Mar/090
The Beginning
Next week - hopefully - magic will happen and this 5000 feet of 35mm film stock will turn into a beautiful music video for Kristin Diable, a new friend and amazing musician.
The project is a collaboration. Elizabeth Orne - a filmmaker finishing her last year in NYU's grad film program - will be directing and I'm DP. Together we've written the treatment and we're set to shoot in an old abandoned 30's movie theater.
Will post more as we go.
Mar/090
the numbers
I'm sitting on the swinging chair on a friend's porch, wrapped in the quiet of the suburbs and listening to the breeze make a dull wind chime of the winter branches. The laughter of children wafts from the school next door with the comfort of a pie cooling on a windowsill. And still it goes silent, telling me it's there by reminding me what's not: the nothing that's left without it.
Today, on this little break from the city, I finally did my bills and prepped my taxes - running the long-overdue additions and subtractions that allow my life to go as it goes. And sitting in this peace, I took a journey through the last year - each entry telling a story. A restaurant receipt from a time I came through town in need of a good conversation and a big margarita with a friend. A late-night pizza at the end of a wild night that I later regretted eating. A Whole Foods total for the most beautiful meal of my life. A card I bought from a drug store and gave to someone who was hurting so much. Now, they're just thousands of bland, inconsequential yet profound little figures that meant so much at the time ... thousands of small moments and big expenses, all those connections and trials, celebrations and laments. And then there are all the travels - the whirlwind trips and rootlessness, high adventures and directionless spinning movements.
All the things I neglected to write down - those moments I'd like my brain to fight to retain - are in these numbers, in a code only I can crack. The bottle I brought to an amazing Christmas party in Maine, and the bottle I bought on my way back down the coast. The provisions for a spring sail with friends that lasted all day and into the night.
In a few days the taxes will be filed and all this paperwork will be tucked away in a manila folder in a storage unit where I've been keeping all these things. But now that I have them in front of me, I pour over them - making myself coffee and reading them over like a scholar. They hold so much.
Though now it's quiet and the dust has settled on this year. Children laugh. Branches click. Tall grass sounds a comfortable sush. And still it goes silent, telling me what's there by reminding me what's not.
Mar/090
Thunder Perfect Mind
I saw this on a friend's blog a while back and it's not gotten out of my head since.
Mar/090
Album released
It's one thing to see your work printed - and another to see it advertised across the pond in the tube stops of London.
Melody Gardot's "My One and Only Thrill" is finally released in the UK (though us in the states have to wait until end of April, I had a visiting friend bring two copies with her from London: one for my makeup artist Victoria Stiles, and the other for mi madre).
Two videos from photographer Nicolas Labrie of the cover advertised in the london tube, and another from the release day:
Mar/090
last-minute
These are from a shoot months ago. My friend Jake at Bitfire digital tech house needed to work the bugs out of his H2/Phase One/mac pro - basically he needed someone to shoot as fast as possible to see if we could get the system to crash rather than contending with it during a full shoot with 30 people on set.
So I called my friend Cristi and these are a few that came of it. The first was strobe, but the second was taken using the profoto modeling lights and a 1/8" shutter - slow enough so the big H2's mirror would shake the shit out of the camera and make sure nothing in the photo was sharp - just the way I like it.
Mar/090
Working it all out
This is from a few weeks ago - Venice Beach.
Those tracks are mine - from pacing back and forth for over an hour while on the phone with a friend. What I'd really like is a time series - to watch the problems thrown from my shoulders and etched into the sand, which accepts all the hardships of man, then smooths itself out. Without another mention. Like sand, we shape and reshape ourselves, making divots out of footfalls - then find the waves that will wash us clean and even and back to where we started.
Mar/090
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
If You Forget Me
Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines
Mar/090
The Subtlties
Looking through an editorial in the new Vogue Germany of Georgina Stojiljkovic by Alexi Lubomirski, and I'm struck by this beautiful toning and blooming highlights, as well as falloff indicative of large-format glass. I've found myself in the habit of scrutiny - of needing to know whether it was done in digital. For sure, it would take a genius and someone with a seasoned eye to recreate this look with a combination of fast glass, post, and perhaps some promist filtering. But .... does it matter? Has the process ever mattered? Regardless of whether it's painted, filmed, shot, captured, synthesized, or grown in a petri dish, the final result is this ... magic.
EDIT: since I first posted this, I had the opportunity to work on set with Alexi and his team, and over a long shop talk conversation with his first assistant Rose, I got my answer about whether they were shot to digital or not ... though I'm not telling.
Having just returned from there myself, this collection tells the story of the beauty inherent in a part of Miami that remains timeless in the textures of linen and palm tree, lit by a sun that can't decide whether its continental or caribbean.
And the magic isn't only in the aesthetic, but in the pose. There's a quality to the postures here that show mastery. Poses like these (more of Steven Meisel's January 08 shoot with Guinevere van Seenus for Vogue Italia).
Favorite
NYTimes Photography Blog
- Pictures of the Day: West Bank and Elsewhere 9 September, 2010Ramadan and Rosh Hashana are observed. […]By THE NEW YORK TIMES
- Medieval Flagellation in an Italian Town 9 September, 2010The images are medieval but Roberto Boccaccino shot them only a month ago, as Daniel J. Wakin reports. […]By DANIEL J. WAKIN
- When the Shah of Iran Took the Pictures 8 September, 2010Newsha Tavakolian was inspired by an intimate series of photos taken by the shah of Iran. Yes, the shah. […]By KERRI MACDONALD and AMANDA RIVKIN
- Pictures of the Day: On a Chinese Oil Rig and Elsewhere 8 September, 2010Oil workers were perched precariously but the oil company said no oil had been spilled. […]By RAYMOND MCCREA JONES
- Mourning at the Scene of a Stabbing 8 September, 2010At the scene of a stabbing in Manhattan, a little girl mourned a young woman she didn't know. […]By KERRI MACDONALD and ANGEL FRANCO