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I’m going to bite off more than I can chew today. The Artist Wanted competition I had entered has come to a conclusion. Much to my ego’s disappointment, I won neither the professionally judged competition nor the popularity contest. But I would like to draw the attention of anyone who reads this to the person who did win. His name is Pete Eckert, and he is apparently totally blind. No really. That’s not a comment on his work. His work is amazing. There’s a depth to it that I’m not used to seeing in photographs. The judges made an excellent choice.

On one level, I can totally geek out on the science of light and visual perception with this. I always found the character of Geordi La Forge on Star Trek: The Next Generation rather fascinating. I didn’t identify with him quite the way I did with Data (or Spock or Odo, in other series), but I was always interested in how a blind man could see what is invisible to everyone else. What human beings see is not reality. We see an interpretation of reality. Visible light is a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. X-rays, heat, microwaves, the color green… they’re all the exact same thing vibrating at different frequencies. We’ve just evolved these structures that we call eyes, and they, along with the optic nerve and visual cortex, take a thin slice of those frequencies and convert them into electrical signals that the brain uses. Hearing works in much the same way. Hell, every sensation you have is an electrical impulse in the brain. So I was always fascinated by Geordi’s VISOR, which took a larger chunk of the EM spectrum and converted it into electrical signals for Geordi’s brain. Geordi could see the invisible, because the line between visible and invisible was drawn somewhere else for him. That’s an ability I’ve often wanted for myself, thus my interest in infrared and ultraviolet photography, but the line between visible and invisible is probably in a different place for everyone. And not just on the physical level either.

When I received the e-mail today informing me of the show reception for Mr. Eckert, in which it stated that he was “totally blind,” I’ll admit with some embarrassment that my first thought was of the movie, Pecker, in which the hot new artist at the end of the film is a completely blind photographer. The whole film is a humorous comment on art and photography in general (well, and fame and celebrity, but I’m not addressing those), and the moment is played for laughs. However, what Mr. Eckert does is absolutely art, and I find it extremely inspirational. This is what makes it art, in my opinion: “I am not trying to depict the sighted world. I am trying to show the world I now see using my other senses.” His work shows us the truth of his reality. That’s what art is about–the truth. It’s not about beauty. But the truth can be beautiful, and in Pete Eckert’s case, it is. And for someone who has lost their physical capacity to see to produce work like this–images that are so intense, so beautiful, so real–should, at the very least, remind us that our limits, like our vision, are often only in our heads.

The opening event is on Thursday, August 7, 2008, from 6 to 9 PM at the Leo Kesting Gallery at 812 Washington Street, New York City. If you have the means, go.

This is going to be a busy week for me. I had a shoot with a couple of trainers last Thursday, another tomorrow, and then a corporate event this Thursday. This basically means that when I’m not shooting this week, I’m going to be at the computer editing and touching up. Oh, how I loathe post-production. I’ve had a number of people ask me about my post-production abilities lately, and I’ve said that while I’m pretty good at it, it’s not something I enjoy doing, so I don’t really advertise that service anymore… I’ll do it as a paid favor for friends who get really busy, but I spent 4 months as a magazine publisher’s Photoshop monkey, and I don’t want to do that again.

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Of course, spending all my free time through the weekend (I am very strict with myself about maintaining no more than a 7-day turnaround on digital shoots, regardless of volume) buried in Photoshop means I will probably not get my website redesign up by Thursday as I had planned. There’s not a lot left to do. I pretty much have 4 finished images to prep and 2 more from Lee’s Carrizo Plains trip to process for the Things gallery, and redesign the blog. The blog will the time consuming part, because I really want to integrate it into the website much more than I have in the past. I’ve been tweaking existing templates to make it look similar to my web design by use of graphics. I want to make it look like just another page on my site, but also design it in such a way that it can still be viewed independently of the rest of the website. That is going to be a small project, and may take a few days that I just don’t have this week. Other than that, it’s going well. I shot the product shot of the Hasselblad and the self-portraits and composited them together for the About page last week. Here’s how that looks:

I’d like to rewrite what I’ve written on the About page, but considering how long it took me to come up with what I’ve got… I hate writing anything remotely close to an artist’s statement. But since I will be dividing the work I show into commercial and fine art, I need to write something for the About page that reflects both pursuits.

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I got a postcard from the college informing me that my application packet “has been forwarded to the appropriate division for review.” So that’s moving along. I expect I’ll meet with the dean in the next couple of weeks. I’m not being cocky. I just have a current full-time faculty member in my corner. That doesn’t mean I’ll actually get a job teaching; it just means that I will very likely get an interview with the dean.

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A trip to Boston next month may be in the cards. Haven’t been there since October of ‘06. I don’t know how long I’ll spend out there yet, but it would be nice to rent a car for a day to drive up to New Hampshire to visit some of the new found extended family that I didn’t know about when I was living in Boston. It would also be nice to take some pictures. I did not do that when I was living there. Of course, the first two months I was there, I was on independent study doing an internship for my last session at Brooks, and at the time, I was so sick of school and the way they insisted I do everything that I just didn’t want to shoot anything. It took several months after I graduated to get out of that. So, I’d been back in California for a while before I was willing to pick up a camera again, and then it was several more months before I was willing to work on anything I’d shot.

This is why it’s important to always shoot personal work. I heard that a lot while I was a student, but never really took the time to develop my own ideas, as I was so absorbed in keeping up with the pace of the school. Brooks can definitely chew you up and spit you out if you let it. Anyway, as a result of devoting all my energy to assigned work, it pretty much ceased to be mine, and I lost most of the joy in photography. It took a good eight months of self-indulgent rehab to get to a place where I felt like my work was my own again.

So anyway, now that I’m back in that place, I’m very excited to go back to Boston for a few days to visit some of the friends I made and take the pictures I didn’t when I lived there. The big question for me is, “What camera(s) do I want to take?”

I decided to put a little bit about my upcoming projects on my Model Mayhem page:

I have 2 projects that I’d like to begin shooting late May/early June ‘08.

The first is a series of expressive hand portraits. I’m looking for all kinds of hands for this. All ages, all races, hand models, musicians, mechanics, hands missing fingers, people familiar with ASL, manicured, not manicured… everyone. What’s this about? Well, I think hands are sexy, and that they have as much character as faces. And, in my opinion, a lot of photographers don’t know what to do with hands, so they’re often overlooked.

The second is something I’m calling “The Faceless Series.” I’m looking to duplicate various print ads and retouch out the facial features. Since this project is a commentary on advertising images (not necessarily a parody), I’ll need people with decent physiques, but again, all ages, all races, male, female. And, obviously, you have to be okay with not having a face in the final image. Some people find that disturbing, which is kinda the point (if we do a TFP/TFCD arrangement, you are absolutely welcome to copies with your face intact).

So, if you dig either of those, send me a message. I’m open to all sorts of compensation arrangements, though I’m a little short on funds at the moment, and don’t know when that will change.

The time frame gives me plenty of time to do some research and shoot examples using people I already know. I’ll probably start putting real casting calls on Model Mayhem and Craig’s List in about a month. The hand stuff will be shot on film. I’d like to keep that project completely free of anything digital. The faceless stuff will require some digital manipulation, so I might as well go all digital on that.

There are a couple more that I’ve been thinking about as well, but I’d like to wait a little bit on these. The first is about “genderqueer,” or “genderfuck,” if you want to be a little more militant about it. I’d like to do a series of studio portraits of drag kings/queens, crossdressers, and perhaps some actual FTM and MTF transgendered folks at various stages of transition. This is definitely something to do later, as it will require quite a bit of research in order to approach the subject matter with appropriate sensitivity.

The second is basically revisiting a concept I had all the way back in my first year at Brooks. In the Lighting People class, we had a final project of 6 thematically consistent images of people, and I chose to work on a theme of things that don’t fit. I had a few good images, and I’ve had a lot of ideas for individual images over the years, not all of them involving people, but most of them requiring pre-production planning and production expense.

I have received my final letter of recommendation, so now all I need to do is fill out the personal statement portion of the application (which I have all weekend to do), then my application for an adjunct faculty position will be complete, and I can deliver it to the school’s Human Resources department.

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I got the rest of the Llano del Rio shots processed today.

Katie was having some trouble coming down that chimney. Anyway, the rest of that day was spent down in Koreatown, at Cafe Jack’s on Western and then back to Stephen and Alex’s apartment. These, I kinda refer to as “Photos a la Gomez,” because Rachel will often shoot in this style with her point-and-shoot. Hers come out better than this. I was just playing around to see what I could get.

Speaking of playing around, I also did some playing around with a few images in Photoshop. These are the result of playing around with various layers, masks, blend modes, and brushes. I don’t consider these art. This is just what happens when I’m bored:

And finally, a happy accident. This was another attempt at a “Photo a la Gomez,” but the flash didn’t fire, so I just got a nice abstraction of Alex’s art installation:

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I’ve also been giving a lot of thought to what I had said in the previous entry about being able to discuss my own work, and specifically, about what The Faceless Series means. I intend it to be a critique about our current cult of conformist individualism. What I mean by conformist individualism is that, in this consumer culture of ours, we base a lot of our identity on what we buy. This is something I mentioned in my comments on Tucker’s blog entry on Kathrin Burmester’s “Peoplescapes”. Yet, marketing and advertisers don’t see people as individuals at all. They see demographics. And when people buy name brand products to say something about themselves as an individual, in my opinion, they’re not saying that they’re an individual at all. They’re buying into an image and saying, “I am part of this demographic.” (And that’s really the reason I hate brands like Abercrombie & Fitch–I see no reason why I should spend $60 to advertise someone else’s brand on my chest.) So, really, what’s one of the most basic ways to identify an individual? By their face. Remove the face; remove the individual identity. I’d like to go more in depth into this, but my brain gets constipated.

Really, what it comes down to is that identity is a social construction, so it varies widely from culture to culture. And in our culture, everything has been taken over by sales, marketing, consumption. At our core, we are not who we think we are. Collectively, we’ve bought into this model created (intentionally or not) by commercial interests, and I think people need to challenge that.

Continuing with the family photo project, I decided to work on my grandfather’s folder today.

He’s probably younger in this picture than I am now by a number of years. I can’t say I knew my grandfather very well. I got the distinct impression he didn’t like me much when I was little. He changed somewhat after his stroke in 1995, when I was 15. But, by then, neither of us knew what to say to each other. I’ll say this for him. He appeared to have found a hairstyle and facial expression that he liked early on and stuck with them.

This is a photo from my grandparents’ wedding reception. I don’t know the date, but I would have to guess sometime between 1939 and 1941 from the uniform. But this was a really great find when we were going through the stacks of pictures.

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American Flats is apparently quite the common photo location over on Flickr. However, I have the distinction of being the only person with black-and-white pictures. I considered bringing color film on the trip, knowing that Niki would be taking me out there at some point, but I decided to go all black-and-white on a hunch. I knew I wanted to photograph that area in black-and-white for a reason, but I didn’t know what that reason was. Now, having finished work on those photos and put them up next to everyone else’s color shots of the same places, I know why. In color, the pictures are about the graffiti. The graffiti upstages the other elements. And it’s certainly a valid perspective to take with putting the graffiti first, but I wanted to tell a different story. In black-and-white, the graffiti seems more integrated into the whole. It goes back to a draft of an artist’s statement I wrote for my marketing class a couple years ago. I wrote that I like to make images from the perspective of an alien who’s crashed on earth and has no way of leaving. An alien wouldn’t necessarily see the graffiti as something that didn’t belong there, or as something that was added later and wasn’t intended to be part of the structure, or that the people who built the structures and the people who painted the structures would even be different groups of people. So I didn’t want to necessarily see things that way either. I wanted the graffiti to be part of the story, not the entire story.

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Oh yeah, I got an e-mail this afternoon from the art director at the agency with the O Bel Sole account, and they are really happy with the work I did for them. That was very gratifying to hear. That was a bright spot on an already good day.