Drama For Sale

This is the photo up at the Bromfield Gallery.

Bromfield Gallery 12x12 Holiday Show: Dec. 5-20

I have a piece in the Bromfield Gallery 12x12 Holiday show. This year they took one from a series of nighttime photos. (Last year it was one of my Burmese Dreams pix that I wrote about in "The Burmese Dreams Series." Hear me read about it here if you wanna.)


Opening reception is TONIGHT at 5:30! Arrive early and you can probably score a couple of glasses of Two Buck Chuck.

Bromfield Gallery
450 Harrison Ave.
Boston, MA 02118
http://www.bromfieldgallery.com/current-exhib.html

Sticks and Bricks

My amazingly talented friend Liz Karney just opened a furniture refinishing store in Northampton, Mass called Sticks and Bricks. Kate and I swung by when it opened. In the front, showroom. In the back, studio/workshop. Liz made everything herself. She has a spy at the dump who calls her when the good stuff gets thrown away. And Liz turns it into gold.


This is the window display. My guess is that Liz put this together the way it is usually done in cartoons. One second there's a bunch of chairs sitting around. Liz grabs them and for .5 seconds there's a blur of arms and chair parts and dust. Then the dust lifts and Liz is standing there with her hands on her hips admiring the sculpture she's just thrown together. Yes, she's that good!



Kate tried to convince me we needed this piece for our dining room.


Kate and Liz on a loveseat Liz made out of a bed.


Liz's tools on the wall in the workshop.


See more on Liz's blog: carpenterant.blogpot.com.

Little Children Part IV

My cousin Kim asked me to do a little photo shoot of her kids while we were in North Carolina for Thanksgiving.


Ain't my people handsome?

Oh: And When I Said I'd Been Busy

...part of that whole busy thing was about getting engaged.


There's us! In Ogunquit! The day we got engaged!

We're getting married next summer in Wellfleet, where Kate spent a lot of time growing up, two towns up from Provincetown, where my Pilgrim ancestors dropped anchor and hung out a while before moving onto way-less-cool Plymouth. The outer cape feels like home to both of us. And lucky ladies that we are, we found the perfect boathouse in which to hang paper lanterns and have a killer party.

Please do not ask me what I'm wearing. I have no idea.

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.