the walk home

Dumbo.

While I was in NY, I worked out of the Brooklyn office for a day, taking the subway out from Manhattan and arriving so early that I walked around for a while taking photos in the rain. The office is in a restored brick urban warehouse in the neighborhood called DUMBO, short for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. The "overpass" part seems redundant, but without it the neighborhood would just be called DUMB... and aside from being embarrassing, it's also just way too beautiful for that.

Lower East Side at night.

sunday storm. (w. wire)

TFP Communique: bringing puppies back to life.

Obsessions are a weird thing. I never know when or how I will get caught in their psychedelic net. They just seem to come- out of the bokeh of life- into one's mind in stunning sharpness and color, and just f*#ing sit there for as long as they want, and then kind of fade out. Bizarre.

I am currently obsessing myself with a new lens: Canon's wide prime superstar the 35mm f/1.4 L-series lens. It's one of Canon's exorbitantly priced, super heavy and massive 'Red Stripes'. It's most famed quality is that it produces the best 'bokeh' (something with an elusive, japanese name that photographers find infatuational) anyone has ever seen. Oooohhh.... There are whole blogs and online communities dedicated exclusively to this lens. The most common words affiliated with it are 'magical', 'shocking', 'close to heaven', 'this lens gives me the shivers', even 'I hate you' (from non-35L owner to 35L owner). Then I read the following which finally underscored the miracle that this lens is, achieving the pinnacle test all lens reach for, but few arrive at:

'This lens once brought a dead puppy back to life.'


(Gus, 2.0)

Once I knew of this lens, the thought of my old, distracting, hexagonal bokeh leaves me disgusted, not even wanting to get out of bed in the morning. What I once thought was acceptable contrast and skin tonality has all turned to flat, grotesque haze. Needless to say, I must own this lens. This is a problem for me, however, because I just sold everything I possible own simply to pay my rent this month. A have nothing left to exchange with the world for my very own, perfect bokeh, puppy-loving lens. I keep searching in my dreams for something to sell my partner won't kill me over, all in vain. And so, like Nietzsche, I proclaim my pain publicly to avenge myself on the limits of my circumstance.

So why 35mm?

Like many young photographers, I suppose, my first camera was a kick-down from pops. A pretty nice one, actually- it was an original 1970s black-bodied Nikon FE w/ two lens: 50mm f/1.something and a 35mm f/2. Looking through the camera, it was nothing special. The 50mm seemed boring to me- it just looked like what everything looks like. It was like WTF, I already see so what's the point?

Then I switched lenses.

The 35mm- bless it's little manual focus heart- was like peering through a beautiful window into a whole new world, with split-screen focusing. Looking through the viewfinder brought me into a place called Photoland, where the mundane became magnificent, subtle, and deeply meaningful. I felt inspired, thoughtful, provoked, courageous, and alive. I loved it, and never used the 50mm again (17 years running...). I ended up shooting with that FE and 35/2 all over the world- at least 9 countries I can think of off the top of my head- dropped it dead onto granite and concrete and mud several dozens of times, hauling it through the rain and snow with hefty amounts of lucious Velvia slide film and a hunger for the photo that would get me a job at National Geographic, or at least out of the house again.

Years later, I thought I'd bite the bullet and saved up for a Digital SLR. And since I was moving into the future and switching to the Dark-side (not digital, but Canon! aghast...), I ditched the 'old-school' prime and bought a 17-40L lens (my first 'Red Stripe') and began to shoot with that thing. But I was already loosing steam, and slowly gave up all together on photography. I needed space from my father- and those pursuits that had some intention of tying me to him; plus, I never could get that same feel w/ my high tech digi that my old Nikon gave me.

So photography slept inside me, restlessly, until my comrades in TFP got my juices for the framed light going again. And with a resurgence of curiosity and creativity has returned my desire for the 35mm prime. Actually, the wide prime in general- I'd love a 24mm, too. More, I'm just hungry to return to that magical, wider-than-life, fixed frame of tone, shape, and light that made the world- literally and imaginatively- come to life for me.

Now, if only I could get my hands on a bit of that puppy magic...

Oakland Sunrise

sunday storm.

Lotus stem-
slightly bent
in this world.

- Basho

bonita alien.

These seaslugs-
they just don't seem
Japanese.

-Issa

DAAAAAMMMMMNNNNNNNN...

...YOU GUYS!

nice works!

stay tuned for a few of mine. I'm inspired!

The Friday Photo. (session 2)

night on the tracks.

j and the looking glass.

the people project.

I'm working on a whole series of these, based off of photos I've taken of friends and loved ones. Not sure what I'm going to do with them yet, but I want to get some ideas.

TFP Communique: Someone else's road trip

Yesterday my friend Alice took the train out from Princeton and we had breakfast in Midtown, then took a walk down to the Hell's Kitchen flea market and poked around in all of the mildewy fur coats and ancient rocking chairs. One of the vendors had those boxes of old photos and postcards that you see sometimes. I bought five of someone else's old photos- road trip photos, mostly. Could the photographer have possibly imagined that in fifty years their photos would be sitting in a box at the Hell's Kitchen flea market and bought by a total stranger from California? Seems like human life just passes from one hand to the next.

One of the photos was a black and white snapshot of a gift shop in a town called Adams, NY. When I got to my coworker's place last night, we Googled Adams and, according to epodunk.com (I am not joking), it's upstate east of Rochester. (j, ever heard of it?) (A while ago I was in SF Chinatown and picked up a random postcard of a tiny fog-wrapped lil fishing village that looked sad and beautiful; the back of the postcard said that it was a place called Noyo, CA. A couple of years later, on a weekend when I needed to drive, I drove north without really even thinking about it, and pointed my car to Noyo. The Adams photo felt like that. "Where's this? What's there?")

After Alice left I walked from 42nd back up to 58th, holding my camera at my side and just shooting photos as I went. Some were good, most were blurry, but it's the ZOO of people that's endlessly fascinating, y'know? Everyone from the naked cowboy to a trio of lost Italian tourists to a dad with his daughter on his shoulders. And that was just in Times Square.

TFP Communique: Red Rooster

Hi TFP.
Update- I sold my Ranchero yesterday afternoon. YES, I DID. I actually didn't make a profit, but it did sell blindingly fast considering that just the other week it was rolling backwards down a hill with a dead battery and bad fuel pump...

Yes, friends, time to start looking into that 5D.

I've been staying with my friend and coworker Amanda in DC this week, brewing coffee, talking politics, and dragging her home from the bar (that was on Monday night). I've also been meeting back up and spending time with some of the students I used to work with, hearing that it helps them just for me to listen and tell them that everything's going to be ok. JUST THAT. Nothing but that.
What would it have been like to have had someone tell me, back then, "You don't have to answer to your parents; you just have to answer to yourself and what you love"?
These last couple of nights I hung out at Busboys & Poets and Tryst, two cafes/restaurants/bookstores that are the (bigger) incarnations of what I'd like to open someday... with your help, of course. The only thing that neither of those places have is what 826 Valencia has going on- a little alcove behind a curtain where you can just sit in total silence and watch fish swimming around in a tank. (Well, that and pirate eye patches.)

It's funny that I always think that I hate DC. I think I hate the cutthroat politics, and the shitty rain-hail, and the fact that every single person owns a knee-length black peacoat, and everything else about this place. But then I always end up loving EVERY MINUTE THAT I'M HERE. In this place, the first thing Amanda does when she gets up in the morning is put on Talking Points Memo and listen to the previous day's progressive tv news clips; and at 2pm on Sunday afternoons, Kramerbooks in Dupont Circle is packed with young and old people just READING while they wait for a table. Yes.

Bus to NYC tonight.

3 pics new

Hey TFP. Here are a few shots. One is from the iphone series (iconic, no?), The next is from a new series I started: 'Hands and Eyes', and the last is a TFP shot that a stride took from our first morning that I developed some.

TFP Communique: Night flight

Dearest homies,
On my way eastward ho to DC now. Like, literally on my way; I'm typing mid-flight. I can't imagine what's going on in First Class right now-- warm cookies? heated blankets?-- because I'm using the Internet in the middle of the sky, how much fancier could it get? Apparently Virgin America is this fancy. The seats are all black leather, the seatbacks are all molded white plastic, the interior lights have a blue underwater glow, my flight attendant is a man named Napoleon. It looks like the train to 2046, all sleek and fancy and ageless. I managed to score an empty row for myself, so here I am at the window seat with my two invisible friends and three seatback monitors and three control panels.

I'm on a busy redeye flight and I land in three hours at 6am EST. Probably no sleep for me tonight; probably, instead, typing nervously away at essays. I took the GRE this morning in Alameda and felt a weight lift off of my chest the second I was done, nearly floated back to Berkeley in the pouring rain. I realized how scared I'd felt these last few weeks- scared of crazy isosceles triangle math problems, scared of not being able to tell the admissions committee what I really mean, scared of being abandoned for inadequacy. I'm finally remembering what it was to be alone with all of it. The little worries and the sheer walls of fear. The only thing I could do was to cling to my mother's leg tight enough that she couldn't shake me off. So, notably, it occurred to me earlier tonight at the airport that I'm traveling with my grandfather's old suitcase, my parents' old canvas bag, and my camera bag which is doubling as my purse for the next two weeks... All of the generations packed at my feet, mine the smallest and most basic and most foundational. If it came down to it, what I would have left if I gave up all of the baggage would be my camera bag, containing: my wallet, three pens and a little notebook, my cell phone, my camera, and j's 10-20mm lens, all nestled in like the Holy Grail.

A good thought for me to ponder.
Signing off, in turbulence,
b.

ps. I have a little side project that I was going to start posting up here tonight, but it's all on my other laptop at home (not this work laptop, which is empty of art...), so it's still comin. I'll call it the People Project. It's about people.

www.aran4atlanta.wtf

(I don't know how to make an A-T-L w/ my fingers...)

back in biznuss

yes!!!!!! great to see some new entries up you guys, will miss tfp this week. se you soon.

portrait: science drop

he drops science, like:
beats lit on fire, like: thieves
in the night, no more.

new york city 2046

The Product

The Process