I hope you enjoy the series as much as I have enjoyed meeting the individuals.

http://www.robertwrightphoto.com/projects-run.html

new work from “Vale of Cashmere” Prospect Park Brooklyn.

Its supposed to go in an iPhone- its called “Square” and it allows you to accept credit card payments over your iPhone which are then deposited nightly to your account. They take 2.5%, which I think is low compared to standard merchant services accounts in the major banks.

I’ve often thought and written about how the whole financial model of professional photography is busted, if you think about your daily life, you rarely if ever get to walk out of any store, professional office, toll booth, school, even church without laying down you hard earned CASH in one way or another for something you received. The kid at the local neighbourhood lemonade stand ain’t gonna take credit either. And there are so many ways now to pay, banks have made it incredibly easy to move money around online and with direct deposit. All for a fee yes but time is money too.

I’ll let you know how it works out, right now I just got it (and its free to sign up and the reader is free too) because I have had now a few occasions where I have been asked or when it might have been more expedient just to accept a credit card.

Maybe the next 5DmkIII will have it built in. Just remember you saw it here first.

 -a toothy grin courtesy Andrew Hetherington…

The first couple you run it’s new and it’s a challenge and you want to see if you can improve. So that’s good enough for numbers one and two. Three is where you know what you are getting in to and you realize that there is a limit to how fast you can run a marathon given the amount of time I wanted to commit to it and where I was physically at my age, the amount of capacity I had to stay healthy and train and not get injured.  And of course you do get injured every year, something starts getting creaky no matter how much you try to avoid it. Its not like I have been running for years, the body takes a long time to respond to training if you consider that against a lifetime of not training.

So going back to the basic question- why run this marathon, if I wasn’t getting any faster, and if I had nothing really to prove to myself, is it just about fun, is that enough? Aren’t there easier ways to have fun?

I knew I could do it, although the any given sunday rule applies, anything can happen while you are doing it. And I didn’t really know how my knee was going to fare. But you don’t go to the start line and think of 26.2 miles. You just think about getting warmed up, finding your comfortable pace, getting to whatever miles your friends are at, seeing whatever landmarks, halfway points, bridges, etc, you piece it out. You are just going from one place to the next.  And that’s how it gets done.

I really didn’t actually think about running a marathon and finishing until 400m from the end, when all efforts to stave off a cramp were failing, I think your body knows exactly what you are asking of it and at that point it is saying, ok, really now, this is enough. This is why in military training you’d do whatever stupid thing it was and they would let you think for a half a second, now we are done, and then they say, ok, now do it again…just so you understand that limits are all mental.

The last 6 miles I really pushed hard, doesn’t mean I was going any faster, but my splits were not tanking into the 9′s either. Mile 26 was actually my fifth fastest mile overall, (8:08!) so I was gaining ground, and I knew that slowing down would mean cramping so it was all about pushing harder not less.

And in that effort I found something strange, I kind of started to welcome the pain, it meant I was doing it right, that I was actuallygoing to finish the marathon…it was a surprise to me. As the legs got more and more leaden, I just pushed harder and harder and I think I realized that there is a whole other side beyond when you think you are done. I don’t want to get all mystical about it, as soon as I crossed the line I was incredibly happy to not be running but for those last 6 miles and especially the last 400 meters which for some crazy reason has to be uphill, the tightening of my right quadriceps into a vice-like cramp was not the real issue, even as it was happening it was not happening, it was over already, as long as I didn’t really focus on it. In reality, yes, it was real, probably another mile and it would have dropped me, but that’s not what had to happen, I just had to get to the top of the hill and that was alright by me.

So why run a marathon, the answer is so that you can experience pain in a different way. You want to lean into it. It means you are closer to succeeding than you think.

At least that is what I learned this year.

That and I’ve got a great bunch of friends and neighbours who supported me on and off the course- thank you all!

First is a website update. I streamlined the logo and have separated out galleries. There will be some new galleries added in the coming week. Piece of advice; don’t bother creating your own custom website. Just get some service to do do it like aphotofolio or livebooks. It is not worth the effort. I had to migrate to a new server and have lost days to that. And I sort of know what I am doing, just enough to be dangerous. Massive PITA. If you are interested, I have used slideshowpro.com to provide the functionality, also their Director software to manage the backend. It is well integrated with Lightroom so I can export images and they appear instantly, formatted.

New also is iPhone and iPad compatibility via HTML5- ok so you don’t care- but the website works and formats for whatever iOS or Android device you are on. Check it out.

You might notice some new faces in there- tomorrow I will post about recent work.

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.

Excellent organization, staff, signage, location-(C’ville) theatre, food.

iPhone rig (owle bubo) turns heads even more than highly expensive german rangefinders or affordable japanese rangefinders.

Videolicious app making all possible- see WtJ…

Hot, humid, friendly.

Next year- absolutely.

I think there are a lot of echos going on after the recent killing of OBL, no sooner was his body “eased” into the Indian Ocean than we had everyone telling us there could now be new threats, reprisals, etc. It never seems to end. The new vigilance is the old vigilance.

I think the Newsweek feature on Special Ops in light of Seal Team 6 is interesting, and no matter how we try to understand and be sensitive to Islam, we never seem to do it right (re; burial of OBL).

Another interesting similarity is the cultural fascination with eschatology-”end times”-2012 currently and Nostradamus then.

Look for more in the coming days.

In light of my recent posts about older working methods, part of the interest here for me is to try to connect with the kind of spontaneity I had or thought I had at the time. It was not about lighting or styling or anything but seeing.