Posts Tagged: 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.
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.
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: 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
You must be logged in to post a comment.