NEW YORK NEW YORK – This is a very busy time for me. Barely time to meet simple physical needs, let alone photograph. I did make it out to Fairway to buy groceries. Taken with m Ricoh GRD IV, my constant companion during this period. As you will see I don’t excel at “street”, even with the street shooter’s favorite camera in my hand.
Fairway
Back to my self portrait series. I experimented with what I looked like at various resolutions. Here is one of the February 14, 1999 self portraits, shot on an 8×10 Arca Swiss. In this version I’ve reduced the resolution to four pixels by four pixels.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – I took a break between meetings today to get out into the street with my Ricoh GRD IV. This is a stitch of three images.
BlackRock
Let’s continue the ongoing saga of variations on self. It’s 24 slivers just as in yesterday’s image but I’ve blended them into a continuous image and trimmed off the stuff on the top and the bottom that didn’t blend well. the scale on the bottom is a continuous 24-hour scale – as you read from left to right you get me later and later. The single shot with glasses on results in a sliver of glasses on my nose.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – A pair of Bryan Hunt sculptures, Flume I and Flume II, have been installed on the island on Park Avenue between the Seagrams Building and the Racquet and Tennis Club. The look like gigantic gnarly metal cobras. Here’s one of them, captured with my ever-resent Ricoh GRD !V.
Cobra
Continuing on the theme of variations on the 24 hour self portrait series here’s one where I sliced the images into 24 slivers, and built a composite with a sliver from the earliest time starting on the left and reading hour by hour as you move to the right.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – We went to Mas, a new locavore restaurant on Downing Street in the Village, to celebrate Francesca’s Birthday. Here she is blowing out a candle, taken with my ever-ready Ricoh GRD IV.
I mention the equipment that I’m using in most posts. Why? Well it’s because it helps bring traffic to this site as people search specific camera brands that they are considering.
Happy Birthday Francesca
So . . . back to the 24 hour self-portrait series taken in 1999. I have experimented with theses images at some length, for example by exploring the grid. (You may remember that the background is a grid “appropriated” from a Chuck Close image.) I divided the print plane into a grid, and then for each square I selected at random the corresponding square in one of the 24 self portraits. The result is a self portrait assembled from randomized bits of me taken over a 24 hour period. The finished work includes a title and caption. ad is printed 24×36 inches.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – On the street with my miniature camera. I’m slowly gaining confidence in it – getting a better feeling for its capabilities and limitations. I’m not really good a street photography and street photography generally doesn’t move me. A lot of the work that I see by other photographers is colorful looking people (often from the rear) in colorful setting, lacks dynanism and is wildly derivative of Robert Frank. There are exceptions. For example the energetic body of work being produced by Daido Moriyama (who shoots by the way with a Ricoh GRD). There’s an argument that the Ricoh is to this generation what the Leica M3 was to an earlier generation. Anyway here’s an image from Third Avenue caught with my Ricoh GRD IV. Of course my shadow in the picture is derivative of . . . Robert Frank.
Dandy
I mentioned several times in the last month that the 1999 self portraits were taken in my Connecticut studio with an 8X10 camera. Here’s what it looked like. That’s me holding the cable release for the lens (whatever it was) on the Arca-Swiss view camera.
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 – I’m taking a break from my new Rikoh GRD IV – in good light I find the Alpa, 35mm Schneider and Phase One IQ 180 back irresistible.
This from East 72nd Street. It’s a bit surprising that this building’s coop board permitted air conditioning vents to be cut through the decorative limestone facade.
72nd Street
Here’s number 23. This is the penultimate image from my series of 24 hourly photos of myself taken on February 13 and 14, 1994. This one is from m12:00 noon on February 14. Once I’ve presented all 24 of these, over the next week or so I’ll show you some composites and collages assembled from them, starting Monday.
