Friday, November 30, 2007
The Rickshaw Pilot
Location Undisclosed
Today, I finally freed this image from my cryo champer of undeveloped film, a memory reanimated into tangible form. I had completely forgotten about it. I snapped this image just before a rickshaw ride in 2003. Later that day, I proposed to my wife.
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Coolidge Theater
Coolidge Corner
Boston, Massachusetts
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Thursday, November 29, 2007
Gust Front
Castleton Island,
Castleton-on-Hudson
New York
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Saturday, November 17, 2007
Astonishing Panoramas of the Recent Past
Over the last ten years, I have managed to bring a camera pretty much everywhere I go. A successful image is sometimes more luck than preparation. At this point, I feel like I am missing an important piece of clothing if I leave the house without some form of camera in my backpack. Having a camera along can turn even the most mundane tasks into potential opportunities.
I love the unobtrusiveness of a high end point and shoot for daily use. Practicality prevents lugging a 4 pound DSLR and lenses most places. The DSLR’s size and storage needs are hefty and preventative for working undetected in public environments. I’ll take the 8 megapixel, 6 ounce, point and shoot version any day. High quality digital images from a consumer grade point and shoot cameras weren’t always an option, but today, there is virtually little difference in a quality point and shoot’s image quality compared to the DSLR, only lens choices. Remember, megapixels have little to do with image quality. I have actually seen photographers use the number of megapixels their camera has as a marketing tool. For an uneducated consumer, I can see how this would be an effective strategy, but the reality is, after a certain point, megapixels become a moot point unless you are planning on printing extra large images. Seems like in any gear driven endeavor, there are pissing matches about whose equipment is better. Personally, I will take creativity over technology any day.
The bulk of my images from the 90’s are either film or slides. I have drawers of negative sleeves and hundreds of boxes of slides that never get looked at. I keep them for sentimental reasons, but they will probably never see the light of day again.
In a corner of my studio, sits a large glass container filled with at least a gallon of undeveloped film canisters. The canisters are in essence miniature time capsules of images from forgotten days ten years in the past that have been preserved in decade old air. At the time, as I accumulated more and more canisters, I lost interest in getting them all developed. At $11 dollars a roll, the financial investment would have been substantial. I wasn’t working professionally yet, so there was no urgency of a deadline to meet. A majority of the images in the containers are experiments, travel documentary, and a few failed attempts at cliché band photography. Today, the value of film photography has decreased substantially allowing me to have the film developed directly to CD.
The first electronic SLR I owned was a Canon EOS Rebel with a National Enquirer sticker on the outside of the lens hood and a Trek Mountain Bike Racing Team sticker on the inside. I think the system cost me in the neighborhood of $800 in 1990 dollars. I loved taking that camera to bike races because the Enquirer logo started a lot of conversations with interesting people. Somewhere in my archives, the camera and I are sharing a frame with Marla Streb just outside the press office at Mount Snow, Vermont. That Rebel has accumulated quite a few frequent flier miles.
I only recently started developing the film, and like some new age regression therapy, small details of past lives came flooding back in vivid detail. For the last ten years, undeveloped images have been preserved in small black cylindrical time capsules, bathed in the air of the day I sealed them. Atmosphere from Breckenridge, Ground Zero, thunderheads off the coast of North Carolina, mountain summits, underwater plant life, forgotten projects from art school, former friends, arch enemies, and younger versions of myself sporting varying lengths of hair, has been freed from the stasis of the small black and gray cryotubes marked with cryptic geographical information written in fine point sharpie: monster, obx, adks 03, winter3, nyc 0801, grd 0, kayak 4, moca, dc 00, troy wor, cc 98. It is a language all my own. Photography lost something when there was no longer a need for film canisters.
There is a strangeness is seeing the world as it was in your own recent past. The faces of former friends seem at the same time familiar and foreign, each linked by a nebulous shared moment of common geography and interests that have since evaporated.
Sometimes you are friends with people for no other reason than common and unpredictable intersections in personal history. The shared adventures of the past, both major and minor, are enough of a magnetic force to draw two people together.
Sometimes, that magnetic field weakens and the bonds that connect personal histories fail. They fail like cheap batteries and the signal becomes weak. The legends of youth are no longer impressive. Neighborhood tall tales shrink with old age as if starved for calcium. Sometimes, the simple fact of the matter is that people grow apart and little more analysis is needed.
Sometimes on nights like tonight, I sit here in front of the monitor and muse about all the people I once called “friend” and wonder how they are as they go about their days insulted in whatever cocoon they have chosen as I go about mine inside of my personal cocoon, orbiting those things and people who are important to me.
Sometimes the velocity of life is breathtaking. People become strangers a lot faster then it takes for them to become friends.
Did you ever wonder where the strangest place a picture of you resides? That drunken pose at a summer party locked away in someone’s junk drawer, or that trip to the shore with that person you dated for a few months folded up and stuck in a book on a shelf thousands of miles away, or a stranger’s blog? Every single picture of ever taken of you has to be somewhere. The evidence of your former self is scattered in a million unreachable places. What was once familiar is now taken out of context and stripped of sentimentality, like a piece of trivia.
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Thursday, November 15, 2007
Night Bridge
Waterford, New York
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Sand Mandala
[Left Bottom] Tibetan Monks Constructing Sand Mandala
4 Days work only to swept away.
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Bomber's
Lark Street
Albany New York
The one true universial law:
Everywhere we go, there will be burritos.
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Pagoda in Whiteout
Grafton, New York
As a snow squall erases the details of the stupa, all external sound is absorbed and erased. I go months without visiting the pagoda, but I always return. I can’t seem to stay away from its clean lines and pristine white dome, especially in weather.
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Port Towers Film Strip
[Above] Port Towers
Port of Albany
Albany, New York
The abandoned and automated industrial landscapes of the port are fascinating subjects to photograph. Taken out of context, their geometry implies 1960’s science fiction cold war utilitarianism. Strange towers belch unknown clouds under the cover of darkness as aircraft warning beacons fire at six seconds. Advances in modern automation permit these immense mechanisms to be controlled by shadowy figures in air conditioned command centers lit by the glow of computer monitor. From the air, on approach to Albany International, the plants of the port resemble a giant circuit board. Signs restrict cameras in the same graphic style as the no smoking circle with a red slash through a camera. "If you see something, say something" is the mantra of a new era of Homeland Insecurity. CCTV eyes behind double smoked Lexan see everything with unwavering diligence.
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Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Farm in Fog
Rural Rensselaer Country
New York State
35 mm Test Image
I developed an affinity for farm landscapes over thousands of miles of cycling. Country roads provide the best terrain and a refuge from the traffic of suburban roads. To this day, farms still remind me of summer group rides, pace lines, and Italian steel.
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Mountain with Moon
Staats Island / Port of Rensselaer
Rensselaer, New York
Digital Image shot with Lens Baby 2.0
Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye. A change in perspective can change the world. The image above is not a mountain, not even close. I used the Lens Baby 2.0 to transform this 15 foot high cone of dirt into a mountain landscape.
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Monday, November 12, 2007
Late Night 8MM
Albany, New York
Fuji RVP 50
The last bus of the night moves by as the faces of strangers in the the windows flash like the frames of old 8mm movie film, their expressions frozen as the movement of the bus provides only a glimpse. Like one of those animations drawn on the edge of a pad, the windows draw distorted movement and the individual frames make no sense.
42º39'13.39" n
73º45'28.08" w
51 meters
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The Secret Life of Bikes
Crushed Shell Alleyway,
Provincetown, Massachusetts
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Saturday, November 10, 2007
Concrete Plant
Troy, New York
35mm Test Image
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Thursday, November 8, 2007
Ghost Bike
Memorial to David Ryan
Riverview Road,
Clifton Park, New York
There was a time in my early 20's when the only two satellites that orbited my planet were cycling and punk rock. I was young, lived alone, was unattached, and was singularly focused on all aspects of riding. Over the past 18 years, I have had more scrapes, altercations, and near misses than I care to recount. I have only been hit once and for that I consider myself extremely lucky. There were times I was logging between 250 and 300 miles a week. Broken down in hours, that is a lot of time on the bike. It is also a lot of time on the shoulder of road fighting it out with SUV's and pick-ups for a few inches of real estate. I remember the day David Ryan was killed. I think we shared a few group rides but I not sure. What I do know is that we had the same interests, traveled in the same circles, and were roughly the same age. Any number of times, it could have been my name on a ghost bike on the side of the road. Too many times, actually.
I saw a photo of this memorial in the local paper. Like a lot of local photojournalism, the image was weak and boring. Out of respect for a fellow cyclist, I wanted to shoot a fitting image of the ghost bike before it disappeared.
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Line Drawing
The Devil’s Pulpit
Great Barrington, Massachusetts
On the Devil's Pulpit, all that remains is a line drawing of skeletal trees.
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Sunday, November 4, 2007
The State Theatre
The State Theatre
Ithaca, New York
America was once an empire of theatres.
Today, the empire has gone the way of the classic American dream scenario: ride the crest of success through the window of opportunity before someone who is better funded, more adept at reading market trends, and more agile, comes along and paints the window shut.
The State Theatre of Ithaca opened its doors on December 6th 1928. Vaudeville shows filled the stage 3 nights a week with an eclectic patchwork or magicians, acrobats, athletes, and anyone else with a talent unique enough to justify the price of admission. The 1930’s ushered in the era of film and the theatre was converted into a movie house. Ten years after that, people stared, wide eyed, at the movie screen as weekly war reels flashed glimpses of the Oklahoma burning at Pearl Harbor and later, the fire bombing of Europe. Somewhere beyond the confines of the city, the struggle of good versus evil raged in places with abstract names. The cinema provided both information about the outer world, and an escape from the anxiety of the war effort. The cost of admission bought a 2 hour refuge.
It was the 1980’s that would eventually prove fatal for the State Theatre. Years of disrepair combined with the effects of America’s mass suburban exodus finally closed forced the State to close its doors for good. The lights in the photos above went dark. The empire had lost one more outpost.
Today, the outposts are connected to food courts, film is digital, analog is THX, movies are product placement advertisements, and Clark Gable is George Clooney. Not better or worse, just different.
Tonight I am sifting through more photos from the past year, backing up files, assigning key words to images in my database, while watching reruns of 1970’s cinema. The dispatches from the empire of theatres remind me of the days of seeing movies with my father as a kid. Going to the theatre was always a big deal in the days before DVD's and DRV's.
Right now, a half sunburned Richard Dreyfuss is frantically sculpting the Devil’s Tower from mashed potatoes. I had forgotten how striking the Spielberg’s cinematography was in 1977's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. As Roy Neary’s (Richard Dreyfuss) utility truck rumbles across rural Indiana in pursuit of the mysterious lights, the immense darkness becomes part of the cast of characters. In some of the best cinematography of the last 30 years, the lights of Neary’s truck appear fragile and insignificant under the blackout of the Indiana night. The scale of man, machine, and landscape combine to construct the perfect metaphor for the entire movie. The empty spaces of the countryside become as mysterious as the cold vacuum of deep space. Spielberg creates a character from the natural world while simultaneously illustrating the scale of our existence, something that every landscape photographer strives for.
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Saturday, November 3, 2007
Evidence
Location Unknown
Longitude and latitude make little difference. Everywhere you go on the planet, there will be evidence of humans.
And that evidence is trash.
“When a man throws an empty cigarette package from an automobile, he is liable to a fine of $250. When a man throws a billboard across a view, he is richly rewarded.”
Every year, Bulmer Photography and R7 Studios, donate thousands of dollars in design time and photography to environmental charities.
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Friday, November 2, 2007
Rooftops
Troy, New York
Satellite dishes turned upward drink in the information streaking through atmosphere as it passes over the tarred rooftops and water towers of the city. Like a dog from a garden hose that can’t get enough water, the gray dishes stare unblinkingly into the expanse. Years ago, the only link to the outside world was two tin cans and fifty feet of string. That was then. This is now, and voices from distant broadcast desks repeat the same events with different words filling the 24 hour news cycle with every possible fact, both real and fabricated. None of us are strangers anymore.
From the fourth floor, the city looks totally different than it does at street level. Rooflines and brick canyons run in both directions and opposing angles. The telephone wires, cell towers, and aircraft beacons have become a hypnotic, automated dance. It is a world that provides the same fascination as looking into the inner workings of your computer. It has much of the same vibe as getting a quick glace as camera one pans across the control panels of the Starship Enterprise in 1966. You know it is nothing more than a thinly constructed façade of painted plywood, Lucite and Christmas lights, but it looked so god damn cool in action. You knew it was all fake, tear-it-down temporary, but you wanted to believe so badly. There is a certain and undeniable beauty in infrastructure, whether real or imagined. The armature of imagination is the same at any age. It just has to be uncovered, maybe deconstructed a little.
Sometimes you want to believe more than anything. You willingly suspend your critical thinking because you want to believe that the guy peeking out from behind the paper mache rock a few feet from Kirk’s polyester landing party is really an ominous alien warrior. You don’t even want to entertain the possibility that it is a guy from property services dressed in a garbage bag accessorized with plumbing fixtures, glitter, and angry red glass eyes. We are a nation of believers. From day one we are taught to believe in God, the President, the flag, the Tooth Fairy, Hannah Barbarra, The Six Million Dollar Man and ourselves. Sometimes it just feels good to believe, whole heartedly. Reality and truth be damned.
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The Mysterious Chemistry of Twilight
[Above] The Mysterious Chemistry of Twilight
Sunset behind Provincetown from the Truro shoreline.
Truro. Massachusetts
No, the name isn’t a lyric from an Emo song.
“The Mysterious Chemistry of Twilight” is a line from the audio book we listened to on the drive to the Cape this past weekend. I liked the flow of the words and set out to take a photo to match the phrase. As the sun set behind Provincetown, I set up in a tidal flat for this exposure.
The Cape feels decidedly different in the off season. The lines have evaporated and the quaint shops of P-Town have either closed early or shut down for the season, leaving thank you signs in empty windows promising to “see you in April.” The shore in the off season is very appealing.
The last time I was in Las Vegas, I visited Peter Lik’s gallery in Cesar’s Palace. I have long been a huge fan of Peter’s work, and seeing his work in person was a must. His gallery is filled with amazing, large format landscapes printed with metallic pigments. The photos are mounted with track lighting with dimmers. As the display lights are dimmed, different wavelengths of light react with the metallic pigments in the photos. The result is a truly dynamic image that seems to change in hue and intensity in much the same way the sunset changes the colors of the land and sky. The effect is a 2 dimensional living landscape.
“The Mysterious Chemistry of Twilight” is 63 inches wide. Tonight, I am in the process of preparing the CMYK production file for metallic printing. This will be the first image I mount with optical lights and dimmers. If successful, I plan on constructing custom frames with built in lighting for my large metallic print offerings.
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Thursday, November 1, 2007
Warm Cars Are Better Than Cold Hands
Truro, Massachusetts
Just back from a weekend on the Cape. The early morning weather was cold along the coast. Monday, at Race Point at 5am, the air temperature was 38 degrees backed by a 30 knot onshore wind. Standing on the observation deck over the beach, the open Atlantic was streaked white with crescents of white water. The weather was so cold, that it beat me back to the warm car within ten minutes. Ungloved hands on cold tripod legs knot up quickly.
I was hoping to shoot some star trail photos of Pilgrim Monument and the Provincetown skyline, but the weather and atmospheric conditions didn’t cooperate. Personally, I didn’t have the fortitude to stand on the shore for a few hours photographing the arc of the constellations as the planet revolved on its axis. The fireplace was far too tempting.
Above is the compliment of photo gear I brought along for the weekend*. Personally, I love lugging Pelican boxes through hotel lobbies. The sight of the ABS plastic cases is always a catalyst for conservation. More than once I have been asked if I am a scientist on a research project. The temptation is always there to concoct wild stories about the contents of the cases. But I don’t.
* Old school tripods for exposure to salt water and sand.
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