A Fist Full of Film

This is the Rebellion against overproduced images often in the digital world. These are images made from my film cameras. Each image I shot myself. The subjects are often friends, and acquaintances in their world.

Making Lemonade You know when you go to those museums and you look at some of the stuff on the walls, and then you go…”Seriously?  Really?”  Incrediulous to the fact that piece of garbage up there is either too closely “emulating”(they don’t call it copying in the art world), or has no distinct style or relevance.  You ponder how the heck it got there.  How some curator has a belief that this piece of work needs to belong in this place of sidewalk artist acceptance.  That’s all it is really, a decision.  However a decision made from someone in charge. I work for some Art Directors, and Photo editors, and I think, “Really? that’s what you want?”  When you watch a commercial or see an Ad in a magazine, the “Creatives” as they are called, give you reference frames, and you kind of just stand there in bewilderment and go…”Really?”  But near the end of the 12 hour day, they sign your check.  These curious moments in the biz is less frequent than most, but sometimes you get a string of them back to back to back, and it just makes you second guess so much.  The Government, NASA, and the Human Propensity to slip into the Zombie Dystopia.  Standing in the Met at a sideshow exhibit to distract the Alexander McQueen queue, I shot this of my brother in a “Photo exhibit,” of these photographs.  Perhaps they make someone else tingly, but not me.  I need to see people.  People is what makes this world interesting. That’s what I dig about the Portrait, that’s why I can’t stand too posey-stretch my body into a “C” modely stuff.  The portrait is not only the key to someone else, its the key to someone else responding to you, the photographer.  Trust, awareness, connection, sensitivity, all relate to the photographer and his method.  And if your subject is the slightest bit uncomfortable in the photograph, it shows not just volumes, but across the planet. When I shoot a portrait of someone, part of my belief in shooting film allows me to use cameras that are 30 years older than me.  When they see how much care goes into the process, the film, the expense of the camera, the value of craft, they understand rather subconsciously that this person…cares about what he does.  Contrast that with the fact, that its not just a mechanized acutuation of a digital sensor snapping away into a oblivion.  The nuances in the face, the posture, intensity of the eyes all fade into a muted version of the real person who has gone on auto pilot.  Who wants an auto pilot plastic version of reality?  I’ll tell you who…its that damn sasquatch. New York, NY Leica M6 50mm Summilux 1.4 Fuji 400H

Making Lemonade

You know when you go to those museums and you look at some of the stuff on the walls, and then you go…”Seriously?  Really?”  Incrediulous to the fact that piece of garbage up there is either too closely “emulating”(they don’t call it copying in the art world), or has no distinct style or relevance.  You ponder how the heck it got there.  How some curator has a belief that this piece of work needs to belong in this place of sidewalk artist acceptance.  That’s all it is really, a decision.  However a decision made from someone in charge.

I work for some Art Directors, and Photo editors, and I think, “Really? that’s what you want?”  When you watch a commercial or see an Ad in a magazine, the “Creatives” as they are called, give you reference frames, and you kind of just stand there in bewilderment and go…”Really?”  But near the end of the 12 hour day, they sign your check.  These curious moments in the biz is less frequent than most, but sometimes you get a string of them back to back to back, and it just makes you second guess so much.  The Government, NASA, and the Human Propensity to slip into the Zombie Dystopia. 

Standing in the Met at a sideshow exhibit to distract the Alexander McQueen queue, I shot this of my brother in a “Photo exhibit,” of these photographs.  Perhaps they make someone else tingly, but not me.  I need to see people.  People is what makes this world interesting.

That’s what I dig about the Portrait, that’s why I can’t stand too posey-stretch my body into a “C” modely stuff.  The portrait is not only the key to someone else, its the key to someone else responding to you, the photographer.  Trust, awareness, connection, sensitivity, all relate to the photographer and his method.  And if your subject is the slightest bit uncomfortable in the photograph, it shows not just volumes, but across the planet.

When I shoot a portrait of someone, part of my belief in shooting film allows me to use cameras that are 30 years older than me.  When they see how much care goes into the process, the film, the expense of the camera, the value of craft, they understand rather subconsciously that this person…cares about what he does.  Contrast that with the fact, that its not just a mechanized acutuation of a digital sensor snapping away into a oblivion.  The nuances in the face, the posture, intensity of the eyes all fade into a muted version of the real person who has gone on auto pilot.  Who wants an auto pilot plastic version of reality?  I’ll tell you who…its that damn sasquatch.

New York, NY

Leica M6 50mm Summilux 1.4 Fuji 400H

4 months ago