Stalks

It's a good month. I went to the Griffin/PRC Portfolio Reviews last weekend (these events gather art and photo professionals to meet individually with fine art photographers, kind of like speed dating), and people were kind of nuts over my work, especially my squirrel picture. Also, I'm doing lots of new work, like this picture of stalks. Again in the Public Garden, about a hundred exposures in 20 minutes. The tourists are back and people are out with their cameras. Ideal conditions for me.

More Birds

When you are at the Boston Public Garden on certain days in spring, it feels like this picture, with birds swooping and wheeling everywhere. I would appear to be obsessed with birds, but I guess it's mostly formal (although my mother loved birds and so does my sister). I don't really care too much one way or another myself. What I like is that they are all over the place and at all angles, like some Constructivism. This picture has about a hundred layers and took the usual 45 minutes to photograph. The second image is a detail.

Shepard Fairey: Two Views

This is my comment on Greg Cook's photo of a "vandalized" Shepard Fairey hunk of graffiti on Washington Street in Providence. Greg Cook's blog is the excellent New England Journal of Aesthetic Research.

Detail

This is a detail of of the picture below. I try to make nice, bland-looking pictures that are crazy when you look closely. Crazy is in the details.

Swan Boats

One of my main artistic goals is to avoid cliche, but lately what draws me to the things I photograph is their cliche value. I really like going to these over-photographed tourist spots--the Boston Public Garden, Copley Square, etc. My reasoning: I should go out and attack gives me the creeps head-on. I don't want to be fear tulips, ducks, foliage, children and the beautiful Boston Public Garden anymore. However, the woman (above) carrying the small canvas, in my opinion, is shirking her duty regarding the cliche. And I love her for it.

The picture above is of the Public Garden last Thursday and is a composite of just over a hundred different exposures taken over about 35 minutes during my lunch break. (Click image to get a little more bigness.)

Public Garden

Here's a picture (plus a detail) I did this week, at the Boston Public Garden. Like my other work in this series, it's a digital composite, with people in their real positions. A kind of condensed still version of a time-lapse movie. I didn't know that I liked birds! (click on images to enlarge)

More Side Projects

It hasn't been a very productive winter, image-wise. But spring has been a boon and spurred me to do some corny flower pictures. Sometimes I like to think that my big project is going at the cliches of photography head on and seeing what I can do.

Side Gig

Here's a side project. I took a couple of dozen close up pictures of my son's face then combined them in photoshop. This is a total fiction, but it still kind of looks like him, if El Greco took the picture, maybe.

Here's another one of my digital composites. This one combines about 160 images, taken during a half hour or so in the Boston Public Garden last week. The humans are all blond females. I'd been planning a picture like this for almost a year, and I don't even like animals, although birds are okay.

Yaddo

I was stunned when I opened the envelope from Yaddo yesterday. It had the word "pleased" in the first paragraph instead of the usual "sorry." I'm invited to be a guest at Yaddo next January! Yaddo is an artist's retreat, an old and famous one. Philip Guston, John Cheever, Robert Lowell, and Clifford Still stayed there in the past. Recently Miranda July, Rick Moody, Jonathan Letham, and who knows who else have been guests. I'll be there for a month with nothing to do but work. It's maybe the fourth or fifth time I've applied, so there.

Squirrels and the Baroque

I've been planning this picture for a while. I don't really like squirrels, so I wasn't sure when they were most active, although I thought it was spring. That turned out to be right, so I did this picture last week in the Boston Public Garden, which is right near my work. I brought out some crackers to lure them into the frame, but otherwise they took stage direction poorly. (I would have liked some squirrels smack in the middle of the trunk.) I find this picture fairly creepy, which I like: as if nature is conspiring in plain sight. Formally, it kind of looks like a Gaudi building or Baroque sculpture, which I also find pleasantly creepy, as if the figures are frantically trying to wrench free of the marble. Coming later this spring: a pigeon picture.



Bernini's Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi

My Pitcher's on a Book!

Here's my picture, To Jewishness, on the cover of a real, live book. It's a college writing textbook. The picture is of a tea cup with a poem by Kenneth Koch written on it.