Journeys through the visual landscape

wind and rain

2010-01-11T21:27:00.000-08:00

It's been a while, I've been writing other things in other places for some months now.

But I'm re-ordering things a bit, in part because of the recent book release... www.f-elevenbooks.com for details... and a web site revamp and a new link to this blog is part of that. Using one of the other ones is just a little too messy.

Then there's the burst of post-earthquake motivation... a story for next time.

adaptable

2009-04-27T08:23:00.000-07:00

Something like four years ago, I had a negative interaction with a mass-market franchise outfit which offers free wi-fi; basically, on a second visit I was unable to get into an art site because of an adult-content filter. When I e-mailed the parent corporation to express my disappointment, what came back was a form letter which really didn't even address my issue. Then, I started receiving marketing spam from them, which still comes through periodically.

So I boycotted the place. For four years. They got not one dime of my money.

Today I've finally reconsidered, largely because I know that corporations are not static places, that with the coming and going of people in management come other changes. Although I'm still not naming them, not ready to give them any positive PR just yet.

There's a practical aspect to this also. I needed to download an edited version of a document sent by one of my colleagues, so I could add my own edits and put it back into the system for the next guy to take his shot at it. Today is strictly business, nothing that's even remotely likely to make a content filter go tilt. And I'm staying with family in the suburbs, there are very few choices for wi-fi here... apparently the assumption is that everyone has internet access in their homes. Probably true, but I'm not going to take the time right now to install a wi-fi box there, or start moving someone else's DSL cables around, and the independent coffee places I prefer to to patronize for wi-fi are in the city or in Evanston, each 20-30 minutes away from here. I'm not going to inconvenience myself that much for the sake of principle, not then my project budget is involved.

So they got $1.87 out of me today. And indeed, it does appear to have changed. The interface is less intrusive, the login is intuitive... which it very much was not last time. Now there's a "free newsletter" box to check, so the spam is optional... maybe if I ask them, the old spam will go away now. Or it can just keep going to my junk mail folder, which is probably easier.

No time, today, to find out if they still censor. Maybe next time. But it sure is strange to sit in a coffee place where the average age of the clientele appears to be about 60. For an upscale suburb, they sure are noisy, and less than tactful.

wet

2009-04-26T13:22:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, the morning shoot was warm and we dodged a light shower at the end. The afternoon shoot... it took major ingenuity to make it happen at all, after the first few frames. It poured. And the temperature fell 25 degrees in an hour. It was so cold, windy, and wet that it was literally impossible to shoot on location; the first time that's really happened. We salvaged what we could by doing some head shots in a bar with a large window, and then some silly shots in a toy store across the street.

After too much time in the rational side of the brain, the muse seems to have returned. Ironically, it returned today. It was still raining until just a little while ago, so I haven't pushed the possibility of a third shoot while here, that will probably wait til next time. But I'm having fun with some street photography, or documentary, or... I'm not sure what it is, but I've finally found a way to effectively capture the absurdity of suburbia. And one advantage of being forced to shoot in the bar yesterday is that I'm remembering how much fun it can be to do portraiture.

crazy

2009-04-24T15:46:00.000-07:00

Chicago: I'm in my old Lincoln Park neighborhood, about two blocks from my old house, the one I left about eight years ago. It's a warm spring day, in the 80s, after (so I'm told) a cold early spring. It's one of the first few really warm days of the year. It's evening rush hour, so everybody is out, commuters plus people out for a run or a stroll, and the early dinner crowd. I'm watching from the window of a wi-fi spot on Armitage Avenue.

And it's mad crowded. The traffic is nuts, and they're all in a hurry, and no one is relaxed.

Maybe I'm just off a little today, adjusting to a sudden 20-degree jump in temperatures, but it doesn't feel good.

But I did get a lot done this morning, and I have two shoots tomorrow; one with a known quantity, a favorite model, and one with someone I've not yet met. I've barely begun to think about what to do with the opportunities.

Grrr

2009-04-18T15:38:00.000-07:00

nevermind

arrogance

2009-04-18T15:10:00.000-07:00

For some reason, it's easy to get the ego out of balance on things photographic.

My hypothesis is that it's partly because it's so easy to be abused as a photographer... the guys doing weddings and things like that are routinely taken for granted and manipulated by clients. So a certain amount of assertiveness goes a long way toward being treated with respect. There's a tipping point, cross that line and respect becomes the norm. There's not much in between, people are on one side of that line or the other.

Shoot the right genres though, and it's a little too easy to let that ego grow. For example, working with models. It's easy to start believing your own propaganda when attractive young women start dropping their clothes for you, often without even being asked.

It comes up because I've just ripped somebody a new one on a forum, something I rarely do. But he'd just responded in a less than respectful way to someone who had asked a valid question, and when I looked at his profile, it was the usual story. He's an unknown, and he can't even use a light meter. Almost every one of his photos is technical garbage. Yet he's so puffed up and full of himself, it's evident in everything he writes. I'm assuming it's overcompensation, that he's trying to convince himself. But he's got almost nothing to back it up.

I'll tolerate it to a point when the ego and the ability are in balance. There's another guy posting a lot lately who is more than a little arrogant. The difference is that he's got a long list of gallery and publication credits, meaning he's not the only one who thinks he's good. And he really is good. Maybe not as good as he thinks he is, but he's undeniably good.

Still, Don Rumsfeld had a lot of ability to go with his even bigger ego. And eventually, it was his downfall. So it's best to do a reality check every now and then.

around the bay

2009-04-17T17:59:00.000-07:00

Much of my energy so far this year is going into my real job... I have a fairly large project going which involves managing staff from four offices in two states, and while it's a good client to work with, it's also a demanding one. As a result I didn't do my first shoot (with a model) until early March this year, and have not been posting here nearly as often as usual.

But things are slowly coming under control as I get more people trained up on the project and can delegate more work. And it does mean I'm in San Francisco once or twice a month. At one time I'd had a waiting list of models there, but then worked on things other places for a couple of years, so have had to rebuild that list. Things are moving now on that front as well.

After the shoot with Iona Lynn in March, I've made it a point to schedule one shoot each subsequent trip. It's been an evening and weekend thing, which is why I'm keeping it simple. But if anything, it's more important than ever to shoot now, to exercise the creative side of the brain and balance the rational demands of Monday through Friday.

The second shoot was a fortuitous bit of chance. I had an inquiry about reliable Bay Area models from another photographer, someone I've never met but have encountered frequently in various forums over the years. He does classic fine art nudes, and was planning a west coast visit. So that sent me off to check on a few models, see what they were up to.

One person I'd lost track of was Hana, who I'd had a memorable shoot with in 2005. She was gone from the site I'd found her on then, later I learned she'd taken a sabbatical from modeling, and she had just recently returned. So this time I found her on MM, and of course contacted her immediately, and within hours we had another shoot scheduled. It happened within days.

We shot at an East Bay location, one I've used before, but in a part of it I hadn't explored yet. It started off as almost a fashion shoot, if in a surreal setting, and ended with nudes. We could hear people for much of the time, but rarely saw any, and were never interrupted when it mattered. It was almost dark when we returned to the car.

The next shoots happened just a week or so ago. I'd been talking to Alea off and on for nearly a year, and it seemed we were just never in the same city at the same time. This time I checked with her, and she'd just returned from travel. Again, we were able to schedule a shoot fairly quickly.

That's her at the top of the post, with the bright red hair. As so often happens, we talked as much as we shot, and then talked for hours more after we shot... ending with a midnight burrito in the Mission District. The images took a few days to grow on me, but I've used several of them now in various venues. It seems to have been a successful shoot, and I certainly enjoyed the evening.

A couple of days later, I had three hours to fill between time in a financial district office and a South of Market exhibit opening. So I posted a casting call for a just-for-fun shoot, and had a response within an hour. It turned out to be her first shoot, so I spent part of it teaching. Kind of fun though, since there was zero pressure, the photos weren't really for anything beyond helping her start a portfolio.

Next: Chicago next week, for the first time in perhaps five months, maybe the longest I've been away from there in years. Then back to San Francisco in May, at least once and probably twice, followed almost immediately by a swing up the Oregon coast (tacked on the back end of a Crescent City meeting). I've already booked a shoot for Oregon, and have a tentative one in Chicago, although I haven't thought much about the San Francisco part yet. I have a agreement in principle to shootn there soon with someone who has interested me for a while, but she's on travel right now and it's not yet clear if she'll return in time for this trip. So if not this time, then next time.

refresh

2009-03-10T20:21:00.000-07:00

After a longer than usual pause (two and a half months) without photographing a model, the muse returned last weekend. I spent a good part of the day with Iona Lynn, with a couple of hours of that time devoted to taking photos and most of the rest to talking about photography and things related.

We shot at one of my favorite marin locations, in a sustained moderate rain. I'm back in a medium format mood for now, so it was all tripod work, with an umbrella over the camera. I only shot about 4 rolls, 48 frames. As I sometimes do, I gambled and tried a film/developer combination I'm not really accustomed to, and while I'd nudge things a bit this way or that next time, it worked pretty well. There are quite a few good ones to pick from, and one that really pops. Always the perfectionist, I wish there was just a bit more shadow detail in that tiny area under that iron ring on the wall...

The important thing is that I'm ready to shoot again, finally. Since I'm returning to the Bay Area in less than two weeks, I've started scrambling a little to set some things up, since my once long waiting list of models there has dissipated from neglect and moving to other places.

There was already one possibility in place, someone who corresponded in mid-trip last time but too late to fit in that time... a nice counterpoint to the darker ones I usually work with, she's blond and not afraid to make crazy faces. I like her attitude, so hopefully the timing will work this trip.

Then Hana came out of nowhere, one of my favorite models ever, who I'd lost track of and haven't seen since sometime in mid-2005. She called me this morning, and I think we just might make a shoot happen soon. Nothing is ever sure with Hana, it's like trying to hold onto the wind or the fog, which is exactly what makes her so awesome to shoot with. it will happen if it's ready to happen.

Before that came about I posted a casting call. I always cringe a little to do this, because while it draws a surprising number of quality responses, it also draws some people... well, I should be careful what I say. Not my usual type, let's leave it at that.

So as I sometimes do, I specified nudity... sometimes I do that just to scare away the wannabes, although this time it's real, something I do really need for this particular concept. And this time... two interesting responses. One very tall and very alternative; and one a little more glamour-like than I usually accept, but attractive and, I think, with enough range to do what I need.

Suddenly I have more possibilities than available time, so I'm relying on the fact that it's not likely all of them will actually happen, it would would be surprising if at least one didn't need to at least wait til a future trip. Sometimes one will just disappear after the first message exchange. So let's see who stays interested and who falls by the wayside, and go from there.

getting ready

2009-02-21T17:46:00.000-08:00

This is probably the longest I've gone in years without photographing a model. Just over two months. Until recently, the muse just didn't seem to be home. I just couldn't get excited about it, actually chose not to follow up on several offers.

But the creative urge is finally stirring. Partially, that's because after a lull I have some travel coming, and have an offer to shoot in the Bay Area from someone I've worked with twice before. Then last night I was browsing other Bay Area models, looking at casting calls, and initially finding nothing even remotely worthwhile... and then, by shifting the search focus a bit, I hit on one from a model I'd just seen a few days ago on the web site of a well-known photographer. Not sure yet if the schedule will work, but if it does I might contact her. Both of these girls are good... very good.

I'm finding people in other places too, unfortunately mostly places I'm not likely to visit this year. Still, they're interesting people. We take inspiration where we can find it.

So, the image-drought should break in just over a week. Then I need to start giving some thought to a spring Midwestern trip, and what to include within that.

answers

2009-01-24T20:42:00.000-08:00

Last night I did a total re-write on the last chapter of my latest e-book, the one about my experiences photographing alternative and other models these past five years. Although the exercise raised as many questions as answers, some clarity did rise to the surface.

In the process of writing, I thought back over all the phases of my photography, over a lot of years. The commercial years, when I photographed only for money. The punk journalist years. The various series from 1998 through 2003, shown in galleries, usually one to two years around each conceptual core before moving on to the next concept. The post-2003 years of photographing internet models.

It struck me that it's been only in that most recent phase that I've worked mostly with people who define themselves as "models." As much fun as that's been, I'm beginning to find that it's a limiting factor. I need a more diverse set of subjects.

I'm actually starting by scanning some of that earlier work, portraits and nudes of non-models, people who are simply... interesting people. It's more work to find those people, to set up those shoots. But it's what needs to happen more often.

presidents

2009-01-15T22:06:00.000-08:00

several weeks ago I read a book on Ulysses S. Grant. Pretty random, I was in a used book store, picked it up, found it to be well written and interesting, and bought it.

The book was limited to the Civil War years, covering the military career of a man almost universally acclaimed as one of the best military strategists of his time.

I remembered reading that Grant's presidency hadn't gone quite so well. But I didn't get around to doing the research until tonight.

Actually it was only half as bad as I'd remembered. Apparently a lot of the negative reviews were due to a tolerance of corruption, and indeed there is a list of scandals that is amazing by modern standards. But there are also some positive accomplishments listed; a solid record on civil rights, certainly visionary (and risky) at that time; several economic and monetary policy accomplishments; and a generally solid foreign policy record. Like most who have actually fought wars and seen men die, he kept things pretty peaceful during his eight years in charge.

That's so often the case with tarnished presidencies. Nixon may have had his mega-scandal, but he also signed the Clean Water Act and ended the Vietnam War. More recent presidents, those who have not yet found their full place in history, tended to have their good as well as there bad. Reagan presided over the breakup of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, but he was also tarnished by Iran Contra and we're still paying the social costs of some of his budget cuts. Bush I was generally lackluster, but he pulled off a masterpiece in Iraq, winning a military victory but then pulling back... in the face of short-sighted criticism at the time... to leave a balance of power intact in the region. Clinton's optimism helped fuel eight years of unprecedented prosperity, even as the first seeds of of the financial crisis were sown.

But then we get to Bush II. And I can't think of a single positive thing he's done. Not one. Nothing that will matter in a year, much less in 100.

He started a war in Iraq on the basis of things that turned out not to be real, thus distracting attention and resources from the legitimate fight in Afghanistan. As a result both conflicts are ongoing. The economy lies in wreckage, in the depths of what will probably be the most severe recession since the Great Depression. The level of incompetence in federal agencies is at an all-time high, as evidenced by the botched handling of Hurricane Katrina and the spate of DOI decisions being thrown out in court because they were based on politics rather than science. And Americans are no longer the "good guys" of Reagan's movies, now we're torturers and violators of civil rights. Those are the highlights, but the list could go on.

Bush II makes Grant look good in retrospect. And as difficult as Obama's job is going to be, it can't help but be an improvement. Only a few more days, and the nightmare is over. History is not likely to be kind.

taking a break

2009-01-15T21:32:00.000-08:00

Except for some images of Bay Area project sites, things distinctly work-related, I've hardly taken any photos so far in 2009. Certainly, none of models. I've made no real attempt to set anything up despite having been approached (by e-mail) by a few more models. There is one person I'd like to photograph sometime soon, someone I've worked with once before, and I really should e-mail and ask her... but what I have in mind isn't a conventional pretty picture.

The rest... when I'm feeling ready.

sun

2008-12-30T23:17:00.000-08:00

After two weeks of cold rainy weather, today was warm and gloriously sunny.

Last weekend I took advantage of the not very nice weather and my curent break from travel and did most of a re-write on "Ephemeral Creation," my post-punk memoirs originally published a little over five years ago. I fixed a few errors, wrote some new bits and pieces, expanded a few discussions, added some additional photos, messed around with format. It's almost ready, I just need to re-scan half a dozen images that I'm not entirely happy with.

I'd been procrastinating this intending to update my desktop publishing software first, but decided to go ahead and do the re-write in Google docs, which I've been using a lot these past several months. It worked well enough that at least for now, I'm going to put it online that way, as a PDF e-book. Free software that's poised to bring the Microsoft Office monolith crashing down is somehow appropriate for self-publishing a second-edition punk memoirs; and it's fun to watch mega-corporations fight to the death.

Being on a roll and having a four-day weekend, I next went after the chaotic jumble of text files that represent the last five years of my alternative photography experience. Surprisingly, they fell right into place, almost 70 pages worth already. There are still a few more chapters to be written from scratch to fill gaps, to help the narrative flow, and there will still be editorial decisions to be made and photos to be scanned. But it's entirely possible that a beta version is only a couple of long hard days of effort away. I'm probably going to put that one out to limited peer review first on a small, private photography forum, and then edit a little more based on the feedback I get there. But it's possible that my next book isn't very far away.

Over the past few days I've been contacted by several fascinating models, smart people with unique looks. It's more at the networking and hinting stage than actual offers so far. Unfortunately they're in far-off places like Toronto and New York that I have no known reason to visit at present, and possibly not the time or motivation either. Hell, I'm already stalling on a couple of shoot offers that many other photographers would kill for. The passion is going into writing these past weeks, not into creating photos. Still, it's pleasant to think about.

spam

2008-12-19T13:50:00.000-08:00

Spam is a fact of life for anyone connected to technology. Filter and ignore, basically.

For the most part, California's do-not-call list has effectively eliminated the telephone version of spam. There's the occasional alleged non-profit raising money for some police or fire association who seem to think they're somehow above the law, but usually a simple "no thanks, I don't deal with phone solicitations, send it to me in writing" makes them go away, quickly. After all, there's no way to know that voice on the phone is who they say they are.

But last night I got a call from Wyndham Resorts, one of those annoying things "giving away" a trip to Las Vegas. One of those annoying guys who ignores the "no thanks" and keeps talking. Then ignores the second "not interested" and the third.

I had to get extremely aggressive with him, he simply was not going to stop talking otherwise. Once I finally got him to shut the fuck up and listen, and told him I was on the do-not-call list, he said "there's a loophole." But he finally went away.

Now that's such brilliant marketing. I've gone out of my way to sign up on a list which basically makes it illegal for these guys to call me. So they claim to find a loophole, and call anyway.

It apparently has never occurred to them that this might annoy people enough to make them never spend money in that place again? Duh.

These guys apparently own Ramada Inns and a lot of other things, and they got my info from some hotel stay in the past. Guess what... there are lots of hotels to choose from. I won't be staying at theirs anymore. I'm even going to do the research to see who else they own.

Wyndham is hereby added to my list of annoying corporations to not spend money on. I've boycotted Panera Bread since they responded to my complaint about an over-active e-mail filter which blocked art sites with a form letter and then put me on their e-mail spam list (about one a month from them still gets filtered into my junk folder, four or five years later). There are a few others.

I'm still debating whether to report Wyndham to the Attorney General's office, or simply write their CEO a letter.

nasty

2008-12-15T11:52:00.000-08:00

Usually, what passes for "winter" here is more like spring in the rest of the country. I guess that's even true today, even though temperatures are some 15 degrees below normal. It's 43 right now, windy and rainy and generally nasty. With occasional thunder, something that's pretty rare here. Cars coming down from the mountains are covered in snow.

I'm not complaining about the weather outside, considering that it's 14 in Chicago right now. It's suppossed to stay this way for most of the week, but we'll deal with it.

Except that today had to be the day that the heat gave out on the third floor of the office. There are only about half a dozen of us up there on the top floor, and we came in to find that it was 56 degrees inside this morning. Three power outages, probably triggered by everyone firing up space heaters at once, contributed to not a lot getting done before 11:00 am.

Someone is working on it. But he's still at it several hours later, so it's not an easy fix.

At the moment I'm in a nice warm coffee house, having a nice warm bowl of soup. After my 12:30 meeting is over, it might become a day to work from home.

dummy

2008-12-09T13:30:00.000-08:00

My reaction to the arrest this morning of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich on corruption charges: No surprise. Except maybe that it was the feds who finally got him. The rumors I've been hearing thus far had been from state people.

What's really sad is that Illinois now has two back-to-back tainted Governors. I was in the room when George Ryan made his infamous "I am what I am" comment to the press. Now, he's a convicted felon (one of my buddies from the punk era, now a prosecutor, helped to convict him). Then, he was merely a business as usual politician, known for cutting back room deals.

I've never met Blagojevich, although I've heard some really interesting stories from people who knew him in his college days. They're hearsay unfortunately, and todays allegations remain exactly that so far, so I'll keep this to myself for now. All I'll say is that his administration has gutted IDNR, and that resource conservation has suffered as a result of political appointees replacing experienced and competent people there.

Oh for the days of the Jim Edgar administration, perhaps the only spotlessly clean one there in recent memory.

It's not my tax dollars going down the drain anymore, I've been gone for almost eight years. But the people of Illinois should be ashamed of themselves. It's time to clean house, throw the bastards out. It's time to stop assuming that corruption is inevitable, to take back the state.

As for Blagojevich, for such an allegedly smart guy, he's sure looking not very bright today.

choices

2008-12-08T19:28:00.000-08:00

I've finally made some computer upgrade moves.

The decision had been postponed a while, partially just to be stubborn. Last spring when I started shooting digital again after a two-year break, this time with much larger files sizes, it pretty much forced some changes. But I preferred to do it at my own pace, not when dictated by decisions of manufacturers. My ancient laptop was rendered pretty much useless by the newer camera technology, it wouldn't hold enough RAM to run the current generation of image processing software, and the earlier versions of Photoshop won't read modern RAW files. But I managed to squeeze a RAW converter and up to date Photoshop into my desktop machine. Not with a lot of room to spare, but it ran. Slowly.

My laptop is an old Powerbook G4, the 867 mhz 12-inch machine dating all the way back to 2003. I still really like it, still works perfectly, and I have no intention of getting rid of it. Even today, it's a perfectly capable word processing and internet machine, and it's compact and light (4 pounds). It will continue to be my on-the-road machine, the one that goes in my bag for airplane trips, for the forseeable future.

The desktop machine isn't all that much newer. It's a G5 iMac dating from something like late 2004 or early 2005. I'm not nearly as attached to it as I am to the old laptop, the iMac is a reasonably good machine but it's basically another piece of plastic, and I'm beginning to need something faster, and it seems the hard drive is always almost full. It's the first generation of the newer design, but with an older chip, and there's some low-level fan noise that the next upgrade of the same machine didn't have. Not a major problem, just a minor annoyance, and a reminder to beware of first-generation technology.

I've been watching recent upgrades and had pretty much decided by this fall to make a move soon. I'd also decided to go with a laptop and external monitor setup to simplify future upgrades. The new monitor, a 23-inch version, is already here, a refurbished and fully warrantied bargain picked up relatively inexpensively.... one big advantage of not being in a hurry. It took about three months of patiently waiting and watching to snap it up.

The computer decision was harder. The Macbook Air was tempting because of the light weight, only 3 pounds. But the first generation model was crippled, with a slower processor and much smaller hard drive than my three year old desktop machine, among other things. The just-out 2nd generation version is better, almost there, but not quite. The new aluminum Macbook is also tempting, and powerful enough for what I need, but the high-gloss screen and the lack of a firewire port turned me away. Reflections are the norm in most wi-fi cafes or pretty much anywhere on the road. What are the folks in Cupertino thinking? How to work effectively when they make it hard to see? And the Macbook screen is now taking a rap as cheaper and not as bright as the other current Mac laptops. And firewire, losing that might not by itself have been a deal killer, although it would have meant finding the long-hidden USB cable for my scanner; but added to the screen issue, no thanks.

I'd intended to wait another month or so. But what I finally did was take advantage of the aftermath of the black friday sales, prolonged at some venues way beyond what was probably the original intent. Enough markdowns, and a rebate offer, combined with the fact that there are some just discontinued models out there... it all added up to an opportunity to pick up a Macbook Pro, the version just superceded last month, for $550 under retail, plus a $150 rebate on top of that. That's probably less than the average year-old used equivalent on the open market.

It isn't actually here yet, probably won't be for several days yet. But it's got the old matte screen, and way more power than I need, about a 30% jump in processor speed, four times the RAM, and 25% more hard drive space than my old desktop.... which will be retired as soon as I'm sure I've got everything I need off of it. The new machine will live on the desk except on the rare occasions when I need that level of power to be portable, which isn't often; the smaller ancient laptop will fill the mobility role in most cases. It's easier to carry a few extra 2GB CF cards when I need to shoot digital (especially with memory prices falling) than it is to lug around a 5.4 pound hunk of aluminum.

Especially considering how big and heavy and overcomplicated my DSLR is. But that's another story.

things

2008-12-08T13:04:00.000-08:00

So on Friday night at the office christmas party I won the "living out of suitcase" award.

Maybe the fact that I recently spent six weeks "commuting" between California and Chicago contributed to that... on top of plenty of more routine travel earlier in the year.

In fact, they're right. My bags are only half unpacked. They hardly ever get completely unpacked.

In other news, it was a fun Arts Alive night in Eureka, on Saturday night. A mild, foggy night, a good crowd, some good art. I met a couple of new people, including a really good photographer who I hadn't encountered before.

I probably would have forgotten to go, if one of the guys from the office hadn't brought it up the night before. He asked if I was going, then said something about often seeing me with "attractive women" on arts nights.

Well, yeah. Models, usually. Typically not for very long, but apparently long enough to make an impression.

He should have been there this time, he missed out. As usual, a 20 minute interaction, a couple of five minute interactions. Just saying hi and catching up on small talk, random encounters in a gallery or on the sidewalk.

That's OK. It's fun to routinely be in proximity to beauty.

dark noise

2008-12-01T23:27:00.000-08:00

I've been corresponding these past few days, by e-mail, with two people who were once in a band you've heard of, unless you've been aestivating these past 20 years. One of them I've come to know quite well in person, the other I've met only once, very briefly, a lot of years ago. I've recently pulled out and scanned some old photos of these folks, which apparently has gotten me thinking about music.

When I took those photos, they hadn't played publicly yet, that didn't happen til two weeks later. We were on different ends of the business; I was at the peak of my music journalist "career" and they ranged from locally well known musicians to complete unknowns. We were peers, all part of the inner circle of what was essentially a major market but cult-level alternative music scene. People look back at that band today, kids who weren't even born yet when it all began, and they must think it's all so unreachable, so mysterious and remote. Yet at the time, they were just another band, getting ready to open for a then-better known band now lost in obscurity for all but those of us who were there. Most bands didn't make it, of course, so no one in the scene ever took anything for granted. This one turned out to be one of two from that time and place who did break out nationally, a little later.

But I got so jaded in those times, when rubbing elbows with local and touring British bands was so routine, and so many of them are so well known now. It's strange, hearing songs on the radio these days, and remembering hearing that same song in a small club, with perhaps 100 people in the room, then attending the afterparty with the band, drinking with them til dawn. No names needed, it's all out there if you really want to know, it's all written down and documented elsewhere.

Tonight after responding to one of those e-mails, one of those random connections happened, someone I met briefly a few years ago popped into my head. She was born probably around the time I took those early post-punk photos, she's in her late 20s now. She has a band, one of regional and cult-level notoriety, not unlike some of the people and bands I knew so long ago; well known within a small and specialized niche market, completely unknown to anyone outside of that group. Not my taste in music, really; hard to describe, but the same issue I had with so many bands back in the old days. Too fast, too loud, taking themselves much too seriously; burying (an appropriate word, in a way) so much potential, so much talent, under layers of barely harnessed youthful rage.

I don't know this young woman well at all, don't even know her real name. We had an interesting conversation once, and she played her latest CD for me, and we learned that we have at least one common influence... a now well-known band that I played pool with once and photographed another time, in fact wrote a scathing review of their show for the 'zine; yet a band that to her is something remote, something possibly heroic. She has their bumper sticker on the back of her car (a black car, of course). I think of seeing them as 20-somethings, drunk at 5:00 am, and I smile.

Where was I... in that conversation, in that couple of hours, I learned a lot about some aspects of her. She's very open about some things. She guards other things very closely. I know that she had a very difficult childhood. I know that she considers that "not necessarily a bad thing." I know that her dreams, her nightmares, are dark, that what is in her music comes from inside, from her darkness. I know that she's hardened in a way that most could never comprehend. I know that she's afraid. I'm not sure if she knows that or not.

Tonight I went looking for her online, even though that conversation was quite some time ago, and our most recent e-mail exchange was perhaps a years ago. Of course, I found videos of her and the band, mostly live footage from one show.

I watch her, in a torn white dress and garish makeup and black boots, spin across the stage, throw her soul into her music. I listen to lyrics so dark, so primal, intended to frighten and repulse the ordinary person. I know that it's real, I know that there really is controlled hatred of... something... in her. I know that she's more real, more dangerous, than any of the scary-looking people I spent so many big city nights with so long ago. I know that she contains the rage, measures it out slowly, controls it.

And I look at her, and I see a girl fighting against her fear. For me, her edge is an artifact. She's let me see behind the shadow, just for a few seconds at a time.

She's a strong one, she'll make it. Even as she endures the flames of her own personal hell. In 25 years, I wonder who she will be, what will come of it.

shift

2008-11-30T18:20:00.000-08:00

Today I spent a few minutes on Main Street, with some good coffee and taking a few photos. It helped remind me to keep things simple. It helped remind me that I enjoy documenting this time and place we live in.

I then scanned some of the things I've shot in various parts of California over the past year, in LA, in the Bay Area, in the central valley, and closer to home. And there's a lot to work with.

It's got me thinking about an in-state road trip sometime this winter to find and photograph a few new places.

holiday

2008-11-28T19:27:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I slept late. Today, I ran errands, paid bills, all the mundane things; and read for a while. Didn't touch the computer until after dark, left my phone upstairs.

And I still have a weekend in front of me. The break feels good.

I'm feeling a desire to do some fairly straightforward and minimalist portraiture, but at the same time not in any particular hurry to make it happen. I have offers to shoot in San Francisco and Chicago, and the first thing is to decide when to be in those places next.

But first, I'm tempted to spend a few hours in the darkroom, pull together sets of related images and make prints, something I haven't done in months. Maybe it's almost time for another exhibit?

cold

2008-11-22T17:15:00.000-08:00

I had found the location one day while trying to access a nearby location; a trail ran alongside the historic Illinois and Michigan Canal, and less than half a mile from the parking lot, I'd walked past the ruins of a late 1800s steel mill. Now, it was part of a county park in the far southwest suburbs of Chicago, a recent acquisition. Surprisingly, few areas were fenced off. Except for the steepest dropoffs, it was open and accessible.

Now, weeks later, I arrive with Claudine. It's almost an hours drive, so we have plenty of time to talk. It's late afternoon, the weak winter sun hanging low over the horizon. It's 36 degrees, but at least there isn't much wind.

We walk in, and begin with a set of concrete arches; actually, in a rear chamber I hadn't even found the first time. We're a few hundred feet from a busy commuter rail line, and even closer to a small road serving local industrial facilities, and no one can see us. The concrete walls shield us from prying eyes.

We walk through the structure, carefully choose locations, talk thorough sequencing, positions, angles. Those decisions made, Claudine drops her clothing into a neat pile. Here, in full sun and out of the light breeze, the cold isn't too bad. We spend perhaps 10 minutes on the first few sets of shots.

Covered up again, we walk to a second location, a few hundred meters to the north. This one is a jumble of concrete ruins, sunken below ground level, guarded only by a "warning, dangerous ruins" sign. Moving through this jumbled landscape without care could indeed be dangerous. We climb down slowly, choose two spots. The challenge here is to edit things out, to simplify the composition among the chaos of rubble. We work with two small openings in the rock. Again, we're out of sight. Trucks drive by and no one sees a thing.

The third set is a little more challenging, because it's in the open, fully exposed. The sun is also about to slip below the horizon, and now there is a distinct chill in the air. Claudine stands on worn and eroded concrete polygons and rectangles, carefully avoiding the glass of broken beer bottles in the depressions, her smooth naked skin contrasting with the cold, hard substrate. We work quickly, pausing twice when people bicycle past on the trail barely a hundred feet away. We almost don't see or hear the pickup truck that follows, and Claudine is caught in the open this time. All she can do is drop to the cold ground and not move. The driver is thinking of other things though, eyes straight ahead. He never looks in our direction, never knows what he missed.

We return to the car a few moments later. I've only brought three rolls of film, intentionally, to minimize the length of the shoot on such a cold day. 108 frames. The whole thing has taken only an hour, with easily half of that devoted to picking locations. Now we drive back north, talking about the experience, laughing about almost being seen, comparing notes on our past experiences. She says something that surprises me, something I need to think about a little.

We part ways, already thinking about what to do next time.

pause

2008-11-22T15:23:00.000-08:00

I've just taken a few moments to file negatives from earlier this year, and I'm seeing a departure from my usual patterns of shooting.

For one thing, I'm only seeing about 16 models so far for 2008. I'm probably forgetting a couple, because the purely digital work isn't here, I'm looking only at film negatives. But that's about half the number I've worked with each of the previous few years.

A few of those have been unknown or brand new local girls, basically people I agreed to shoot with just for practice, not expecting too much from them.

One reason for the drop in total numbers is that I've worked repeatedly with a few favorite models this year: especially Inga and Claudine, about three times each so far, and twice with Iona Lynn. And I'm liking that, really finding the nuances, finding ways to get very different results from the same individuals over time. There are a few others from this year I'd shoot with again if the opportunity presents itself... Shae, Heather, Wenchi, Amy.

It may affect how I shoot from here forward. It's complicated because those faves are anywhere from 250 to 2,000 miles from here, as are most of the other people I really enjoy shooting with. And identifying the rare muse is a lot of work, both upfront in culling from all the online possibilities, and then in the actual shoots, finding the relatively few who have the talent, the compatible personalities and interests, the right energy.

halflife

2008-11-19T16:25:00.000-08:00

I managed to squeeze in one very quick shoot before returning from Chicago. Claudine came out for the end of the day, and we worked for about an hour in the cold (36 degrees) and fading late afternoon light. About 12 hours later I was on the way to the airport.

On the ride back we talked about the usual photography related things, traded old war stories about past shoots. It suddenly struck me that I'd just talked about working, only four or five years ago, with models who are now pretty much gone from the scene. Of five in particular, two I'm certain are "retired" and I'm assuming a third is also, at least I haven't seen any recent images of her, or heard anything; and the other two are in transition, working mostly behind the camera as photographers these days and only rarely accepting modeling gigs.

There are plenty of 20 and 30 year veteran photographers around. It's so unusual to hear of a model who remains active for more than a handful of years.

paradigm

2008-11-05T14:44:00.000-08:00

Last night we experienced a significant political realignment. This will rumble through society from now until January 20, and well beyond... and it will be a long time until any of us know what it really means.

In Barack Obama, I see a charismatic man who has defied odds throughout his political career. Things break his way in part because he refuses to believe otherwise. If he can convey his optimism to America, if he really can reach across different colors and classes and beliefs... if he can defy all the rigid boxes of modern American politics, all the special interests and ambitious advisors who would tug him every which way... great things could happen. Certainly, it must be an improvement over the past eight years; after eight years of an infamously dysfunctional administration, how could it be otherwise?

Some presumably fear change. How deep into the abyss must we plunge to open those eyes?

One of Obama's greatest strengths is his grounding in constitutional law, expounded on at length in one of his books. An essential skill, because part of the problem is that we've broken loose from the moorings set by the founding fathers... imperfect as they were, and even after more than two centuries of a changing world, those famous and powerful experiments in democracy continue to define us as a people. We must not forget, in fact we must re-learn. In a time when most accumulate a chaos of unrelated beliefs similar to those held by their peer group, molded by marketing campaigns and special interests... this is one path back to a core set of beliefs upon which to base important decisions.

For a little over two months this will be a nation, a world, in transition. Unlike Obama, many of us on the "down-ticket" part of the ballot don't need to wait. We can do our little incremental bits to change the world now, or at least within days. And I'm honored to have been a winner on that same paradigm-shifting day, one which will go down in the history books as a day of profound change.

new

2008-11-03T21:47:00.000-08:00

Finally, I've uploaded the new web page. Actually most of it has been there for several weeks, but now the new index page is up. There are still a couple of minor glitches... some text that needs to be kicked in away from the margin, things like that... but everything works now, I think, except the couple of things that clearly say they don't (a couple of bits of writing still in progress).

I'll need to add to it. The above mentioned writing, which is perhaps another hour or two of work to add. More images in a couple of the galleries (some of which are already scanned). I need to clean up the punk memoirs, which are linked about two layers deep, they've been there forever and are starting to look dated and have lost a few images through accidental deletions over the years. Those pages get a lot of hits, so they really need to be fixed. I keep meaning to do a major re-write and expansion, but that will require time, something that's in short supply at the moment.

The biggest differences from the previous version: A lighter look, a bit less edge. More words. Changes in the way images are grouped and presented, less abstract than anytime recently. New images, some shown before in other places, some not. Old words, post-punk words, written a long time ago but only read by a very few people until now.

The old version is mostly still there, on blind links, although I'll probably delete almost all the old pages after a transition period. Got to keep all the kids who hot link images at least a little honest.

Usually I like to update the site once a year or so, as a very rough average. It's been a lot longer than that, it was overdue. Hopefully the next update won't need to be put off as long.

It's ironic that even as I tame down the site a little, I'm mulling some fairly extreme concepts, and corresponding with a Bay Area model who just might help make some of those concepts into reality.

home

2008-11-01T20:57:00.000-07:00

... for a little while. it felt so good to get a full nights sleep, and then take a nap mid-day. I almost feel human again.

No more travel til at least Thursday afternoon...

craziness

2008-10-28T21:22:00.001-07:00

I'm having fun, and I'm too busy to enjoy it. Make any sense?

The call came in from a new client a bit over two weeks ago: "how quickly can you get here, and how long can you stay?" A few days later I was in Chicago, on a very large and very rush project... can't say a whole lot more just yet. I've been home once since then, last weekend, for about 28 hours with a side daytrip to the Bay Area... and have a few more days in Chicago before being able to take a bit of a break. It's one of those work-eat-sleep-work again trips, with breakfast and lunch catered in to a dedicated project office, dinner with the large and ever-changing project team, except on days with meetings or field visits (like today). It's challenging stuff, but exciting.

But it means, for now, no time for writing, or photos, or visiting with friends, or almost anything else. Ah, the joys of consulting...

It slows down a little in just a few days, I think... although who knows, today has already brought two surprises and two almost immediate resolutions of those issues. But gotta go now... early meetings tomorrow.

web

2008-10-13T22:15:00.000-07:00

The update of my photography website is almost done, it's mostly uploaded except for the new index page. I still need to work out a few glitches, fix a couple of internal links and some general QC. But I'm probably going to go ahead and put it out there soon even though a couple of the galleries don't have quite as many images as I'd like in them yet... it's always possible to add to those later, and after the next couple of evenings I'll be on the road for a week and with very limited time.

Almost all the images will be different. It's a somewhat different approach this time both in feel and in the way the images are presented; a little lighter look, and a less abstract presentation of subject matter, grouped in more conventional categories but also running together a little. This reflects the fact that I'm in a phase of seeing connections again, that each subject seems to lead to and fade into another.

things

2008-10-12T14:47:00.000-07:00

I need to go back to Chicago later this week, had a call a few days ago from a new client and I need to take care of some rush things for them. It's going to be a busy 6 days, I'm getting off the plane and going straight into strategy meetings with project managers and lawyers, and probably working straight through the weekend. Not sure how much time if any I'll have to do anything related to photography. But I did take a few minutes today to think about what to bring, and so far I'm leaning toward keeping it simple. One Leica, a couple of lenses, a handheld incident meter. No digital except for my consumer level pocket-sized little point-and-shoot, and that only in case I need to do any project site documentation.

The reasons: At the recent shoot with Claudine, I took more digital shots (about 180) than film (about 72). And I fell into the trap of shooting quickly just because I could. End result: 40 of the film images made the first cut for editing, only four of the digital images did.

A line in the Weston movie last night brought it to the surface, a mention of the creation of 1,400 negatives (on 8x10 sheet film) during an entire summer of California travels.

I'll bet some digital shooters routinely capture more than 1,400 images in every shoot they do... and that not one of them has, or ever will, even remotely approach what Weston did on that trip.

Another issue has surfaced repeatedly, including in the last two location shoots. I like to shoot in low light, and the little rangefinder lets me get away with it. With no mirror to create vibration, and with the exquisite balance of the Leica, and with the precision of the split-image rangefinder for focus, I routinely handhold at 1/15th, 1/8th, even 1/4 of a second while shooting at dusk or at night, and almost all of the images are sharp. That's led me to try doing the same thing with digital, and... it doesn't work. Shooting at those same speeds results in lots of shots softened by camera vibration, lots of shots with the focus just-barely-off because of the darker, less-crisp DSLR viewfinder and no depth-of-field margin of error at f/1.4 and with the 1.5x crop factor. Yeah, I know, kick up the ISO... but digital noise isn't as pleasing as grain, and I tend to push low light limits anyway, give me more speed and I'll shoot in less light.

I've shot the two cameras side by side, gotten 95 percent success with the Leica, and 25 percent success with a brand new Nikon DSLR, both of them with top-end fast prime glass.

So increasingly I'm shooting digital when speed matters, which for me isn't often, and film the rest of the time.

Another bit of simplifying: Shooting film while on travel allows me to carry my smaller/lighter/easier to use/ancient Mac laptop.. a 12" Powerbook, only 4 pounds. It's too old/slow to handle the huge download files of the current crop of DSLRs, but functions just fine as a word processing and web machine. So that saves me a lot of bulk and weight.

Now if only other things in life were so easy to simplify.

timeless

2008-10-11T21:45:00.000-07:00

About 4:30, taking a break from scanning, I grabbed the papers off the front sidewalk and skimmed them. Two days to look at, because yesterday had been such a busy day.

In yesterdays paper was a notice of a screening, a documentary on Edward Weston and Charis Wilson. It gave a time, 6:30 today, but not a place. Fortunately, the correction was in today's paper, the Morris Graves Museum in Eureka. I was there by 6:15.

Edward Weston died five months after I was born, but he was one of my early photographic influences. I'd known of his work very early, because my father often spoke of him. The real influence happened in the late 70s though, when I read the two-volume set of Weston's Daybooks. They were so direct, authentic, down to earth. They inspired a renewed interest in photography, one that very possibly contributed to the documentary work I began doing on the Chicago punk scene just about that time. There are references to the Daybooks in my journals from that period. I also first learned of Charis from reading the daybooks.

I'm not sure when I saw my first Weston prints. The first extensive exhibit was, I believe, one I saw in New York in the mid-1980s, but I probably saw a few scattered examples much earlier than that. I've rarely passed up an opportunity since then, and have studied those prints many times, enjoyed the subtle tonality, the beauty.

The Daybooks of course deal largely with the earlier days, the transition from pictorialism to modernism, the formal compositions. I always preferred Edward's later work, from the 1930s on. Not very many years ago I found a copy of the "California and the West" book, the one with the 1937 to 1939 Guggenheim Grant images, the one with the forward written by Charis. I've paged through that book so many times since then, and it sits in front of me now. It's so much more subtle than the earlier work, less idealized. This work includes death and decay, an acknowledgement of mortality. It's not easy work to look at, it takes many views to fully appreciate. And it gave momentum to my concepts already underway, my nudes in the human-modified world of disturbance and decay. It was the kiss of death for the already mortally wounded myth of pristine nature, at least as seen through my eyes.

So I owe Edward and Charis a bit of an intellectual debt. They're only one influence among many, and perhaps not the most important one, but they're still an influence. Both of them.

I arrived at the screening in time to grab a seat. The room rapidly filled, the final count was 238, more than four times what had been expected. The crowd was mostly older, refined, well dressed, with a scattering of younger artists.

The director introduced the film, then let it roll. The core was a series of interviews with Charis, 90 at the time of filming (now 94 and living in Santa Cruz). She's still sharp, and some things were easy for her to talk about, even fun; other were more difficult. The re-enactments of the shoots and various other events, with actors, were surprisingly believable. The authenticity... any experienced nude model, any experienced photographer of the nude, will smile, will recognize certain rites of passage, certain experiences.

The film really clarifies the importance of the model-photographer connection, really demonstrates that it's not just technique, not just a pretty body. The personality, the emotion, the energy, is so evident in these images. The creative collaboration requires two. The changes over time, these too become evident. The photographs mirror the relationship.

Charis as rebel also brought a few smiles to my face, given how many rebels I work with. The images of her unshaven, natural, at a time when postal regulations forced most models to shave because mailing an image which showed pubic hair was illegal... and the shift over time from in-your-face rebellion to just being who she was, authentic, with Edward's encouragement and as she matured. Then, the increasing distance as she came into her own, as Edward apparently struggled with that level of independence.

I didn't know until tonight that Charis lived in Eureka from 1945, after she left Edward, until at least through the 1950s.

I recognized the muse. I saw an earlier version of so much of what I've come to experience myself. In some ways, these two personify so many of the traits I've come to know among the many models and photographers I've met and worked with. It's no wonder that I keep crossing this path.

choices

2008-10-11T21:39:00.001-07:00

Today began as a relaxing day. I rode my bike down to Main Street for breakfast, ended up sitting down with two of the locals, both a lot older than me. I very much enjoyed the conversation, as well as a few that followed on the sunny but windy sidewalk, warm and cool at the same time.

After returning home I dove into scanning some of the negatives processed last night. From the two rolls of Claudine, 72 frames, I scanned 40 images... many more than usual. One example is above, but I've barely begun to actually work on the images, it's going to be so hard to choose from all the keepers. What an amazing shoot.

modern myths

2008-10-08T22:29:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I did a google search for some local demographic data, and found what I needed pretty quickly. While on one of the source sites, I saw a link to a forum, and followed it, and in turn followed a couple of links to threads about the Eureka/Arcata area.

What I found there was a series of responses to questions about this area, about what it's like, what the job market is like, etc. The responses were almost entirely from out-of-state people, some of whom had visited once.

Some of the responses were reasonably helpful. But there were several which commented on alleged trashed out front yards, abandoned cars, homeless people; and there were a couple of comments from locals about a "depressed economy."

Two things bothered me about those responses. Let's tackle the ones about the economic situation first, because the answer is simple: Those comments are untrue. They're speculative, none of them cited any actual data, and often they were based on 20-year old information. The "problems" they mentioned are smaller and more localized here than they are in the places those writers are from. But it's a misconception that I still hear sometimes even from those who should know better.

A lot of the problem stems from the 1980s decline that accompanied the transition away from a resource based economy. The logging industry sagged, jobs were lost, some people left the area. People who visited then remember that... I was here briefly in the mid-80s, certainly I remember. We're past that now. The glory days of logging are over, it's a specialty market now, the old days are never coming back. That's a good thing, because it's forced the economy to diversify.

The most telling and most recent sign of that is the beginning of service by Delta Airlines this summer. I was there for the arrival of the first plane, and had a very minor role in making it all happen. It means that we now have three major airlines (the others are United and Alaska/Horizon) flying into a county of only 130,000 people. Clearly, that would not be happening without solid economic justification, especially when times are tough for airlines.

And the airlines are right. The unemployment rate here is currently right around the state average. Median incomes are a little below the state average, but the cost of living is also lower... about 80 percent of the national average. The "Targets of Opportunity" report published a year or two ago by the county identifies six growth sectors, areas which are growing rapidly, and which in general are creating jobs which pay well. I've tossed my copy deep in some pile of paper and don't have time to look for it right now, but among those growth areas are professional services (engineering, architecture, etc.); niche manufacturing; and health care services. There are increasing numbers of telecommuters who have fled the big city (for six years I was one of them), and more information and management workers. Thus the need for those airplanes.

Growth is slow but steady and sustainable. At a time when many rural parts of the U.S. are shrinking, that's a good place to be. We're continually being named to some magazines "best places to live" list often on the basis of outdoor recreation and clean air.

The people who are whining are the ones who have missed the chance to ride opportunity, often the ones who have failed to notice it. The rest of us have been too busy to point it out.

Admittedly, I'm in a better position to see it than most. I sit on the local economic development commission, so I see the numbers firsthand. I know, at least casually, a lot of the city and county decision makers and policy setters. I work for one of those fast-growing professional services firms. Maybe most importantly, I've already watched a variation of this happen in Chicago, 25 years ago... and remember all too vividly the naysayers, the ones who saw the fading days of the rust belt, but never recognized the emerging opportunities... the ones who were left behind. Sometimes the Phoenix can't arise until the ashes have reached a certain critical mass.

The too-rapid growth in the midwest created both good and bad... too much traffic, too much shoddy development. Hopefully, with our more sustainable pace, we can avoid repeating some of those mistakes here.

The second disturbing thing about those comments is a bit more ambiguous. In sum, a few people saw only the fact that we don't all obsess over perfect lawns and shiny new things, and they just didn't understand that. We aren't as materialistic as many parts of the nation. And I need to think on how to really express this adequately... because they didn't see, didn't accept, that we've done some things differently here by choice; that we (or at least many of us) just like to live a little more simply, and don't need to keep up with or impress the Joneses.

That's helping us as the financial bottom falls out of so many other places. Our economic peaks aren't as lofty here. But our chasms aren't as deep, either.

rain

2008-10-03T12:53:00.000-07:00

The rains have come early this year. Yesterday was a warm gentle rain. Today is less pleasant, not all that much rain yet but cool and raw and windy.

Still, I enjoy the rain. It makes for a more somber and thoughtful mood.

bail

2008-10-02T14:27:00.000-07:00

Like so many, I'm following the bailout closely. As a management major in school, I took more than my share of economics courses (known as "the dismal science" for a reason). I've also met at least one of the major players in attempts to resolve the current crisis, and know members of his immediate family quite well, so there's a bit of personal interest.

Obviously, failure to find a resolution will have profound consequences. I have little sympathy for the Wall Street players, although there's plenty of blame to go around they certainly need to shoulder a major portion as the front-line participants. But the pain won't stop on Wall Street. It will also hurt lots of small investors, lots of people with 401(k) plans, and indirectly... in job losses and inability to get credit... a lot of people who had little or no personal involvement in the fiasco.

And yet, the unthinkable occurred to me the other day, and I can't get it out of my head: Maybe, in a perverse sort of way, a collapse of the financial system could be the best long-term thing that could happen to our economy. Maybe that's the only thing that will break us of our materialistic addiction, our binge of buying things we don't really need with money we don't really have.

I have one additional concern, one that I so far haven't seen much discussion of. As banks and investment firms fall like dominoes and some are acquired by larger banks, a significant consolidation of the financial industry is taking place. Banks like Wachovia (which got in trouble partly through acquisitions of its own) are now in turn being swallowed by titans like Citibank. Yet acquisitions and the dealings of mega-firms contributed to the crisis. Are we simply reducing competition and setting up at a minimum a future of distant dealings by huge impersonal and out-of-touch corporations with huge political clout, and which too often outsource jobs overseas? Or at worst, are we setting up the next crisis? In finance class, they taught us to diversify to reduce risk. Yet here we are, consolidating, creating oligarchies.

Maybe we'll draw back from the precipice this time. Yet it's important to remember that our current economic system is essentially a 150-year old experiment, that in it's present form dates back only to the post-WWII years. Even within the relatively short span of recorded human history, it's little more than a blip in time. One can't help but wonder how long a system predicated on never-ending economic growth can be sustainable. The cliff is out there someplace, we just don't know how far in the distance it lies; and we can't see much in the dismal darkness.

city light

2008-09-29T20:24:00.000-07:00

Chicago: This trip happened on about 36 hours notice. It's short, only about three and a half days, and packed fairly full. I didn't expect to have time to shoot. But just hours before leaving for the airport, Claudine e-mailed and offered to shoot. I called her after arriving, we talked this morning, and squeezed in a shoot early this evening.

It was cool and rainy all day, so we shot in her lakefront apartment. It's well lit, windows on two sides, sparsely furnished, even minimalist. And it's... white. White walls, white ceiling, white drapes. There are three B&W prints in white frames and white mats, shots that Ralph Gibson took of Claudine. I'm flattered that she's asked me for two prints from our first shoot, to hang alongside those prints already on her wall.

Toward the end of the shoot we pulled back the drapes, shot with the adjacent high rises in the background. Since it was still light out, I'm not sure if anyone was able to see well enough to enjoy the show... they would have needed to look in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. We didn't care.

I shot enough digital to know I've got plenty of keepers; the black & white should be even better. The light was a little tricky, but worth the effort. More importantly, after the ambivalent feelings of recent weeks, this was a fun shoot. There wasn't much conversation while we worked, because there didn't need to be. Things flowed effortlessly.

in the headlights

2008-09-23T20:21:00.000-07:00

I'm in discussions with two models at the moment about local shoots. Kind of surprising really, because I've made no attempt whatsoever to pursue anything recently. But they've been persistent, one of them may happen later this week, and the other is tentatively about 10 days out.

Neither model is very experienced, but they're both tall and thin, each with an interesting face. The first one, I think she knows what she wants, I'm feeling pretty good about that opportunity. The second one I haven't been talking with long enough to be sure.

But today, when I read her latest message and then clicked through her portfolio again, there were some new images. That's good I guess, because the others were basically consumer-level digital snapshots. The new ones are technically sort-of-OK but far from great, slightly washed out, some cheap zoom lens flare, but just at the minor-problem level.

What really strikes me is that while the newer images are marginally better than the older ones in a technical sense... she's far more expressive in those earlier snapshots. Maybe a better way to put it is that she's more natural, more relaxed.

The new shots are mostly implied nudes... that is, she's wearing nothing, but nothing shows. Hands, objects, etc. are strategically placed.

And she's obviously not having fun. She looks almost scared... what I call the "are we done yet" look. She's rigid, tense. She isn't ready for this. She's been pushed, or has pushed herself, right up to her limits.

The photos aren't credited, but I can guess who did them, and I know for sure who didn't. There aren't very many photographers who do people here. I'm looking forward to meeting her in person just so I can ask a few questions about that shoot.

Thinking about it a little, it's become plain that while at a basic level the photos could have been things of beauty, they aren't. It's not really about the technical things; it's more the intent, I think. My sense is that either consciously or unconsciously, the photographer was so fixated on seeing the girl naked that he forgot about taking the pictures, that became secondary. The resulting energy exchange was of course a less than positive thing. The connection isn't there.

It amazes me that so few photographers understand this... except that there was a time when I'm not sure I did, either. I was fortunate to shoot with some pretty talented people early, and my lapses into "photo-lust" were, I think, brief and widely scattered, so mostly it didn't slow me down. But so many fall into this trap of not thinking, creating superficial images that are about nothing but their own ego.

It makes me want to slap these guys. It's just so selfish, and in the end, such a waste of everyones time. Of course there are too many of them. Educate one, three more buy cameras. It's a losing battle if fought at an individual level. It's the social and cultural context that's messed up, the photographers are victims as much as the models are.

There's more I want to say on this, but it would mean straying way into conjecture and speculation. Better to wait a while and learn more first.

who

2008-09-22T22:36:00.000-07:00

As I continue to compile images for my web site update, it's forced me to think about what my selection criteria are. In most subjects of course, it's about visually striking images which have something in common with the other images in the same series.

But putting together the portrait section, it occurs to me that it's not just the quality of the photo; or rather, it's partially about something that, within that genre, contributes a lot to the quality of the photos. And that, quite simply is: How interesting is this person?

I have an advantage, of course. I actually get to meet the subjects, I know more about them than most viewers will. Still, if I engage with the subject, if I find them interesting, that tends to come across in the photos.

I'm making a bit of a break from the recent past in that I'm thinking about posting a few images of fairly well-known people this time. Mostly, people from my punk years, people associated with infamous bands. Ironically, that was the first time I photographed people as art. I have lots of earlier photos of famous people from my photojournalist years, especially politicians, some of whom are still in the news. But those photos were taken as part of a job. I made no attempt to personally engage with the subject, even though I had opportunities. The most unusual example: Once, in (about) 1978, I was asked by a friend on a major campaign staff to escort Bob Dole (then a relatively young Senator) from a meeting to a press conference, because they were short on staffers that day. So I had five minutes all alone, including an elevator ride, to chat with him. Even though I disagree with him on lots of issues, did then and still do now, I came away from that meeting respecting his integrity. He clearly believed deeply in what he stood for, had thought it through. He just came from a different background, a different world, than I did. But the only photos I took of him were at the press conference, and they're bland and boring, not worth posting. It wasn't til a year or two later that I learned to wield my camera as more than a mindless literal recording device.

Of course it's usually difficult to guess, while we're still able to get close enough to someone to get a good photo of them, who will one day launch to worldwide name recognition. But what I've learned is that it's remarkably easy to get close enough to lots of interesting people, and then count on the fact that some of them, some small percentage, will eventually go places.

I thought of that tonight as I sat in a room full of people with some measure of local power and influence, people not now well known outside of Humboldt County. I looked around and wondered if someday I'd be reading about one of them in the national press; and realizing that I just need to keep taking photos of interesting people wherever I find them and whenever it's appropriate.

america

2008-09-19T22:52:00.000-07:00

For about the third time in the past few months, I've started re-doing my web site. The previous couple of efforts died, because I just wasn't happy with the direction it was going. This latest effort is surviving so far, although I've still got plenty of work to do.

One of the dilemmas is always how to group the images. Usually I do it by concept, but this time I'm simplifying, just doing major subject groupings... portraits, nudes... and that's where I'd hit the latest snag.

I do a lot of street photography. I do a lot of cityscapes. I do a lot of natural landscapes, or at least mostly natural. Increasingly, I've not cropped out the signs of humanity, and sometimes I've made them the central element of the composition.

About 15 minutes ago, while doing a little minimal photoshop on the image above, I realized that it's impossible, at least for me, at least right now, to split those categories. They simply overlap too much.

As I've traveled across America on all these business and personal trips, I've looked at the beauty, the ugliness, the contradictions. I've thought about what de Toqueville wrote about this country, and what those who followed in his footsteps wrote. And I've documented.

The image above is of something I found last summer in Eagleville, California, on the return drive from Burning Man. It's a place of sharp transition. Look to the east, and see the browns and tans and grays of the desert, with Nevada literally visible about two miles away. Look north and south, see verdant green, where springs issue from the mountains and feed lush wetlands and an elongated, narrow strip of green pastureland. Look west, and cedar-covered mountains rise quickly to nearly 6,000 feet. And in this place, an abandoned lot, shadowy memories of games and laughter past.

I'll work on this particular gallery of images over the weekend, I've only chosen the first three so far but there a lot more to work with. If there aren't too many distractions, hopefully I'll get this selective tour of the national psyche uploaded before long.

fire

2008-09-18T20:41:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning to smoke rising above Main Street. One of the old turn of the century redwood buildings was in flames. Quick work by the local volunteer firefighters may or may not have saved the shell, but for sure the inside is badly gutted. A restaurant is out of business for the near future, and 7 young guys living upstairs are essentially out on the street.

I saw the owner of the restaurant on the sidewalk, she was crying.

I couldn't stay very long, because I had a meeting in Weaverville today... only about 90 miles inland, but more than two hours driving time because of the winding nature of Rt. 299, and because of localized one-way controlled traffic related to cleanup efforts from the recent wildfires in Trinity County. Actually they're still burning, probably will be until the first rains in a few weeks, but things are pretty much under control for now. Unlike two weeks ago, I couldn't really see any smoke from the road today, just a few crews cutting up and hauling off burned trees which were in danger of falling onto the road. But at the meeting we learned that about 260,000 acres have burned since June in Trinity County alone. Blackened ground is visible more often than not from Big Bar to Weaverville. The cost of fighting those fires, both financially and in lives lost (at least 11 firefighters) and in health risk (from particulate matter, or PM 2.5) is mind-boggling.

We debated the fires at the NCUAQMD meeting; I agree with my counterpart from Trinity County that the Smoky-the-Bear mentality of the past 80 years, the conscious policy of suppressing fire, has been a slow-motion disaster. I strongly diisagree with my counterpart from DelNorte County, who thinks that salvage logging is the answer.

That's because dead down wood and standing dead wood (known as "snags" in forestry jargon) are essential habitat components for everything from bats to woodpeckers to salamanders, and they don't contribute all that much to the fuel load. Instead, it's the even-age structure of forests managed for logging that's the problem. They're much too dense relative to their pre-settlement condition, and mostly the same size. So if fire gets up one tree, it jumps to the next, and the next. Soon there's a raging crown fire. A few years ago when fires burned in Humboldt Redwoods State Park, the old growth... with its complex multi-layer canopy... escaped with little more than ground fires and an occasional charred trunk base. Adjacent second-growth stands of Douglas fir, even age, went up like an oversized bonfire. There wasn't a lot left in some places.

The inland forests are a lot more vulnerable than the stands in that park, because it's hotter and drier inland. I did see a few recovering stands today which looked healthy, widely spaced mature trees which had survived the fires, only grass below, all the once-dense saplings burned away. Run a nice safe controlled ground fire through there every few years, after the first fall rains when fire is easy to control, and it may be a very long time til catastrophic fire revisits those stands. But other areas are thickets of young shrubs and saplings, tinderboxes waiting for a flame. These are areas where fires were so hot that even the big trees died; now young vegetation fights for space, crowded shoulder to shoulder.

In even age stands, selective cutting may be a good thing. Take half the trees, or even more, out of there, leave the biggest trees and a few smaller ones, and then follow up a few years later with fire, and there's hope for those stands.

Fire is an essential part of the equation, for the simple reason that for thousands of years Native Americans burned the woods. Fire was frequent and of low intensity, and the ecosystem is adapted to that fire. Ironically, in that time before subdivisions, there is evidence that in southern Oregon fires were set by a lone woman as she harvested seeds from last years fire-dependent plants (the guys were probably waiting downwind, bow at the ready for that deer about to flee the fire... but that part is speculation).

Burn enough times, over enough years, and the presettlement open woodlands would eventually return. But modern humans are impatient creatures, unwilling to wait for the sapling that survives every 20th year when it's too wet to burn, unwilling to wait another 70 years for it to grow to maturity. Old-growth structure takes time to develop. I'm fine with helping it along though, at least in managed forests, even-age forests, by culling some of the trees, releasing the remainging ones to sunlight and more rapid growth. Once, or maybe at long intervals that is... because logging = soil disturbance = erosion.

The bottom line is that we can't do it without prescribed fire though. Selective logging by itself only postpones the problem (assuming the contractor doesn't just take the big trees instead of ther small ones they're supposed to when no one is looking, as was documented in one Texas study on Forest Service land... in that case, risk is almost immediately increased). Doing nothing doesn't work either, because that's what got us where we are today.

As is so often the case, the "solutions" pushed by the more extreme special interest groups won't work. What the loggers and their backers want won't work, or at least it's only part of the answer, done the right way and in the right places. And what the more extreme environmentalists want, the hands-off, myth of pristine nature approach, won't work either, because there hasn't been unmanaged land in this place in several thousand years. Hands off old-growth, most of the time, yes... although even there, in most woodland types, an occasional low-intensity managed fire is a good thing. But unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot of old growth left. The rest, the disturbed stuff, needs a pretty serious push back toward equilibrium. We may not always get it right on the first try, but it's about time we get out there and start learning.

splinters

2008-09-15T15:16:00.001-07:00

This weekend I had a guest in from out of town. I met her a few years ago, through one of my ex-punk buddies, didn't know her well.

After two and a half days of firsthand experience, it's crystal clear that she embodies everything we rebelled against in the late 70s and early 80s.

Which leads me, after a little non-linear wandering, to the fact that the original intent, the original philosophy and goals of any counterculture movement, these things tend to get lost pretty quickly. I was fortunate to experience the punk thing while it was still fresh and relatively uncorrupted, and in the pre-internet days it took more than 24 hours for the world to learn about out little rebellion. But soon enough it was diluted. Soon enough it turned into a dress-up party, and excuse to get drunk. Soon enough it wasn't about ideas any more. I probably stayed a few months too long, but that's about when a whole lot of us left.

It's harder today. The world learns of any new idea overnight, the corporate interests try to coopt or acquire anything with cachet (= marketing value).

A little more wnadering, and we come to Burning Man, which began a few years after my departure from punk (even that word "punk" no longer means anything, at least it bears no resemblance to what we were in 1978... it's mostly misunderstood, misapplied today... but that's another entry). Burning Man may once have been a TAZ (temporary autonomous zone), but not anymore. It's locked into the same place, the same time, every year. The law patrols it, three different jurisdictions at least. It's watched from a distance by the marketing types, and that only because it's too hot/cold/windy/dusty for most of the boys and girls in suits to handle, except of course the ones (like me) who go there to get away from the office, to forget it for a little while.

Instead, it's a bunch if mini-TAZs. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them. because there's no predicting, no controlling what happens on any given few yards of ground. What was there this year may or may not be replaced by something else next year, and again the year after that. The anarchy and chaos layered over the structure is what saves it. Always, someone will do something unexpected, and then do something new in a different place the following year.

Always keep moving. Never stand still for long.

perspective

2008-09-13T23:29:00.000-07:00

different worlds, different views
through the haze of pretension
the games she plays
tolerated, at first
but the field has changed
and not everyone understands
invisible lines
the storm brews
fly away
soon

silly model girls

2008-09-12T22:58:00.000-07:00

Most of the models I work with are very bright people, very realistic and very involved in collaborating to create strong images. Because I don't do a lot of mainstream work, I rarely encounter the unrealistic demands that I hear about from some photographers. But I do occasionally stumble on them while browsing random portfolios. I just found a good example, one that I'll share to showcase a particular subset of what apparently happens a lot out there.

She says:

"I gained about 15lbs since I was released from the hospital so I'm now 135lbs and working on working it off"

"I will currently only be taking on paid shoots"

"Only other way I will shoot TFCD is if there is atleast 1of following -MUA, hairstylist, or wardrobe stylist. Or if its for a tearsheet. Sorry if that sounds harsh but it is what it is!"

"I DO NOT SHOOT NUDES UNLESS IT INVOLVES BODYPAINT!!!! ok got it? great!"

She's 5'3" and her avatar photo is so badly underexposed it's hard to tell what she looks like. I've never heard of anyone she's shot with. All 20 shots in her portfolio are technically uneven in quality, and... to put it bluntly... she looks like a slut in most of them. I assume that's what guys are paying her for, but those guys rarely happen to be talented photographers and they aren't doing tasteful, sensitive work.

She's far from the worst I've seen... no demands for all of the images on CD right after the shoot, nothing about bringing her boyfriend along, or any of several other standard items. And at least she's done a few shots, she's not a total newbie.

I guess I just don't understand why she gets any inquiries at all. Either a lot of guys are really desperate, or else there's a market that wants to buy what she's selling.

night

2008-09-11T00:02:00.000-07:00

San Francisco... I'm in an adorable little boutique hotel on Powell Street, small but art-deco cute. I'm just back from grabbing a late dinner at a Thai place on the corner, where I was one of the few round-eyes in the place, and I saw mannerisms and heard words that were like a flashback to my winter working in Bangkok some 11 years ago. Unlike most suburban Thai places which are dumbed-down to cater to the farangs, this one is fairly authentic.

It was fun to walk back on a vibrant street at midnight, with shops and restaurants still open and lots of people on the sidewalk. This part of San Francisco is a bit of a mixing zone, all kinds of people from upscale to downtrodden, but it's... alive.

I'll probably leave the car in the lot and walk over to the office (on Montgomery) in the morning. My meetings aren't til afternoon, so I'll have some time to catch up with everyone I haven't seen in a while.

There are some other things buzzing... on the way down I had a brief conversation about temporary autonomous zones, androgeny, and chaos, among other things. But it's too much to attack right now, must leave some things for later.

growth and ideology

2008-09-09T13:46:00.000-07:00

There are two "major" papers here in Humboldt County, neither of much significance by major market standards. One is a conservative rag started by a local wealthy businessman, the other is harder to characterize politically.... mostly because of a stunning lack of leadership or innovation, which results in an essential abdication of anything related to policy or ideas to the other paper. There are smaller, community specific papers doing more interesting things, but it's a shame that it's left up to them.

Today at lunch I was skimming through a days-old copy of the conservative paper, one of the issues I missed while at burning man; basically, it was the only thing to read in the newspaper basket by the front door of the restaurant. There was a column, not a particularly well thought out one by the standards of any paper (including this one), which went off on the standard rant against government "control." He specifically cited San Francisco and New York City as "liberal" examples.

Now I'm not a fan of command-and-control government. In fact, I despise bureaucracies. I have a deep-seated libertarian/anarchist streak, (depending who you ask), but at the same time know all too well that in an absence of oversight... people will be people, as witnessed by the recent credit implosion caused in part by lightly-regulated greed. There usually need to be some checks and balances.

So it got me thinking... is there any correlation between style of government and growth?

At first superficial glance, one would think that "conservative" towns might tend to grow more quickly, because of the theoretical relative absence of regulation.

As usual, a look at the numbers showed that it's a little more complicated than that.

San Francisco, like many cities, grew rapidly (+ 7.3 percent, or 53,000 people) from 1990 to 2000. But the 2000-2006 trend defied the projections, with population dropping by 4.2 percent. Without digging deeply into the statistics, my educated guess is that it's a direct result of the astronomical run-up of housing costs during that same period. I know a lot of people who want to live in San Francisco, and can't even think about affording it right now. To some extent the city is a victim of it's own success, in spite of a liberal government that can be... entertaining to watch sometimes.

New York is less ambiguous. It's been one of the fastest growing cities in the nation recently, in raw numbers second only to Los Angeles in 2006-2007. From 2000 to 2006, the city-wide growth rate was 3.0 percent, and all of the boroughs grew, which surprised me a little; Staten Island led the pack at +7.9 percent, Manhattan stood at +4.9, with Queens bringing up the rear at +1.9.

Looking at the table of 2007 fastest growing cities in raw numbers, it's a mixed bag. There are classic laissez-faire cities like Houston and Phoenix in the top 10, and indeed there are probably more "conservative" cities than "liberal" ones in the top 100. But there are some striking examples of progressive places too, for example Madison Wisconsin.

At the local level, much too small to make anybody's lists, it's similarly mixed. Conservative Fortuna is growing, as is liberal Arcata, as is apolitical McKinleyville.

What does it all means?

Again, it's an educated guess. But I suspect that it comes down to how much people want to live there. If building permits are dispensed like candy, that may, and probably does, facilitate growth. But if no one wants to live there, the regulatory climate is irrelevant. Reversing the slide of a dying ag town in Iowa or Nebraska requires major financial incentives and innovation, and even then it may not work. Conversely, in certain coastal areas or in the sun belt, government needs to get fairly obstructive to discourage growth. That's especially true in places like the one I live in, which seems to continually be on some magazine's "best places to live" list.

Not that it doesn't matter at all. When I came here seven years ago, it was for quality of life (and to flee the lack thereof in Chicago). But I passed on Arcata because it quickly became clear that government there can border on the irrational. Anyplace where signs on the plaza list six or more things starting in the word "no" is a little scary. Both ends of the political spectrum can be good at infringing on individual rights, in different ways and for different reasons.

So I found someplace nearby, someplace with a similar art scene and the same mild climate and a less intrusive style of government. Even there, in a town with alleged libertarian tendencies, I've had to fight some battles against irrational government. The difference is that I'm not alone.

The problem isn't necessarily regulation. The problem is irrational regulation, for its own sake, without a clearly defined underlying philosophy. Governments tend to copy ordinances from other cities, thus perpetuating mistakes of the past. Government, no matter it's ideology, tends to grow. We need to periodically review our government, ask on a department by department basis, what's the goal here, what's the objective, and are they meeting it, and if not why not, and if not what can we do to fix it. And occasionally we need to get rid of something, or combine some things. For the simple reason that times change, a mandate developed years ago may no longer be of use, and sometimes people settle into a rut and don't work as hard as they used to.

The only problem is that I haven't yet figured out how to make that kind of credibility stick.

gray

2008-09-07T15:47:00.000-07:00

The fog lifted only for an hour or two today, it's gray and cool outside. It's refreshing after the desert. It's a reminder that the rains will return in perhaps four to six weeks.

I'm getting caught up on all those little mundane things. Laundry. Using the air compressor to blast the playa dust out of the inside of the Jeep before I take it in to get the window fixed tomorrow. Some reading.

Yesterday was the big town-wide garage sale that brings in tourists from down below, beyond the redwood curtain. They drive around in thing-lust, looking out their side windows, not paying attention, generally making life dangerous for pedestrians. I rode around town on my bike, since there was essentially no place to park anyway. But it was a high-awareness day, a watch out for others day.

Breakfast. Making the rounds of garage sales, more to talk to the neighbors than anything else... I already have too much stuff, didn't buy a thing. At 7, to Eureka for Arts Alive, and to meet with a model and negotiate a shoot. It may happen in the next couple of days, or maybe not til after the Bay Area trip. She works retail, and gets her schedule only a day or two in advance.

Arts night was crowded, but not particularly interesting, so I didn't stay very long, didn't see very much that caught my attention. We have a big exhibit opening here at the gallery in Ferndale next weekend... so I'll need to continue prepping for that.

2008-09-05T21:57:00.000-07:00

San Francisco author Rebecca Solnit, in her collection of essays titled "Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics" says:

"To think of a figure in this vast western space of the Great Basin is to see a solitary on an empty stage, and the space seems to be about the most literal definition of freedom: space in which nothing impedes act or will."

A few sentences later, she touches on Burning Man as one of several places/events to have "realized this definition."

Even if it isn't very solitary.

But it's true enough that the inhibitions fall away, that people go there for freedom, defined in many different ways. Some, but not all, understand that with freedom comes responsibility, that in some ways responsibility is freedom.

For me, freedom came late in the week, in the second major duststorm. The heavy suspended dust filtered the sunlight, moderated the afternoon temperatures just a little, and I was finally acclimated to the heat and the 4,000-foot elevation. So I grabbed my camera, safely packed away in a plastic bag inside a case inside a pack, and my goggles and dust mask, and headed off the right edge of the city, in the general direction of the bit of playa-art called Babylon.

The intensity of the storm gradually built, but the path toward Babylon was so well traveled that it was signed, big psuedo-highway markers that said "BRC 69." The whiteout closed in around me, until I could see no one else, could barely see 50 feet. All but a few people had taken shelter.

That's when I felt that freedom, like walking around in a hot dry cloud, surrounded by tens of thousands of people, yet all alone. For a while I stood there and felt the sensation, felt the hot blast of the wind, the blowing playa dust. I stripped off what little I was wearing, to feel it all the better, stood in the hot wind, feeling like all I needed to do to fly would be to stick out my arms.

Eventually, bored with that, I climbed to the top of Babylon, all 10 or 11 stories of basic boxy steel construction, past two people asleep on mid-floors, and stop on the top in a white void, unable to see the playa, unable to see anything except the top floor upon which I stood. Bored with that too, I slowly wandered back to camp.

This began a series of explorations of the playa, all the way out to the bordering fence one day; around parts of the city another. Usually these excursions were in the cold magical light of dawn, ironic because I'm usually not a morning person. Sometimes they were later in the day. One afternoon I took my camera, in another whiteout, deciding to find some random attractive young semi-naked woman to photograph in the midst of the white out, just because I wanted to; as a way to spoof my own more controlled photography of models. Walking to the edge of the city, I pulled out the camera and walked slowly, like a predator stalking its prey; only to find, five minutes later, that the prey was stalking me. A young woman literally followed me, smiling, staying close through several turns as I tested her intentions, until I asked if I could take her photo. She rubbed up against me as she said yes. I looked in her green eyes, quickly realizing that her mood was more than a little chemically influenced, took two or three photos as her mood changed and changed again and flew across her face. Then just as quickly, as she began to ask the same questions for the second or third time, I turned her loose and continued my walk.

The night they burned the man... I found it a little annoying. We arrived early, staked out places, all 9 of us. For the next hour, people pushed to the front, packed in too tightly, until it became a distinctly overcrowded and unpleasant experience. I was seriously considering leaving, going back to camp, when they finally set the flame.

The next night, for the temple burn... more of the same. More late arrivals pushing to the front, too much loud talk ripping at the solemn mood. Why is it that people with nothing important to say, tend to say it so loudly? I listened to those present to mourn the lost ones shout down the insensitive ones, tried to feel sorry for those battling their substance abuse issues or their general lack of sensitivity, and not being in control.

I too was there to remember, to honor an artist who had done his part to create a community, who had launched a whole network of creative individuals. My photograph, a portrait of the late Hobart Brown, was stapled to the wall of that temple, as were words that others had written about him, about what he had done.

The flames finally stunned all into silence, at least most of the time. I heard sobbing behind me, felt a wave of energy from the crowd.

As the structure fell, the wind picked up, the wall of dust howling across the playa. With perhaps 20,000 people out on the open playa, a mile from camp, at night, visibility disappeared. We sighted on the green lasers of Opulent Temple before they too vanished into the white, walked calmly back to camp, and managed to find our way. I wonder how many took a wrong turn and wandered blindly for hours, fighting down panic or despair.

The winds were perhaps the highest of the week so far, from a different direction than usual, and they had gotten under one end of the cover on the dome, torn two or three grommets loose from the rebar stakes. There was never any danger of losing anything, the dome is very stable. But we had to work for about 20 minutes in the dust storm to keep it on the outside, away from us on the inside.

I had to leave early on Monday, to beat the mass exodus and get back to the coast. At that point I thought the LA trip might happen Tuesday morning, so was on my way out pre-dawn. There was hardly any traffic so early, but when I rolled down the window a bit going past the gate, it caught a moment, stuck in the accumulated playa dust, and popped off the track, slowly sliding down inside the door. It made for a cold ride through the early light of the Nevada desert, finally warming as I crossed the state line and pulled into Eagleville.

There, my Blackberry began to buzz endlessly as some 200 e-mails came rolling in (despite having had my out-of-office notification on), the first signal I'd had in a week. Scanning quickly, I found the ones about the LA trip, which I'd delegated to someone at the office to set up for me. Yes... not til Wednesday. Time to relax, no need to rush.

Breakfast in Alturas tasted so good. Including stops for gas, food, and a one-hour nap in a rest area, I rolled down the hill to the coast 12 hours later, about 9 hours of actual driving. Arriving home, I quickly unloaded the car and then slid into a very long and very pleasant shower. It would take a couple more of those to find the last of the playa dust.

The pile of dusty things remains in the garage, I'll finally have time this weekend to sort through it. I have an appointment Monday to fix the car window, fortunately there's no crime to speak of in my immediate neighborhood so there was no hurry; although I took the other car to the office today, because oldtown has its transient population. With a business trip close on the heels of a week-long "vacation" in extreme conditions, I'm tired. I'm on deadline at the office, with a major draft document due in less than two weeks, with a meeting in San Jose scheduled for next Thursday, with two other rush projects breaking. But for now, I feel good, feel like things are fun.

And this years crew, no longer virgins... they're already planning for next year.

180

2008-09-05T20:39:00.000-07:00

Burning Man is a study in contrasts.

It's the planned city, laid out (literally) like clockwork; with streets from 2:00 to 10:00, and the cross-streets conveniently lettered. Center camp is... in the center, at 6:00. Medical and ice are at 3:00 and 9:00. Major theme camps are at pre-assigned locations.

And that's about as far as the urban planning goes. Anarchy overlays the grid, and works, sort of, at least it works a lot better than one might expect.

Maybe that's because the western concept of property doesn't mean much when the fourth-largest city in Nevada springs up almost overnight, and then a week later, fades away like a mirage, like it was never there. Then, a year later, it returns, but never quite the same.

People arrive, often in the dark, set up, find fuzzy boundaries. Sometimes, delineated by a rope or a line of cars. Sometimes blurred, unmarked, with strangers becoming neighbors and then merging into semi-affiliated camps sharing things freely. Large camps one year split off into clusters of satellite camps, visiting each other across the "street" and the vacated space being filled by virgins. In my case, I spent my first Burning Man in the Kazbus camp, and have at least stopped by to say hi every year since then, this year they were kitty-corner from us... I once learned things from more experienced participants there, and have since passed them on to others.

Sustainability? Yes and no. Everything is imported. Everything must be carried out (or burned). The "city" works because it only lasts for a while. Maintaining banks of porta-potties for a week is practical; longer term.... there's no wastewater treatment plant on the playa, and the porta's get pretty grungy by the end of the week. It's similar with water... possible to keep hauling it in from the outside, but only practical for so long.

One of the bits of genius of Burning Man is the ban on driving except for arrival and departure, and of course art cars or "official" vehicles. In a way it's proof that bicycles and feet are perfectly practical methods of transportation at a compact, high-density scale. Just when one wonders how to translate that to the outside world, comes the mass exodus on labor day, the endless traffic jam as 20,000 cars all try to leave at once. If only we had high-speed rail to the playa, turned on for one week a year, dormant otherwise.

The weather; more extremes. 100 degrees by day. Sometimes into the 40s at night. High winds, sometimes exceeding 70-mph; dust storms, white-outs, dust devils like mini-tornadoes. It's a harsh place, a place of extremes. if it weren't, there'd be 500,000 people there instead of 50,000.

Then there's the primitives-vs-RV war. Those of us taking pride in roughing it, doing endless battle with the elements, scorning those safely sheltered in the safety of RVs. I'm sure they're equally condescending toward us, the scruffy-looking ones coated in white dust. To each their own.

---

Back to the story. For the first two or three days, I took it easy, enjoyed the absence of a cell phone signal, not having any desire to check e-mail (although it's possible on the playa), not thinking at all about the office or my clients. In the calmness following the first white-out, my project manager background did come out, as we debriefed the event, came to the conclusion that in future we need to rein in the over-enthusiasm of the newbies who wanted to set everything up right now, and instead concentrate on getting a core structure up solidly enough to survive anything; then get some rest, be able to think clearly again, and stage from the shade structure to add to the camp complex over a day or two. Quality over speed.

Fortunately, we had a mellow and drama-free crew this year, and that was the only time all week I had to assert myself. Unlike last year, when I seemed to be spending way too much time keeping two or three people from damaging themselves or those around them. Two or three people who were off in other camps this year, aggravating someone else; or not present at all.

I began to spend a lot of time reading, jotting down notes. The connections began slowly, built, turned in unexpected directions. Connections between countercultures spanning my lifetime and a little more, a flow-state of rebellion over time, ideas about the next level of rebellion, about a quiet anti-corporate insurgency from within. A realization that my punk years were really, deep down inside, about rebelling against a suburban sprawl that we still only poorly understood, that wouldn't be well defined until later, by new urbanists who hadn't chosen that name yet. We rebelled against an absence of community, even an active suppression of community, an abandoning of common space and the center; we created our own community, in the inner cities at that time abandoned by most everyone else. Fitting, that it came to the surface in the community that is burning man, in the first half of the week when some said that the (initially) smaller size of the city made it feel like the older, more cohesive days.

That would change later in the week, as the crowd grew to record size (almost 50,000), as the shallow and materialistic ones descended on us for the weekend. We ignored them as best we could.

Breaktime...

247

2008-09-05T18:13:00.000-07:00

My notebook lies open in front of me, playa dust embedded in the black covers. I can feel it, see it, smell it.

As usual, it took me a little while to acclimate to the playa. I don't deal well with extreme heat, so I've learned, those first few days, to just find a shaded and breezy spot and take an afternoon nap, to be nocturnal at first.

We'd arrived at 1:00 am, an hour after the gates opened to the general influx, set up our dome, with a crew of 8 (initially, to grow a little later on) it went quickly. A few of us caught some sleep , the virgins though (half our group this time) were so excited, they stayed up all night. I woke mid-morning to find them all passed out, everything set up, but not quite secured the way it should be, the tie-downs not quite done.

Just then Nevena, our Italian fashion designer, strolled into camp. She'd flown out from Milan to attend Burning Man, become part of our camp via e-mail exchanges, and now, after a bus from San Francisco airport with a group of burners, she walked out of the sun like an apparition.

Moments later, the winds picked up what seemed like half the Black Rock desert and hurled it against the emerging city; as if to say, what is this intrusion on my emptiness?

Our dome held, although I had to quickly throw a few ropes over the top to keep the cover from flapping excessively. The new easy-up that would be our kitchen, the one not adequately tied down... I watched it lean, heard the metal snap. By now several tired people had rolled out of tents, as we pulled it back from the brink of disaster. A random stranger walked in and handed us a length of angle iron... "here, you need this more than I do." We quickly duct-taped it to a corner support. A few moments later, with more ropes tied off to vehicle tires and bumpers, we were able to lay down and wait out the dry-storm without any further damage. Our virgins had learned a lesson about complacency in a place where, given half a chance, nature will gladly try to kill you.

Time to go get dinner... more later.

white

2008-09-05T18:04:00.000-07:00

hot dust
naked heat
fly in the white
in the white
tens of thousands of people
yet all alone
in the white
in the heat
roads to nowhere
roads to the future
roads of now
sun tries to pierce the dust
like a needle
like a hallucination
crossroads 69
the eternity of now
the circle of now
the sound of now
the heat of now
the mystery
from the ephemeral city
from the ephemeral earth

triangle

2008-09-03T23:24:00.000-07:00

I'm 48 hours back from Burning Man, and sitting in a fancy hotel in LA. Quite the cultural contrast.

I knew there would be travel right after the return, but the details weren't worked out when I left. So I had someone at the office set things up for me once the "go" came in from the client. That meant I didn't know exactly when I'd need to leave until I drove into Cedarville two hours out of the Black Rock Desert, and once again had a phone signal... and a couple hundred e-mails on my Blackberry. I spent most of breakfast in Alturas sorting through those and reading the important ones.

It wasn't that bad, I had a full day at home before needing to head to the airport. This is a fast track project, and this trip was for a meeting and a site visit, with the intent of identifying issues and writing up a memo to propose methods of addressing those issues. It's fairly complex, and this is probably just the start. I'm expecting to be back down here within a few weeks for agency meetings.

But first, there's a San Francisco trip next week, and another probable fast-track project breaking in Chicago. It's looking like a busy travel season this fall.

I'm hoping to find time to write about the Burning Man experience, but not tonight, not in any detail... I have an early flight to catch tomorrow. For now let's just say that it was a good crew, 9 good people, no problems, no drama. The event... as usual, I saw the best and the worst of human nature. But overall I'd say it was a better experience than last year, and I managed to acclimate to the weather/elevation/noise more quickly this time.

More when I can.

entropy

2008-08-17T22:59:00.001-07:00

It's perhaps only because I'm on deadline at the office, working part of the weekend, not thinking about much else. Maybe it will pass after Tuesday. But there's no particular desire to pick up a camera at the moment. I'm getting residual messages from models, one local and one in San Francisco just recently, and I just can't get real excited about it.

Next week is Burning Man, which I'm looking forward to mostly because my cell phone doesn't work on the playa, and while there's e-mail at center camp, I'm never tempted to use it. For a week, I cut all ties with the outside world. They can't find me. Whatever it is, it has to wait.

This year I'm feeling a desire to bring a few political philosophy books along, and a notebook and a pen, and go back to basics, sort through core beliefs. We'll see how realistic that is, because the heat of the day tends to sap motivation. I don't deal well with extreme heat. And at night... if you've been, you know.

I do bring a camera to this event each year, and my style tends to go even more minimalist than usual. There's so much visual overload, it becomes essential to edit out almost everything, find very precise things of interest. Things, more often than people.

Maybe I'll deal with the models after I return. Right now, September feels like yesterday.

grrrrrr

2008-08-15T21:52:00.000-07:00

I'm not in a good mood.

I'm on deadline at the office... that will pass, in a few days. And, someone has just failed... and I use that word consciously... to live up to a commitment they made to me just last week. By doing so, they've caused me a fair amount of extra work and stress at a time when it's not appreciated. And, I've recently had some additional unwanted responsibility dumped on me.

Once I'm past the short-term deadline, a few decisions will be made.

whirlwind

2008-08-08T11:42:00.000-07:00

I'm at the Unicorn Cafe, in Evanston Illinois, about a block from the Northwestern University campus. This Chicago trip was a surprise, two days notice. I'm here to help an elderly relative who got into some financial trouble. The summary: 11 credit cards, and a bunch more they sent her which were never activated. She didn't even know how many she had until I asked. She tripped some credit report threshold, or else the companies are having cash flow trouble, and they all wanted to be paid at once. If I hadn't intervened, they would have grabbed her meager bank account, left a 76-year old lady with no money at all, no way to pay her phone bill, no way to buy food. They had pressured her into giving them bank routing numbers. What was in that account would have covered about one percent of the total.

Is anyone still wondering why there's a major financial crisis in this country?

For what it's worth, American Express was the easiest to deal with, very accommodating, very easy to work with. Chase Bank was the worst; transferred three times and still couldn't get a straight answer. Apparently the front-line people aren't trusted to make decisions, and the hierarchy is tangled and inefficient.

Oh, and Chase was charging her 28.99 percent annual interest. The prime rate is currently 5 percent... why is this legal? Even if it is, why is Chase charging nearly 30 percent?

I pulled my account from them more than two years ago, after they made three screwups in a few months. One wonders how inefficient companies stay in business....

Anyway, it's pretty much handled now, and I may even be able to get a shoot in this weekend before flying home. I'm back to traveling light, one 12.8 pound bag (just weighed it) with my laptop (4.8 pound 12" Powermac) and two Leicas. No heavy DSLR this time.

why?

2008-08-01T14:52:00.000-07:00

What are the reasons we create our art?

Is it the creative process itself? Would we be satisfied if we created and walked away, if no one ever saw the art? Last summer I created a rock sculpture somewhere in the mountains of Lake County, stacked them into a mini-monument; certainly by now they've fallen, been scattered by winds or aninals, The process of creating was still satisfying. Is it art if no one sees it?

Or do we need the reactions... the praise, shock, whatever... of others? Must we show, get feedback, to be fulfilled?

Or must we profit from our "art" ???

I don't know the answer yet. Maybe there are many answers, varying with the questioner, with the time, with the place.

It comes up because of a question from another, on what to do about unauthorized non-commercial web use... if anything.

Must we protect our "property" ? (such a western concept, property).

Or is it better to maximize the number of viewers, sometimes with the unsolicited "help" of others?

Does it matter?

Salome

2008-07-28T23:50:00.001-07:00

From the July 12 shoot in Lake Forest, Illinois. Not much more to say, the picture does that for me.

spiral

2008-07-28T23:20:00.000-07:00

I know better... but in spite of it, they very nearly got me, those damn corporate marketing people.

The foray back into digital started it. The product had been improved enough to do away with pretty much all the complaints I had last time around. So when the bug bit to play in color this time, there was no excuse not to try again.

I'd only skipped one generation, about three years. But everything was so much bigger-better-faster. Maybe it's just the blinding speed of modern technological change. Maybe it's planned obsolescence. It doesn't really matter which. But everything else "needed" to be upgraded.

My ancient version of Photoshop wouldn't read the new RAW files. Easy enough, $89 upgrade, and I liked the new product better anyway. But the new version of Photoshop is too big to run on my 5-year old laptop, as is the newest version of the camera manufacturers RAW converter software. So I seriously thought about upgrading the laptop. And now, after a few months of shooting, the hard drive on my newer desktop machine is pretty much full, and that may very possibly mean some new storage.

Except that I stopped long enough to take a deep breath.. that, and doing five shoots in two weeks in Chicago has me temporarily satiated, so I'm in no hurry to fill the remaining 2.9 GB of space on that hard drive. Which gave me time to think.

I got around the need to immediately do a laptop upgrade by buying a couple more CF cards, and waiting to download til I was back at my desktop machine... $50 instead of $1700. And I'm in no hurry to shoot again at the moment, so I can take my time to think about storage options, and in the meantime I'm backing things up with what I've already got to work with. Slow, but effective. And most importantly, I've made a decision to return mostly to film for my artistic work, saving the DSLR for things where speed is essential... work things, special events, rush things. For my model shoots, there's usually no rush. And I'm getting better work in B&W anyway. As the Chicago trip progressed, I shot more film and less digital, and didn't even need to use one of those extra CF cards.

That means I can get by with my ancient 12-inch G4 Powerbook for a while longer. It's a perfectly adequate e-mail and web machine, and it's smaller and lighter (a little over 4 pounds) than anything but the Macbook Air... which really needs to go through one more generation of growing pains. I'm still going to need to address the storage issue, but now I can do it at a more casual pace, and maybe more simply than would be possible if I kept shooting at a pace of 4 GB of RAW images per event.

So my world has slowed down again, become just a little less complex. I'm back to making changes at my own pace, not at a pace dictated by someone else.

savanna

2008-07-12T17:35:00.000-07:00

The first five days of the trip have been busy ones, with early mornings and full work days. After the mild weather of the coast, it took me two or three days to fully acclimate to the warm, humid conditions here.

Today was the first day of the trip not devoted to work, and after the morning thunderstorms had passed through I called Salome and told her I was on the way. We drove up into Lake County, to a 500-acre oak savanna site where I'd done some research in the past and so knew my way around.

It was a 15-minute walk in, mostly on gravel trails. There was a little sun at first, then the clouds returned. There was enough of a breeze to keep the mosquitos down, and to make it a pleasant day. We circled around off the trail into a small wet depression not very visible from the trail or from the multi-million dollar Lake Forest homes just a quarter-mile away.

We did most of the shoot with Salome standing knee-deep in the wetland; for part of the time she held a two-foot long garter snake we'd captured on the way in. Then we crossed into the nearby oak savanna, one of the best remaining examples of this community type in the world, and did another series (sans snake, we'd released it near the first wetland) standing in the dense sedges of a smaller marsh. Both of us, because to get the shots, I had to be knee deep in the marsh too. We kept it shorter this time, there were a few more bugs in this area more sheltered from the wind.

As usual, Salome served above and beyond the call of duty in the name of art. Her legs were pretty scratched up by the time we got back to the trail, and she had picked up a few readily visible mosquito bites. I've shot with her 7 or 8 times now, and it seems she endures heat, cold, wind, freezing rain, mud, or something equally challenging each time.

It may be a while til I'm able to post photos. I shot with three cameras this time, 35mm and medium format B&W film, and digital with two lenses including a rented 18mm wide angle. But I only have my work laptop with me this trip, so will probably accumulate CF cards and download them all at home in about 10 days... three shoots to go, and one of those may be all film. I have five 2GB cards with me, used one today, and can easily get more if I run short. I'll probably get a head start on processing film while here, but of course have no easy way to scan til I return home.

viewshed

2008-07-06T18:25:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I processed two rolls of Neopan 1600, and the results reinforced what I've been feeling recently about the relative merits of shooting digital vs. film.

This one is from the recent shoot with Amy. The digital shots that I had a look at within minutes of downloading the cards were gaudy, bright red, attention grabbing. But once past two or three images that I liked a lot, I found myself struggling to find any substance in the rest of the images. They were close, but my attention faded after a few seconds.

Yesterday I had no problem finding 10 B&W film images to scan. Considering I shot more than 200 digital images, and 36 on film.. that means I really like about 2 percent of the digital images, and more than a quarter of the film images, and actually it's more than that. Some were sequences, similar images except for perhaps expression or a slightly different framing. Often any of a sequence of three or four would have worked well, and I had to choose one of the batch. And I found myself excited about doing that.

Maybe I've just been shooting B&W so long that it's natural for me to see that way. But I feel like I know exactly what I want with film, and tend to drift with the instant gratification of digital.

I'll be shooting more film on the trip these next two weeks.

in the beginning

2008-07-06T17:40:00.001-07:00

The not very good photo above was taken in 1972. It's from my first "real" shoot with a model. It was the day I learned the power of the camera.

I was about 16, had been shooting for the school paper and for various local suburban papers for less than a year. Sandi, the model, was a year older than me; she was a senior, I was a junior. More importantly, she was the captain of the cheerleading squad, the homecoming queen, easily the most popular girl in school. She was the kind of girl who normally wouldn't even have noticed a guy a class behind hers.

I don't remember exactly how the shoot came about, but it was her idea. I knew her from all those football games and basketball games, the ones both of us spent on the sidelines. It was inevitable that I'd get to know her and others like her, we had plenty of time to talk. In any case, I found myself in Sandi's yellow 1967 Chevelle, with another cheerleader, a tall thin redhead, the three of us riding to a small lake in Park Ridge. It was a small public park with grass and a few trees, surrounded by upscale residential neighborhoods. Sandi seemed to know everyone, cars honked, people leaned out of windows and waved.

I don't remember a lot about the shoot itself, and this is the only surviving print. I knew enough by this time to keep her out of the harsh summer sunlight, to avoid strong shadows, but I didn't quite nail the exposure on the tough backlighting. Still, it's a good shot of Sandi, she looks good, and looks looks taller and thinner than she really was. Ignore the distractions of the branches, ignore the lack of a good black, and the rest is OK. At that early stage in my experience as a photographer, I could have done a lot worse.

The important thing though, is that the experience taught me a lot about what a camera was really good for, and that it was as much about attitude and expectations as it was about the camera. The photographer thing could go either way. I had a fair amount of prestige at school as a staffer on the paper, it got me out of class sometimes, and into sporting and other events for free, and a lot of people knew who I was. I'd been in the teacher's lounge, a forbidden zone for most students; I'd given direction to top administrators during those few precious moments when it was my photo shoot to direct. But I'd also just shot a wedding for money, for a neighbor, and been treated badly, as hired help. At best, I was ignored, in the background. At worst, I was expected to do the bidding of a bunch of drunks. I swore then that I'd never shoot another wedding for pay, and I never have.

This comes up because these past few days I've seen an unusually high number of posts from photographers who are obviously feeling put upon, and they seem to think it's everyone's fault but theirs. They're feeling disrespected in various ways. And it's made me remember that it's been a very long time since I've felt that way, and that there are reasons it worked out that way. It wasn't an accident.

Although I wasn't a very good photographer yet in those high school days, I was part of the local elite. I was reliable, so I had the backing of the newspaper advisor, and plenty of assignments, usually the better ones. I worked closely with a few of my counterparts on the yearbook staff, people who shared my status. Even then, we were aware of those who wished for our opportunities.

I shot less in college, but usually for pay when I did... model comps, product work for corporate clients. Then came the punk years, when once again I quickly found my way to the inner circle... largely because of circumstance, being in the right place at the right time, and capitalizing on the opportunity. I drank with and photographed people who are household names today, and thought nothing of it. Sometimes I still smile when I hear their songs on the radio.

Although I took a long break from photography after that, ever since those punk days I've photographed what I want to photograph, not what someone else wants me to photograph. Just last week I turned down an offer of a paid gig, referred the person to a local pro.

I have no idea what happened to Sandi, I never saw her or heard anything of her after high school. But thanks Sandi, wherever you are, for helping me learn a very important lesson about how to use a camera to visit interesting places and meet interesting people, and never look back. The camera only opens the door, it's up to us what we do with it after that.

planning

2008-07-04T21:57:00.000-07:00

I fly to Chicago on Monday, and jump right into project work the first few days. The shoots start next weekend.

I have two set with friends, models I've worked with a dozen times or more, known quantities. One is precisely scheduled, and the place and the concept are firm. The other, we're winging it. We'll talk on the phone once I'm on the ground, probably grab a cup of coffee the first night or two, and figure it out from there.

The other two are with people I've not yet met. Both are experienced models, one a very alternative girl from Iowa of all places (we're meeting halfway, in a place neither of us has ever been to), and the other is a local art model.

I'm debating whether to pursue any more than that. There are a couple of other photogenic friends, not models really, but people I've photographed before, and they don't even know yet that I'm going to be there. I haven't delved too deeply into the usual online sources either. But even if I don't know yet how aggressive I want to be about booking, I do know exactly what I want to shoot. Splitting it between B&W and color this time... or more accurately, returning partially to the old familiar B&W... has made it all clear again.

surprises

2008-06-29T23:32:00.000-07:00

I'm doing the accumulated film in pretty much random order, starting with the batches I've got an even tankful of. Thus, the four rolls of Acros 100 got to go first.

One of the fun things about cleaning up old unprocessed film is the surprises that await. There were pretty much "fifth roll" situations, the one roll from a shoot that didn't get processed because it wasn't an even number, so not efficient to do at the time. Two of these rolls are landscapes or street photography, but there are also two "lost rolls" from the shoots with Nixon Sixx and Trinette, both quite a while ago.

They're hanging up drying now.

I really do miss shooting with the Leica. It may need to come out and play again.

a week...

2008-06-29T17:24:00.000-07:00

... until I go to Chicago. Unexpected gallery related things chewed up most of my day yesterday, but today I'm taking inventory of unprocessed film and deciding which batch to attack first, starting tonight. There's more than I thought, mostly medium format. I'm not likely to get all the way through it before heading east. But that's OK, because I'm probably going to shoot more film while there, and some of the MF has been around long enough that I don't even remember what's on it. So I'll probably do some of the 35mm stuff first.

I need to carry my digital gear on this trip, because of the need to document some fast-flying critters for work. Endangered dragonflies are a lot easier to catch in flight with an auto-focus tele-macro. And I keep an old beat up medium format body stored in Chicago, so it's simple enough to carry one lens and be able to shoot film, also. But I may pack a Leica too since it adds minimally to bulk and weight, and have the capability to shoot several different ways.

It's going to be a funny schedule this time, with an early start and field work every day (including weekends) that is sunny and warm and not too windy. I'll have a crew of biologists with me, and they'll be staying very close to the project site so I'll have weather eyes on the ground. On rainy days, which have been not uncommon in the midwest recently, we have the choice of doing office work, or if it's been a good week and we've gotten enough done, taking a day off on short notice. Even on days we work, the critter is down and in hiding by 1:00 pm, so we grab lunch, clean up, tidy up our field notes, and we're done by 2:30. I may have afternoon meetings a few days including one with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and there will be days when I have a ton of e-mail to sort through... usually best done on a fast wi-fi connection from an inner city coffee house, where I can get a solid network connection... or need to edit documents or meet some deadline that I don't even know about yet. But it's flexible. Some days I'll probably work long hours, others will be short days.

So I'm taking advantage of the long summer days to book a few shoots, generally after 5 when the light will be better. I'm not sure when the next Chicago trip will be, so no point in waiting. Two shoots are set, two more are in discussion stages, and we'll see what else might materialize.

circle of technology

2008-06-25T22:36:00.000-07:00

Two things that annoy me about digital:

1. The myth of "it saves money."

Not when the camera body is obsolete in two years or less. Not when the latest download software won't run on my otherwise perfectly good if old G4 Powerbook. The software wants more RAM than the aging laptop will take. As does the latest version of Photoshop (the older/smaller versions won't read RAW files from the newest cameras). Not when I'll soon need more storage to back up my hard drive which is rapidly filling with 12mp images... even the hard drive on my newer/bigger/faster desktop machine.

So if I go on a two week trip, like I will soon, and if I have three shoots booked, as I do, with more possible, I have a choice of buying a pile of CF cards at approx. $14/GB, or spending $1,000 or more on a new laptop that I don't otherwise really need yet, + something to back it up onto.

2. Permanence, or lack thereof.

I have very real concerns about longer term handling of my images. Digital media last what... five years? At a minimum, it's going to mean backing up all those images, and then backing them up again, and then again... more of them each time.

When I lost interest in photography for a while in my post-punk burnout (OK, 1983 to 1997 is more than a while), I returned to find all my old negatives in perfectly good condition, carefully labeled in envelopes. I sell as many of those old punk images as everything else combined, so that's a good thing.

Let's say, hypothetically, that for some reason I get bored with photography and walk away for several years. Will I come back to find the digital equivalent of useless dust?

The minimalist punk rocker in me is beginning to get pissed. Maybe I need to work through this digital phase. Maybe all that time spent processing film at the kitchen sink isn't so bad after all. I'm trying to simplify things, not make them more complicated.

and then

2008-06-21T23:47:00.001-07:00

The rest of the week... I drove straight back from the shoot, got home after midnight. I expected to be tired at the office the next day, but actually felt pretty good. Finally, Wednesday night, I got some sleep. Not enough, but a start.

Things have been busy since then, getting caught up after the travel. There hasn't been enough time to work on images, there hasn't even been enough time to think about much other than work. But now I should have some time to catch up, these next few days.

Wenchi

2008-06-21T23:33:00.001-07:00

She contacted me last year, when she was 17. I stalled, didn't say no but didn't schedule, either. When I heard from her again a couple of months ago, she'd turned 18. I looked at her updated portfolio, and found that she'd posted some dramatically improved photos.

It took a while to arrange a shoot. I'm not in Sonoma County as often now as I was last year, and my recent visits have tended to be day trips on very short notice. We came close a couple of weeks ago, but once again our schedules missed by only a few hours.

I didn't expect it to work this time, either. I'd told her that I'd be in the area the early part of the week, but didn't yet know which day. As it turned out, I flew into Sacramento on Monday night, caught my connecting flight to Arcata, and managed to get a little over four hours of sleep before starting the drive down to Lucerne for a project site visit.

I'd messaged her late Monday night, giving her basically 16 hours notice that I'd be not too far away. Tuesday morning I found a response: "what time?"

It would need to be an after work shoot, because I had a busy day to complete first. The site visit went quickly and smoothly, and I stopped at the office long enough to meet with some people and write up a draft memo and send it to the client.

I finally meet Wenchi in person around 5:00. We talk, look at photos, pick a place to shoot... Marin Headlands... and stop at her house for a few minutes to pick up some things to bring with. Not much, it fits in a small bag. Surprisingly, traffic is light.

She takes two calls during the ride; the second is from another photographer. I need to infer the questions; where are you going, what kind of shoot are you doing? The answer to the second question, "artistic nudes," surprises me a little, because we haven't talked about this yet, but she's already decided.

It's warmer than usual at the location. We begin, and as I frame the first image and press the shutter release button, I feel the wall of energy. I know this is going to be good.

We talk during the shoot, she tells me a lot about herself. I don't believe all of it; but that doesn't matter, because as she says herself, reality is whatever we decide it is. Then the conversation spins deeper; we talk some more about the nature of reality, about nothingness, about self-affirmation, about ancient mysteries. She understands things 18-year olds aren't supposed to understand.

The shoot itself... she throws herself into it. She dances on the edge, leans out over the precipice, pulls herself back at the last second. Then starts the process all over again. The intensity, the energy, is unreal. She turns it on and off at will. Just when she seems strong, she confesses her weakness.

On the 45-minute ride back, she sleeps in the car. She has willingly let the camera steal her soul; now she looks like the little girl she no longer is. I realize that she's thrown everything she has into the shoot, until there is nothing left to give.

She burns so brightly. I've known people like her before, in my punk years. Some settled into a more sustainable pace. But not all of them made it. Some reached too far and disappeared into the darkness.

I fear for her.

transition

2008-06-21T23:27:00.000-07:00

The shoot on Friday of last week turned out to be better than I'd expected. It's the early shots, in the minimalism of the restored prairie, that I'm happiest with. Oddly, they're more about the place than about the person.

There are some OK things from the other parts of the shoot, but there's a bit more complexity going on in the backgrounds, and not as much gracefulness from the model. It's these first few shots that made the time worth spending.

no clarity

2008-06-15T19:16:00.000-07:00

Chicago. I came here for the annual O'Banion's reunion, and arrived a couple of days earlier than I really needed to, courtesy of frequent flier mile blackout dates.

So much of Wednesday was spent in transit, a relatively uneventful day. Thursday was primarily a work day, although I did manage to meet artist Laura Myntti for lunch, and then had a succession of early evening meetings folowed by dinner with my friend Natalya. There were a couple of unusual and interesting conversations... but I'm choosing not to go into great detail right now.

Friday was a vacation day, and it's unusual to do that here. The only real daytime event scheduled was an afternoon photo shoot, with a dancer in the far NW suburbs. She had responded to a casting call which clearly specified nudity and shooting out in nature, with a distinct possibility of encountering mud and water... especially after all the recent rain here. She had called a couple of days before the shoot to express new-found reservations about the nudity part, but I decided to go ahead and shoot anyway. At least she was communicating and being honest. And in the end that turned out to be a non-issue; she tried to do some implied poses, decided it was too much effort to strategically arrange arms and legs to hide, and quickly gave up trying.

But in mid-shoot, she finally told me that she's a clean freak. This as she's standing in an inch of water and mud, surrounded by prairie and marsh. It was making her uncomfortable, and finally I understood why. I couldn't help but wonder why she'd offered to do this, the conditions had been clearly stated.

We finished the set, and I took her back out on the pavement for what proved to be essentially a fashion shoot from that point on. In a short white dress and heels, she moved much more happily among the painted white lines in the parking lot. Not the most enticing background, at first thought... but it's amazing what selective cropping, the right angles, and shallow depth of field can do. My inspiration was those fashion shoots in tacky ghost towns, the ones that could have been disastrous with the wrong composition but somehow are made to seem exotic and edgy.

I'm not worried about the composition part. But I haven't really reviewed the whole shoot yet, it's sitting on a stack of CF cards, and I haven't looked at the "in nature" series at all. I'm sure there are some keepers in there, but I expected a little more from this model than she delivered.

Friday night, another dinner, another long conversation. Saturday, I sleep late; Saturday night, I head over to Holiday Club for the O'Banion's reunion. It's not that crowded yet when I arrive, and I have a succession of conversations with a variety of geezerpunks; some are old friends, some I've just met. Roseann is there, not working for a change, and it's good to talk to her. I have a long talk with a guy named Dan. Suzanne Shelton is spinning, and when she's done she says hi, and we both realize we knew each other somehow, more than 25 years ago, but neither of us is really sure where or exactly when or how well. She spun at Neo then, distinctly on my second tier of hangouts, so it was probably somewhere else. It's lost in the haze of the past, so we just start over.

It's crowded by now. It gets a little cross generational, as Colleen arrives with a slightly jealous boyfriend in tow, then Chryssy and Rae and two goth boys from LA come in sometime after midnight. Some vanilla girl wanders in from the other side of the club, around 40, attractive but conservatively dressed. She asks a few questions, then asks me to dance.

I don't think she's prepared for the very physical intensity of a punk dancefloor. She hangs in there for four songs... there was a Bowie number, and the last one was Siouxsie's "entertainment" which resonated because it was brand new the night I photographed Siouxsie, way back in 1981. But by this time, the girl... it never occurred to me to ask her name... was clearly shaken. The dance floor energy had completely overwhelmed her, she'd gotten in way beyond her experience. I gavc her a graceful opportunity to escape, and didn't see her again.

The end of the event was a chaotic series of conversations, with John Kezdy of The Effigies, and with many of the people mentioned above. At 3 am, as the club closed, a few of us headed over to Exit, where we were entertained by an expressive bartender until 5 am, then we all went to Hollywood Grill for breakfast. It was fully light when we came out, and each went our own way.

I had time to wander the lakefront for an hour and take pictures before meeting Salome for coffee at 8 am... yes, I'd strongly suspected it was going to be an all-nighter. It had been so common once, all those years ago.

While we were at coffee an intense storm front moved through, with high winds and heavy rain. It was over an hour later as we left, but by then it had wreaked havoc with any thoughts I'd had of catching an early flight. I checked at the airport just in case, but it was all long lines and cancelled flights. That Bay Area client, the scheduling impaired one, is just going to have to wait one more day. I'll fly Monday as originally planned.

The punk reunions are always a trigger for introspection, and somewhere during this one I'd begun to hope for some new clarity. Although there are some new questions, I don't think many answers have followed yet. The diverse thing now lumped into "punk" was a key part of my younger life, something that shaped and forged new directions. It's always there, inside, all these years later. I see the same angst in others, the ones who lived through it and are now successful, whatever that means.

All I'm sure of is that even as we formulated complex philosophies in those days, it wasn't complexity we wanted. Maybe that's the core contradiction that must be addressed, or at least one of them.

I also see that as much fun as it was to see all the friends, old and new, older and younger, to have all those conversations so far beyond what most would understand, about subjects that would bring fear to some; the city remains shallow and superficial outside of the stolen and all too brief moments of intellectual intensity. Outside of the passion of ideas, there remains the urban emptiness.

fossilized

2008-06-08T23:17:00.000-07:00

We sometimes let people borrow the gallery space for parties, and tonight was one of those times. When possible we go out of our way to encourage young creative artistic types... It was a little different this time.

I may very possibly have been the youngest person in the room this time, if you don't count the young guy doing the catering. There were two lady lawyers who were within a year or two of me, and it escalated rapidly from there. Several of these folks were 20 to 25 years older than me.

But it wasn't the ages that made it strange... it was the egos. There were several people who were doing a whole lot of talking, and not nearly enough listening. They should have spent more time listening.

There's the old cliche about learning from elders, and in some cases it's true. I mostly sat and listened, and in a way I did learn some things, but they weren't very profound things. I've got all the latest gossip on the local legal community, and heard a few stories about old Hollywood parties that might have happened before I was born.

But the overwhelming feeling was... well, I used to feel this a lot back in my punk years; when some older guy would roll out the same standard world view he used at every party, as he played know it all and tried to impress everyone, while having no idea what we were really thinking.

Back then I wore a button on my jacket that said "look sharp" after the then-current Joe Jackson song of the same name. A line in the song kind of sums it up: "well hey shut your face, maybe you will see or hear."

Then, as now, I listened quietly, and formed my own opinions.

under seige

2008-06-07T22:54:00.000-07:00

There are basically two seasons in coastal California... raining and not raining.

We're more than a month into what should be not raining now. Except that yesterday morning, it rained. Not a major storm, but sustained windshield-wiper level for about an hour.

And that released some unusual kind of pollen or something. By late afternoon, I was being hammered by allergies. I actually left work an hour early, because my eyes were tearing up so badly I was getting concerned about being able to see well enough to drive.

It finally began to subside this morning, but it's not gone yet. So I spent part of today catching up on sleep, which admittedly I needed to do. An early afternoon walk down Main Street proved to be a lot of fun, it seemed there were fewer tourists than usual (gas prices beginning to take a toll?) and lots of locals out instead. There was a neat musical moment, too... keeping this intentionally vague... but a well known '60s musical icon lives here in town, and at an outdoor fundraiser, she got on stage and among other things sang one of the old songs. So beautiful.

revenge of the squirrels

2008-06-04T23:10:00.000-07:00

Tuesday morning, up much too early again... I work in the hotel room for a quite a while, then patch into my 8:30 am conference call. An hour later, with that over, I throw the last few things into my bags, grab a cup of coffee on the way out the door, and head down 880 and toward San Jose.

This is the morning I thought I'd be taking care of the now postponed project, so all I really need to do instead is take a look at another project, get a sense of the land in an area where I need to make some design decisions for a stream restoration. Essentially, I need to be able to go to the engineers with a specific concept so they can put a cost on building it. As so often happens, there are conflicting values; expanding a floodplain means impacting a historical resource. I need to find a creative way around it, a way to reconcile the conflict without adding too much to the project cost.

But that won't take long. I know what needs to happen, or at least what the choices are. I just need to look at it.

On the way I pick up Iona Lynn, and initially the idea is that she can take some photos and we can talk shop after I've completed my site walk-through.

But first, a little about the site. We're at a municipal park, a very old one, dating to 1872. Once a bustling spa where visitors took the hideous sulpher-smalling waters for their alleged healing properties, it's now a basic passive recreation park, with hiking trails and picnic grounds. Old stone walls line the creek banks, arched bridges seem to be everywhere, and sad remnants of springs issue from the inside of stone grottoes.

All is calm enough at first. I pace off the distances from the stream to the stone structures, take a few photos for documentation, take some notes, formulate a fairly specific concept. I have no idea how long it takes, I'm not thinking about time. Iona is off in the cattails somewhere, stalking some elusive critter with her Rollieflex. Eventually I'm done, and we look around at some of the stone structures. As we begin to walk back out from the upper canyon, we pause at one of the grottoes.

Iona Lynn is a very experienced fine art model, and now she volunteers to get naked and pose in the grottoe. Sure, sounds great, except that this is a busy place. There's a person going past every minute or two. We just watched the ranger make his rounds and drive out again. Not to worry, she says she can just pull back to the interior of the dark grottoe, and I can block the entrance.

It worked great for a while. A guy rode by on a bike, oblivious. A runner went by, also oblivious. Now a guy walks by, believes my ruse of taking a photo of the bridge across the way, and he hurries past without looking.

The photo above is Iona Lynn messing with the (so far) unknowing guy, now 30 feet away. Until he hears a sound and turns around, and she's standing there, stark naked, five feet from cover. We both laugh hysterically as she scampers back inside and peeks around the corner.

We have some great shots already, so it's time to get dressed; the whole thing took maybe 10 minutes. The guy lingers by the next bridge for a while, circles back to get a closer look, but by now we're not paying much attention to him. We stand looking at a colorful algae-encrusted seep on a rock face, when for the second time, rocks and dirt cascade down the slope and land at our feet. Then it happens again. This time we see the squirrel scamper back to cover. Soon there are several of them, kicking and throwing small rocks down the cliff face at us. Nature is fighting back, the rodents have had enough. It's very funny to watch.

Eventually we tire of the furry little performance artists and walk back to the car, and go to get some lunch. By mid-afternoon I'm headed north, stopping back at the Santa Rosa office for a while before heading up 101 and home.

seeing red

2008-06-04T22:22:00.000-07:00

I spent Sunday night at Harbin, throwing my sleeping bag out under the stars. At dawn I drove into Middletown for a tasty breakfast... check out Buelah's Place, if you're ever there in the morning... and then made the 45-minute drive over to the Santa Rosa office.

One of my clients called not long after that to let me know that the project would slip a few days, the surveyors hadn't finished flagging the site boundaries yet. So much for my efficiently planned multi-project travel schedule. Suddenly I had a little more extra time than expected.

I'd had some discussions about a possible very quick lunchtime shoot right in Santa Rosa, but by now I knew that wasn't going to work either, at least not this time. She couldn't make it til a little later in the afternoon, and I couldn't wait that long, with a meeting set in Berkeley. No way was I going to delay long enough to encounter rush hour traffic. So we agreed to wait til next trip.

But things went smoothly after that. I brought some work with me to lunch, and hit a flow state, one of those times when the words come easily, complex multi-faceted projects fall into place and it's just so obvious what needs to be done to resolve those thorny issues; one of those times when the fingers can't keep up with the thought process and the page is soon full of jumbled notes and bullet points to implement in detail later. I didn't dare break the flow, I sat there and wrote for nearly two hours. But it was time to hit the road, before that traffic got nasty.

The meeting was quick and easy and I actually had time to take a few deep breaths before the evening photo shoot.

The area around the UC Berkeley campus north gate is pretty familiar. My colleague Adrianna once lived in the apartment building on the corner, and we often would grab lunch or coffee at one of the shops when I was in town. I'd also known various profs from the school over the years and had visited with some of them. One of my mentors, early in my career, had gotten her PhD at Berkeley, and I'd heard so many stories on those long nights in the lab or while hiking to study sites in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

I arrived five minutes early, and soon enough saw the bright red hair round the corner. Impossible to miss. Amy had brought some unique hand-made things to wear... I don't get to do arty fashion often enough, so that was fun. And then it turned out that we sort of work in different aspects of the same general field, so there was a ton to talk about. We wandered the campus, shooting in what to most would have seemed like random spots. But the backgrounds were carefully chosen. Despite her slight trepidation (which I didn't see until tonight), expressed in her own blog, she did well.

I haven't really had time to look closely at all the images yet, but from a skim there are some good choices to work with. I'll spend more time on it tomorrow, really go through the images and find the ones to take into post-production. It's nice to have good images, which we do, but that wouldn't have mattered. The conversation alone would have made it all worthwhile.

The delay is courtesy of Adobe. I'd downloaded a trial version of the most recent Photoshop release a while back, then ordered a permanent copy to replace my slightly out-of-date version. it took almost a week longer than it should have to arrive, so for several days I was back on the old version (after the trial period expired). Last night, tired and fresh out of the car after a five-hour drive, I tried to install the new version, which had arrived at last.

Guess what. The trial version "remembers" itself, so it's not possible to just enter the serial number from the new product. And the new copy can't be installed until the old one has been uninstalled. It's theoretically possible to just drag it to the trash (gotta love Macs) except that the numerous files are so scattered around the hard drive... miss one, and the software won't install. Messy.

If I'd trashed that .dmg file from the trial, I'd have been screwed. It might have taken hours to find and clean everything out manually. Fortunately I still had it, and was able to run uninstall (20 minutes), and then install the new copy (another 20 minutes).

As somebody said on the forum where I looked up the fix: "Adobe, this is unacceptable."

OK, a short break, then we can talk about Tuesday.

local politics

2008-06-04T12:18:00.000-07:00

I should have pictures from the Bay Area trip soon, maybe even tonight. But first, some commentary on yesterday's election.

I'll stay clear of the national news for now, plenty of others have things to say about that. Right now, today, I'm more interested in local results. Three of the Humboldt County Board of Supervisor's seats were up for election yesterday, and the results foretell a lot about the direction we'll take for at least the next two years.

As in so many places in California, there are pro-growth and slow growth factions here. Unlike most of the rest of the state, we haven't paved the entire landscape with big box stores yet. So the choice still matters, more than in some other places where it's already too late.

In the First District (my home district), it was a straightforward two-man race, and I know both candidates quite well, have worked very closely with them on the Salt River restoration project. Incumbent Jimmy Smith, a gentleman, a diplomat, a mediator, with a proven track record of bringing in state funding ($6 million for Salt River) and a key player in the Klamath River talks. John Vevoda, a local rancher with a long history of involvement in issues related to the land. Jimmy won re-election easily, with 71 percent of the vote.

Although I consider both men as friends, it was an easy decision for me. While John raised some important issues, among them the excess of planning and scarcity of actual results by county government, his positions were ultimately undermined by lack of a coherent philosophy, which resulted in glaring contradictions. The most important was an emphasis on growth, especially on creating jobs, while at the same time stating a desire to maintain our rural lifestyle.

Sorry John, you can't have it both ways. Double our growth rate, as the general plan update alternative you favored would have it, and soon enough we'll look like Sonoma County. And I have no desire to make Humboldt just like everywhere else. If that's what I wanted, I would have moved... somewhere else.

Apparently lots of other voters saw it that way, too.

In the Second District (southern Humboldt) it was more complex. Incumbent Roger Rodoni was locked in a heated three-way race, which he most likely would have won, when he died in a car crash a few weeks ago. The Governor appointed his very capable wife Johanna to fill the balance of the term, which runs through the end of this year. But the ballots were printed, Roger's name was already there. So his campaign ran a dead man, assuming that Johanna's re-appointment would follow.

This mattered because Roger was easily the most conservative, the most pro-land-rights, member of the board. On 4 to 1 votes, he was often the 1. Yet as I've learned elsewhere, this role of contrarian... especially an assertive contrarian, unafraid to speak his mind, as was the case with Roger... is an important one. Somebody needs to ask the tough questions, and sometimes it does make others stop and think. Fortunately, Roger was an easy contrarian to like. While I knew him only casually, I had immense respect for the man. I'll miss him.

The dead man got more votes than anybody else last night. Not many more, but he led the field of three. However, because he fell well short of a 50 percent +1 majority, under a quirk of California election law, he won't be on the ballot for the November runoff election. His two opponents, who appear to be less conservative, will battle it out for the seat.

In the Third District, which includes liberal Arcata, incumbent John Woolley chose not to run for re-election. We'll miss John, I've come to know him quite well after sitting next to him on two regional boards these past couple of years. I doubt he's going away though, just being active in a different role.

This was a three way race with two serious candidates. Any of the three would have done well, I think. It looks like Mark Lovelace scraped out 52 percent of the vote, so he's in, no need for a runoff. I just met him last weekend, with a favorable impression. He's a bit more progressive, I think, than opponent Brian Plumley, although not as far off the left edge as Paul Pitino, who refused to take contributions and thus doomed his own candidacy from the start.

Bottom line: The new Board appears to be (if they're as good as their word) solidly behind general plan alternative A, the slow growth/maintain the current growth rate/minimize sprawl alternative. That's a clear defeat for the real estate lobby, which I'm being careful to distinguish from the ranchers, who I respect. The redwood curtain holds, for now; we've fought back the SoCal hordes, although I'm certain they'll regroup and return.

The pro-growth candidates raised some important issues, though, and they have me re-thinking a couple of items. They're absolutely correct about the paralysis of county government, I see it firsthand every month at Salt River meetings. My thinking coalesced a few weeks ago on a car ride to Crescent City, talking to another County Supervisor, one not up for election this time. She was telling me about the recent controversy involving so-called building code enforcement checks (thinly veiled excuses for warrentless pot busts, according to others), where code officers were accompanied by armed backup who allegedly drew guns and pointed them at people. It had just happened again, same guy as last time, despite the lurid press coverage. After hearing about an ambiguous chain of command, I asked the obvious (to me) question: Where's the accountability? When one of these guys screws up, what happens, if anything?

I just read a few days ago that the overzealous individual in question had been transferred back to the Sheriff's Department, which in this case is a demotion, and serves the dual purpose of putting him back where everybody (including him) knows exactly who his boss is. No more ambiguity at least for one individual, although the larger issue remains to be solved.

But it has me thinking about accountability. There's a massive bureacracy out there which I suspect has lost track of the end goals and become bogged down in the process itself; a process without end, without deadlines, without measurable performance criteria. And we need to change that. We need to get government working for the people again, instead of working for the hive-mind.

That isn't easy to do. The Brown Act means that elected officials can't just sit around and brainstorm these things, not without calling a public meeting. And there's an understandable hesitancy to go out on a limb with partial information. So I need to think about this for a while, think about a way to set a policy with enough teeth to make a difference.

happy

2008-05-31T23:43:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I've got it pretty easy.

I've been off-and-on planning a Bay Area trip, with the initial impetus being work related. It's a pretty simple site visit, some travel time, maybe a couple of hours in the field, and half a day to write it up.

But the client kept pushing the day back. Initially, that meant I'd be able to delegate it, because I had someone in the general area on another project part of last week. Then the day slipped again, so that didn't work. Now it's maybe Monday, more likely Tuesday. So I'm headed down that way tomorrow afternoon, and I'll basically work out of our Santa Rosa or San Francisco offices til the word comes from the client to "go." I have a stack of paper and project file folders and my laptop, enough to keep busy for a couple days easily.

I have about half a dozen models wait-listed in the Bay Area, some I'm more interested in than others. But the constant schedule changes have made it impossible to really set anything up. I kept a dialogue going with one of them, the one of the bunch I'd really like to shoot with, and that may still happen this time. She's checking her work schedule and hopefully I'll know in the morning. But no guarantees on such short notice.

I hate to waste a trip to a major market when I'm still feeling a need to play with the new digital gear. So tonight I posted a casting call, clearly identified as short-notice, clearly identified as a dusk/night shoot... because that's all I can be sure of at this stage.

Within 30 minutes I had a response. She's attractive, she's alternative, she already has some good photos, and after reading part of her blog just now... she's very, very smart. She's also efficient. Two sets of messages back and forth, and we had a time and place set near the Berkeley campus. Less than half an hour to set things up.

So while other photographers whine about drama and no-shows, I routinely get to pick from really interesting people. They're not only fun to shoot, they're fascinating to talk to during the shoot.

eureka

2008-05-18T20:09:00.001-07:00

It's an unusually warm evening in Eureka, as I prowl the alleys with Inga during our third shoot. She just keeps getting better. First the poses tighten up, and now, midway through this shoot, I begin to see subtle expressiveness well beyond what she's done before.

Up to this point I've been struggling a little with direction on my return to color/digital. It's almost as if what had been so easy for me with black and white is suddenly brand new. The technical aspects have been surprisingly easy. Today, suddenly, I have the conceptual answer to go with it.

Just as I've made the technical things work by simplifying, I'm realizing that minimalism is my answer for the creative things also. I know this, have known it for a long time, yet it's so easy to stray from the path.

At least in the short term, I think the emphasis is going to be on simple colorful head shots, with simple background elements; and a renewed foray into nudes in the landscape. There will need to be a little experimentation with this, with the balance of person and land. It needs to be done in a fresh way, something just a little different from what others are doing. I have some ideas to start with.

mantra

2008-05-07T15:07:00.001-07:00

Simplicity is the new rebellion.

looking up

2008-05-06T00:52:00.000-07:00

lead by not leading
the doorway is below.
hesitate...
at first, nothing there
the fire is passion
inside
ancient mysteries
lost for so long
found again
so simple
the duality of man
human and animal
the body and the mind
one

ain't it fun?

2008-04-28T00:30:00.000-07:00

I've got to admit, one of the really fun things about this gig... is that I get to sit in a coffee house, and when the charismatic girl walks in, the one who makes everyone turn and stare... she comes and sits down with me.

Today was a variation of the usual theme. I got there right on time, as I was getting out of the car Inga called and said she was on the way, five minutes out. So I got my coffee and sat down.

The last time I shot with Inga, she had medium-length black hair. She had told me that it was shorter now, and that she had bought a couple of wigs and was having fun playing with them.

In walks the girl, the one that everybody turns and stares at... and she's got her back to me as she walks up to the counter, I can see her in the next room. She's got long blond hair, leopard-print tights, and bright red boots. And right away, I know it's Inga. A second later she turns and waves.

I've taken an interest in this girl. For one thing, she's currently the only "real" alternative model in Humboldt County, the only one who calls herself a model, at least since Bella finished school and left. Inga is a long-time Suicide Girl, and at my recommendation she applied for Wicked Talent... and Donna accepted her immediately, which means that she too sees the potential. But I don't think Inga has lived up to her full potential yet. Too many paid shoots with guys who want to do nudes and couldn't take a competent photo if their life depended on it. She's good, though, and she's improved since our shoot last fall. Today I got her to understand that she needs to get that cute butt of hers out there and shoot tfp with a few people besides me, and get a range of top-quality work in her various portfolios. To make the point, I showed her a few web sites... people who do "oh wow" shots. I think she understands now. She says she gets to LA about once every three months, and will be in the Bay Area in a few weeks, and says she's going to find some good photographers to shoot with.

Anyway, after our chat, we drove over to the nearby Samoa Peninsula and shot at a couple of locations. This is my first real digital shoot with a model in probably four years, it's all been film since then, so I decided to just let it happen, see where it takes me. I haven't had time to really go through all 300 or so images carefully yet. But I like at least some of them, and I just traded e-mails with Inga, she likes the first few, too.

visual wealth

2008-04-26T23:51:00.000-07:00

For a while, I'd posted on my various web presences that I was taking a break and not actively seeking models. It had the desired result, the steady flow of unsolicited requests gradually tapered off; one nice thing about working mostly with smart models is that they can and do read.

So for about three months I didn't shoot a whole lot, just a few times; one that I solicited, and a couple that happened as a result of in person encounters.

With the recent change of direction, it was time to shoot again. So I got active in various places again, thinking it would take a while to stir up some activity. But then a few days ago, signs of life began to appear. Lots of them.

It began when I posted a casting call, something I don't do all that often. There were four or five responses, not as many as I've gotten on some previous occasions, but these were mostly quality replies. Then someone I'd talked to months ago about a local shoot resurfaced. Then coincidentally, one of my favorite local models e-mailed and inquired about shooting again. Two more out of town unsolicited offers came in last night and today.

Currently I have two shoots scheduled here, one scheduled and two tentative at a time to be negotiated in the Bay Area, and offers for if-I-ever-get-there from Fresno and somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Iowa (but she offers to drive to KC or St. Louis).

The local shoots happen first. From there, we'll see what happens.

cold toys

2008-04-23T22:13:00.000-07:00

I'm having fun with the new digital gear. Having fun seeing in color again. It's diversifying my photography.

The added bulk and weight is taking some getting accustomed to. I've kept it manageable by carrying only the one camera body and one lens, in a very small case. I may just keep doing it that way for a while, it simplifies something that is already too complex. Similarly, I've settled on some settings that I hopefully won't need to change too often. I still feel that all those levels of menus get in the way of creating images.

So far I've been doing street photography, objects, a few landscapes. There hasn't been time to set up local shoots with people, so I'm looking at waiting til the next Bay Area trip, probably in about a week and a half, for that... already a couple of nibbles.

"the path...

2008-04-23T22:08:00.000-07:00

... into the light seems dark."

from the tao.

all my colors

2008-04-14T22:52:00.000-07:00

After quite a few years of mostly black and white film photography, I've found myself more interested in colors recently. Since it's now essentially impossible to get E6 processing done in Humboldt County, or any kind of color in medium format, that's been pushing me back toward reconsidering digital.

My last foray into digital was in 2003-04, and I wasn't very happy with it. The 6mp DSLRs of that time had tiny, dim viewfinders (amazing, considering that photography is about seeing), and often did very bad things to skin tones. it didn't take long for me to consign that camera to collecting dust and return to my Leicas.

I pulled the DSLR out again a few weeks ago, after ordering one of the relatively new Zeiss ZF (Nikon mount) 50mm f/1.4 lenses.

The lens is compact, all metal, solidly built, and focuses down to a foot and a half; with the DSLR 1.5x factor, that's pretty tight framing. It won't meter on my ancient D100, so I had to shoot with a handheld meter. But even with the dim viewfinder, it was crisp and easy to focus.

The early test results were amazing. Not only are the images incredibly sharp (this lens design allegedly resolves 320 lines/mm, the best ever tested for a 35mm mount lens), but they seem to render the color better than I've ever seen out of this camera before. And the bokeh is pretty fair, too.

So this morning I dived back in and ordered a brand new D300. It should be here in a couple of days. I'll then be able to meter with the new lens, and have 12.3mp, a nice bright 100% coverage viewfinder, better dynamic range, all in a metal-frame DSLR. Basically, they've fixed almost all of my gripes from the earlier model.

I think I can make it work by keeping it simple. The intent is to carry only the body, the one Zeiss lens (for now), a few CF cards, all in one compact case. Maybe a backup film body, depending on the situation. By keeping it light, easy to carry, and by using manual focus to eliminate some of the over-complexity of DSLRs... we shall soon see how that translates into actual images.

/geektalk

simplicity lost

2008-04-07T20:14:00.000-07:00

I vaguely remember, many years ago, hearing a couple of old guys wax nostalgic about the simple old days, before everything got so new-fangled complicated. I pretty much scoffed at the time, thinking they just couldn't cope with change, or had a bad case of grass-is-always-greener syndrome.

But today I'm thinking that maybe they understood something that took me a lot longer to learn.

Now I'm no Luddite. I wouldn't know what to do without my Blackberry and my laptop. Hell, I'm a consultant, we thrive on change and ambiguity... we better, or we would have gone nuts in the first two weeks.

But today, I'm responding to the confluence of two things.

First is something I did at work these past few days. In the process of preparing the environmental documentation for what was originally designed as a fast-track federal permit, something to cut down on red tape and reduce the time and expense of obtaining fairly routine approvals for low-impact transportation infrastructure projects... I had to wade through more than 1000 pages of background guidance and participate in one meeting and several conference calls from the state implementing agency (Caltrans). And I'm not done yet. Someone obviously missed the point here.

Second, I'm seriously thinking of upgrading my DSLR. I've never been very happy with my 4-year old D100, it does bad things to skin tones, and after all this time in the damp coastal climate it's starting to create rare but annoying little glitches. Not often, but too much. Almost time to replace it. And in the digital world, 4 years ago is practically the bronze age.

Looking at D300 literature, I'm seeing that there's a 421-page technical manual, and interspersed with all the high praise I'm reading complaints about the complexity of the menus. I don't really think that's going to be a problem, there's enough in common with the D100 in a control layout sense that I'm pretty sure I can have it functional in a basic sense in an hour or less, and I have no problem thinking in hierarchical terms and dealing with elaborate menus. Although I pity someone touching one of these things for the first time, with no previous DSLR experience.

I probably need to do this sooner or later. Yet I'm seriously spoiled by years of playing with my Leicas and their stark minimalism.

But those are just the symptoms prompting the rant. What I'm seeing is ever increasing complexity. I never knew those allegedly simpler times the old guys talked about, the post-war economy was well underway before I was born. Yet in that relatively short timespan I've seen ever increasing complexity, and if anything the rate of change is only increasing. Rapidly.

I can't help but wonder how long we can sustain it. Probably beyond my lifetime, with any luck. But I wonder what todays kids might witness, or their kids.

There's no turning back. It's easy to utter platitudes about cutting bureaucracy, but all those bureaucrats are real people with real mortgages and real families. Chop all those regs I had to deal with today, and a whole lot of people are out of work. Chop enough at once, and throw the economy into the mother of all depressions. As if we could chop them anyway, because the workers and the special interests have already built a powerful political lobby to keep them in place.

The technical complexity is harder to pin down. The consumer DSLR highlights the paradox of it all; it caters to the masses looking to take a picture without thinking too much (as they have since the first Kodak Brownie); yet to do top-end work with a DSLR requires understanding that 421-page manual and a bunch of software and peripherals. They aren't simple gadgets, even as they create the illusion of simplicity.

In practice, it makes us either become specialists, good at a few things, or a drop out.

The recent news about how many Americans are locked away in prisons highlights that drop out rate. Lots of others fall into a perpetual underclass, unable to function in a high-tech society even as corporations clamor to let more educated foreigners in on work visas.

Our entire economic philosophy is a 300-year experiment based on the assumption of never-ending growth. It's scary to think there might be flaws in those assumptions.

I have no idea where it's headed. The possible paths diverge from here, and a lot depends on the vagaries of political will and outside circumstances.

But I'm pretty sure of one thing: Whichever road we follow, it's going to be full of potholes, because of all the paperwork required to fix them.

silver

2008-04-06T00:49:00.000-07:00

Why does it matter?
What happens when we've seen too much?
When it's too easy, and too hard?

High above it all, seeing everything and nothing.
Seeing the colors.

notes on the apocalypse

2008-04-01T22:38:00.000-07:00

The story begins in the suburbs of hell, under a few old billboards. The sky darkens, and it begins to rain. I see the glow reflected in her eyes, trace the light over the curves of her body. The world races by, and no one notices.

Meanwhile, in New York, a young woman ascends the razors' edge. She is colorful, marked with reds and blues, and with irreverence. The sharpness passes through to the other side, eight times. 3,000 miles away, and yet so close. Two others watch and wait.

The straight lines become vertical curves, and wind becomes cold. Shades of brown fade to dark green, then blur and disappear behind. There are two kinds of limits, one real and one imagined, both so poorly understood. Hope fades, then revives. It is only the rebellion that matters. As always, a few will do it their way, the hell with the conventions of society.

ancient babies

2008-03-13T23:15:00.000-07:00

The times I find really fascinating are the times of forgetting, or perhaps of remembering something lost a long time ago. The times of letting go, of slipping back into the honest mind of childhood, before we learned all these personas and defense mechanisms and ways of being good at things. Those are the magical times.

Once a long time ago I walked into a room on a breezy fall evening, with fog hanging in the air and almost hiding the full moon. My mood, for some reason I can't recall now, bordered on the surreal, I was already deep in my creative side. On a whim, I asked her to step completely outside of reality, and somehow she understood. Then we went to a mythological place, somewhere I never could have invented, and I can't really tell you what happened during that 90 minutes; because that wasn't what mattered. It was a dream, except I was really there, she was really there.

Or at least I think so. After all, what is reality?

contradiction?

2008-03-13T23:13:00.000-07:00

I've seen about three of these this week.

She says she wants to do edgy pictures.

In the next line she says, usually in ALL CAPS, that she won't do nudity.

(wondering) what else she's afraid of?

I have no real desire to find out. Next.

then and now

2008-03-09T22:24:00.000-07:00

In the city, long ago
hot pavement, cold neon
cold fear
so long ago
naked idealism
we changed the world
not the way we expected
still friends,
so far apart, in space and time
the understanding remains
we question still
we always will

land

2008-03-04T22:59:00.001-08:00

Last night I responded to a post by a very bright and creative person in England. She had made a comment on Ansel Adams photos of Yosemite... something about how she had never seen the place, and thus they didn't move her. Which got me thinking, because I have been to Yosemite. Several times. And it isn't the same place I've seen in pictures.

I first saw an Ansel Adams photograph when I was in my early 20s. It was at an exhibit at Northwestern University; I remember being in awe, looking at these big, beautiful prints of the western landscape which seemed to glow, to give off a light of their own. At that time, I hadn't yet visited Yosemite; but the prints were inspirational, bits of technical virtuosity.

Odd, but it wasn't until last night that I realized... the prints were so good, that they transcended the landscape they were intended to capture. The "art" was in the two-dimensional piece of paper, and it had little to do with the landscape.

Ironic, because Adams was a central figure in what is sometimes known as the transcendental school of thought on landscape photography... basically, the landscape as spiritual experience. He was, of course, an important figure in the progression of photography, the modernist counterpoint to Mortenson and the expressionists. The razor-sharp images of Adams and his friends raced past the soft and romantic fantasies of Mortenson, and brought photography into the modern era.

There was a day when I would perhaps have sided with Adams, seen things in much the same way. But landscape photography has continued to evolve, as have I. My current viewpoint depends as much on my training in ecology as it does on anything related to photography. It is also based in part on the days and weeks I've spent at Yosemite... mostly more than ten years ago.

I've looked at those famous scenes, and I know what Adams cropped out. There is no sign of human influence in most of those images, but the human presence in Yosemite is relentless, impossible to miss, while you're actually standing there. In the valley at least, it's difficult to get very far from roads, cars, buildings, and people.

But whether in the valley or in the more remote high country, something else is wrong. When I look at those prints today, I see a dense conifer forest, an artifact of fire suppression, of the Smokey-theBear mentality that was just coming into its own in Adams day. With the absence of the fires that had burned for 10,000 years, the trees closed in. The earliest photographs of Yosemite show a much more open place, with widely spaced trees, savanna-like. No longer.

This change itself is one part of a sequence, a progression. Once, there were glaciers, then came grass and flowers and trees. The native people burned the woods for a variety of reasons, and their population was perhaps once greater than we now know. After 1500, those people were decimated by diseases introduced from Europe, their numbers much reduced. The fires continued, but perhaps not as frequently. Then, with western settlement, after a brief period of increased fire to burn off logging slash, the fires almost ceased. For more than 100 years in many places, the cleansing fire ceased to burn.

Today, Yosemite burns again. The fires of today are carefully managed by park staff, constrained by the buildings and the people and by smoke regulations. They may have checked the encroachment of trees, but they have little effect on those already in place. The structure of the forest depends on the patterns of decades, of centuries. The landscape is constantly shifting, it is temporally and spatially dynamic, and it always has been. But it operates on a scale not readily apparent to impatient human eyes.

The forests are not real, no more than bambi in real. We have imposed them on the landscape, as we have altered the processes of millenia. We are newcomers, and we do not understand this land we claim to own. But is it possible to own something that has existed for billions of years, may exist for billions more after we are gone?

In my own photography, I've moved away from the myth of the pristine landscape; because it's been a long time since anything has been pristine, and the myth is a dangerous one. I no longer crop the human influence out of the picture. Often, it's the central subject of the image. Now, I'm interested in the human elements within the landscape, the ephemeral presence that, in our arrogance as a culture, we falsely believe is of such great and lasting importance.

smooth

2008-03-02T21:58:00.000-08:00

She walked rapidly across the room, pausing near the window. The sun touched her soft bare skin, and the cold concrete. Something moved behind another window, across the courtyard. Half a world away, the remains of an ancient city told silent stories. The dead are long forgotten. Clouds rolled across the sky, white then grey and finally turning to red. Below, the sand shifted, reminding us that in the end, nothing matters. Ahead lies only the unknown.

now

2008-02-29T21:24:00.000-08:00

It's gotten busy again at the office, after a couple of moderately easy weeks. That's a good thing in the sense that I like to be busy, and one of the new projects is challenging and fun and within my area of expertise. The down side is that there's less creative time after 12+ hour days. My cameras don't get to come out to play very often.

I need to teach a photography workshop at the office sometime in April, and then repeat it for our Bay Area offices sometime after that. Someone noticed that some of our young engineers and scientists are more capable with a camera than others (was that stated diplomatically enough?) when doing project documentation or marketing shots. While I keep a little distance between my work and creative sides, it's no secret what else I do. So the request was made a while ago.

I've taught before, three times, full semester adult ed/college credit courses. But never on photography, and never in this sort of time constrained, here are the highlights of the basics kind of way. It will almost certainly be a good experience, though. Every other time I've done this it's forced me to organize and clarify my thinking, turn what I know semi-consciously into a series of talking points able to be understood by others, and research gaps in my knowledge, or places where I haven't kept up with the latest. So I'll probably start outlining this weekend, and then think about the details for a while.

found it

2008-02-27T21:14:00.001-08:00

Oh, look. I found one of the images of Lizzy. Taken on a cold Sunday morning in the spring of 2003. She's wearing a too-tight pink corset, almost bursting out of it, and a pair of ratty jeans, and no shoes. Of course, you can't see any of that, because it was her face I was after. The wonders of selective cropping...

power as a two-way street

2008-02-27T18:39:00.000-08:00

I've photographed people within countercultures ever since my punk years, so it's inevitable that I've encountered a fair number of fetish-related opportunities over the years. At first, this was accidental; for example, the girl in 1979 who slapped a pair of handcuffs on herself during the shoot, and handed me the key.

An opportunity presented itself in the spring of 2003 which made me curious. I met Lizzy on the art scene, and she had the most fascinating and expressive face; I asked her if she'd be willing to be photographed. She looked at me, hesitated not at all, and said "one can never have too many photographs."

I learned sometime during that conversation that Lizzy was the headmistress at a local house of domination. That is, she got paid to hurt guys, and managed other girls who did the same. And yes, that's what they wanted her to do, that's what they went to her for. I got to see the place when we did our shoot on a Sunday morning, a couple of hours before opening. Lizzy had obviously been out too late, was obviously hung over, her hair was a mess as she let me in the front door. She disappeared in front of a mirror for 10 minutes, fixed her hair and applied makeup while I set up the lights. She exchanged her tee-shirt for a corset, and came out looking... just great. We were ready to go.

That was when I learned about the roleplay ability of dommes. Even with a hangover, Lizzy could turn it on and off at will. She could look scary, silly, or any of a hundred other things. I was also struck by how open and friendly she was, how unlike the stereotypes of people like her. Later, it made sense. Her job was, essentially, about acting. Each guy would come in with a different fantasy, and it was her job to fill it... and it paid a lot better than working at Starbuck's. But away from work, she was just another pretty girl.

We took relatively few photos that morning, and got a number of keepers. I lost track of Lizzy not long after that, she got into a little trouble and disappeared (what I've heard is secondhand and anecdotal, so let's just let it go at that). But I'd learned a few things from her. Besides learning about the acting ability, I learned that dommes have a voracious appetite for photographs, because it's one of the ways they market themselves. Thus, they tend to be quite cooperative at least toward experienced art photographers.

Many dommes are artists, and I soon learned that I already knew quite a few of them, I just hadn't known about the other half of their dual lives. Usually I knew them by their real names, and as I photographed each one I learned about a carefully crafted internet persona. Each girl was known by an exotic pseudonym. Usually, pre-shoot, they were anything but exotic without the fancy makeup and clothes. Usually they had very ordinary real names.

I've photographed about 15 or 16 of them now, in half a dozen cities, and gotten lots of exhibit quality photographs. I've learned that dommes often are fairly comfortable in their bodies. Once I stood in a basement in Ohio, the young woman in front of me for this TFP shoot (they've all been TFP) wearing nothing but a pair of eight-inch platform heels, when she began to laugh, and said "just think, most guys pay $250 per hour, and they still don't get to see this." Another domme, in Los Angeles, explained it to me just recently: She said that to get the quality of images she needs, there's an understanding that the photographer needs to get what he or she is after, too. Since dommes tend to be artists and thus enjoy working with art photographers, there's often an acceptance that art nudes are part of the game. Usually, neither of us posts those. They're intended for gallery walls, for limited consumption.

All of this comes up because last night someone directed me to a recent forum post by a domme I'd photographed a couple of years ago. Here's what she said:

"I've never used photos on my website that looked like they were shot in a dungeon. My first photos were black and white, shot on 35mm in my old apartment in Chicago.... I liked my first photoset particularly, because as it was shot in a non-kink setting we had to completely rely on my expressions and poses to convey dominance. I think it was successful. The idea was that... it's important to show me as powerful in non-kink settings. I wanted to show that I didn't need the dungeon and toys to have authority."

She's talking about my photos... which of course is very flattering. And it's a good description of the way I work with people like her. They're on-location portraits, drawing out emotion, conveying energy through expression and body language and less tangible things.

She's also, consciously or not, talking about life. As a young (mid-20s) woman, even as a tall and exceptionally well educated one, she understands that outside of her work her power is limited. On the subway, no one knows (or cares) that she's a domme. At the fast food counter, the employee is as likely to be rude to her as to anyone else of her age and gender. Like everyone else, she needs to do laundry and buy groceries. She can, sometimes, use her looks to get her way. But it's not institutionalized power, and she knows it. Then, at work, she dons her fetish garb and assumes consensual power for a few hours. It's a fragile power, entirely dependent on that consent.

On the other hand, as a middle-aged white male, my power is real. It's built into my position at the office, my box on an organizational chart. I also enjoy certain political perks beyond those typical even for someone in my situation.

During the shoot, I'm actually the one in the dominant position, and usually they understand that. But I don't control freak them even though I could. There's no need. I will sometimes provoke emotion in very aggressive ways, although they know it's about to happen, it's discussed in advance and fully consensual. But overall, the shoot is intended as a collaboration, and one of the goals is to avoid the usual cliches. This model, at least, seems to think it's working.

That's her in the photo. Let's call her Victoria, although of course that isn't her real name (which isn't very exotic or edgy). This is one of the ones she did for me, never intended for her website. But I'm going to let her tease you, and we're both in on the game. I'm not going to show you the next frame, the one where she's let her hands drop to the floor.

tentative

2008-02-16T22:18:00.000-08:00

Since the LA shoot... the results of which I'm actually quite happy with... I've had no real desire to photograph people. Before the recent Chicago trip I browsed portfolios, toyed with the idea of setting up a shoot or two, and couldn't find anyone who really got me excited. Even my known quantities didn't get the creativity to the surface. I had dinner while there with two of my favorite models from the past, and talked to a third. I didn't even unpack the camera til nearly the end of the trip, and then only to do a few night shots on the wintry suburban streets.

The nasty weather and the fact that I was fighting off a cold may have contributed to that. But thinking about it on and after the trip, this time it seems to center on the concept of who to photograph as much as anything. I'm in a bit of a rebellion it seems, against limiting myself to working with people who consider themselves to be "models." Sometimes, that's fine. But apparently it needs to be more diverse, be more than just pretty girls.

At an event last night I was introduced to a young woman who at first defined herself as a photographer, then talked about how she likes to be in pictures, too. She hinted pretty plainly that she'd like to be in mine. I went home without committing, looked at her online presence, mostly words with a few images. It's not a clear decision, but I've decided to photograph her, as much to step back and observe my reactions as anything.

I had a chance to watch her during the event. She's tall and thin, attractive enough, and moves reasonably well. She wore a piece of jewelry she had made herself, strong and primal, and it was that object, and her relation to it, that pushed me toward saying yes. That and the fact that she's apparently never heard of the online model sites, and thus doesn't define herself in that way.

From a quick comparison of schedules, it may take two or three weeks to make this happen, which is fine. More time to think, more time to ponder the implications of the fact that 45 days into 2008, I've done only one real shoot.

2008-01-26T21:34:00.001-08:00

01.20.08 to 01.23.08: Los Angeles... an ambiguous place for me. Once, I spent a lot of time here. Once, I thought about spending even more time here. Then I realized that it's like a weight, that it only pulls me where I don't want to go.

It's no longer the laid-back place I wandered in my college years. Now it's flash and fast paced. Now, more than ever, it's materialism. It's a mirage, this plain of things, this desert of excess.

I arrive on Sunday morning, and have time for breakfast with Audrey before my shoot. Audrey was one of my acquaintances in the punk years, when she sang in The Dadistics and I wrote and photographed for the 'zine. I think we only actually met a couple of times, although I have two sets of photos of her. She's had a rough couple of days, and going to breakfast seems to help.

At noon, I'm heading for Shae's downtown loft. She's almost ready when I arrive, still fighting with one uncooperative false eyelash. She lays out the things she's brought, and none of them really cover much. A couple of thongs, a see-through black thing, a few straps, shoes and boots. Apparently she's not shy.

The ninth-floor loft is bare, concrete floors, bare walls, exposed concrete ceiling, lots of windows on three sides. She's just picked up the keys in the past few days, and the furniture consists of one chair. We begin to shoot, exploring the shifting window light, exploring each other. The conversation quickly veers toward the darkness. The serious expression becomes more variable, emotion rises to the surface. The energy flows. She trusts enough to let go of control, to slip into a headspace that she now visits only occasionally. Then she comes back to what she knows so well, what she will learn to know even better. She's already aware, hungry to learn more.

I'm not sure how long we shoot, longer than usual. There are many pauses to talk. For much of the time she's wearing only shoes. At the end we talk more, sitting in her car, looking at photos. I finally pull myself away.

The next night I meet with several photographers in Pasadena, and for four hours we talk shop and more. One fellow has some surprisingly subversive work. But it's time to head north, to attend to my next days work. It's after midnight when I arrive in Bakersfield. The project goes quickly the next morning, leaving some unexpected time at the end of the day. I drive through the oilfields, photographing the blasted landscape. This is the cost of urban sprawl, of the car culture. This is the cost that most people never see. I find myself wanting to come back here, to spend more time photographing this strange place. But now, I need to get back to LA. There, I need to get back on an airplane. I need to get out of this place.

black and white

2007-12-26T22:00:00.000-08:00

This is from the first shoot in the new gallery space, not quite a week ago... it's so nice to have high ceilings again, that's one of the few things I miss about the old Chicago studio, six and a half years in the past. No more worries about that issue. Now all I need is more electrical outlets and even and reliable heat, that will keep the models happier.

Anyway, this is Maria. In the past she's done fairly mainstream shoots, with competent but mainstream photographers; a little glammy, very soft in a presentation sense.

She had the sense to ask for edgier, but acknowledge that it might not be wise to dive all the way in at once, to work somewhere in the middle, a transition from, as she put it, where she is now to where I am.

So these are just a little harsher, just a little scarier (for her, at least I assume so), but without pushing limits too hard, without trying to make her be something that she isn't yet.

She worked mostly in a black robe, and with her dark hair and the black background, her skin was the only contrast. The robe moved, shifted, sometimes a little, sometimes dropping mostly away, barely there. I knew it might be tricky to make it work, all the black. Maybe it's crazy to try this on the first shoot in a new space, but I decided to just do it, followed my intuition, either knew it would work because of tons of experience, or have deluded myself that I can pull anything off, not sure which.

I think there are some shots which show a little more emotion, I'm sure there are some with expressive hands, but I'm (again) almost out of paper so still need to make proof sheets.

I thought this was going to be the last shoot of 2007, but there just might still be one more, will know for sure tomorrow. Taller, older, light hair, very different.

spoiled

2007-12-11T00:23:00.000-08:00

These past few weeks I've been looking at a fair amount of top quality photography. Enough that I just haven't paid much attention to the mediocrity that is, of course, everywhere.

Mostly, I've been looking at work in the context of thinking about who to invite in for a gallery exhibit. Either my intuition is on this week, or I've just been lucky.... a lot of the web presence I've viewed has been pretty good, and some of it has been world class.

It had to end.

Today I unfolded a scrap of paper someone gave me the other day, punched in the url of this guy they had met, said he was a photographer. The home page didn't completely turn me away, but anybody can get lucky once. In one more level, look around for a few minutes. OK, that's enough, time to go. Nope, not this guy.

There's nothing wrong with it technically, in the exposure and photoshop sense. But if this guy ever had an imagination, it took a vacation. He's a technician with a camera. And he thinks he's good, to the point that he writes about photography in his blog as if he needs to explain to the world why he takes pictures. But he can't compose a picture (or a paragraph, for that matter), and his work is just... bland. It's about the subject, in a neatly boxed and strictly representational sense. There's no deeper connection. There's no passion, no feeling.

He reminded me of myself, at about 17, shooting for the papers, thinking I was a hotshot just because people paid for my photos. I didn't understand yet that they paid because I delivered reliably, every Monday morning, in time for deadline. They tolerated reliable mediocrity, while shunning some shining creative talents who couldn't deliver two weeks in a row.

I look back at some of those old images and wonder why anyone paid for them. I hope Mr. photo dude gets to that point someday. Unfortunatly, I know firsthand that it takes a pretty profound existential kick in the head to wake up.

femme fatale

2007-12-05T23:55:00.000-08:00

I like to play with fire.

I met her almost five years ago, then didn't see her for a long time. One night, in a club in Chicago, I saw her across the crowded room. By then, I knew her real name, or part of it. She was surprisingly friendly. I encountered her repeatedly after that, sometimes late at night in that or other clubs, sometimes at gallery openings. Over time, I came to know her well; or at least as well as she lets anyone know her. In so may ways, she remains an enigma.

Like so many femme fatales, she's strong, cold, and vulnerable all at once. She likes to flirt, she's told me so, and she's good at it.

One summer evening we went to dinner. She dressed elegantly, and we sat in a Thai restaurant and talked of things that would have shocked our neighbors. On the way back to the car she let me photograph her, two images on the sidewalk in the fading light. She agreed in principle to be photographed more formally. Then, as often happens, I didn't hear from her for months.

That's been the game, for five years. Friendly flirtation, then absence. Prompt response to e-mails or phone calls, then for a while, none. Then an apology, and more flirting. With most women, even with stunningly beautiful models, I walk away if this happens once. For me, attractive women are commonplace. With her, I tolerate it, enjoy the challenge, and it's all a game. We each win battles in this very civilized war without an end.

At last, she did let me photograph her. We shot in her third floor apartment, first with window light and then with a pair of compact hot lights. The image above was taken toward the end of the evening, after I'd seen an impressive range of expression. Sometime before this she had told me of her past as a fashion model, in Germany I think. Indeed, she's no stranger to the camera, even if it has been a while.

The last time I saw her, about four months ago, she offered to get together and shoot some nudes. Then, of course, I didn't hear from her for several months. She reappeared, by e-mail, two weeks ago. Of course I'm 2,000 miles away, and uncertain when I'l be back in her neighborhood. When I am, there's a 50 percent chance she'll be ready to shoot. Or not. But eventually, she will. When she's ready.

One night, three years ago, I saw her without makeup, in jeans and a tee-shirt. I was on the sidewalk in front of a gallery, getting a little fresh air, getting away from the crowd. She came down from her apartment next door, just running across the street to buy cigarettes. I'll never forget the look on her face when she saw me. It hurt her so badly to be seen that way. Yet, it was just a few weeks later that we went to dinner and she looked so elegant.

She knows so many people, flirts with so many men. Now, she enjoys her power, revels in it's use. She knows, I think, that it won't last forever. She understands the fragility of power, its ephemeral nature. Already, even as she's surrounded by people, she's alone. She may always be alone, and at some level, afraid.

above and beyond

2007-12-04T22:17:00.001-08:00

There aren't very many of them. But some models will do whatever it takes to create a powerful image.

Salome has done it every time we've worked together... five times? She's been encased in plaster, unable to move for an hour. She's played in the mud on a hot summer day. She's been buffeted by strong winds and blowing sand after driving an hour each way to the location. She's shivered in the cold November breeze off Lake Michigan, wearing only a thin bit of cloth. Finally, she's braved late winter freezing rain and a winter storm advisory for several hours, and traveled two and a half hours each way with me, to and from another location.

Perhaps I should offer her an easy shoot, one without adverse weather, one not physically strenuous...

Nah. That wouldn't be any fun.

As you can see, Salome takes visual creation seriously. Ask her to go into a particular emotional headspace, and she dives right in. Sometimes that can hurt more than the physical things or the weather. It's something many models never learn how to do. Yet she seems to go there for real, and stay there for as long as needed. I've had to remind her to give that dress a tug, cover that stray nipple when someone walks by, she's so deeply into her creative space.

What to do next...

bridge of now

2007-12-04T00:29:00.001-08:00

Nixon Sixx, from a September shoot near Berkeley. This peninsula, a metaphorical bridge from past to future, with each chasing the others tail. Here, those who came before failed, and discarded the pieces. Most walk around, avoid this place. A few create something new from the relics of that past, something the old ones would not understand, would reject, as we have rejected them and their ways. Here, like Nietzsche, we watch the past die, watch it rise from the ashes as something new. What some fear, we encourage. What they don't know might hurt them. Here, among dark and light passageways, we walk, we discover, we create. She wears the flexibility of the edge, and of nothingness.

One who seemed so innocent told me of this place, several years ago. Now, the years mean nothing. Her innocence was false, a disguise, a precurser. The next ones, the silent one, and the dark one, and the yet unknown one, they file through this place without time, leaving only memories, and images.