Hello

So I'm working on setting up my blog but the first week of school is taking place so yeah....we'll get there. I'll update it here for any that are reading....if any. Lol.

Final Post (but like, not really!)

The internet could be quite suffocating, in ways only outer space may be suffocating - claustrophobic in it's vast expansion. The awareness that it grows faster than we can grasp or count, knocks the air out of me.

So when I thought I would become part of this expansion (you know, beyond Facebook and all) I choked a little. And yet here I am, some 30-something posts later, realizing I've developed a sense of self assurance and perhaps even some discipline I spited not having, only months ago. In short, it was a growing experience - it still is. And yes. Yes it will continue to be (hopefully).

It feels a bit meek to the point of being absurd, to write and think people are actually reading (and to my relief people were - so thank you very much). But it became something about myself and with myself. The permeable thing - I think it played out well, and has actually been a thread in the work I've put out in the past 10 weeks, particularly.

But I did fail in some regard. I wish I could be more consistent with the way the blog turned out. No matter. I'm thinking up another one, and one that will be prompted by self motivation (it's still in the works, right along with my personal website!). Blogs are interesting mediums in that they're like individual soapboxes, and if by chance someone stumbles on it through Google or a erroneous link, as I have come across a great deal of things myself, you can be heard and engage in an interaction that is unique to the internet society.

I've come upon countless strangers - to no full regret, I've accepted the ways I divert my own life by diverting it into the life of others. Not fearlessly. In full suffocation and gasps, hoping to get my voice out there so that I can expand and feel my mind too expand, like a universe of its own. Sagmeister said that keeping a diary promotes self development. I hardly think of this as a diary, and yet I guess it's no more different. And neither are the results.

People keep telling me I've changed. The scarier part is realizing it yourself mid shower with shampoo in your eyes and suddenly being thrust back into the day at the airport, when you felt all the change, and did not know in which ways it will manifest. I only hope it keeps coming, and keeps me in this comfortable (and sometimes all but) nook of creation some dare call creativity.

Thank you for reading! Here are some unpublished images haha.

Edward Steichen in Fla.? Just in time for the break.

Steichen and Fashion --- I think yes.

The Museum of Art in Ft. Lauderdale is having an exhibition on Steichen during his "Conde Nast Years" as the exhibit has been titled (Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, the Condé Nast Years 1923 - 1937). I was looking at some exhibits to attend while being at home - the Miami museum scene is just recently picking up. I realized the other day talking to a stranger that I had taken a lot of the energy of the place for granted.

Not that I could ever be truly immersed in it since I was always 30 minutes from downtown Miami (where all those shots you see in movies and tv shows really are). I hope to reacquaint myself better with the place that has been home for the past 9 years of my life.

We'll see what this does for my over the break assignment. Finding home all over again hahaha. I'll delve into Calle all over again and see what I get out of it. Wish me luck!

(All photographs gathered from MoA Ft. Lauderdale's site).

Some art Reps

Nick Waplington

Christian Witkin

Rankin

Takay

Jeremy Kost

Anthony Costifas

Terry Richardson

Robert Maxwell

Mario Sorrenti

Walter Pfeiffer

Steven Meisel

I posted some artist agencies some days ago, but I found another one and thought I'd share some of the ones I know. I can spend hours on these, but they never compare to having prints! If only I could hold these. Nevertheless it gives for a nice exposure to different styles.

Mostly these are commercial photographers but that doesn't exclude talent at all! So hopefully you enjoy it.

http://www.art-dept.com/photography/

http://www.artandcommerce.com/

http://www.artpartner.com/

http://www.jedroot.com/

A failed attempt

For the final project, a project that is still untitled, I tried shooting an image in the studio. I'm still going through ups and downs on that project. This is particularly from a down.

The issue is that these are genuine "lessons" if they can be called that. So the photographs have to feel genuine to me. They have to feel earnest or else they draw the whole idea in bad light. I can tell this is going to be a long term one.

Good Advertisement

I have a particular taste in advertisement. I like ads that look well thought out. Ads with theory, with an expectation of reaction. Where things don't necessarily look good, but feel good. The notion that in advertising you make everything look so perfect that the audiences wants it, because of its flawlessness, is an old notion. Mostly we're past the idyllic and perfect, except maybe when it comes to cars. Mostly we expect more out of advertising, is it selling a good value to us? do we agree with the implications of the product being sold? why should we not by the other one?

I don't know much about advertising though. I look through a lot of it and analyze it and try to see how they wrap around our lives, how they flood our day-to-day actions and desires, how often, they become icons of something we want and work forward to and in some sense keep us in focus, and in line to making enough money to buy that product or something of equal value. Advertising is motivation.

Diesel has the best campaigns

Great Campaign by Levi's

A Doc. I've been itching to see since last summer.

Some Impromptu Portraits

Thought I'd share. I'm working with these LEE filters for the handheld flash. I got it at the Den for about 3 bucks so it's worth it. I used them for my still life photographs but yeah.

Let me know! :D

Leonardo and Work

I figured it would be somewhat appropriate to blog about Leonardo since we started talking about him in our art history class yesterday.

Presenting our final projects, I noticed there was a lot of room for expanding ideas -- there usually is. There's a strange situation with being an art student. We start projects and then have to move on to the next idea -- quickly, and it's hard to keep the life of any one given project when there's so many that have to be done.

I try to pour my ideas, premature as they may be, into the work I have to put out in class. A sort of pre-exploration of any concept that might interest me. Often I haven't finished them -- but that's the point; they're not finished. Like Leonardo Da Vinci said, "a work is never finished, only abandoned."

La Scapigliata (pictured here) is like a visualization of this idea. There's a beauty to our ideas, as bare as they are, but they continue there -- rough outlines, the embryos of what could be a great exploration.

I was talking to one of the girls I was going to photograph for an assignment. We talked about work and how much we had to do -- I advised that work has life outside of the classroom and our assignments. If we think of work as a grade and not a self-accomplishment merely asserted or denied by a grade, art's beauty can soon become tedious.

I've abandoned a great deal of works, but I intend on going back and exploring ideas over and over again. Some of them are bound to not happen, but we're always sure to find something new in the old.

Leonardo was always finding something new -- that was his greatness and his failure. We need only accept the fact that these things are still a move forward, even if they remain static in the timeline of our work's life.

Art breathes - even the incomplete type.

The Treachery of Images (and puns!)

Thank you Magritte hahaha. I ran into this once a few weeks ago. I saw peeps at the Corner Store for $0.79. I had to do it.

Enjoy.

Hey Stefan!!!

If I make one of these, how's that for extra credit!? hahahhaha

Just joking, but I think this is so awesome! Professor Davidhazy could probably have some fun doing this hahaha.

Just sharing :D

Douglas Gordon & Appropriation

Two years ago I spent a summer at a museum to learn how to write journalistic pieces on Art as a form of critique or for informative purposes.

I didn't realize how much I had learned that summer, mostly because it was all so latent until I came to college and started learning about different aspects of art.

The exhibit was "Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967,” a compilation of artworks in installation, video, illustrations and photographs that centered around Rock & Roll and music for the past 4 decades. A lot of it dealt with fantasy, it dealt with the transcendent idea of music, the self-indlugence of performance, the minds of musicians and the artists that wished to be musicians, the idolization of musicians, the parallel of going to a concert the way a devout Catholic attends mass every Sunday.

One of the most striking pieces was Douglas Gordon's clips from concerts, one from a Rolling Stones concert, another from the Cramps performing. They were bootleg videos shot by the audiences at these shows. The videos were slowed down to move at a glacial speed, the fast energy of the rock shows suddenly very considerate, slow and real. More easily felt, you could see the crowd and catch each individual motion because there was time for that.

They were all appropriated videos. In fact, his most famous piece is 24 Hour Psycho, a 35 second clip from Hitchcock's Psycho made to last 24 whole hours. His photographic work is also very similar with series of photographs in which the motion and changes between shots are subtle and almost imperceptible.

This reminded me of the talk the other day on appropriation of work and copyright. It's been in my mind lately a lot. I hadn't realized Gordon was one of these artist defying that idea as well (though not directly of course - not like Richard Prince).

That's all. Enjoy.

Productive with Product-ish Shots

I guess it's a step forward to working on something. It's better than any of the crap iv'e been doing. In any case, these were test shots for my actual work (which will be very Levinthal-ish).

Comments are more than welcome :P

The Passing

I have never met him. I knew him only through clothing and through quotes and interviews and what people had to say about him. All of that, made him seem great. I'm sure he was.

Alexander McQueen was without doubt one of my favorite artist in the world. There was something dark and beautiful about him and his work. I was always fully enthralled by his designs and his shows - he worked with psychology and social issues, messed with his audience. He was experiential and experimental - he wanted everyone to be part of his fantasy, and watch him unravel fearlessly and fearfully, both at the same time. He was so open to letting everyone see inside his mind and understand the fantastical way he absorbed the world.

Whatever the cause was - it was speculated that it was suicide, though no final word has been given - he carried with him a reputation of non-commitment, of freedom and of lightness that came across so heavily. He'll always be L'enfant terrible.

The strangest thing personally is how I personally become enamored with artist; Plath, McQueen, Collins and a million others. Not romantically, but in beauty. If they make beautiful things, for a second I'm in love with their mind and the way they're in love with the world. I'm in love with their sadness and whatever else motivates them to attempt expression. Like Camus said: "It's not your paintings I like, it's your painting."

I'm not sad he died so much as I'm in some disbelief that his art reached an end. I almost want to envision the last seconds he had to himself and hear his thoughts. I always do when I think of people dying - infamous last thoughts.

Just as he lived in beauty, I hope he rests in it.

Another funny thing

Some late night fashion-related browsing (I had to catch up) led me to this:

Richard Prince! AAAAAAAAAAAH hehehe I will talk more about him when I get the chance. I have lots to say. For now just this hahha.

Change...

Fun change...hehehehe

Inspiration, Inspiration, Inspiration.

I still have no Still Life

I have noticed i have one very basic problem with the still life assignment - I'm so indecisive about additive approaches to art, more specifically photography.

Working on a blank canvas is so difficult, and especially when the subject is as a static as still life is. I'm still wrestling one idea. One thing is for sure though - no more edible subjects.

There are days...

I have a flickr account in which I used to ramble on incessantly and very often to a point of exposition fueled by carelessness and with a sense of outer pressure that makes me cave. There are days when things, feelings, cancel each other out and the resulting feeling is one of apathy and sleepiness.

Yesterday and today were such days.

A painter in San Francisco on flickr, noted once how these were so periodic for me. I told him I had noticed. There's just always a week or a few days of withdrawal from things. I want things to stop. I want to exist somewhere outside. If I were a song, I'd be a song about wanting to be an animal.

Luckily, there's art. Not my own. But art - in poetry, in a painting, in a photograph, in song or film. Beauty, when things get so gray, can be so refreshing and releasing.

And I'm reminded to stop all the worrying and the petty anger and to breathe.

I guess it's only said so much because more complex words just won't do: sometimes you just have to let go.

Three ladies, three muses

Alexandra S.

Chloe C.

Lydia B.

I think photographers are a bit predatory. We're territorial as it is, whether we want to be or not. The mere fact of photographing something, especially today when an image can travel across the world faster than your paycheck can arrive in the mail, changes that location.

So it is in a predatory (in a non-sexual predatory) way that I found and picked these three ladies.

I love being inspired by a face alone, and a body and body language. I find myself scrutinizing everything about everyone I encounter, and that I got to photograph them is accomplishment enough since half of the time I want to photograph someone, I'm rather reserved and quiet about it.

But getting around these faces is fun, for lack of words. They seem so infinite in their capacity for beauty and for grace and I fantasize the feeling of photographing them in different ways before I can even see a clear image of them in my head.

The thing about muses for me, though, is the fact that I like to be beauty through them, and with them simultaneously. When someone agrees to your portrait, they agree to your art, and your expression and they give you ownership of that moment and their behavior (some more willingly than others) and for that moment of collaboration and inspiration, you do a dance with each other's minds And you're with them and understanding them, and you, and images come out and so do memories.

Sure, I can't help it but romanticize the dynamic sometimes. But, truthfully, these photographs of them bring to me a moment of engagement that I find beautiful, all on its own. My own little inside joke.

Shooting Shows

I don't mean this to sound like I'm being a "show off" I just want to share the experience.

I was recollecting some old images for a website I'm setting up (and you could go and set one up yourself ) to put my work out there, beyond a blog. I remembered I had a lot of photographs from concerts, so I started arranging photographs for a gallery precisely for concert photographs.

Flipping through the hundreds of lackluster images, and finding the few good ones in between, I remembered the stress of shooting concerts.

They're fun. They're exciting. They're nauseating. Here's a few tips and truths.

You get on average 3 songs to photograph, the first three of the set, which amounts to roughly 10 minutes. And get good ones. You don't get to chimp around and see if what you got was good, so it's really of the moment, you have to arrange your frame well, be focused on the viewfinder and while you're not looking keep your eyes open on the stage for any photo-worthy moments about to happen. It's good to research the band to know if they do anything special. For example, had I known the bassist from Underoath rocketed snot in between songs, I might have been more ready for when it almost hit me. Kyo, singer of Japanese Metal band Dir en Grey, loves punching himself and scratching himself up mid-concert; hardly a pretty scene, but definitely a photogenic one.

Then there's the other guys. If it's a small show you'll get a few 5 photographers. In a big amphitheater you'll get a good 15 -- without counting the videographers with their mastodon cameras. And the audience 3 feet behind you. The security guards watching you. The space, or "pit," is super narrow so you'll get elbowed and you'll trip and you'll get sweat on you and your lens.

The tip is to be polite to everyone, and to try to be as inexistent as possible. Then you could really focus on what you're photographing and get as many moments as possible. You have to be alert. It's no war, but it gets pretty rowdy in a metal show (or even pop-rock shows, like when I photographed Cute is What We Aim For).

The other issue is the light. My first concert was photographing Slipknot as my main stage to cover. It was a show of smoke and flashing lights and fire. You had to be ready when the light went from dark to about 4 stops higher. And then all the fuzzy photographs in between. And the noisy photographs. And the blurry photographs. And the 10 minutes.

I heard from an old photographer, Saul Weinstein, that you don't make the frame follow the action, you wait till the action comes into the frame. I learned much later you just aim the frame around the people and just make small arrangements. Otherwise you'll get blur or awkward compositions.

It's good to have fast cards, too. You don't want to have a slow card with your Nikon D80 so that every 3 photographs it has to load and lag a bit (i missed a very personal photograph with the singer from Papa Roach because of this).

And also, keep professional. One thing that was constantly driven into my head by my editor is to never seem like your enjoying the show. You're a photojournalist, and you're supposed to be unbiased (I had to remind myself when Underoath played one of their very good songs and I found myself singing along!).

Oh and yes. Try to make friends with the other photographers. I got a few good tips once while shooting with a Nikon D40 with a broken lens, and tape from a nice (and rather handsome) photographer from Spinner (at least I think it was spinner). The show went a lot smoother after that and he gave me a few tips which I'm sharing with you now.

So yeah. Just a little something to keep in mind.

Guyland

A bit delayed, yes, but I went to see Michael Kimmel talking about "Sex in Guyland: Bingeing, Porn & Hooking up." Guyland, as he calls it, is the extended adolescent phase that all of society falls under. He creates a norm, the social environment created by the middle-class white male from 16 to late 20's, through which he compares and creates marginal social environments in which everyone else exists.

He had a strong feminist aspect, but it was more of an idea of "inequality" in Guyland and the homosocial bond among men that excludes, and as a result, objectifies women as a form of revenge for the seeking of equality the feminist movement actively sought. He noted that men felt invaded because of this, and that this invasion created a stronger brethren among men, characterized by self-policing among men for the fight of who's the manliest, to put it simply. While that characteristic has been around since perhaps the Persians, it's more aggressive and more avaricious now, because of the idea of betrayal.

Interesting. Not as inspirational as I thought it would be, but his notes on porn and our consumerism of porn (which outgrosses that of McDonald's) were definitely eye opening. I'm always open for a new social issue to explore.

Came across something funny...

From Dogging.

From The Park.

While browsing blogs the other day I came across a post about Steven Meisel's Dogging photo shoot he did originally for Vogue Italia's January 09 issue, but was rejected because it was too much (which is saying something since Meisel has been shooting every cover for the magazine since 1988, and still is shooting as his newest published book "Steven Meisel's '317 & Counting" suggests). The same shoot ended up in the hands of V magazine's Winter 2008 Issue.

But as I came across them I remembered Kohei Yoshiyuki's The Park which Stefan showed us in class while learning flash photography. Meisel's photographs are obviously a reference to Yoshiyuki's work. The soft light in the photographs the crowded frames, the odd sense of voyeurism. Call me crazy if you don't think so.

I thought it was excellent. And also, who knew how long V magazine has been available online...and why didn't you tell me?!

-Sam