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.

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!