NEW YORK NEW YORK – Well here I am in my office with my new Nex-7 camera and a Leica 35mm Summciron v.4 lens, the “bokeh king” (“let’s strap the king onto the new camera and see what happens”). So here’s my Lava Lamp. The photograph in the background (from the Jim Dow courthouse series) is out of focus and the bokeh looks pretty smooth – score another win for the king. Click through the bokeh link if you don’t have any idea of what I’m talking about. Anyway, here’s the Lava Lamp:
NEW YORK NEW YORK – Well here I am working with the iPhone again. I really like this thing as a camera. This is taken in our office and surprisingly the iPhone handles the color of the chairs (called “paprika” by the decorator) and the mixed lighting.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I’m lurking through life with my shirt-pocket-sized camera. Here’s an ATM that includes another self-portrait. The distortion foreshadows some of the composites that I’ll be posting later this week from my 1999 24 hour series of self-portraits.
Interestingly (perhaps predictably) I’m falling into a familiar pattern of daily photo projects. If you Google “one photo a day” or a similar combination of words you’ll find sites with titles like “Ben takes a picture of himself every day” or “Noah takes a picture of himself every day for six years”. Who gives a damn? Why would you bother to click through one of these links, edging yourself one click closer to carpal tunnel syndrome? “Ben takes a picture of himself . . ” is like a 20-year old’s memoir. Not enough milage to be interesting.
The picture-a-day space has become a rundown neighborhood. It seems to be populated with losers who don’t have anything else to do with their time than take pictures of themselves. There are now sites that make it easy to post a picture a day. Try flickaday for example. (Sponsoring my own website for this purpose is distinctly not easy.) There are more of them, a lot more of them, than when I started this project two years ago. There’s a photo-a-day bubble in this country. Notify the Federal Reserve – picture of myself every day sites may be Systemically Important. If photography were housing these sites would be double-wide trailer parks.
Anyway, here’s the ATM taken with my Ricoh GRD IV.
ATM
Free at last – this is the last picture in the series of 24 self-portraits taken hourly over 24 hours on February 13 and 14, 1999. It’s taken, well 24 days, to get this off of my chest. The camera was an Arca-Swiss 8×10. In this and a few other images in the series I look slightly cross-eyed. It may be the camera angle which was a bit to close for portraiture.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – More time in the trenches on may day job, and fussing around with my new Ricoh GRD IV. This thing lets you get really, really close.
Place mat
More me. This is number 23 out of the series of 24. We’re getting close to the end.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – I’m feeling really stale with the Leica at events. I couldn’t take a picture I liked at Chris Matthews’ launch party for his JFK book. I’m stuck with a shot of the ceiling of the room we were in ath the Gramercy Park Hotel. Grim. This has been a very busy period with my day job making it hard to get into the moment.
Gamercy Park Hotel
Self, taken 8:00 AM February 14, 1999. One of a series of 24.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – This is the second day of the annual James Beard Foundation food policy conference, held (as noted yesterday) this year at Hearst’s offices in New York. I spent the breaks giving myself a tour of the very good art collection on the floor where we held the conference. Here’s a view of a Chuck Close self-portrait and of a conference room both taken with my Leica. The Close work is important to me – a while back I appropriated it in one of my 24 hours projects – I posted a typical image from that project below.
