Autobiography in Five Short Chapters
Portia Nelson

I

I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost, I am helpless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes me forever to find a way out.

II

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I am in the same place.
But, it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

III

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in, it’s a habit.
My eyes are open. I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.

IV

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

V

I walk down another street.

Happy 2012, everyone! May you walk down many streets and leap over deep holes.

More KZSU photos are in a group show I’m in up at City Hall. You Look Familiar is still up at the Arts Commission, and will be til Jan. 6th.

Also, on Dec. 7, Open Show partners with SF Film Society to hold a special screening of Restrepo, in memory of Tim and to benefit the Committee to Protect Journalists. Come out if you’re in the Bay!

Another China trip is in order starting later this week and running into mid Oct. This time I’m looking forward to avoiding the blazing heat late summer. I’m hoping it will be temperate enough that I can actually spend some time walking around without wishing that the hollow body of my camera was refrigerated.

Unfortunately, I will have to leave before this comics museum in the shape of giant speech bubbles opens. Boo.

Well, for me at least.

This week I found out that a few of my KZSU photos will be a part of the SFAC’s group show, You Look Familiar, this fall. The theme is about shared identity and association. That’s KZSU alright. Though fair warning that, being the misanthrope I am, most of the images are of spaces.

It will run from Oct. 5 – Jan. 6 as far as I know, but I’m not sure if it will be in the gallery space or the City Hall basement space (which would, actually, be quite appropriate since KZSU is in a basement). This will be a nice little capstone to the project, and I can lay it to rest sound in the knowledge that finally somebody outside the campus will have laid eyes upon the glorious mess that is our engineering department.

And now at the very least I can rest easy that this strange aspiration to be an art photographer is not just the delusional product of our photo department (yet another basement) being very nice to me. One day I will rise out of the basement!

This is a little photo I took with a digital point and shoot in October of 2006. I was a horrible photographer, having only taken vacation snapshots on a crappy film camera and then a 2 megapixel Canon Powershot here and there. But I suppose even then I’d had a lot of practice looking at things, particularly through a car window, because when I drove by this scene, I felt compelled to stop. I took a couple of pictures, using the roof of the car to steady the camera, and when I looked at the photo at home, it was the time that I thought photography might be interesting, that a camera might be more than something you pull out at scenic viewpoints and on special occasions.

The birth of this blog pretty much coincides with the first proper photography class I took, which was Lukas’ intro black and white darkroom technique back in the spring of 2008. So when I think of how this blog has changed, I inevitably also think about how my process and work have changed. In the year and a half between that first significant frame and the darkroom course, I upgraded cameras many times and I remember them all, as many photographers do. Not because gear means much of anything, but because, let’s face it, when we change gear it usually indicates a corresponding change of mental attitude. When we buy a new camera, we ultimately hope for a change in the way we shoot.

It’s amusing that so much of my progress I piece together by looking back through online accounts – Flickr, Facebook, my email… reminds me of this line from Toby Barlow’s incredible book, Sharp Teeth: “We hand our lives – our addresses, our letters, our numbers, our photos, our dreams – to these dumb throbbing machines as we become emptier, remembering less and less.”

But I don’t believe that. If it wasn’t the internet, it would be a notebook, a photo album, a scrapbook.

At any rate, I laid out the last four or so years for myself to get a sense of what happened when, and I was surprised to see how simultaneously slow and fast the time has gone. Four years is a long time, but when I flesh out each development, each dose of learning, it doesn’t seem like much at all. When things happen slow, they happen real slow, and when things happen fast, they sure happen fast.

It’s only been in the last year or so that I’ve been comfortable in my current workflow. There are flurries of shooting, but something intangible happens in the idle spaces in between; it’s true that shooting a lot is productive, but I’m not so sure that not shooting isn’t productive. I’m fairly certain by now that my particular brain is some sort of breadmaker – out comes the loaf, after a long stretch of poofing (for god’s sake, don’t expect it to happen quickly). Who knows what witchery makes it happen, but please don’t forget the yeast. For your sake I hope your brain is a coffeemaker.

As for the present, I’m gearing up to do some social media work for Open Show (watch out, we’ve got something good this fall) while continuing to shoot some production stills for Futurefarmers’ wonderful A Variation on the Powers of Ten, which I believe I’ve mentioned before. The project has progressed enough that we can say that there may be a book of stills and background material as well as an exhibit at some point. Plans will need to be firmed up, but I’m curious and excited to see this happen.

Meanwhile, in the back of my head, a mad scientist is trying to throw fine art photography, multimedia installation and collaboration with the scientific community together into the same stew. Will report back on how this concoction tastes at a fruitful future juncture…

For now, here are a few more China photos if you haven’t been Flickr-vigilant. Preliminary, but shaping up to… something.

~

vs

Jim Lo Scalzo, from Salton Sea

I did some quick scans – click to see bigger sizes. Jeremiah does performance, Jacquie does sound installations, Ala (who has now graduated) does film, and Sanaz combines photo with graphics and new media. Y’all know what I do.

ALMANAC: An Index of Current Work and Thought

Wall II (The Space Between Us), Jacqueline Gordon

Auto-Analysis, Jeremiah Barber

Hotrod, yours truly

Tektite Revisited, James Thomas and Meghan O’Hara

Ayandeh-Nameh, Ala Ebtekar

Mega Giga (Detail), Sanaz Mazinani

Thank you Boo, Sanaz and James!

These are gerenuks. I donated this print for Life Support Japan 5 and this week I was pleasantly surprised to see that the edition had sold out. Keep an eye out; there are still a couple more releases of new photographs. Already $50K raised for Direct Relief and Habitat for Humanity. Wow.

I also have a humble little picture in the group portion of this month’s F-Stop.

Lastly, SUSS (Stanford Undergrad Sustainability Scholars) have started a brand spankin’ new blog, and they did a post on a few of my photos. I’ve never had anyone write anything at length about my work, so it’s a strange feeling – like I should be wearing sunglasses while reading it. I actually really like what Mark wrote, yet I still have to force myself to read it. (Why is that?)

As I’ve said before, I love the idea of working more closely with people who are interested in the issues I’m interested in, and I might draft up a post for the SUSS blog about the role of visual arts in public outreach for action organizations. I’ve thought about it a lot since I touched on it in my In Focus essay and since talking to Jason Houston of Orion Magazine at PhotoAlliance, and I’d really like to dig up some concrete examples. Look out!