Posts in Category: Photography
Disaffected Youth
Theo on Telegraph / © 2011 neo serafimidis
Is a picture really worth a thousand words? If so, which thousand? Who determines which thousand words it is, the author, or the viewer? Or someone else?
The day before Halloween we went down to the vintage stores on Telegraph Ave in Berkeley to find costume material. The first store we went into was having a closing sale and all items were $5. I scored a complete costume for $10. I figured I’d saved about $30. We were out in a jiffy, and afterwards, Theo and I waited outside while Sarah fought the lines in the hat store.
We goofed around and took pictures. I asked him to go stand by the wall. He walked over and turned around. I don’t know where he learned to put on this look of teenaged disaffection already. He constantly walks around with his jacket hanging off his left shoulder like this. It drives me absolutely crazy, but no amount of my pulling it up and zipping it up, and telling him to straighten up has any lasting effect beyond about about three minutes.
But appearances can be deceiving, as we all know. Beyond this obliviousness to his own appearance, and genuine stubbornness–thanks mom, for passing the genes along–he’s actually still very affectionate, concerned with fairness, and does not like cursing.
While we were taking our pictures and waiting for Sarah, our meter expired just a hundred feet away. As Theo and I walked up to the car to sit down and wait still more for Sarah to come out of the hat store, I saw the envelope. We had a $40 ticket, quite literally within 2 minutes of the meter expiring. How? Where had they come from? Did they sneak up? Did they get an alarm when the minute passed?
Immediately, the disaffection ran upstream from the son to the father. I dropped f-bombs in disbelief.
And just as quickly, I was chastised, “Hey! You said bad words, Daddy!” I looked at him with his jacket hanging down, and an expression at once concerned and mischievous, and I said, “I’m sorry, Theo.”
Oakland Oldsmobile
Oldsmobile and House, Oakland, CA. 2011.
Sometimes when I’m working from home, I’ll go to a cafe and work. Today I met up with a programmer friend who also likes to work outside the house at a favorite cafe, Local123 in Berkeley. The trouble was that once we got there, there was nowhere at all to sit. This is the second time in a row that I have arrived there and had to move on. It’s a nice place and it is great for the owners that they are so busy, but it looks like I have to find somewhere else as a first-choice work spot. In any case, we headed down San Pablo Avenue to Actual Cafe in Oakland.
Actual is located in the neighborhood where I used to work and go for lunchtime photo walks. As soon as we turned off San Pablo to park, it all came back to me, and I remembered what a photographically rich area the neighborhood is. Everywhere I looked I saw a shot. It would have been very easy to get totally distracted and just go for a stroll, but I resisted the urge. Instead I just took a couple shots and headed into the cafe to get working. But I made some mental notes of things to come back for on the weekend.
Brain Re-wiring
Manny and the Gretsch
Recently, Sarah and I went back to Fresno to attend a loosely organized get-together of people from the arts and music scene of the late 80’s and early 90’s. At least that’s how I think of it, because we left town in 1993. In fact, many people live elsewhere now, but come back to town over Christmas break to visit the family.
This year also included a bonus: a reunion gig of The Miss Alans, a popular Fresno band that really nearly broke through, but not quite. The reunion gig really turned out to be the centerpiece of the weekend. I was not really part of the TMA scene back then, but was really looking forward to seeing the couple members of the band that are friends and to seeing them play. One of the great things about the show was having an opportunity to really work on taking concerts photos in the low-light and high-contrast conditions. I had never had much luck with this before. But with my D300s, I was able to get some shots I was really happy with.
Then an awkward thing happened. During the last song of the show, guitarist friend Manny hopped off the stage to get a beer or something, and suddenly one minute I was slugging beer and taking photos, and the next I had a live guitar in my hand with the band vamping, waiting for someone to do something with it. Unfortunately, long ago were the days when I played guitar almost at all, much less in front of lots of people, and my brain was no longer wired for serendipitous improvising. So, deer-in-headlights syndrome was the result.
Yes, I was a little embarrassed by the whole thing. Even writing about it now is cringey. And it made me wonder why I even still have instruments taking up space in the closet and next to the computer. I had the realization that it was really time to get rid of this clutter in the house and in my psyche, this part of my ancient past.
Then a funny thing happened. My climate scientist friend Bill is taking guitar lessons and insisted we get together to try to work on some kind of modal soloing ideas he was introduced to at his guitar lesson. I didn’t really want to do this, think about this, face this. But I did. So, tonight we did that. We traded twos and fours over some progressions, and it was hard, but we both really got into it and had a great time. We came away exhilarated. So now we are planning on jamming every week, figuring it out, and getting it down.
Yeah. Face the fears.
Forgotten Heirloom Project
The Forgotten Man
My father’s birthday is coming up in the next few days, and so I have been thinking about him a lot lately. One of the things I’ve been meaning to do is photograph everything I still have from him, and create a kind of catalog of evidence. Somehow I never get around to it, and periodically forget about it altogether. This seems like as good a time as any to actually start exploring the project.
One of the remarkable things about my father was his outsider art. He made pictures, sort of mosaics, out of cut up postage stamps. This is a part of one of his pieces devoted to FDR. He was also an FDR democrat. To the very end. Content-wise it’s quite unsophisticated, but what do you want from an uneducated Greek immigrant who survived the depression working menial food service jobs in NYC?
I still miss him after 16 years, but I’m glad that he is not around to see the current political climate in which Republicans are actively aiming to dismantle Social Security.
Second Guessing
Berkeley CA. 2010.
Predictably, I have problems with any creative activity I engage in. It usually boils down to two things, which ultimately are two forms of the same thing. First, a nagging feeling that if the work is not something totally novel, then it has little artistic merit. Call it the curse of modernism. Since pretty much everything has been done, or at least everything that a working parent might have time to do, that seals the deal on the possibility of artistic merit. And so every result feels inadequate.
Second, there’s a lack of commitment or willingness to see something through to its logical conclusion, to really try different variations and different approaches with a given idea until I have turned it round and round, and really analyzed it from every angle. I think that’s what good artists do. They don’t get bored with say, painting lemons, after painting 4 or 5 lemons. They are not done until they have made dozens and dozens of paintings and visualized lemons in every conceivable way. That kind of thing always impresses me.
But it’s hard for me to do.
On the other hand, I still seem to be making photos of partially cropped cars parked in suburban neighborhoods. It is not that I’m eagerly exploring new conceptual terrain in this theme. It’s just that it’s so easy to do. Old cars basically make the shot on their own, making my job easy. And there are so many of them around here that I can’t go a day without passing at least one or two worthy subjects. For the time being, I suppose I’ll keep going, as long as I don’t get into any fights in the process. If only I could turn a couple upside down and see the underside…
Everyday
Fire on a winter evening.
I may be headed for a train wreck, or at least another large public failure. I’ve noticed recently that I have really slacked off taking photos. I still have a few regular things I’m doing, but the maniacal, camera-always-in-hand behavior has been tapering steeply away. So, when Darren mentioned to me yesterday that he was joining a Project 365 group on flickr, I knew right away that I needed that, too. This is a group where one takes one picture and posts it every day for a year. It might sound easy, but it’s a tall order. I know there will be many, many days where I won’t feel inspired or energetic enough to shoot, process and post.
So today Darren sent me the link to the particular group he had in mind (there are several on flickr and elsewhere), and I joined. And being the anal retentive sort, I really wanted to start the project on January 1, so I scrambled to see what I had over the last couple days so that I could catch up and get going. By a stroke of sheer luck, I had something from the first two days of the year.
The first shot above is a totally random shot of the fire at a little New Year’s Eve dinner party of neighborhood parents who were not going to make it to any of the usual hipster spots in SF to celebrate. Ah, parenthood. Thanks Bea and Steve. It was fabulous to be included.
Bottling the 2008 Cabernet
The second shot is from a Sunday afternoon wine making session of our little winemaking group. That’s where Darren told me about his project 365 intentions. Thanks for the tip, Darren! And thanks for trading off corking the bottles; that’s hard on the lower back. Anyway, in this photo Sarah and Ruta’s arm are filling bottles with the 2008 Cabernet Sauvignon that the group made before we joined.
Telephone Pole and Shopping Carts
Finally, the third shot is from a shoot I did for the albany.patch.com feature I get to do, “Where in Albany…“. I’d tell you more about this particular shot, but I’d end up giving away the answer to this week’s play. I can’t do that until someone has guessed it. All I can say is that I serendipitously ran into my friends Emily and Ken as they were leaving a restaurant and I was wandering the streets looking for inspiration. Ken and I ended up standing there talking for a bit, and after awhile some other people came out of the restaurant. Standing around with a largish camera on a tripod often invites questions (sometimes confrontational ones!) and that’s how I ended meeting a couple other working photographers, including Chris Fuzi.
But I haven’t yet said what the risk in all this is.
It’s this. Once I got home and finished processing some shots, posting my albany.patch shot, and my flickr Project 365 posts, I happened to read an article on Mashable about WordPress putting out a challenge to bloggers to commit to posting everyday (or every week) in 2011.
Well, I can tell you that the drop-off in my blog posts has been bothering me for longer than the drop-off in photographing. So, now I’m committed to blogging everyday. That’s TWO 365 commitments, which is nuts. Because if there is one thing you can count on, it’s that I have no follow through. Naturally, combining the two and posting on the blog about the photo of the day over on flickr has already occurred to me, and this post is essentially the first one to take that approach. But still…
So, there it is. Check in regularly so you know when to start berating me publicly for flaking out!
Merry Xmas
Pickup with Dali Joker #1
This might be the closest I get to a holiday card this year, although I’m sure Sarah is still holding out hope. In any case, I do hope that my friends and family find things that bring cheer into their lives now and always. Have a Rockin’ Christmas.
Temple of Found Objects
Click image to view full size.
Perhaps my favorite photograph from our vacation in Hawaii. I expected to find many beautiful things to photograph in Kauai. There is an abundance of natural beauty. What surprised me was finding such nonnatural beauty. I don’t know who built this temple, or why. To what gods? For what end? It doesn’t really matter. I’m just glad they did. It seems to have been built largely of found and recycled materials, especially large metal, everything from tin cafeteria trays to airplane engines. All beautifully sculpted.
Night Hike in Del Valle
Cub Scouts hiked for hidden treasure in Del Valle State Park.
Corvair Square
I recently changed the route of my bike commute to work. I was simply trying to get away from San Pablo Ave, which, while it is the straightest shot to my workplace, is also very bike-unfriendly. There are lots of cars, obstacles, freeway on/off ramps, and debris.
I decided that I would try to slide over to Hollis Ave through Emeryville, and this took me into west Oakland. The result is a new crop of photos, and some incubating ideas for future series.
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