemporary Japanese photography was quite limited prior to my trip although I was fortunate enough to see an excellent retrospective last year at the International Center of Photography on this very topic.

It also seems that doing a basic internet search does not yield many solid results other than a long, phonetically challenging, alphabetical list of names on Wikipedia and photoguide.jp that, upon first glance, seems quite daunting to dive in to.

The best source that I have found is the well written and regularly updated blog, Japan Exposures.

One series of images that has stayed with me from the ICP exhibition is Asako Narahashi’s half awake and half asleep in the water- it’s subject drifting further from the shore, a hypnotic meditation which is able to balance a surreal buoyancy with an oppressive sense of aquaphobia:

A contemporary photographer’s work that I was introduced to in Tokyo and greatly admire is that of Nakano Masataka, specifically his Tokyo Nobody series, with its desolate streets and empty intersections capturing an otherworldly stillness and commenting on the impermanence of permanence. With the tranquility comes a slight sense of unease, of trepidation- I am left not thinking of the moment captured but of the moments prior to and post, wondering what happened and what will happen next:

The inverse voyeurism of Masataka-san’s Tokyo Windows series is also of note.

There seems to be a tangible sense of searching and longing to the contemporary Japanese photography that I am drawn to, even a slight sense of melancholia, of isolation. Like trying in vain to capture a fleeting moment that will not come to pass again, trying to impress stasis upon inertia.

Maybe this, in some way, is representative of the dichotomy that is modern day Japan- pre-war traditions, rigidity, and isolationism trying to strike a balance with post-war reality, modernism, and cultural assimilation, especially in regards to the work of the venerable and prolific Daido Moriyama:




In any case, the mood and message is most certainly subjective, but I feel that I can learn from the raw emotion and textured aesthetic inherent to much of contemporary Japanese photography in relation to the often calculated geometry, didacticism, and minimalism that I tend to favor in my work.

In regards to my study of said topic, I am most certainly at the tip of a very large iceberg, or shall I say, at the tip of Mt. Fuji.