Posts in Category: Photography
Minimal
I’m afraid there is very little, today. It’s minimal. It could be a daily occurance, if I’m not careful. Or perhaps, if I were more careful.
I must not think bad thoughts
xpro Neo
Totally grown up and still not able to deal with my own essentially unphotogenic nature. So, now I’m approaching the problem by making self-portraits. TFT. I thought I could play with the processing and obscure or soften this nature, but so far it seems to just spiral down further. For awhile I tried being super-clean shaven. It helped slightly with the aging that premature gray adds (yessss, it is premature), but not so much with the camera. So then I tried facial hair with quotes. That’s a big FAIL too. Gonna change that in the morning. In any case, I’m now reminded of the time my avant-rock/performance group played a house party and we had a really bad night, sounded terrible. After we finished and were breaking down, a woman I knew said to me as she walked by, “You shouldn’t have the green light on you.” Why does the super-ego pile on like that?
Photojournalism
SFMOMA Interior / © neo serafimidis 2011
It was a weekend of photojournalism.
Yesterday, I managed to get to SFMOMA to see the Henri Cartier-Bresson show just before it closes. It was fabulous. I was familiar with a little of his his early stuff, such as ‘Behind Saint Lazare Station, Paris, France’ but really did not know the range and depth of his work. And I was surprised by some images that I had seen before, but did’t know were his, for example, portraits of Sartre and Camus. It was a tremendously inspiring show.
Then I had my own brush with photojournalism this afternoon. I had picked up my mother from her facility and was bringing her to my house for our usual weekend time together. As I pulled out onto San Pablo Ave, the traffic was getting backed up. The reason was that right at the bottom of my street at San Pablo, there was some sort of traffic accident. The police were there but the paramedics were only just coming up behind me.
Pedestrian Hit / © neo serafimidis 2011
After the fire engine passed, I ducked down a side street and parked. I asked my mother to stay in the car and grabbed my camera. This was a little bit dicey because of her dementia, but she is doing ok lately, and really can’t move fast enough to get very far very fast these days. And I intended to be quick about it.
As I got to the end of the block I could see that they were working on someone lying in the street next to a stopped vehicle. A pedestrian had been hit by car, probably turning left onto San Pablo at this T intersection. I quickly snapped a few shots and ran back to the car. I could see that the person on the ground was able to move a hand, but they were totally facedown on the asphalt.
After getting home, I got my mom settled with some food and drink and got online to post a breaking story–just what I saw–to the local news site I shoot for occasionally, albany.patch.com. Before long, our awesome editor got the rest of the story from Albany PD and updated it.
My photo results are obviously not to be mentioned in the same breath as Cartier-Bresson. But the lesson of being always ready with camera as one moves through the world, as he was, was reinforced today.
Albany Bowl Bar Entrance
San Pablo Ave, Albany CA / © Neo Serafimidis 2011
This is another shot from the Albany Streetscape set but not selected to be included, since I took about three shots of this view. This is the southern end of the bowling alley, where the bar is. I have to admit I like these in black and white, and it is making me think more and more about picking up a medium format film camera of some sort. I’m not sure whether I would produce the Streetscape project in B&W. I like rather like the color. I suppose it will depend on what kind of feel I can get with color, especially printed.
Also, one of the reasons for staying away from B&W is to stay away from overtly calling attention to the “photography” and focus on the documentary aspect of the project. And since the genesis of the project is an examination of the notion that the commercial streetscape is a 1950’s streetscape, I don’t want to prejudice that examination by suggesting something one way or the other in the treatment of the work. The B&W does that.
Interestingly, I have never really been in the bar despite living within a few blocks of it for almost 10 years now. I always end up further down the road at HTC or Mallard. I’ll make an effort to visit this year.
Albany Hill Mini Mart
Albany Hill Mini Mart / © Neo Serafimidis 2011
Photo of Albany Hill Mini Mart from my Albany Commercial Streetscapes project. I suppose it’s not really that exciting a shot, but I have a soft spot in my heart for it. It is kind of an homage, again, to Ed Ruscha, this time to his Twentysix Gasoline Stations book. Although it could be Shore or Wessel, too. But since the project as a whole turns out to be an echo of Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip, I’ll just go with that.
In any case, looking at images from Twentysix Gasoline Stations online, I was reminded of something from my childhood: the gasoline station across the street from my Uncle Pete’s shoe repair shop. There were two things about that station that I never understood as a small child. The first was the brand name, which was Terrible Herbst. I didn’t even know that it was the name of anything because it was so strange, and I sure didn’t know how to pronounce the second word. I remember sitting in the shop looking out the window at the station, silently mouthing the words, trying to figure how to pronounce the name by trying to figure out what felt right in my mouth. I wasn’t used to seeing so many consonants in a row. Who knew it was a big regional brand, much less that it’s still around?
The second confusing thing to my feeble five-year-old mind were the signs next to each of the drive entrances. As I remember, they were three-foot-high metal signs on stands with springs so they would give a little in the wind. They were plain white and written in red letters were the words “GAS WAR!” I really did not know what that was supposed to mean. I knew what gas was, and what war was, but I couldn’t put the two together in any way that was meaningful to me. Even now, I have to suppose that “PRICE WAR” would be more intelligible. Despite being confused, I would feel the effect of reading the word ‘war’ as a tiny little adrenaline-like rush, because war was exciting. It made me want to be back at home playing with my army men.
Dang, I can still picture that station in my mind. I sure wish I had a photo of it. Besides being an interesting thing to have, it would help me sort out some of my foggy memory about it, because I seem to remember there being a winged horse, which is the old Mobil graphic, of course. I vaguely think the stations were next to each other. Here is a google streetview of where it/they once stood.
View Larger Map
Swivel the view around to the other side of the street and zoom in a bit to see the little white storefront building where Panos Shoe Repair was located once upon a time. There’s lots of memory there. But that’s a story for a different time.
West San Pablo
San Pablo Ave, West Side of 500 Block
Today I began photographing the Albany commercial streetscapes. Throughout I used a Nikon D300s with a 35mm-f/1.8 lens at f/16, and ISO 200. I began on San Pablo Ave., at the northern border with El Cerrito and worked my way south toward Berkeley, shooting only the west side of the street. I paced off about 18 to 24 paces between shots.
I didn’t quite finish the side because I ran out of memory near the end. I might have ten more shots to go to finish the side. As it was I came home with almost 200 shots, and it took me a little over two hours of walking and shooting. I have already managed to edit this down to about 130 or so. I think San Pablo will end up being a set of 300 or so. Perhaps Solano will be about the same. The shot above is near the north end, and the one below is at the south end, just below Marin Ave.
San Pablo Streetscape at the Gill Tract
Location, Location, Location
"XXX" From the "Where in Albany" series. Albany CA. January, 2011
It was a spooky evening for photography in Eastbania last night when I went out to shoot for the “Where in Albany” game feature on albany.patch.com.
The current obsession in Albany is the locating of a marijuana dispensary somewhere in our little town. The current application to open a dispensary was coming before the City Council again tonight, and it was expected that the applicants’ appeal would be rejected. It would locate it in a largely residential neighborhood on Solano Ave. But there is another application right behind that one that locates a dispensary down in the light industrial edge of town next to the train tracks.
With all that in mind last night, I set out to photograph the locations under consideration. The Solano location results weren’t all that interesting. But the fog helped produce something of interest down by the tracks.
"Light Silhouette" / © 2011 Neo Serafimidis
I suppose that all in all, this looks more like where expects to find one’s pot than a row of quaint storefronts surrounded by suburban-style homes.
Family Heirloom Project: Sewing Kit
Mom's Sewing Kit / © Neo Serafimidis 2009
Another of the photos I took while preparing to move my mother out of her apartment and into a board and care facility. That was almost exactly two years ago. Somehow it seems like decades ago, so much has changed since then: she went through surgeries and medical emergencies, and is so much more out of it; I went through job changes; we lost a few people; Theo has grown so much.
Anyway, my mother kept a lot of her sewing stuff in an old tin. It probably had butter cookies or something like that it in it originally. The holiday design caused me to associate holly with sewing rather than Christmas for years. At least they have sharp pointy things in common.
Family Heirloom Project: Flowered Print Dress
From the Family Heirloom Project. My mom made all her own clothes the entire time I was growing up. It had been awhile since I had seen her wear this one. I can’t even remember when I saw her in it. But it is typical of the kind of fabric she would buy. She did sew some some elegant things. But curtains and the occasional dress got the gaudy treatment with outlandish prints, usually with lots of blues and greens.
Long Day
Shot at MacArthur BART while wait for Sarah to pick me up and go into the CIty.
Well, It’s been a long day. I think I’m too tired to write much tonight. But here’s some outlines.
I left for work about 8:15 and took the BART to my work at the Oakland Federal Building.
Two interesting things happened at work. First, one of the high-ranking respondents to a request for feedback on a draft business process guide I have been working on editing for months and months finally sent his response today, the very last day of the response period. He basically said this will not fly (contains unauthorized methods) and to stop the development process immediately. And that he’ll get back to us. Thanks.
The second thing that happened was that from my cubicle up on the seventh floor I heard what sounded like a car alarm going off down in the street below, along with some strange, pre-recorded muffled talking. After trying to ignore it for about 10 minutes by turning up the music in my earbuds, I finally got up to make a snide comment about it to a co-worker. After another five minutes of group snarkiness, the security officer came back through and told us to evacuate the building immediately. Oops. And don’t take the elevators. I walked down to about the fifth floor when I got word that the “drill” was over. Not sure but, I think we have failed the drill. Good thing it wasn’t one of those fertilizer bombs or I’d be in deep shit.
The day at the office was followed by two art openings. The first was a small show in a small cafe a block from my office in the street level shops of the Tribune building. I have one piece in the show. Thanks Sarah Filley! So, I walked over after work. I saw friend Paula Wirth, who curated the previous show I had some pieces in, and which led to one being in this one. And I had good time talking to Paula’s friend Will, a jazz vocalist and a photographer. After a couple glasses of champagne it was back on the BART to MacArthur Station where my Sarah picked me up to go into the City for more festivities.
The second art opening was friend Seth Dickerman’s show at Muse Gallery in SF. The show is great. I really like his dreamy layering of motion anyway, but here the technique is used with multiple panoramic-style shooting that is rendered with distinct frames or panels rather than stitched into a single frame. This gives it a motion-picture-film-strip quality. Nice. Afterward, a bunch of us went to dinner at a taqueria on Valencia in the Mission. Overstuffed, mildly buzzed, and exhausted, I arrived back home 14.5 hours after leaving this morning.
Now, I’m really too tired to write another word.
Update: and judging by the typos I had to correct this morning, I was too tired to write the words I did write.
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