dance like an gastarbeiter...

well, minus the arbeiten...;)



merry christmas! :)

till we meet again

the semster ended...hm, I want to say chillaxing began...but, that would just not be true so let's leave it at, semester ended:)

and a look beyond the funeral home...

carroll gardens, brooklyn

...

the life and times of jason duncan...

jason walks dogs in south brooklyn
and one in manhattan...that one is a puppy and needs to be walked two times a day so...jason walks dogs in south brooklyn and two-dogs-worth in manhattan
he lives at the end of the 4 train
his household has a cat
he plays drums in a band
the band practices in his living room
he has multiple tattoos and hates waking up early

I loved this assignment:)












p.s. if anybody should require jason's services:
http://www.littlebuddiesdogwalking.com/

sugarcoating the underground

a month or so ago, we got two weeks in our picturemaking class to do a story on the NY underground. and underground in this case was anything that was happening...well UNDER ground:)
and then of course you get the feeling something very big and unexpected is what is expected of you. and you have all these grandiose ideas that are not even ideas really but just glimpses of imaginary photographs you think somebody much better and more experienced than you would make...and then you see the clock ticking away and you realize it's time to be realistic and find something where you will actually have free hands at doing what you do, where, hopefully, you will feel comfortable enough to do a good job while still having a subject that interests you and makes you want to take pictures. and THEN you spend four days trying to think of, find AND gain access to such a place. two weeks suddenly sounds like 5 minutes
well, I was lucky enough to have spotted Veniero's bakery and pastry shop/cafe my first month in NY when I was still living in East Village (ahhh, East Village...well, anyways:). I would pass it every day on my way to school and I would catch a glimpse of the baker's feet down in the basement through the basement shaft. I had thought even then of photographing there so...this assignment came just right (well, just right after I gave up on the idea of exploring secret hallways of the Met or spending a week in Bellevue's morgue...)
in any case, I was then more than lucky to get permission from the owner family (robert and his sisters) to visit the under ground bakery as many times as I needed plus I also got the guys that actually do the baking to get used to my presence and, I like to flatter myself, even like it (to a certain degree:)
it turned out to be a lot of fun so this is for Carlo, Erasto, Mike, Segundo, Teodoro, Sacramento, Jose Luis and Angelo (who actually had no business being downstairs but I think he just wanted to work his way into the final edit...and he did!)
and special thanks once again to Robert and his family










p.s.if any of you go and visit Veniero's on account of this post (hands down the best ITALIAN cheesecake in NY!), please mention my name casually so maybe I get a slice or two on the house...

and to prove how serious I am about this cheesecake, here's what cahrles got for his bday:


I never joke about dessert...

this week I met eileen...

I don't know...I just thought I should make a note of this encounter cause...I have a feeling there'll be more to say some time in the future
I might be wrong but...we'll see - at least I hope I'm not

in any case, I was shooting in the funeral home (that's a story and a half...will tell it some time soon) and, since there was a wake in one of the chapels, I was constrained to to the other part of the house. suddenly, a lady came and asked me if she could just sit for a bit in the room I was in...guess, she just needed a moment to...breathe (she was actually the only daughter of the man who the wake was for)
well, we started talking and I got to know this amazing female pastor, who lives and has a congregation in, no more nor less: Marlboro, New York.
I hope I get to see more of her...and of Marlboro:)

thank you mr learoyd!

Richard Learoyd, Anne

ok...let's start at the beginning:
there is an exhibition currently hapening in ICP museum which I went to see a few weeks baclk. it's a cool exhibition, lot of different stuff, yada yada...but! then you come into the room in the back of the 1st floor, you turn right and there is a big big print of a girl in a red dress (hence the name: Agnes in Red Dress)sitting on a chair.

Richard Learoyd, Agnes, Red Dress

you like it/don't like it, find it interesting/not interesting, whatever but whichever of these it is (I both liked and found it interesting but let's leave it at that), something maes you want to come closer and take a better look. there is something off about this print...the girl looks...too alive almost - if she weren't slightly bigger than most people, you would assume she was sitting right there in front of you. and then you do go closer and the feeling is still the same...details, shaaaalow depth of field...everything is there and more so than you ever saw before. and then you, which you usually don't do, feel the need to read the sign - there must be some sort of an explanation. and there it is:
mr learoyd does his work in a room-size camera obscura! that is, he uses two rooms with a pin-hole in between them. and in the one is a model while in the other is (and this is the best part) direct positive paper!!! there are no negatives, there is no camera, there is though, a movable wall which is there to determine, not so much the size of the reflection but to focus (if I understood correctly) and there is a hiiiigh quality lense in the hole.

so...I talked abut this photo for days, tried to get everybody and anybody to go and see it so, you can imagine how exciting it was, the moment i realized there was actually a whole show of richard learoyd's work!
so excited that, in the excitement I almost missed it:)
luckily, that didn't happen - I went to see it on the very last day (the same day I was moving and also shooting for a school assignment of my own) and...oh, so good that I did!

all the works on display in this fancy shmancy 5th avenue gallery are, hard as it is to imagine, even more impressive than the one in ICP museum
the models are ready to walk out into the room and thier faces show more detail than you would get when looking at yourself in a mirror. sound like it would be a bad thing (all the tiniest of tiny imperfections being there for all to see) but it actually makes these women (and an occasional squid) as beautiful as it gets.
and the depth of field is so shallow that, with one eye in focus, not only is the other eye but the base of the nose already, loses sharpness. or, to illustrate the point better, in the nude version of this image of agnes (I couldn't find the nude but the position is the same), her shoulder is in focus and so is her hand but the rest of the arm is not!

Richard Learoyd, Agnes B

and to think I almost missed this!

try that position and take notice how little distance it is between the shoulder and the arm...I mean, to make a camera (roomsize!) taht can note this distance...wow!

so...thank you mr learoyd, this show made my moving day 10 times better than it would otherwise be!
well, mr learoyd and these awesome friends of mine...but that's another story...:)

j-No on flickr

how big is your big idea?

we had a workshop (Big Idea) with Bob Sacha and it was...awesome!:)
really got us thinking in a different way about our work and the assignments that we choose. his idea basically is to find your Big idea - whatever you feel most interested in or passionate about (it should be as broad or narrow as you want it) and then try and stir all of your work form this moment on in that direction. so that, after, hopefully, many a happy year of being a photographer, all of your individual projects will still be able to be A body of work (we're thinking books, galleries, life-time achievement awards...:)
the idea could be as simple as driving around America (Robert Frank), recording your favorite bar (as Anders Petersen did with Cafe Lehmitz), taking pictures of trees around the world (Stuart Franklin) to as complicated as recording migration (Sebastiao Salgado).

other important lesson: try an go multimedia!
won't get into details but, suffice to say, after coming into class on saturday morning, most of us hard-core multimedia opponents, we left on sunday evening rushing to find a store still open to buy sound recorders. and, I must say, taking pictures has only become more fun since then! how fun it will be once we start editing...well, I'll pull a Scarlett and think about it tomorrow. or, better yet, I'll think about it in december (that scarlett was not the smartest after all...)

anyways, for inspiration, here is an amazing multimedia site:

www.mediastorm.org

and then,on my way home from the workshop:

more waterfront

that day I went to the Far Rockaway
and...well, it's far, they're not lying!