photo camp article, project update

BU Today did a cool slideshow and article on the PRC Photo Camp, and some of the point-and-shoot pictures I took of the kids for the PRC made it into the slideshow. My pics are mostly right near the beginning, then after that it’s a ton of the students’ work. I think you’ll be really impressed (with their stuff, not mine). Go take a look.

Now for a quick update on my clothing project: After thinking that my project needed a new name (I pushed myself to come up with a name before graduation and I had hoped the name would grow on me but it never has) I got the same feedback from someone I really trust. But then something happened that if I believed in signs would certainly be one, because a title came to her in a sort of dream and wouldn’t leave her alone, and it turns out that this title is the same one I was using at the start of the series. Maybe it’s time for the project to return to its roots. I feel like my understanding of it got more and more complicated until it returned to something so simple, and so it follows that the title should also come back around. So that’s that. Unless something else presents itself, I’m going back to the title “Other People’s Clothes.”

Now I’m off to play with my newly-purchased-on-credit AlienBees CyberSync Remote Controls. Sweeeet.

Common Ground and documentary photography

I’ve watched the Common Ground multimedia piece by Scott Strazzante on MediaStorm a couple times now. Mostly I am a sucker for multimedia – I think that using the multiple senses of viewers is a great way to tell a story, and in a very accessible way. But I’m also a sucker for stories about land and people’s relationship to it. I think about this a lot regarding my own long-term project, Twist of Fate Farm, where I’m documenting the small, natural farm that my father and his partner run in southern New Hampshire. So I enjoyed Common Ground a lot, because it tells a couple loosely-connected personal stories to address a trend that is common and timely right now: sub-divisions popping up where farmland once was.

From the website: On July 2, 2002, Jean and Harlow Cagwin watched as their home – the last remnant of their 118-acre cattle farm in Lockport, Illinois – was torn down clearing the way for a new housing development. Several years later, Ed and Amanda Grabenhofer and their four children moved into the new Willow Walk subdivision, their house just yards from where the Cagwin’s home once stood.

Strazzante uses an interesting visual tactic, where he pairs similarly composed images of the couple who once owned the farm, to the family that now lives in a development on the same land. I think these diptychs are effective in showing the passage of time and the before and after. At then end of the piece I feel a little unresolved though. At one point the audio says “It’s the next step in the next generation. That farm land changes to suburban, and you still see the same qualities of life even though it’s no longer a farm land.” I’m not sure that I’m convinced the same qualities of life are there now. Certainly the images show similar emotions between the two families, like joy, playfulness, exhaustion, love, sadness, etc. But I don’t think a Walmart provides the same qualities of life as a farm. This is of course my own bias against how we view certain kinds of “progress”, and not necessarily an issue with the photographs or multimedia piece.

I also enjoyed this interview with Scott Strazzante on Sports Shooter (which is a few years old, but very relevant) and his ideas about the significance of documentary photography, respect, time spent on projects, and personal relationships with subjects. A lot of his comments resonate with me and force me to think about my own work and also the marketability of my documentary projects.

I definitely see the outcome of Twist of Fate Farm taking multiple forms, although it’s tough to imagine the end or outcome since I’ll probably be working on it forever. I would like to do a multimedia piece and I want to start collecting audio, although I don’t own a good quality recorder yet. For now I just write a lot in my journal, each time I visit. I’m always learning more about the farm and the project is still evolving, although I often have hang-ups about it. My latest is that I think it might actually be a color project, not black and white anymore. This is a big change. But I’m “shooting through it” and trusting that my images and time on the farm will lead me where I need to go.

Steph interviews Thomas M. Fabian II

Thomas Fabian is a friend and fellow recent graduate at NESOP. Since our first term together, I’ve appreciated sharing classes and critiques with him, and have always been eager to see what he photographs next. Often his constant shooting and production of work has pushed me to shoot more myself, and I’m pretty confident that he’s never going to stop. Definitely check out his work and his Blurb book, which is for sale.

Will you talk a bit about how you decided to start the project on the MSPCA (Massachusetts Society for the Protection of Animals), and the overall story it tells?

I chose the project because there is a special place in my heart for animals and more so for the people willing to dedicate their lives to lend a helping hand to them when they’re in need. I also did it because of the unrelenting negativity in the media and my need to document people trying to right the wrongs of others. From these two reasons I set forth to portray the day to day activities the staff at the MSPCA performed routinely in order to provide a quality life for these animals who had been neglected, abandoned, or surrendered.

I know you made the project into a book on Blurb.com. Did you submit it to the Photography Book Now contest? What was it like laying out a book for the first time?

I turned the MSPCA project into a book for two reasons. The first was to enter it in the contest, which I did. The second was to see my work in book form and to explore that as a final output of my work. Laying out a book is a difficult process, or it was for me at least. The choices of caption/no caption, two page spreads, and having multiple images on one page were hard decisions to make because up until now my final output for my work had always been prints, and there the only decision to make was what kind of paper to use. In the end I chose a simple one image per page layout without captions in order to focus the attention on the images and the story they told without influencing people with my words. My only regret was that I didn’t include more images/pages and will take that lesson with me if and when I make another book.

What, if anything, would you change about the world of documentary photography today?

If I could change anything it would be that photographers take the risk to explore the opposing viewpoint to what they’re trying to portray. It seems to me that so many photographers are quick to assume a stance on something and completely ignore the merits of the opposing viewpoint. I’ve learned that in every situation no ONE side is 100% right or 100% wrong and to ignore something one does not agree with is irresponsible and to ignore the truth. In the end I feel that documentary photographers should pursue the truth and if that means exploring aspects that one may not agree with then it MUST be done, otherwise it’s just fiction and a set of pretty pictures to look at.

What are you working on right now and how are you staying afloat now that school is over?

Currently I’m working on a few new projects. One is documenting the student experience at the New England School of Optometry for use by the school in various forms (pamphlets, website). Another that is currently in the early stages of getting of the ground is documenting the Make-a-Wish foundation of Massachusetts, focusing on both what it takes to grant a wish as well as the experiences of those being granted those wishes.
Aside from those two local projects, I am also in the process of being embedded with a group of field artillery soldiers in Baghdad and documenting their lives.
I’ve also been photographing events and short documentaries for corporate reports. In short, I’ve been taking every chance I get to pick up my camera and go shoot.

What do you think your biggest challenge is as an emerging photographer?

Contrary to what I’ve been told countless times by countless people that I’m entering a saturated market, I’ve found that all it takes is some creativity to where I search for work. That being said, the biggest challenge I have faced is finding the confidence to talk about the value my work has to offer. In normal everyday sales, one need only sell the benefits of their product(s), however being a photographer that product is myself, and selling yourself takes some serious courage. These days banks like to see where their investment dollars are going and as a photographer I can supply businesses with that visually, the hard part is being able to sell that.

You shoot street photography and I like it! I know that it’s difficult and time-consuming to create a great body of street photography these days. What do you think the relevance of this subject is today and what options/opportunities do you see for it surviving now that many of the masters have passed on?

Street photography is indeed difficult to produce bodies of work from. To be able to capture just one image requires immense amounts of time observing the interactions of moments all around us, and the unpredictable nature this adds leads, often times, to entire days where all that is captured is just almost shots. While many people will argue that street photography is no longer relevant and simply a cliche I believe that it is evolving. In todays sedentary lifestyle-society, street photography represents the visual documentation of how people spend their time when they leave their house/apartment. Todays generation of street photographers are documenting people tying to get from one place to the next in the efforts to return home to sit down with their computers and televisions.
I find street photography to be extremely important to document the lifestyles of each generation and as such becomes an important part of our history. Another aspect is simply the beauty of of capturing that perfect moment and allowing it to be dignified by being witnessed for more than the mere instant it existed.

Photos © Thomas M. Fabian II

old project, new project

I’m at the point with Interim where every other day I either feel like it’s really about to take off or it’s never going to go anywhere, and I don’t really know which side the coin is going to land on. I do feel like my understanding of the project continues to change, so much so that I feel like I need to totally rewrite the statement and even possibly rename it. I fight my natural urge to give up and throw things away when they get this confusing and I’m trying to keep up the momentum, to keep pushing on because I have faith that there will be something to see and learn with each new image that I make.

I’m also not sure whether starting a new project now is the best idea, but that’s what I’m going to do. I will be working primarily with film, and with other people, strangers even, which I think will be really great for me but it scaring me a lot right now (I’ll probably write about that fear soon in an attempt to figure out exactly what is so scary). I’ve been setting appointments to shoot with friends of friends, with people from Craigslist, and I have some other ideas in the works. I’ll be posting more about it as the project develops, but right now I’m just trying to convince myself to take the first leap and get started, which I know is the hardest part.

For now, I post some inspiration:

Picture I love looking at today: $560,000 view by Julia Staples

Series that is most inspiring me right now: Jesse Burke’s Portfolios

Alec Soth on Portraiture:

Documenting my marketing actions

I just read a post by Leslie Burns-Dell’Acqua on her blog, Burns Auto Parts, called How to Lose Weight. Of course it’s not actually about losing weight, but about how to make yourself accountable for taking steps each day to promote your creative business (with the analogy of a diet diary).

While I’m certainly not a fan of diets, I did use a small notebook once when I needed to save money, where I wrote down everything I bought for about a month. Flipping through the book every few days definitely helped me see the big picture, and made some purchases immediately stand out as unnecessary. So I’ve decided to try a marketing journal and make a goal of filling it. I just pulled a blank notebook out of my desk and wrote Marketing Journal on it. There, it’s done!

My goal is to complete a certain number of marketing steps each week. I haven’t decided on the number yet, but these steps could include any of the following: calls to entry/contests, updating my website, posting to Existing Light, sending print or email promos, making phone calls, attending an event and introducing myself to people, updating my mailing list, going to a portfolio review, etc.

Before photography school, I’d never considered taking a business class. After the three I took at NESOP, I’ve learned that I need little tricks like this to help keep me on target (I get distracted easily). It seems like an incredibly obvious task, but sometimes we can’t see those by ourselves. This is great advice for an emerging photographer like me, and I’m definitely going to use it.

response to music and photography

Last night I went to see Wolf Parade at the Paradise (for free! at a sold out show!), and while this would seem to be unrelated to photography/art, give me a chance to make the connection. I recently read a blog post where the author was describing the difference between his reaction to music and his reaction to photography (I wish I could remember whose blog so I could link to it), specifying that he thought that photography would never move him the way that music does. I’ve spent some time thinking about this, and even though both music and photography are art, my response to each is really different. I’m someone who usually processes and responds to things solely with my head and not my heart or my body, and though I’m very passionate about photography, rarely does it engage my heart or my body. I can spend hours looking and thinking and being excited about and inspired by the images I see, but one good song will knock me on my ass and leave me crying and aching and weak. And I’m a visual person— my memory is tied to vision and spacial relationships, so what is it about music that gets to me? Or, on the flip side, what is it about visual art that doesn’t? I don’t think I have an answer.

I do, however, have a link to some visual work that has recently torn me up inside, but this could be because of the writing that accompanies the images: Phillip Toledano’s Days with My Father. The images are beautiful and tender and sad, and if the writing doesn’t make you feel something, I’m not sure what will.

Recent Art Viewings

Stopped by Boston Young Contemporaries the other day to check it out. Most of it was fine enough but a few artists’ pieces caught my eye:

Laura Skinner – portraits with seemingly natural, dramatic light and a tension and strangeness that I really like.

Jesse Kahn – from Indiana! Love his constructions; his work is delightfully queer. Check out the amazing embroidery work.

Sean M. Johnson – who I met when he invited me to be a part of the Bear Art Show (the show was not exclusive to bears, of course). Really into his investigations of queer masculinity.

Christine Rogers – who I also met at the Bear Art Show at Sean’s place. I like the idea behind her “New Family” series, though I wish I had access to an artist statement.

Kelli Thompson – Paintings. I really enjoy looking at “Kita as Bowie.”

Last night was both First Fridays and the last day of the PRC Summer Photo Camp. The night started when Steph and my fiance, Leyna, met me at the PRC. The kids had a final gallery show there with their favorite pieces from the 3 weeks showing. Some really clever and beautiful and fun work. I’m sure some more pictures will show up on the PRC Flickr site soon. Then we headed to the South End… too many galleries closed and not enough interesting work. We tried to catch the exhibition of AIB Photography that was supposed to be open but for some reason the building was locked. At least I can see the show online. Verdict: the best food and the best art was at the PRC.