05.07.2010 | 08:58 PM •
A few screws, a little time, and this...

04.08.2010 | 02:34 PM •
The photographer who took some of the most
influential photographs of the 20th Century (and made
the word Leica a household name) is having a giant
posthumous retrospective at
MOMA. This photo, taken in
April of 1945, though less artful and more
strictly photojournalistic, is one which has
always resonated with me. Besides the explosive
emotion, there’s a novel’s worth of content
which can be extrapolated from the scene. For
those of us who were schooled in the decisive
moment street photography aesthetic, HCB is a
god. His genius was not only in his timing, but
in his distance. Asked once about what inspired
him to trip the shutter when he did, he said,
I’m paraphrasing,
“La géometrie.” True,
but like Bach who pretended that all his
compositions were nothing more than mathematical
variations, form is clearly married to passion
throughout HCB’s work. What makes the show,
which opens Sunday, a real treat is that many
never before seen photos will be on view, some
of which are included on the
HCB, The Modern
Century’s web
preview.
03.25.2010 | 12:54 AM •
An image rediscovered from 5 years ago when testing
out Adobe’s new
Lightroom 3 beta, which is
fantastic btw.
03.24.2010 | 11:49 PM •
I discovered a neat little
program which records your
mouse movement (clicks, pauses, trails) as you
work on your computer. Above is 3 hours of mouse
activity around my desktop. Below is 7.4 minutes
of mousing without the background. Looks pretty,
means nothing, but is very fun.
01.27.2010 | 10:02 PM •
A bunch of salt and pepper packets came with my egg
and bacon on a roll. Interestingly, they were about
the size of the thumbnails on my
Pierrot 2.0 promo card.
01.21.2010 | 10:28 PM •
My friends LuLu LoLo and Dan Evans are staging a
production of
The Straitjacket, a
fictionalized play about Emily Dickinson in the
Metropolitan Playhouse’s Another
Sky program on American women writers.
12.16.2009 | 09:40 PM •
Finishing up my last shoot of the year, I discovered
some scaled-down maquettes of paintings used to
design an upcoming exhibition of Alex Katz’s work.
11.17.2009 | 11:06 AM •
We had nearly completed documenting over 60 years of
his work, when he died on November 11th. An obit is
on the NYT
here.
10.31.2009 | 11:38 PM •
Many gigabytes of my video, sound, and body data were
recorded by artist
Paulette Phillips in Room 17
at Atlantic Center for the Arts. Ever the cruel
sadist, Paulette forced us to tell lies under
threat of high-voltage electronic shock as we
were strapped naked to a medieval chair. Do I
lie? I lie. A really interesting art project
actually, and I was glad to be data harvested.

10.18.2009 | 11:52 PM •
Coincidentally, I was looking through a catalog
raisonée of Gerhard Richter's work on the 32nd
anniversary of the biggest events of the German
Autumn on October 18, 1977. I am returning to a novel
which takes some of its inspiration from the tragic,
misplaced angst of the RAF.
10.06.2009 | 10:53 PM •
A blurred closeup of Irving Kriesberg's oil paint
palette. More about the 90-year old artist, whose
work I have been documenting, in future posts.
03.08.2008 | 09:44 PM •
Framing—what else is street photography about?
Windows within windows. Rectangles within rectangles.
A grid of views. A bento box of subjects.
Raghubir Singh, who took the above picture, is my
favorite Indian photographer. He made a great book of
pictures called
A Way into India,
which featured the Ambassador, India's
ubiquitous version of the VW, as object and
frame for his peregrinations through his
colorful homeland. Check out some of his
pictures
here.
10.24.2007 | 03:41 PM •
If you haven't been following Errol Morris'
indefatigable research into which of Roger Fenton's
two pictures of the Valley of the Shadow of Death
came first, it is definitely worth a read (
part1,
part2,
part3). Like a one-manned JFK assassination
inquiry, Morris tries to refute Susan Sontag's claim
that the photo with the canon balls on the road was
staged, "a fake." This whole subject is fascinating
for photographers like me who strive to document
reality, but know that aesthetics often trump when
the subject is mundane. Here are the two photos in
question. Now, which was shot first and why?
OFF
ON