Hello all, i hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season, I myself have had quite a rough one... but now its back to the New York grind after a hiatus in North Carolina...
I quickly wanted to pass along an interesting project that Marvin Heiferman asked me to share. He has been working on a very interesting project at the Smithsonian called "Click! Photography Changes Everything." It is a web based project that will, as I understand, connect the massive Smithsonian photography archives up with contemporary contributors (a wonderful list has already been compiled and is available via the website). The goal is to examine the way photographs function and one of the ways is to have people contribute essays as well as photographs that they have either taken or something that is memorable.
So before I muck up the true essence of the project any more I encurrage you to check it out. They are currently accepting submissions from the public but it is also worth your time to browse the site in general.
Stay well and warm!
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Monday, December 22, 2008
In Charlotte...
Hello Hello! So, after a super rough month of end of the semester projects, stress, no sleep, and so on... also in the midst of all of this I had a group show and open studios which resulted in some not to nice comments from the people i live with (more in a second) and then two days later my uncle died, the only one left in my family on that side other than my dad and little sister... Then i drove his jeep all the way down to north carolina a good 10 hours without any music by myself not knowing if im in a death trap or not! haha... but i made it safe and sound and i'm here with my girlfriend, which is the best part!
So... Finals are finaly over and its made me realize just how much of my life is dedicated to grad school studies... all of it. And now i am on break but it doesnt feel like it becuase i still have so much to do... and even more emotional repairs and cares to take on now that i have time! but all that said... it comes with the territory and its great... just overwhelming. It also made me realize how this blog has become more about the school stuff than what it used to be... which i dont really like... so i'm going to try to shy away from that...
So, to start - my work has always been and probably will always be the type of work that is considered racy by some... there is a lot of nudity and so on that reoccurs throughout my work... but it is in no sense classless or tasteless or ill considered. And i guess living in the art bubble that i do with all of my fellow artists i never really get any negative feedback in that area, its all just kinda accepted without too much thought. Nudity has been in art for centuries, actualy since the beggining of art history, which is accredted most often to the Venus of Willendorf - a nude female most popularly thought to be a sign of fertility. So, it should come as no surpise that thousands of years later we still have nudity in art.
All of that said, in the show/open studios that is a part of my program, two pieces of work were chosen from my most recent series which shows my girlfriend nude and one of my lower torso and legs and her nude in bed. The two pieces were chosen by a commite of people to be a part of the show and i didnt have any say really. Anyhow, i was going to display them in my studio anyhow, so they were to be shown.
I invited everyone i knew in NY (not too many people) including the family that i live with. Only one of them was able to make it, the 22 year old daughter, and she reported back to her mom who completely blew everything out of proportion and got really upset with me. I do not need to go into any details here but it was very upseting... I just couldnt understand how a 22 year old could be so immature but more importantly how her liberal mom would be so offended by simple nudity.
anyhow, it made me reconsider how work is seen and interpreted and it really makes me confused for the most part...
so thats that.... i'm going to try to update the blog more often now that i have some spare time...
i hope everyones hollidays are what they desire.
So... Finals are finaly over and its made me realize just how much of my life is dedicated to grad school studies... all of it. And now i am on break but it doesnt feel like it becuase i still have so much to do... and even more emotional repairs and cares to take on now that i have time! but all that said... it comes with the territory and its great... just overwhelming. It also made me realize how this blog has become more about the school stuff than what it used to be... which i dont really like... so i'm going to try to shy away from that...
So, to start - my work has always been and probably will always be the type of work that is considered racy by some... there is a lot of nudity and so on that reoccurs throughout my work... but it is in no sense classless or tasteless or ill considered. And i guess living in the art bubble that i do with all of my fellow artists i never really get any negative feedback in that area, its all just kinda accepted without too much thought. Nudity has been in art for centuries, actualy since the beggining of art history, which is accredted most often to the Venus of Willendorf - a nude female most popularly thought to be a sign of fertility. So, it should come as no surpise that thousands of years later we still have nudity in art.
All of that said, in the show/open studios that is a part of my program, two pieces of work were chosen from my most recent series which shows my girlfriend nude and one of my lower torso and legs and her nude in bed. The two pieces were chosen by a commite of people to be a part of the show and i didnt have any say really. Anyhow, i was going to display them in my studio anyhow, so they were to be shown.
I invited everyone i knew in NY (not too many people) including the family that i live with. Only one of them was able to make it, the 22 year old daughter, and she reported back to her mom who completely blew everything out of proportion and got really upset with me. I do not need to go into any details here but it was very upseting... I just couldnt understand how a 22 year old could be so immature but more importantly how her liberal mom would be so offended by simple nudity.
anyhow, it made me reconsider how work is seen and interpreted and it really makes me confused for the most part...
so thats that.... i'm going to try to update the blog more often now that i have some spare time...
i hope everyones hollidays are what they desire.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Site Update
So, I've finally had a chance to update my website. There has been a period of about six months where I could not even edit my site at all - we've since fixed that problem only to be wound up in another, where some of my code is unresponsive and the domain is locked to my old server while I'm transitioning to a new one (due to the above problems!).
ANYHOW, its updated - there is a new series with the working heading of "In Progress" It is a collection of 20 new images from my exploration of sex in photography.
Also, I am starting a new series that I'm very excited about, coming from a very related conceptual background as the sex photography. I am asking people to send in images taken from their cell phones that they either took for, or took-in-the-manner-of, their lovers if they were absent from them. The resulting self portraits are a diverse range of mainly sexy-like myspace images of varying quality and size. I then edit these photographs and pick one from each person and I will draw that picture on a 30X40 inch scale.
The idea here is taking the vernacular and personal and bringing into the public sphere and as art... Thats the simple version... we will see how it develops.
so anyhow, check out the new work on My Site.
ANYHOW, its updated - there is a new series with the working heading of "In Progress" It is a collection of 20 new images from my exploration of sex in photography.
Also, I am starting a new series that I'm very excited about, coming from a very related conceptual background as the sex photography. I am asking people to send in images taken from their cell phones that they either took for, or took-in-the-manner-of, their lovers if they were absent from them. The resulting self portraits are a diverse range of mainly sexy-like myspace images of varying quality and size. I then edit these photographs and pick one from each person and I will draw that picture on a 30X40 inch scale.
The idea here is taking the vernacular and personal and bringing into the public sphere and as art... Thats the simple version... we will see how it develops.
so anyhow, check out the new work on My Site.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Fancy Cameras...
So, I have always wanted a Mamiya 43mm f4.5 superwide lens for my Mamiya 7II camera... but the damn thing is so expensive! So, now that I'm at ICP I decided to try my luck and see if they would buy one so that I could use it... I e-mailed this person and that - nothing, wait wait waiting... so I decided to take matters a little higher and e-mailed the head of the entire school, Phil Block. We'll he looked it over and sure enough, he went ahead and told the director of the photo cage/ darkroom/ digital to order one. A week and much anticipation later, I biked down to the school and finally held this beautiful lens in my hand for the first time. The damn thing is perfect. There is no distortion, its a 43mm hitting a 6X7 negative frame... were talking you can practically see your feet and the horizon in a single frame with no distortion! The advantage of this lens is that its pretty much the only superwide for a handheld camera with no distortion and this large of a negative. It compares very much to the Hasselblad Superwide Camera, however the Hassie lacks in a couple fields, first its a smaller neg. second, there is not focusing mechanism - you have to measure or guess and third, the Hassie is more expensive. The only complaint I have about the Mamiya is that the external view finder uses up the hot shoe so you cant use on camera flash and that the going back and forth from view finder to rangefinder (which controls meetering and focus) is a little cumbersome - but well worth it!
Here are some images -
The focal distance at f16 and 22 is 1 meter to infinity! and this is what the frame looks like from eye level. There is a handy little bubble in there if you want exact parallels.
I also got one of these -
The Leica C-lux camera is a handy little thing... its about the size of my cell phone and shoots at 7.2 megapixels... After my Canon 40D got stolen I felt lacking not having a digital but realized that I dont really need the bulk and cost of something like the 40D (or the new 50D)... I dont shoot profesionaly with digital anyhow and the only thing that i really enjoyed about the 40D was all of the control I had over it, but i was still just shooting friends and such. So this little thing i carry wherever i go, it weighs less than my cell phone, and is great fun. I kind of wish i had bought one of the higher grade Leica compact digitals, but that is just me being picky - for what i use it for, it hardly matters.
Here are some images -
The focal distance at f16 and 22 is 1 meter to infinity! and this is what the frame looks like from eye level. There is a handy little bubble in there if you want exact parallels.
I also got one of these -
The Leica C-lux camera is a handy little thing... its about the size of my cell phone and shoots at 7.2 megapixels... After my Canon 40D got stolen I felt lacking not having a digital but realized that I dont really need the bulk and cost of something like the 40D (or the new 50D)... I dont shoot profesionaly with digital anyhow and the only thing that i really enjoyed about the 40D was all of the control I had over it, but i was still just shooting friends and such. So this little thing i carry wherever i go, it weighs less than my cell phone, and is great fun. I kind of wish i had bought one of the higher grade Leica compact digitals, but that is just me being picky - for what i use it for, it hardly matters.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Finaly...
I have a minute to write!!!
ICP's master program has been amazing so far... but honestly its a lot of really intense work that doesn't leave me much time to do anything else but work on stuff for classes and sleep - the sleep part being the most neglected. I find myself trying to "take breaks" by looking at and reading about photography - or even drawing a little... but this just leaves me up until the wee hours of the morning. Not to mention I bike at least an hour a day, but that hardly helps to relax in NYC.... I've only been hit once so far though... so that's a plus (i guess?).
anyhow, i've been doing a lot of research on sex in art and photography... specifically the sexual act as portrayed by photographers/other artists such as a Jeff Koons, Mappplethorp, Serrano, Natacha Merrit, Barbra Nitke (one of my professors), and so on... After looking at hundreds of images and a few films, what i've noticed is that the inclination of these artists is to really get into the nitty gritty of what the actual act is... with the exception of some of Nitke's work and maybe some of Merrits... Serrano just kind of catalouges the different aspects of sex in his "history of sex," Koons goes all out porn sytle with huge photorealistic paintings of him and his wife, and the rest just looks like really well done and historically relivent works due to sexual frustration and/or shock value art... I do not discount any of these artists for their acomplishments - in fact i love most of their work (voiding Koons)but the research has left me lacking... I am embarking on my own photographic project dealing with the nature of sex and really feel its important to develop a narrative... sex is very interesting and multilayered... the anticipatory feeling one has sitting at a bar with a beautiful partner can often rival the feeling of receiving oral sex for example... so are those feelings not just as important? and what of the sex act itself... their is this huge build up of expectations, emotions, chemical reactions, and so on... untill its all done and one cums or whatever happens and then its like this dramatic fall after the slow and powerful build up... what about that fall? its not the cum shot as in Koons' work... (its not really shown in many others)... there is something more complex and almost depressing about it - so far i've only seen this depicted in Geoffroy de Boise's work (or maybe merry alpern's images of the women counting their money after being paid for their sex)... but even that seems like excitement and not depression. When i speak of depression i dont mean in the literal depressed state, but more a depressed feeling after a huge build up, a return back to normal... Also, i see very little of any sexual expression, gender reversal, or feminism... (seranno excluded and possibly Merrit) Everything seems to be so male dominated and kind of ridiculous... I've asked myself, and have not articulated the answer to, what is the difference between porn and art that looks almost exactly like porn??? Anyhow in my series I am challenging myself to entertain notions of extended narrative, gender reversal, intimacy, and transformation of porn-sex into art-sexuality. who knows how it will turn out... but i'm going for it!
ICP's master program has been amazing so far... but honestly its a lot of really intense work that doesn't leave me much time to do anything else but work on stuff for classes and sleep - the sleep part being the most neglected. I find myself trying to "take breaks" by looking at and reading about photography - or even drawing a little... but this just leaves me up until the wee hours of the morning. Not to mention I bike at least an hour a day, but that hardly helps to relax in NYC.... I've only been hit once so far though... so that's a plus (i guess?).
anyhow, i've been doing a lot of research on sex in art and photography... specifically the sexual act as portrayed by photographers/other artists such as a Jeff Koons, Mappplethorp, Serrano, Natacha Merrit, Barbra Nitke (one of my professors), and so on... After looking at hundreds of images and a few films, what i've noticed is that the inclination of these artists is to really get into the nitty gritty of what the actual act is... with the exception of some of Nitke's work and maybe some of Merrits... Serrano just kind of catalouges the different aspects of sex in his "history of sex," Koons goes all out porn sytle with huge photorealistic paintings of him and his wife, and the rest just looks like really well done and historically relivent works due to sexual frustration and/or shock value art... I do not discount any of these artists for their acomplishments - in fact i love most of their work (voiding Koons)but the research has left me lacking... I am embarking on my own photographic project dealing with the nature of sex and really feel its important to develop a narrative... sex is very interesting and multilayered... the anticipatory feeling one has sitting at a bar with a beautiful partner can often rival the feeling of receiving oral sex for example... so are those feelings not just as important? and what of the sex act itself... their is this huge build up of expectations, emotions, chemical reactions, and so on... untill its all done and one cums or whatever happens and then its like this dramatic fall after the slow and powerful build up... what about that fall? its not the cum shot as in Koons' work... (its not really shown in many others)... there is something more complex and almost depressing about it - so far i've only seen this depicted in Geoffroy de Boise's work (or maybe merry alpern's images of the women counting their money after being paid for their sex)... but even that seems like excitement and not depression. When i speak of depression i dont mean in the literal depressed state, but more a depressed feeling after a huge build up, a return back to normal... Also, i see very little of any sexual expression, gender reversal, or feminism... (seranno excluded and possibly Merrit) Everything seems to be so male dominated and kind of ridiculous... I've asked myself, and have not articulated the answer to, what is the difference between porn and art that looks almost exactly like porn??? Anyhow in my series I am challenging myself to entertain notions of extended narrative, gender reversal, intimacy, and transformation of porn-sex into art-sexuality. who knows how it will turn out... but i'm going for it!
Saturday, August 30, 2008
looking at thousands of photographs
So, since wed. i have basically been sitting at home, at the kitchen table, for about 8 hours a day looking at photographs and reading about them... both in books and online... my eyes burn, my head is going to explode... but ICP has given me a week off before classes start and i guess i am just trying to prep myself... plus i am really feeling lacking in my own inspiration as far as what i will take pictures of. its not easy moving from a place where no matter where you go, everyone pretty much knows you, to a place where you know almost no one... and those you know live in brooklyn or something and you have to schedule appointments with them to meet up.
anyhow, i have also been researching what i think will be my next series... an exploration of my memories through journaling and ultimately photographs... not an easy task but one that i am willing to embark on.
anyhow, try looking at a billion photographs over the course of a few days... its insane... your mind stops working... photographers names run together, you forget things you know you know... its weird...
but its what i want to do for now.
anyhow, i have also been researching what i think will be my next series... an exploration of my memories through journaling and ultimately photographs... not an easy task but one that i am willing to embark on.
anyhow, try looking at a billion photographs over the course of a few days... its insane... your mind stops working... photographers names run together, you forget things you know you know... its weird...
but its what i want to do for now.
Friday, August 29, 2008
NYC
I am now living in New York City. I was unbelievably lucky to find a place via fellow chicago photographer, Jordan Schulman, in the upper west side right next to central park... I love it here and the neighborhood is fantastic. I had orientation at the International Center of Photography and it was fantastic. The facilities are just incredible... they gave me keys to my studio... i met the other nine students in the first year masters class and some of the second year class... it just seems so perfect in all ways!
for some reason i already feel at home here in NY, even though i have only visited before and never lived here. I am truly a city boy at heart and i just love it.
Biking here is very similar to chicago except i've noticed that you just have more of those close call situations and the roads are horrible... there will be holes, huge mountain like hills of pavement, uneven grates, yada yada... and the cabs come just that much closer... but i love it! all the more invigorating! i revamped my bike, putting white cut off risers, finally a front break instead of no breaks (already has come in handy), a new silver and black chain, and i bought a kriptonite chain lock...
I cant wait to begin working... i have so much that i want to print and develop...
More updates to come soon!
for some reason i already feel at home here in NY, even though i have only visited before and never lived here. I am truly a city boy at heart and i just love it.
Biking here is very similar to chicago except i've noticed that you just have more of those close call situations and the roads are horrible... there will be holes, huge mountain like hills of pavement, uneven grates, yada yada... and the cabs come just that much closer... but i love it! all the more invigorating! i revamped my bike, putting white cut off risers, finally a front break instead of no breaks (already has come in handy), a new silver and black chain, and i bought a kriptonite chain lock...
I cant wait to begin working... i have so much that i want to print and develop...
More updates to come soon!
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