once again...

i am wanting to ask my parents what I was like when I was a child. I am remembering the subtleties of a life that I am no longer surrounded by.  And It is those minute memories that haunt me rather than the big ones, as usual. The brisk saturday mornings in my father's car on the way to gymnastics practice. I did gymnastics? Now I cant even spell it. I was so bad at the high bars, I do remember that. We have photographs of my parents wedding day, and even those are enough to bring me to tears but I'm wondering about the everyday buzz of life and what it was like for them. The songs that made their hearts tender over and over, what they felt when they woke up in the morning when it was raining, how the felt about their parents and how they felt about death. My parents were so good looking in those photographs, they were so young and full of life, but there was something about them that I am still struggling to translate. Something that transcends youth, happiness, or anything else. The funny thing is ive felt more passionate about them and this than anyone else in life. 

Ephemeral Art, Eternal Idea

blueprint, instructions to bring forth an idea is the real enginuity

 to address-the parallels between art and technology, art and life, art progressing at the the same pace

the need for representation- prevailing only in idea

the power of the idea, the power of the visual?

idea being the most valuable, powerful part of the art

the studio- a place to reflect, realize ideas, then make them materialize

work that is site specific.

everyone tell their own story bit its a tale which at best will become someone elses story

observer completes the work of art- observer reacts in accordance to his own past experieces

sets

tense relationships

it is 2008, picture a middle aged man coming home to an empty house, collared shirt and pants still on, staring into the fridge, face illuminated. staring into the fridge the same way your father is staring into the computer screen day in day out. the same way mother stares off into the black window into the black night as she washed dishes. This is  everyday life ,un-enthused, often lonely, and most of all tired. Everyone is so tired. I here it in my fathers voice when I call the business line,  in the recording message, forced English words from a foreign tongue, all for the business, all for the money. none of it means anything. We all do things that we don't want to do. Isnt it funny how people train themselves to refrain from reacting, learn to just accept the discontent, "im not happy, but who is?" Maybe this is just what happens as you get older. 

back to these..

flux proposal

For this particular body of work, Masha Badinter and Sarah Quick are confronting the ideas of voyeurism and surveillance through the remodeling and re-appropriation of the photographic image. We would like to give viewers the chance to experience these images, vicariously as the voyuers, in a gallery setting without the discomfort or fear with which these roles are usually associated with.  This theme is inspired by the connection between personal information and images in terms of their availability and accessibility. This connection is based on the paradox of privacy and on the web versus in real life. There is something very peculiar about not only the amount of information one is willing to display on the internet, but even more so, how much advantage another will take of it. Furthermore we have chosen to apply the boundless

Sarah Quick

perhaps web based communites, and the way people function within them are similar to the Because people not only put their own lives up on the internet but look at others, everyone has become a sort of voyeur. at the same time there are these constant lease for personal privacy against the government so its a real dichotomy. The  blahblahblah

notes

windows and lights coming out of darkness

floating 

glowing 

blinking 

buzzing

dim

reflections 

projecting on cotton or thin materials {tule?} or ither fabrics?

colors bleeding evoking serene mysterious cosmic vibrations

colors that are sexy and sultry and warm

contrasting the black

bleeding sun

reflection of the moving sun

movement

lines going towards the center

bus ride

bus ride with the bleeding sun

this will son be something other than a photograph

moment (grandma's hand)

street moves

association

hospital blues

lens correction

familia

antwerpen

MEGAWORDS VIDEO #2

If you see this in a window come inside!!!!!!

amsterdam

I miss you.

MEGAWORDS!

VIDEO #1 

something else

out of 10, these are the 4 poloroids that came out. Definitely a learning experience.  

So back to the view camera project. The plan i thought up was reworked when i realized how much money it would cost as well as the importance of aesthetics. I decided on going right into instant color film because the photos being in color are very important to me. Furthermore sheet film (which would have to be developed elsewhere) for the camera for 75$ for 10 sheets. The only possibility was with Fuji FP-100c color instant film ($35.99 for 10 sheets). 

I took the camera to N. American St right below Lehigh Ave because there is this dump that has glorious mountains of trash which so elegantly tower over some over  grown weed-trees behind a rotting tall green fence with barbed wire at the top. 

I was out there for 10-20 minutes just setting up the camera before the first police car stopped by to investigate. The two cops first asked if I was shooting  a movie, then asked if they could be in it, then  remembered that it was against their duties as officers of the law to appear as officers of the law in my movie which i wasn't even making. I had a few more run-ins with other concerned/curious folks of N. American St but thats not really what this blog is supposed to be about is it?

Anyway i wasted about 5 pictures- three are white, one is black, one is blue. I finally got the hang of it  and have about 4-5 pictures that i can work with. I then decided i needed more film now that i am getting the hang of reading the light meter and setting the aperture and shutter correctly.

I go back to calumet ready to drop another $35.99 for another 10 pack of film to find out that i had bought the last pack way back when i was there and the two closest locations were Boston or Japan. With the holiday just around the corner the store was closing early, i had 3 hours to find someone that i semi-knew that would be willing to drive to Cambridge pick up the film and wait about 5-7 hours for me to get there as I had convinced a friend with a car that a road-trip to Boston is just what we need right now. Sadly it didn't happen. 

So because of this I have taken the project in a bit of a new direction. The project is a kind of log of events, images, thoughts, and contemplations all generally about the ideas of large format photography, particularly how its being treated with digital photography, the photographing of the landscape and a few things in between. 

More to come...

more....

After the north philly night time shooting i went to europe for 18 days and shot some landscapes there. There is really only one that i would like to included in this blog because of its dire relevancy to the contemporary industrial landscape and i feel the photo itself works better in a singular setting. Here it is:

This photo was taken in Antwerpen, a Flemish city of Belgium. The 6 cranes are only there now as a sort of decoration, they aren't being used for anything except a place to hang up some holiday decorations. If you look really close (in front of the 5th crane from the left) you can see my traveling partner, Jenna along with out native Antwerpen friend Tony, who took us in and showed us around. Noticing the people really gives you an idea of how colossal this sight was. The cranes were huge!!!! The cranes stood on the edge of the waterfront of the river Schelde.

I may or may not rework the photo to make it fit a bit better in the other images i am showing in this blog. The cranes don't really look isolated as much as thy look cramped. Having the view camera in Europe would have been also very inconvenient considering my backpack was huge already and we were doing a great deal of walking. However, it would have definitely made for a better photograph, as you can see from the curvature of the earth at the bottom. 

updates

updates

So, summer is over and the school year has finally begun so I am able to use the view camera. During the summer I continued exploring the idea of a contemporary landscape with an emphasis on the representation of industry, voyeurism and a bit of surveillance. I spent some time shooting in the northeast part of Philadelphia, (primarily Kensington and Fishtown) at night. The photographing is happening at night because that is the time when the landscapes seem the most isolated. At night there are no people around and the buildings are empty- this is when they really come alive and you can truly experience the landscapes of Kensington and Fishtown. There is also something about the landscape emerging out of blackness that is really important to me because I want the image to exist as an individual moment instead of a component of an entire block, street, or even a city. In this way i suppose there is a kind of personification going on. Anyway. Here are a few photos: 

Because these locations are in a shitty area I find the photos are taken best with a small digital camera, no flash and a fast bike or a friend's car. These aren't photos I can take with the view camera, sadly because its just to great a risk with an expensive camera that i don't even own. I guess the question now, is why? Well, I think the industrial landscape has become important to philadelphia, especially put in context to the specific area i am photographing. As we know, the northern part of philly is changing, and its happening very fast. This area is becoming heavily populated with young artists and musicians, galleries and organizations, coffee houses, thrift store, etc. The question is, what stays and what goes. With all this new culture theres no telling what the neighborhoods really were about. There is also the stigma of the "unsafe neighborhood" which is much less a stigma and just a reality in some parts more than others. The point however, is not the risk (if any) that is being taken to make the image. There is some kind of subtle peacefulness that i found in the outskirts of the city, the endless landscape of nameless factories, industrial establishments and there fences, dumpsters, shitty paint-jobs and broken signs. I feel that maybe its important to pay some kind of homage to what else these newly populated areas have, or had beyond the coffee shops and galleries (which are great too).

View Camera Plan

I have divided my learning of the View Camera into 3 stages.

Stage One: Orthocromatic
First i will be using 5x7 Orthocromatic Lith Film, which is a film used for black and white photos and easier to develop in the dark room due to the fact that it is not sensitive to the spectrum of red-orange lights, so I can just take it out of the camera and develop it in the dark room with the amber-colored safe light.

Stage Two: Panochromatic
After the Orthocromatic film, i will move on to Panochromatic film, a black and white film that is sensative to all colors of light, thus craeting a photo with more detail, but more difficult to develop in the darkroom. I will be using a special tank that will hold the sheet film and protect it from the safe light.

Stage Three: COLOR!
This is the most exciting stage. I will be using color film in the view camera. Im not sure which kind yet. I am thinking about investing in some Poloroid 55 film. whopety doo dah!

VIEW CAMERA

So I have finally decided to use this blog for what Its really meant for.
My goal for this semester, amongst many other things, is to learn and master the usage of the View Camera. Why? Well, although the view camera was developed around the same time as the Daguerreotype, its still used today to control not only focus but onvergence of parallel lines. Because of this, the view camera is an ideal tool for architectural photography, because it has a grid on the ground glass, so when youre looking through the camera you can use the parallel lines to line up with whatever to create the perfect photo. I became interested in using the view camera after a photo series i started , and am still working on inspired by nostalgic landscapes. The series is also about the idea of an over abundance of vacancy and emptiness in a world that seems so built-up and over run by people and industries. It seems that people take a place and build it up to better accommodate themselves and then just abandon it. This was the first photo of the series:

Back to the View Camera, I wanted to the horizon line to be a dominant factor in all the photos. Symmetry is also a factor i am thinking about, keeping the photos simple and symmetrical, with no extra content i want to achieve a sort of horizontal flatness of plane, similar to a Rothko painting. The view camera would be perfect for achieving this kind of perfect symmetry.