When you are in it and someone says something great, you think to yourself, yes, remember that advice, then when you get home and try to remember all that sage wisdom, somehow it has faded…

The experience itself has not faded- Look3 is a tremendous festival, very well organized, just to mention a few things:

The location could not be better on a pedestrian boulevard with great food all around, tables in the center to meet and eat, even AC outlets on the lampposts! There were signs and banners everywhere, you could find your way around, and all the volunteers and staff were super motivated and excited.

Charlottesville is well integrated in the festival, all the merchants love the business, even cab drivers have opinions on film vs. digital. They must be reading photoblogs…

The curation and direction of the festival is firm: they are not about workshops altho they have them- what they are about is education, and the “image”. It is the festival of “the photograph”, and they are dedicated to enriching the experience of making and sharing work. They want to get young photographers next to the experienced veterans, and they want to put experienced artists next to each other on stage to see what happens- the pairing of Sally Mann to interview Nan Goldin was a masterstroke- it completely changed my idea of Nan’s work. As she says, she has no relation to “NanGoldin”, whoever she was.  That person is gone. And Nan even turned the tables on Mann, interviewing the interviewer, in a conversation on a couch on stage where it felt like we were listening in on a private conversation, you wanted it to continue to see just where it was going to end up.

The pairing of Massimo Vitali with NPR’s Alex Chadwick was another great idea- a professional interviewer who does his homework, and that voice- if you closed your eyes you could imagine it was Sunday afternoon and you were listening to a great radio interview, and Massimo spoke very intelligently about his work and the realities of the contemporary art world- about how Marianne Boesky challenged him early on in his development to consider presentation as central to what it was he was doing- he realized he was making objects- large scale plexi mounted images, not images- and to concentrate on showing a small body of work over an extended period of time to cement in the viewer or buyers mind who he was and exactly what he did. And it ran counter to the advice he was getting and his own ideas that he had formed over a 30 year commercial career, he was told the beach was not interesting, the pictures were not interesting, and he should drop it and move on. That has since been proven wrong, altho Massimo himself acknowledges he does not exactly understand the contemporary art world and its values, but at last he is getting to make the work he wants to make. A very illuminating interview.

Scott Thode curated what seemed like two-thirds of the work in the evening slideshows- and did a superb job. He must be nearly blind by now. There were several standouts for me- Gillian Laub’s Four Generations, Tim Davis’s Dollar General Drive By, Jeff Jacobsens completely amazing From the Catskills,  on night two, and on the final night, Donald Weber’s Interrogations, Erin Trieb’s The Homecoming, and Robert van deer Hilst’s Chinese Interiors stood out for me. Crowd favorites were Yuri Kozyrev’s The Arab Spring got a huge applause, and the festival ending video from Jacob Krupnick- Girl Walk//All Day Shot which you can see heregot everyone to their feet when the featured improv dancers from the video magically turned up live and performed. A great way to end the evening.

I could probably write more, all the interactions and conversations, how everyone is faced with similar challenges and as David Alan Harvey says, we are one big tribe and this is a gathering of the tribe. The festival is also about community, and is one of the few places I know where photographers and editors feel like they are standing on the same side of the line, all trying daily to get to the image.

If you can go next year, go. I’ll be there.

David Lachapelle and David Salle for NYT

So I’m in LA on someone elses dime and getting tired of the piano player in the lounge of the hotel who is straying too close to “Midnight at the Oasis” for my liking so I head out to walk on the beach near sunset. The ULTRA said bring me back a shell. But the seagulls have been here before me “Pulling Mussles from a…”, so they are all broken.

At this point Venice gets a little feral and Australian, too many louts for me, so I head over to Main St. to look at the shops. It is 7pm, and everything is closed.  There is however one store open, and fate has it that it is a used bookstore and art gallery, so I go in.

A man with beachblown hair who I surmise is the proprietor is seated at the back behind a computer hitting the keys hard every now and again, and so I wordless browse the shelves- there are a couple of Sheila Metzner TwinPalms Press editions of “Color” and I check the price and the inside as I always do to see who sold their autographed copy so I can report back- “So who is Bernard and why did he sell your book?” but these are unsigned  in mint condition.

Still no word from the owner and I look at the fiction first edition on the other wall and all of the covers are beautifully illustrated or have amazing graphic design, so I say “wow these covers have amazing graphic design” or something equally vapid and the owner looks up…

Well that is where the story begins because for the next 45 minutes variously:

I get the whole story, he store used to be on Abbott Kenney but when the rent went to 6000$/ month he had to bail out sadly after many years-

A man comes in looking to be in his 60′s but very California-preserved and he had randomly walked in one day and ended up befriending the owner Michael and becoming a major patron, just a guy from Iowa with money-

I mention I am reading “Just Kids” by Patti Smith and turns out Michaels’ wife is a big fan and wrote about her I think and I say I got to meet her at the National Book Awards and do I have photo- of her, it’s his wife’s birthday- so I will dig one up Michael- its on its way.

I get smitten by 1. Brassai, Paris at Night, with beautiful reproductions in mint condition and at a reasonable price- 2. I get more smitten by a TwinPalms press copy of Lost Hollywood first edition sheet fed gravure, who also published Sheila’s book, and I remember my old Ellen von Unwerth Snaps that I “had” and then “didn’t” which according to the owner is now going for 5 times what I paid-ouch!

Edit: Elizabeth Avedon has a great article about Jack Woody up recently here.

And there is more but I do want to be able to pay rent when I get home so I decide this is it, and in walks another man who looks vaguely familiar and complains of his trials trying on pants but not being able to feel his legs because he is on too much cough syrup (I’m getting parts of this wrong but essentially this is what it is) so he goes to the bathroom and I say to Michael, “he looks suspiciously like…” and Michael says yes, the guy on Buffy the Vampire Slayer Nick Brendon, so Nick now comes out of the bathroom and Michael says, so Robert here thinks you look suspiciously like” and I am outed as just another Hollywood lookey-lou (did I mention I also saw Dennis Leary and Ray Liota in the hotel!) but I guess the cough syrup thing is making everyone copacetic and he is going to Toronto for a comic-con thing and I am from Toronto sort of so its all a nice coincidental evening.

If you are in Venice, on cough syrup or not, visit Deyermond- their motto is “A book can change your life” and Michael is a true believer, a little crazy, very nice, and he has great books and you should go there and buy one or three.

These are the shells I brought the ULTRA. They suit her perfectly.

cover of Lost Hollywood by Jack Woody, TwinPalms press

Jonathan and Danielle Leder of Jacques Magazine-

the NYT story does not mention two influences I think are important- one being Peter Gowland- we didn’t talk about this but you can’t think about pinup photography and not include his name-a complete original, he invented his own cameras even, and another “original” is Italian designer, artist, racecar driver and photographer Carlo Mollino, who made thousands of polaroids of nude and erotic figures, there is a book if you can find it-sure to be expensive, Jonathan had it also.

Went to “bat” for Todd Selby…

Jumped around the Plaza Hotel with Betsey Johnson,

Found out “What Girls Want”

and spent some time up in the clouds with Nadia and Myriah (right).

more to follow.

Don’t get on the plane.

Room with a view

Pick one

a cloud follows me wherever I go

its just alec baldwin

how many jokes can you come up with that involve Tiger, POTUS, and Putter?

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright in the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? well…Frank Rich has a nice column about Tiger and the decade in the NYT

David Sedaris always makes my holiday brighter. With apologies to Eggleston.

you may recognize the colour scheme from my website. ?

When I let myself drift into the intoxication of inverting daydreams and reality, that faraway house with its light becomes for me, before me, a house that is looking out-its turn now!-through the keyhole. Yes there is someone in that house who is keeping watch, a man is working there while I dream away. He leads a dogged existence, whereas I am pursuing futile dreams. Through the light alone the house becomes human. It sees like a man. It is an eye open to the night….a rather large dossier of literary documentation could be studied from the single angle of the lamp that glows in the window….” Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space.

From Ms. Deane- photographer Ӧzant Kamaci has two projects, Pause, and Landing. From the statement:

Pause

In ‘pause’, the work depicts the juxtaposition of powerful machines which are symbols of advancement and technology against nature which is widely accepted as precious and untouched. The medium of photography provides a visual dichotomy of reality and illusion through the aesthetics of plane and tree and their spatial relationship. Planes behind trees as individual objects are familiar and common, but when combined and interrelated, the viewer moves to a new space to behold the unexpected.

Obviously I really like these- I like the scale distortion, the idea of a plane caught in a tree like a kite you might say, the unexpected visual merging of two graphic entities. I could see variations on this where tail markings and other insignia become part of the result. I also like how you can have an idea and someone else will have a similar idea but a completely different take on it. There is no end to the difference you can generate.

Early on I had some failed attempts where I was playing sort of in this garden:

But the results are completely different. And I didn’t have all the technical things worked out.

I think they might have worked best printed large from 35mm negs.

A long time ago I mentioned my friend Steve Guttenberg. Not that one. Steve is a freelance writer and artist and likes to hook up extremely expensive audio and video equipment in his apartment and relax to aural nirvana. He has been feeding my vinyl craze. And my TFK craze. Recently he got an absurdly expensive turntable, the googlifonic kind with a moonrock needle. He played it for me. It went to eleven standing still. I in turn have been setting him up with photoshop techniques and he has gone a very long way in two years. He photographs, and then, well, I’m not sure. This comes out…

Dancers

The part I haven’t told you is that Steve really can’t see that well. He is legally blind. A birth defect left him with impaired vision, but as a child he used to stare at the sun wide eyed because the colour effects that he was seeing were irresistible. The resulting scars on his retina made things worse. But that didn’t stop Steve from eventually becoming a movie projectionist in New York in the Eighties. Did I mention that when you meet Steve, he will tell you a story. And then another. Possibly a third. All fascinating. You see, you want a paranoid projectionist! Focus! Steve brought binoculars into the booth to see better. So he was constantly on the lookout for blurry images. It makes sense if you let it.

Montauk #3

Digital cameras for Steve are like bionic eyes. He can see things very close up. Like a computer monitor from about 3 inches. And also an LCD on the back of a camera. Viewfinders are useless to him, ah, but on a preview you can magnify your picture…10x or more. All of a sudden, distant details are visible. Steve literally takes pictures to see what things look like. Which is by definition, is what a photographer does. And very Winograndian.

The Corner

We are up to 30% of my TFK pledge. More contributors to come.

Over on the Resolve blog this quote from Marc Asnin

I also think you should dress for who you are. I don’t know if people still do that, but when I was a kid, you had to get dressed up for everything. I’m not saying show up as a slob, but you know, I’ve had some interns show up in suits. I’m like, listen, never wear a tie to meet me. You’re in the photo world in New York now. No one wears a tie, man.

So what do you think? I have had to wear a tie but once-photographing in the New York Stock Exchange. Not even in the White House was I required to wear a tie, although I was shooting behind the scenes and not at a State Dinner.  I have had to photograph a lot of ‘Guy’s in Tie’s’ (GITS) and generally felt for them on hot days.

So do only Wedding Pro’s wear ties?

(mad man Thom Browne)

Do you remember? The very first night of September? Love was changing the minds of pretenders, while chasing the clouds away…

Above: Stack o’ promos to go out. Don’t accuse me of being cynical about this photo business…

TFK UPDATE:

Thanks to some recent donations from the  Mr and Mrs. Jackanory, Mr. and Mrs. Bumble, and Mr. and Mrs. Wright, we are sitting over $600 of $2500, that is more than 25% of the way there!