MIT

Here's what happened in about a half hour's time at MIT a week or so ago as students started to repopulate the campus.

Self Portrait

Here's my newest Color People picture, hot off the LCD. That's is me in the green tee shirt, taking a picture for a tourist. She's next to me in pink, and she and her friends are also on the steps just above the camera I'm holding, as well as way up near the top of the stairs.

The Pins: How Does He Do It?

RGB
Here's my set up for making a large 16-panel pin picture. In the paper plate are 56 red pins, 92 green pins, and 48 blue pins. The white panel is a piece of foam board tacked to the outside wall of my back porch. (Click on pictures for larger view.)

I stick them all in a new piece of foam board. You can seen my pencil guidelines, which are cropped out in the final project.

This N0. 16, and you see the cumulative holes in the background.

And here are the holes (all 3,136 of them) by themselves. The project took me two days to stick in the pins photograph the panels and two days to prepare the files and print them.
The final product is a 16 panel rectangle of an overall wallpaper-like pattern, with more holes accumulating in the background with each progression. But, remember, it all happens in a single rectangle, over and over again. Note: the above green is R56/G92/B48!


What Was He Thinking?

• Of Sol Lewitt's wall drawings
• Carl Andre's floor pieces (rgb is meant to be displayed on the floor)
• William Hartnett and other American trompe l'oiel painters
• Scale
• Pins, in these pictures, can be thought of as pixels
• Each panel uses pins in this mix: (R56/G92/B48). This makes a dark green (the color of the green grid). What I've arrived at is the color of a landscape!
• With holes accumulating in the background (while the foreground retains the same number of pins in each panel), I thought this was an interesting way to look at time. (Also see my Color People II project, which kind of does with people what I've done here with pins.)

Bikes

Okay, I feel like a dolt, but sometimes I like to take a regular picture just like anyone else, without all my complicated planning and theories. It's nice to get outside, away from my beloved photoshop, too.

"Pins" at the Griffin Museum of Photography

I'm having a solo show at the Griffin Museum of Photography (Winchester, MA) from Sept. 11-Nov. 2. It will be all pin pictures--photographs of assemblages that include colored ballhead pins and magazine photos. I think they are rather strange and beautiful, but hard to talk about. They are preoccupied with confusions of photographic space and color itself. Guess that doesn't help much. Please see the show instead!

Yellow-Orange and Geometric

It's been a while since I've finished a piece. I've been getting ready for a show at the Griffin Museum of Photography (Winchester, MA) and it's been distracting me from doing new work.

Spectrum

This is the result of standing on the Mass. Ave bridge for about two hours in a near gale. With trucks rumbling by and the wind almost knocking my tripod over, it's a wonder any of the pictures were sharp enough to use. It looks like we're being rounded up and sent to another planet (where color is the organizing priciple).

Green

Everyone here is wearing green. It goes with my other pictures, White, Black, Red, and Blue, all done in the Boston Public Garden.

Babies

This was done at a concert at a neighborhood park. I wanted to do an all-babies picture, and this was as close as I got. It turned into something else, which is usually how I know I'm on to something. It's funny to find myself a photographer of babies, children, swan boats, and tourist attractions.

Boston Common

This could be a strech, but as I was working on this picture, I was thinking of the movie The Third Man, which ends with the hero walking down a long lane past the woman he loves in a beautiful shot that must last three or four minutes. In my picture, there's the guy with the bag, who is repeated into the distance and the woman in the black shirt and khaki skirt.

Kids at dusk playing catch

Here's a new composite picture of my daughter and some of her friends. She's the redhead in the white tee shirt. This took about half an hour's worth of pictures--about 180. These pictures, to me are lively and fun on the surface, but almost unbearably poignant underneath as time so conspicuously passes. (Click on image for larger view.)

Men and Women

Here's a new picture, taken in Copley Square, Boston. It's about twenty minutes worth of pictures, maybe 90 or so. Women are on the left, men on the right. Click on image for a bigger picture.