New Years Day Forecast.

The weather map of all my homes for Monday, January 1, 2007.



Getting out of town proves complicated from Bangor, Maine to coastal Rhode Island as I planned to do tomorrow.

Amity liked the colors so we printed two copies of this picture and framed them.

I've spent the morning in the warroom playroom, making things while studying weather maps and bus timetables. Planning. Then calling to execute plans. Machias looking out of the question. Wondering instead to try returning to RI tomorrow or play it safe and return tonight?

Sigh.

Amity

Goodbye 2006

A moment to blog. Having a ball in Maine with Amity. The ride up with Micah from Manchester to Bangor was also wonderful on Thursday. We hung out more this weekend than we have since graduation in '99. The past three days have been spent cooking, creating, shopping, organizing. Am & I both felt the need to exorcise 2006.

And this morning we head to Machias for New Years Eve and to ring in 2007 with Micah, Tom, Chloe and whomever else we find. And of course, there will be pix. I have been shooting like a fiend (over 300 shots yesterday alone), and look forward to digging through all of it when I get home to Chicago.

But for now, it's upstairs to Nikki's for morning coffee. The plan is to get to Machias for Haddockburgers and Lemon Meringue pie by noon.

It feels sooooooo good to be back here.

Happy New Year!

Holiday Hiatus

Holiday Greetings! You may have noticed I've been away from the bloggery the past few days, during the Christmas holidays. I'm back in Rhode Island with my family, taking a much-needed break from my day-to-day.

I will post intermittently between now and January 4, when I return to Chicago. In the meantime, I am working on a photo project at the Gaspee House, documenting it before it is torn down in Spring 2007 to make way for my parents' new house. I will upload pix as I am able to do so.

This holiday hiatus also allows me some time to head back to Maine and visit with friends and dear ones for New Year's. As I will be with Amity most of the time, I look forward to a few days of creativity immersion. The results will be flickr'd n' blogg'd, claro :)

At any rate, holiday love and cheer to all of you out there. See you soon!

Cosmos

Whilst perusing MSN this morning, I saw a brief article about a blog-a-thon dedicated to Carl Sagan in honor of the ten year anniversary of his death in December 1996. As a small child I was fascinated by space. I can recall borrowing Sagan's book Cosmos from the library when I was maybe 7 or 8 years old. Not that I read it cover to cover, or that I recall anything I read over 20 years ago, but I remember my young imagination being so captivated by his ideas, and the idea of his ideas.



Since his death, humanity has been blessed with the gorgeous images returned to Earth by the Hubble telescope. In a related article on MSN, Sagan's widow and Cosmos collaborator Ann Druyan talks about how Sagan would have adored those images. Truly, the Hubble telescope is one of the great human achievements of all time, considering what those pictures from deep space have revealed, both scientifically and aesthetically. The photographer in me gets lost in those pictures every time I see them, but they also appeal to the small child still trying to make sense of the universe.



I also recall how embattled the Hubble telescope was, particularly in the early days when the calculations were off and the first images returned were fuzzy. It was too expensive, too grandiose. But now, many years and countless pictures later, it's hard to imagine not having those photographs of nebulae or stellar nurseries in all that riotous color.



I can't help but think that people like Carl Sagan contributed to the popular understanding of and passion for exploring the universe. Speaking strictly from the point of view of an artist and educator (I'll let others debate the science), I feel a debt of gratitude to Sagan. If nothing else, his work sparked my imagination as a child, and I have devoured imagery from space ever since. But his ability to reach out and capture the imaginations of others, through television and books, sparked countless other ideas and passions as well.



Like the universe, the effects of such a man's work are vast, infinite, and largely unknowable.

Erin & Nick's Wedding

In July 2006, two of my dearest friends got married in Salem, Massachusetts after almost 10 years together. I had the honor to not only watch a beautiful relationship grow over the years, but also of shooting pictures at their wedding. Here are a few:

SpyCam Chicago, 2004

In the days before I owned a camera phone, there was the SpyCam.



My dad got it for me by using Marlboro miles. He doesn't smoke, but he has a network of donors. He gets the coolest stuff.



Anyway, the SpyCam is about the size of a credit card and took about 26 small but decent-sized pix. Its heyday was March and April 2004, when I was new to Chicago and exploring my new home.



Sadly, I busted out SpyCam the other day and it's dead. I think Dad still has one though. Long live SpyCam!!! Even though the RAZR has replaced it, we shall remember it fondly.



To see more from SpyCam, click any of these pix. This will take you to the set in my Flickr Account.

En la Quinta Luisana

By 2004, after grad school, I was still focusing on interiors. I found this to be a wonderful reprieve for me during my first trip to Valencia. Being immersed in a language in which one is not fluent is exhausting. It's thrilling, and hands-down the best way to learn. But every tiny human interaction requires THOUGHT and EFFORT. We really take for granted how automatically we behave in our native cultural and linguistic contexts.

So, my interest in interiors gave me some quiet time, away from the frustrations and triumphs of trying to communicate verbally, and allowed me instead to immerse myself in what my eyes could see and camera could record . . . It was the most fluent way in which I could communicate. For a change.

A la finca, 2004

A day of rest and harvesting out on the ranch.

Mi familia venezolana, 2004

Quinta Luisana, Calle Acuario. AK y la familia Vargas: Pepe, Marlene, Luisana, Maria Fernanda. Te quiero mucho!

Figure Work

Stacy & I used to trade off modeling for one another in grad school. As a photographer and ballet dancer, she is a great model. She knows how to move, and knows how to make a photograph. She's also an incredible contortionist, and recovering anorexic, about which she was very open, and with which she struggled every single day.



I wanted high-contrast black & white images with an other-worldly quality, wherein the figure is abstracted, but only slightly, so that it still suggests the figure, but begins to suggest other things too.



The banner with the repeated rotating image suggests calligraphy, for example.



Stacy's body also has an androgynous quality in these images, which hints toward that subtle abstraction as well.



I attempted a fair amount of figure work at Iowa, and to be honest, I never found it to be very successful. It's just not easy to do it right. In fact, the thing about figure work is that it's really easy to do it wrong, I've found. Maybe it's just not my medium. Or maybe the real challenge is in the relationship between the model and the photographer. As a once and former nude artist's model myself, I can attest that it's not easy to do --- not because of being naked, but because you need to have that "it" factor to be a good model. So maybe that's it.

At any rate, I have always felt that these images accomplished what I wanted them to be. And I do think I might try it again, working with models. Perhaps the most important thing as a photographer is knowing what you want to make, regardless of models and media.

Courtney Love & The Decline of Western Civilization, Part II

I'm staying up late, blogging and watching the above-mentioned film about glam metal in the 80's. I think I'm going to use part of it as a metaphor for the Rococo period in the 18th century next semester. I also think that Poison's "Talk Dirty to Me" is one of the best damned rockin' out songs EVER. For what it's worth.

Before that, I watched a documentary called The Return of Courtney Love. Hole's 1994 album "Live Through This" is one of my all-time girl-angst favorites --- and I don't do girl angst, preferring male singers and songwriters probably ten to one. But her talent is abundant, and her very public life cycles through the highest highs and the lowest lows. She's kind of an archetype these days: the widow, the drug addict, the mother, the rocker, the Oscar-nominated actress. She's everything and nothing. At any rate, she's working on a new album, according to the documentary, the working title of which is called "How Dirty Girls get Clean." I love redemption. And the scenes from the recording studios reveal some really promising work.

I wonder when it comes out.

Cloud Studies

Thunderheads over Iowa City.


Spring means storms in Iowa, as the world is born again in violent turbulence and glorious shadows and light.


I loved this moment of watching these clouds shift and advance, conquering a gorgeous sunny day and, moments later, turning it gray and windswept and pelted with hail.



But for this moment . . .

SlipHunger

The divine Miss Kate, of the synchronous path, my alpha, my confidante and raconteur, enlisted me in 2003 to photograph this piece called SlipHunger. It was the final project for a ceramics class, oddly enough. It was supremely interdisciplinary, incorporating installation and performance art, as well as the photographs that documented it. I loved the piece, and loved being a part of it.

The piece involved she and her three groupmates sculpting an enormous clay vessel. They then installed the vessel at the edge of the woods near a clearing, and Trent got inside.



The other three members then filled the vessel with three colors of slip. Slip is a slurry of clay and water that is used in sculpting in clay and creating ceramic pieces. It feels silky and divine and utterly sexy to the touch. Once Trent was sealed up in the slip, they covered the vessel.



The groupmates had also created small vessels full of slip, as I recall, like little eggs. They assembled those near the large vessel, and invited the audience outside to smash the eggs. Then, Trent smashed through his egg-vessel. The slip on his skin was gorgeous, and that was what my eye was drawn to. I also loved the ideas of creation and destruction and decadence, of immersing yourself in the materials and media and wearing your art on your skin.



And a sweet pretty boy's skin at that.

No War

Mmmm. Hippies. I miss hippies.