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.
Tokyo Juxtaposed- my series of photographs pairing cultural and aesthetic imagery from modern-day Japan, went on display last Thursday at Supercore in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. A small opening event marked the occasion. Old friends came out to show their support, new friends were made, and a good time was had by all in attendance.
The evening was anchored by the marathon beat/noise mashup of Loud Objects vs. DJ Nori, which allowed the juxtapositions to extend from the images on the walls and the projections on the ceiling to the sounds filling the space, and turned a darkened room into an intimate mixed media environment for a small crowd.
Below you’ll find a selection of snapshots from the evening followed by a few low resolution high definition (what?) video clips.
Thanks again to all who attended, to Katie, Kunal, and Nori for their sonic foreplay, and to Yoko and the rest of the Supercore staff for having us.
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.
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.
