Which is Cooler...

The fact that I can get into this pose before the autotimer goes off?

Or the fact that I have a fireplace in my new house?

Carnival 2008: Wild Wild West

As if anyone in Provincetown needed an excuse to wear chaps.

Catching Up

Coming soon: photos from the forever-ago Carnival in Provincetown.

Here's a hint to this year's theme...


Giddyup.

Little Children Part III

That's Ashton.

Little Children Part II

Another moral conundrum.



This is Chloe. Chloe is a FIRECRACKER. Here she is the summer of her Kindergarten year.

When she entered Kindergarten, Chloe's Pre-school teacher pulled the Kindergarten teacher aside and said, "I just want you to have an idea of what Chloe's going to be like. So, she goes into the bathroom one day, and she's taking a while to come out. So I knocked on the door, and said, 'Chloe, are you ok in there?' And she goes, 'SHUT THE FUCK UP!'"

Oh, the stories I've heard about Chloe.

Chloe's got special needs. She's had some problems with blood flow and one side of her body growing faster than the other. She's larger than the other children in her class and is technically classified as a "dwarf." She scares some of them, but she could not care less. She's got A+ sass. She "challenges" her teachers and tutors tremendously - yet all of them fight to be her #1.

So here, in the picture above, she looks upset; it looks like there's something wrong. I cannot convey in this photograph how much of a charming tyrant she can be. When I took this picture she was reading me the fuck-you act, because she'd demanded that I give her my camera so SHE could take pictures, and I had told her she'd have to dry off first. (Seriously. This 5-year-old girl had me about to hand over my Nikon D200 as long as she wiped off her hands.)

So the photograph. It looks exploitative. It may upset. I know Chloe, and I found myself liking the face I caught, maybe even the shock of it. But I know she's about to head-butt me and then jump happily into the pool with her tutor. (Kate.) What you see is someone with special needs looking tragic, but perhaps also comic. Bad taste?

I'm not sure. Regardless...isn't Chloe's tutor hot?

Time Out for David Foster Wallace

I know I've been a terrible photo blogger.


I've been distracted. More about that later. Right now, a time out to mourn the death of one of America's most important contemporary writers: David Foster Wallace. He hanged himself last Friday in his California home. It's a loss I can only begin to put into words.

I met DFW many years ago at the book party for Infinite Jest. It was a coup to get into this party - you had to get past 2 sets of bouncers (for a BOOK party!). My friend Valerie had just interviewed him for Stim Magazine and they'd hit it off, so she and I wound up in the back room with DFW and a few of his friends. He seemed stricken by the whole event. Infinite Jest was largely about the horrors of consumerism. The rep from Little, Brown had stood up on the bar and welcomed the crowd by saying, "We'd like to thank David Foster Wallace for writing a big book so we could charge $29.95 for it!"

Perhaps he was being ironic. It didn't seem like it. Regardless, DFW shortly disappeared. One of his friends found him locked in a stall in the bathroom. At his own book party. For one of the biggest books of the decade.

Apparently, when the friend found him, DFW said to her: "I just want to go back to my hotel room and watch Baywatch." (He admitted later, in an interview, that he loved Baywatch - he loved the fact that in one hour, a problem was presented, then fully resolved.)

I used to think this story was pretty funny. Not so much anymore.

RIP, DFW. You've changed the face.

Little Children

As the teacher of a creative discipline, I'm always tickled by the arbitrary rules created by teachers of creative disciplines. I, for instance, banned the word "eternity" when I taught a poetry workshop. When she taught undergraduates, my mentor, Amy Hempel, banned the word "dorm." And a photography teacher I know has one rule for subject matter: "No children or pets."

Generally, I agree: Please, no more pictures of your cute kitty cat.

But when it comes to my 2-year-old niece Taya, I just can't help myself.

The End of Burmese Dreams

The Burmese Dreams show came down last week. Big thanks to those who bought photos and donated money to the U.S. Campaign for Burma. I wrote an essay about hanging the show on the day Cyclone Nargis hit - guess what I called it? (That's right. "The Burmese Dreams Series.") I read it at the reading series Four Stories - you can hear an MP3 of the reading here.

My Summer Garden

Obsessive gardening + obsession with macro lens =

The Imboden Factor

Connie Imboden had me doing two things I haven't done in a while. One: shooting in reflections.



Also: macro abstracts.

When I first got my bells&whistles camera I took a lot of arty abstracts. I took them because I didn't know how to use my camera. Ooh, look! It looks COOL blurry! Guess what it is? It doesn't MATTER what it is! It's all about form!

Recognizing the limitations in this, I swung way to the other side and spent my time on Semester at Sea trying to take a nice, solid, "good" photograph.

Glad to be back.

Connie Imboden Happened to Me

I like free things. A very nice free thing happened to me recently. The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown needed to fill a seat in a week-long photography workshop, and due to my powerful connections at the Work Center (thanks Dorothy and Salvatore!) I was offered the $700 slot free of charge. I'd never taken an art photography course or had my worked critiqued in any sort of formal, art-oriented manner. Really, I still very much benefit from basic practical criticism, like "you need to pull out the highlights more" or "next time you shoot in bright sunlight, try ISO 100 instead of 640, dumbass" or "why is it blurry?"

The course was taught by Connie Imboden. I hadn't heard of her. Have you heard of Connie Imboden? You should hear of her.

One of Connie's main bodies of work is a series of nudes shot partially submerged in water. She initially used surface reflections, and then began placing a mirror at the bottom of a shallow pool. The result is a sort of triple image: unless you have someone there to explain what's what in the photograph, it's almost impossible to tell what's above the surface, what's reflected on the water, and what's reflected in the mirror. You can stare at what you might later find out is a man's chin popping out above a thin line of his neck, and, even knowing how Connie works, and that it's a body part, have absolutely no idea what you're looking at.


(That's a foot.)

Google her and read about how Connie was afraid of water as a child and she faced her fear through art...or how the water is like amniotic fluid...or the parallels between going underwater and the inward psychological journey. Yes, yes, yes. I love that it's mainly about form. The photograph is a puzzle. It's about dismantling the geometry of a familiar object and rearranging our associations.

Sometimes it's about being creepy. Me? Fond of creepy, mostly.




The model for this one is Cindy Sherman's dentist.

Guest of Cindy Sherman

(I did not take this picture of Cindy Sherman. Cindy Sherman did.)

Last week I volunteered as an assistant theater manager at the Provincetown International Film Festival. Oh, how I love this town.

For one thing, crazy is everywhere. Also, during film fest, famous people are everywhere. I got playfully elbow-ribbed by John Waters and served chorizo-stuffed mushrooms to Gael Garcia Bernal. Jane Lynch came to my theater twice. Word on the street was that Quentin Tarantino got wasted at the Old Colony Tap and Governor Bradford's, though I myself didn't catch a glimpse (damn!).

In addition to star-f*ing, I actually got to see a lot of great films, including Paul H-O's documentary, Guest of Cindy Sherman.

I have always liked Cindy Sherman fine, but this film made me fall in love with her. Her self-portraits are so dark and serious - and the Cindy in this film was totally giggly and shy. The film editor, Tom Donohue, who spoke before the screening, said he knew much more about Cindy from her work than he ever did from her personally. It was amazing to see her process - there's some really amazing stuff that happens before the shutter release.

Also, she had a long relationship with the filmmaker, Paul H-O, who is well-meaning but definitely annoying, and that whole story line is fascinating.

See Guest of Cindy Sherman!

Lens Lust

I walked into Hunt's to buy matte photo paper. I walked out of Hunt's with matte photo paper and a Sigma Macro lens.

I think I have a problem.

The Burmese Dreams: an Accidental Benefit

So why now for this here blog? Well, I've shown my photos a few times around town (Francesca's and Uptown Cafe, both in the South End, the Bromfield Gallery in SOWA, and presently at Ula Cafe in Jamaica Plain). Do I have a website? people ask. No, I do not have a website. But now...I have...a blog! That makes my "website" show AND tell. And it's free! Thanks, Blogger.

The final prompt to start a blog involved requests for information on the show I hung at Ula Cafe on May 2. (It's still up. For directions and other info on Ula click here). And I really want to get these pictures out there for people who aren't in the vicinity of Jamaica Plain, because there's a "cause" involved, and while I'm usually not a very active "cause" kind of gal, this one is important to me.



My show at Ula, originally called "Police States," became an accidental benefit for cyclone relief in Burma. The two components of the show were taken from my photographs from Cuba and Burma, two nations ruled by oppressive governments. I called the Burma set "The Burmese Dreams Series." The very day I finished hammering the frames together and climbing the walls to hang Burmese Dreams, Cyclone Nargis hit Burma from the south, and demolished most of the landscapes that were in my photographs. I'm sure most of the people in those pictures are dead. So the show became about something entirely different from what I'd intended - it became about loss and tragedy, but also the preservation of what was once there.




This is a sampling of the Burmese Dreams Series. (The color doesn't transfer well - the originals are far more saturated - better representations on my Flickr page.) Consider buying one. It will stroke my ego, and more importantly all proceeds from sales go to the U.S. Campaign for Burma - a righteous organization which has been working for democracy in Burma for quite some time. They're priced at $120 for an 8x8 or 8x10 printed on archival matte paper. If that's steep for you, you can suggest a smaller price and I'll most likely say yes.

Just don't ask why they're blurry. They're supposed to be, okay?

Exoticism and This Whole Photography Thing

I teach a class at Emerson College called Exoticism in Literature and Art. I began my academic inquiry of exoticism as a student at the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2000 because exoticism was what I did: I wrote about cultures other than my own. I exploited the charm of the unfamiliar. Is the word "exploit" nasty? How should art handle this? Meaning, if you're an artist, should you look at this issue differently than, say, a critic would? I play both sides. For more thoughts on this conundrum in the context of my travels, refer to an article I wrote for The Smart Set.

The implications of photographing "exotic" things and people - especially people - cause me concern, but that does not stop me from doing it. Sometimes, with an eye on the light-box peephole, you stop seeing people as people.

These are portraits of Dalits - "Untouchables" - in the village of Nalloor, India. They loved being photographed. The guy in the doorway followed me around all day. We had a great time. I was as exotic to them as they were to me.