New Moon

Moon - 062910-1

Moon - 062910-2

Moon Marie came over on my third night in New York.  She is a great model/dancer that is moving her career from Chicago to New York City.

We tried many different settings, poses, themes and intents.  I appreciated her attention to detail, staging and direction.  After an hour, I realized I shot the first hour at the wrong ISO - 2500.  She was very agreeable to stay an extra hour to redo some of the shots.  Her professional attitude made it a pleasure to work with and her enthusiasm for trying new things made the session fun.

Moon - 062910-6

Moon was very excited to try out using the LCD projector, much like the work Candace and I created.  We tried a few new words, experimented with the Dali image, and a few new images projected on to her.  Her dancer training and both physical and mental flexibility made it rewarding to try new concepts.

Moon - 062910-3

Due to having well over 2000 images from the trip and over 400 of Moon, I have only had time to work on few of hers.  Over the next few months you will see more.  Of the shots I took at the wrong ISO, many are making gritty grainy images that have their own beauty.  A few of the ones posted today are those.

Moon - 062910-4

I highly recommend her for all who work in New York and need a great model for their art.  She is a treat to work with.

Moon - 062910-5

NYC - Final Report - A Journal Summary

The Journal

I had to keep an artist's journal as an assignment for the class during my time in NYC,  I use a journal like that to capture ideas, quotes, thoughts, and other detritus that I pick up and find value in.  I rarely use it as a processing and clarifying tool.  In ways, that is what this blog is for.

Below are a few of the snippets I captured in it.  Maybe by putting them here, they will start to make sense and give me an internal look at what I saw in New York.  I chose not to edit them.  They are in their original words, except where I could not decipher my chicken scratch.  I left all the images hi-res.  Click on them to get the big version.


MoMA

 "I prowled the streets all day feeling very strung up and ready to pounce, determined to 'trap' life - to preserve living." -  Henri Cartier-Bresson

____
Duane Michals
We visited photographer Duane Michals' in his studio / home.  He talked with us for an hour and shared some of his new work.  At 78, he might as well be 38.  He lives.  Some of his quotes that stick with me:

"Before it becomes bullshit, ask questions"
"If you put shit your head, you will lead a shitty life."
"Nobody really gives a fuck about you, it is up to you to make your art important."
"Don't go against your intuition."
"Two choices in life - doing it or becoming bullshit (makes me think of what lightness of being  means)"
"Your true identity is in your secrets. " Maybe I need to photograph my secrets?
_____
MET

The Gugg

American women and fashion exhibit - How much is her desire to look good for herself, for us, or just because that is what men expect?

_____

Central Park Lovers

If You Can

Central Park
At John Lennon's Strawberry Fields memorial in Central Park, across from where he was killed.  Seeing all these people "worshiping" him 30 years post mortem makes me think of his lyric and change it to:

Imagine all the people, "faking" in harmony.

Singing "Yellow Submarine"

_____

With a Mission

The New Museum
(Upon seeing the life-sized wax statue of a man blowing himself) - Should be called, "Wouldn't You?"  I would.

 _______

Unseen Interactions

In Harlem
Life in New York is balls out in anonymity.  If you don't like it, don't look.

_______

Statue of Liberty - is now a beautiful cliche
_______

Ground Zero 
They can't build there.  Things get fucked up and they start over again.

_______

Touch them for Luck!  He doesn't mind.

Wall Street
Grab the brass bull by the balls.  al Quaeda and the banking industry did.




















_______

Coney Island
A depressing side show of recreation.  The hot mid-day sun barely reflects off of the dull paint of the rides.  The creak of the boardwalk matches the creak of the people walking on it.
Coney Island is purgatory. It is where we go when we expect heaven, even for an afternoon, but get used up and worn out ideals of what should be... or was.  Perfect place to observe the human condition in limbo of living.

______

The New York Connecting Arteries
Everyone is an independent being tied together by the one shared thing, New York.  Sid, the local corner market owner and Renee, the art gallery curator, bump into each other on the "N" line as the train stops suddenly.  Both have their lives built by all they have done, but they have done all of that in NYC.  That gives them a sameness that other cities don't hold.

 ______
Things overheard in the city
Costco exit - man angry he can't enter through the exit and the employee telling him to go around.
"Fuck you." he mutters.
"Yep, fuck me.  That is what we are made to do.  That is how we got here.  Now go around." she replies.

Outside the Hogs and Heifers Saloon by Highline Park.
"BAM!" Marla exclaims with a pop as she walks by us toward the bar's door.
"Bam?", asks my instructor.
"Yeah, late last night I was fucked up and fell and hurt my leg. Now I walk every other step with a BAM!"
She demonstrates by "bamming" her hip outward and laughs.  Her friend says, "BAM!"  We all say "BAM!"
Marla walks into the bar and tells us, "You got that right, BAM!"

Hogs and Heifers

______
Leaving NYC
The bus AC is broken and it is hot and muggy.  I snap at Mollee and my dark mood is better experienced alone.  I listen to my music to escape.  I feel more at home in NYC than in SF, or anywhere else I've been.  People are real, they say what they mean, they still care.

I miss NYC because it represents what I am not - not living the moment, not taking the risks to be more, not really living a life.
_____
SF and NYC
SF has a gentle heart for its people and visitors.  It is a fairy tale of acceptance that is both warm and only surface level.   SF is too afraid to offend anyone... other than conservatives.

If SF is a fairy tale, NYC is the dark and rough graphic novel of life.   Life is not always pretty, but it is alive.

SF may be Glenda the good witch, or at least thinks she is.  NYC is not the evil witch.  She is more like the human made mother nature, watching over all her charges.  No one person controls it.

Like nature, things flourish, grow, build, die, and decay.  Like nature, disaster happens and life on it dies for some.  Then things shift around and all goes on.
_____
The New York Look

We dress sexy, we dress good.
We wear something a little tighter, a little more colorful or different maybe.
Shauna over there, looks like a whore in her skin tight gold lame pants, but fuck you for judging her.  She didn't even notice you standing outside Forever 21 as she walked by.

____

On the way to Penn

Penn Station
Looking @ the tiny subway map only confused me.  Old Sid pulling an old suitcase on wheels sees me and asks, "Goin' to Penn Station?"
"Yeah"
"Take the 1,2, or 3.  Its your first stop."
I start to look for the 1, 2, or 3 train.    Sid says, "Follow me, I'm goin' there anyway."  I follow old Sid and his suitcase to Penn Station.
Sid leans in, "What do you want at Penn?"
"BH Photo."
"Yeah, thats on 9th."  He looks at my camera bag and all this confirms is my tourist status.  I am a visitor photographing the "exotics", which is just his fucking home.
I thank him and he replies, "Good luck."
____
The Swarm
We sit on the train coming into the next stop and hear a human roar.  Dozens of high schoolers are yelling in celebration.  They flood our car - some are yelling, other laughing, and singing.  Two are dance grinding each other.  Nothing but noise.
Two minutes, we pull into next stop, 59th and Lexington and the swarm of noisy birds fly en masse off our train car and their shrieks fade and echo off the tile hallways.  WTF was that.
_____

 
The Sexy
New Yorkers know how to be sexy.  They live it, not put it on. 















_____

Looking Up

Empire State Building
When I stand on its observation deck, NYC is my bitch.  I can spit on it.  I can squish Lady Liberty between my fingers.  I can flip off 8 million plus people in the 2 minutes it takes to walk around the obs. deck.  The city is not that much.

The Cage

Then I stand by the edge and look through the protective art-deco thick gauged wire cage and look down upon 42nd street going far down.  Some little shit of a kid runs into me and bumps me hard.  My nose hits the wire.  For one second I die as I see 42nd below about to swallow me.  I am once again NYC's bitch and she is my Mistress.  Don't ever take her for granted.  She will not always forgive.

You are not God.

_____
NY Minute
The cliche is "in a NY minute."  Yeah, its a cliche, but it is all of these minutes that get in your mind/heart that fuck with you/inspire you/hurt you/ and made you and me for all those one-minutes.


NOTE -I have over 2000 images to go through including two sessions with models.  I will post those as they are processed.  This will probably be my last post solely devoted to this trip to NYC as a travelogue.  Too much of it is still in me and has to be processed/developed in my internal darkroom.  As my coworker Ollie says, "when in doubt, take it personally."  I did.

NYC- Report 2 - The Muse(um)s of NYC

Looking at a Rothko - MoMA

I've been to many museums since getting here last Tuesday.  Each has a unique gift to share.  Some were big, like the MET, and some were small, like PS1.

Wednesday - NY Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) - A true gem of grand size.  I visited this for the first time last year and enjoyed it even more this year.  The two best exhibits were photos by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography. 

Looking at Vertical - MoMA

Thursday - The Studio Museum in Harlem A canvas with the following poem painted on it.

The smell of your neck in August and
trying to make love on concrete
somewhere between forgiving to easily
and not giving at all the sound
and the hints of you caught up between my fingers
- Concrete - Adam Pendleton

Friday - The MET.  A must see:  American Women: Fashioning a National Identity.  It explores the history and design of fashion for women and how it shaped the identity of American women.  Hipsters, Hustlers, and Handball Players: Leon Levinstein's New York Photographs, 1950–1980 is another great exhibit.  His photos capture the life of the city in small snippets of existence.  Go see these.

The Guggenheim -  This gift of a building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright is exhibiting a series called Haunted.  It is a contemporary photography, video, and performance exhibit.  The combined media truly make a unified show as you walk up or down the long spiral ramp in one continuous exhibit. 

Looking through the camera to see the art for later - MoMA

Saturday - The New Museum  An edgy/chic art museum in a funky looking building.  The first exhibit greets you as the elevator opens with two realistic life-sized statues made of wax. The female licking/sucking her  breast in a sensual way.  Beside her is a male statue caught in a moment of self-fellatio.  The museum gets edgier after that.  Some of it was there to just shock, others held deeper conceptual meaning.  The top floor (7th) has an open deck with a chi-chi wine bar and billion dollar views of the city and Soho.

Looking at a shared moment - MoMA

Looking to move on - MoM

Sunday - PS1 MoMA - My favorite of the trip.  It is the black sheep step-sibling of the MoMA.  Both are affiliated, that is about the end of their similarities.  PS1 is in Long Island City in Queens and resides in an old school building.  Where The New Museum is the edgy/chic art museum, PS1 is the edgy crunchy museum.  It sprawls through huge old classrooms with rough paint jobs and art laying about.  Much of it, you touch, interact with, and experience.  The subjects are hard and pushing edges with themes of race, sex, gender/orientation, music, moving image, and many other topics.  One exhibit of Leigh Ledare's documents the sex life of his mother and her lovers, as well as his own romantic interests.  It is graphic, maybe even pornographic, but has so many ways to view it including incest and sexual freedom of an autumn woman.  Another exhibit looks at iconic commercial images of African-Americans with three photos from every year (1968-2008). Many bring back memories that make you smile with nostalgia, but with further reflection, illustrates how in all the images, popular culture over-simplifies and incorrectly represents blacks in America.

There are many more museums, galleries and studios, but they will have to wait until next time.

Art Lovers and Art Fast Movers - MoMA

Photo Notes - I enjoy watching people look at art.  The New York MoMA is very generous at letting patrons photograph in the galleries. 

To all my blog authoring friends - I've neglected my joy of reading your great bogs for too long.  My goal is to start reading them again tomorrow.

NYC- Report 1 - Take the "7" to the "1" or "2" and get off at Penn Station

Grand Central

New York City.  It lives up to its hype.  It has everything, the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, the sexy, and the vibe.

You have to have a Metropass to get around.  Cars are stupid to commute in.  Every time I exit a new subway station, I try to anticipate what will greet me and am usually wrong.  Mid-town is glass, sexy advertising and business suits.  Harlem has broader streets than anticipated.  Central Park has more trees and longer trails.  Soho and Greenwich have sexy people. 

When?

I know everyone mentions it, but NYC is a vertical building.  Everywhere, the buildings go way up there.  People living in the sky over the city that has a true American identity.

New York City has a soul and personality.  It is complex.  It can't be easily described for risk of minimizing the depth of it. 

Running Late

I've worked with one model and hopefully can schedule another.  Good to be shooting again.

Next time, I will write about the museums.  They do not fear reactions here.

Start Spreading the News

At the NY MoMA

Then
The romantic ideal
Frank and Tony  - New York, New York


Now
A contemporary take on how it is.
Alicia Keys and Jay Z Empire State of Mind
 

At the NY MoMA 2

Feeling Worn and Street Art

Forgotten Near Palm Springs - d

Today is my last day of work for two weeks.  I leave for my photography class in New York on Tuesday.  The past month has been heavy at work.  We have major projects rolling out in Q3 and Q4 (I sound "business-y" when I write that) and I had to get some big things done before taking vacation.  I am going to have a heavy workload again in July-November as well.  We will see if I have a job next year, but this year is solid.

I have an empty feeling.  My energy is low.  My creativity is barely an ember.  My body is worn.  Normally that would be signs of depression for me, but I think my body and soul know I have a creative vacation coming.  It is going to be an active one with a full itinerary of museums, photo shoots, lectures, group and critiques.  Throw in meals, buses, boats, and trains, the days are full.  I also arranged two photo shoots with models on the side.  I may be tired when I get back, but I hope my soul will be recharged a bit.

Forgotten Near Palm Springs - bw

Street Art
I did not see much street art while growing up in Montana.  Billings, the states largest city at just over 100k people, did not have a big graffiti/street art presence when I was growing up.  It may have picked up since then.



Since moving to the SF area, I've started noticing the good street art.  Some are stencils, others are free form.  I appreciate the art that took a bit of thought and somehow incorporates the environment around it.  Street art and graffiti are tough subjects.  Is it vandalism, art, political statements, declarations of territory, messages of domination, or a mixture of all these? 

Forgotten Near Palm Springs

This art form has been in the press lately with the release of the movie Exit Through the Gift Shop,  a documentary about the famous/notorious street artist, Banksy.  Here is a link about the movie.  

I hope to find more street art while in NYC.  

Here is a great Magnum photo essay on street art. 

Below is a great mental vacation video of street art in a moving animation form from South America.  It is well worth the time to watch it even though it makes little sense in the concrete, but has great abstract concepts.


Have a great weekend.

Dennis Hopper - RIP

Dennis Hopper (l )  Peter Fonda (r) Movie Sill from Easy Rider

Dennis Hopper died a couple of weeks ago from cancer.  He was 74.  The first time I saw Dennis Hopper was while watching the movie he directed and acted in, Easy Rider.  Even though many liked Peter Fonda's character, I always understood and related to Hopper's character better.  Hopper was  a great photographer and artist in multiple genres.  Maybe his broad creation and appreciation for art is one of the reasons I am saddened by his passing.

Hopper was not a perfect man.  He had drug and alcohol addictions, anger problems, was micro-managerial over artistic vision, was obstinate, opinionated, and an egotist.  He  burned bridges and almost destroyed his career multiple times in multiple ways.  Through it all, he lived his life with a need to escape being ordinary.  His path may not have always been true, fruitful, or even that good artistically, but he was willing to reinvent himself and go about his life in another direction.  I respect that brave sense of self-renewal.

"Drugs can work for you, but at one point you work for them." - Dennis Hopper

Paul Newman - Dennis Hopper

Hopper attended the Actor's Studio with all the other great method actors of his time.  It is amazing how I can watch a movie staring him or other *Actor's Studio alumni and see a depth to their craft that many current movie stars lack.  Hopper had this depth of talent as well.  Whether he was playing a biker seeking freedom in Easy Rider, an avenging, homicidal bomb-making ex-cop (Speed), or a stoned reporter in Vietnam (Apocalypse Now), he always had a unique edge and depth that made you want to learn more about his character. 

Much of Hopper's early acting craft came from working with James Dean on Rebel without a Cause.  In a 1990 interview** with Hopper, he shared that Dean told him with acting, "Do things.  Don't act like you are having a drink, have a drink.  Don't indicate, react.  If in the part you are supposed to open the door and someone is there with a gun, react to the gun like you didn't know it was there.  The moment is the reality.  Never anticipate what the next moment will hold."

"Photography is not like painting," Henri Cartier-Bresson told the Washington Post in 1957. "There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative," he said. "Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever. " -Wikipedia (emphasis by me)

As a photographer, Hopper appreciated Henri Cartier Bresson's concept of the Decisive Moment. Look at Hopper's photo, Biker Couple.  In that one instant, he captured all the youth and disillusionment in those two and their relationship.   When watching his acting, you can tell that he was living as that character at that moment.  In each moment, his character "... never anticpate(d) what the next moment (would) hold."

Biker Couple - 1961 Dennis Hopper

This is a key element of both his and my art.  The moment is the reality, even if we are creating it.  We create and capture the decisive moment when we trip the camera's shutter.  Life went on before that moment and continued after, but something made us need to capture that moment.

I've written before about the fermata, a controlled pause in music,  In photography, all that is important is  what is photographed in that fraction of a second.  Nothing else matters except what we saw and knew to be the defining or decisive moment we just captured.

Dennis Hopper understood the value of the moment, whether in a role, painting, or photo.  In many ways he lived his life that way too.  The moment was where he lived.  Thanks for sharing it with us.




Great quote from Easy Rider that summed up the whole point of the movie.

"It's not who you boys are or what you look like, it's what you represent that scares these people." George, played by Jack Nicholson - Easy Rider

Below are a few references, photo essays, video clips, and deeper reads.    I recommend them all.
Slate/Magnum Photos

Retracing Early Rider  after 40 Years
* Karl Malden, Steve McQueen, Beatrice Arthur, Rod Steiger, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Anne Bancroft, and many more. 
** Fresh Air interviews with Dennis Hopper from 1990 and 1996

One important note about these videos from Easy Rider.  Hopper was one of the first directors to use complete contemporary songs as a part of the movie and then match the scene cuts to the music.  He attributes this style to what he saw on TV commercials.  Maybe this was a forefather to music videos?  Hopper thought so.


The Weight - Easy Rider 

Easy Rider - Born to be Wild Opening Credits.

This and That

Katie - 060210

Still working on the Dennis Hopper reflection post. The more I learn about that guy, the more I respect him.  Overall I like him, but there was some parts of his life that make me cringe as I study him.  That makes me respect him a little bit more.

In less than two weeks I will be in New York.  I've arranged to work with one model and may try to line up another.  There is a lot of great talent in that city (probably one of my biggest understatements).

Piernas (Andrea on the hood of my old truck)

So, Al and Tipper are splitting.  It sounds like it was a mutual decision and may even be amicable.  I wish them both well.  Who would have thought they would split the blanket before Bill and Hillary?

As I've mentioned before, sometimes I have a hard time when someone gives me a "photo suggestion."  After seeing the photo below of Andrea's incredible legs stretched so beautifully across the hood of my truck, a female friend said, "Pretty photo.  You know what you should do (I always cringe when I hear that, but sometimes the idea offered is good), you should take a self portrait of you stretched across the hood wearing your cowboy boots to show a "reality vs. fantasy theme."  My response was something like, "interesting idea."  I could tell this was more of what she wanted to do.  I have enough memories of being in, on, under, every part of that truck and some were good,  fun,  humorous, and some I'd rather forget.  For me and what I wanted to photograph and give contextual meaning to, that image is enough.