tastee freez has frozen banana's!

here are some much delayed camping photos... the verdict is that my harddrive "thinks" its okay. it just makes a very high pitched squealing noise from time to time? i guess we have to work on that... when i get loan money and the heart to leave my baby laying in pieces.









a delicious breakfast.



the ascent... up the rockface getting lost and making a new trail.



doing carwheels under the full moon with alittle flashlight painting.



i used to love shooting at night, and i haven't been out in sometime. (above) reminds me. i have a project from this past fall experimenting with multiple exposures and night portraits, both of people and lighted spaces. it was my intention to continue this project in the summer months when shooting will certainly be much more pleasant (since i started it in december). i guess i'm not sure if it has any potential anymore, the mood has kind of passed but we'll see. hopefully those will be up in the next few days along with some pinhole.

now for alittle therapy... maybe if i get this off my chest i'll feel alittle easier tonight. i woke up from a mid-day hangover nap because i had a really startling dream. honestly it really creeped me out. elsie i just had to tell you and i don't mean to scare you.

so i'm walking down a sidewalk with my mother and she and i had just gotten off the phone with you. i see on the grass by the curb a calender. on the calender the date of the 17th is pointed out. i stop to pick it up. my mom gets upset with me and say's what are you doing, that's bad luck put it down. she separates from me and starts to take a different route. as she's leaving me she yells to me "call elise". i keep walking and see another calender with the 17th circled. i think this is too strange, pick them both up and keep walking. there's a guy sitting on the bus stop and i get startled in my dream, i start to walk faster and he asks me what i have in my hands. i call back to him. "calenders. the 17th, are you superstitious? do you think it's bad luck?" he just shakes his head at me and now i'm frightened and i start running. i turn and look around and suddenly there are two dogs chasing me. i tried to scream, couldn't and that's when i woke up. i never saw what month the calender was on. i know the first one i picked up didn't indicate the month.

i don't know why but i just can't stop thinking about it. it really gives me chills. i guess i am alittle superstitious. my phone is dead and i like a dumbass have left my charger at school otherwise i would have called you. love you elsie! be careful.

dear black cat at the empty bottle... i love you as well.

i should not have eaten mini hot dog roll ups at 1am. however i do wish to steal that little black cat. i can't decide if i'm unfunctionally lonely... or just unfunctional. i don't know for sure that even if i did have company i'd be able to deal with the very basics of life. once again i'm trying to work on this... however i think that if i had something nice and warm that curled up with me in bed to pet i would be much less inclined to try to pet boys.

dear david from the genius bar... i love you

i have my baby back, and by that i mean my 15in powerbook, and yes her name is geena. don't ask. with that being said i'm quite tempted to spend the rest of the day restoring her to full glory with all my images, music and software (appropriated? at that) however... i have a long paper i have been trying to write for the past week (since she crashed) on the harlem renaissance and the artist Romare Bearden who's work i can appriciate, but who's life and movement i know nothing about.

i just want to put photoshop back on my damn computer so i can put some camping pictures up, but here are some of bearden's images. he's known for mixed media collage though he was trained primarily as a painter. if anyone is interested the met has a fun little interactive web presentation on him. [here] it's geared toward children... i would like to figure out how some of the animation is done on it. there is a long panaramic piece that you can zoom in and out on. how sweet would that be for my pinhole panaramas? I'm still going back and forth as to whether or not i will include some of my mixed media pieces in my website or if i want it to be strict photography. I guess we'll see how they scan.

"The Calabash", 1970
"Enchanter in Time"
"The Dove", 1964 is what I will be writing about.


today is a day i'd much rather be making art than theorizing about it. i hope i will never get to the point where all i can do is analyze things to death... i know i can do that with my own life quite easily so i hope that doesn't seep its way into everything else i do.

too much tahini

dear elise: please look at these polas and remember how much you adore me when i tell you... i have broken the white vase with the cork stopper. i am terribly sorry. i was quite sad because i also liked that very much... and it did come crashing upon my head quite violently. i shall find you something quite lovely soon that doesn't come from ikea.




i made the worlds worst hummus tonight. it was beyond vile.

p.s. we have basil plants now... and i haven't killed them... yet

fabricated family

"Real silence-speaking is the kind that comes out of people's mouths when they've got a secret stuck on the back of their tongues. I'm not sure if people silence-speak in order to drown the secret by covering it under so many other words, or if they silent-speak in order to dislodge the secret from the back of the tongue- using all the other words as elaborate levers and pulleys and in this way bring it to the front of the mouth, and then out into the open. Probably for both reasons. Atleast in this family it seemed to me that this was true." -Nomi Eve




I silent-speak most of the time my mouth is moving. I'm never actually uttering the words that are present when the thought of speaking originated.

I just finished "The Family Orchard" by Nomi Eve. This is a fabricated history of the author's family, as if it were pieced together though the handed down legends. It's quite beautiful because where does truth and speculation blend when generations are so far gone and how much of history is really honest to god fact?

I haven't met most of my family, but I know they are there across an ocean. I know them through acouple photographs and antecdotes. I have vivid memories from when I was very young, two and three years. Most people don't retain that, so I wonder if I actually did or if it was engrained in my memory like truth through the photographs and stories my parents would tell everytime they brought out an album.

I'm in a portrait class for the fall and I'm so excited to work again with what originally brought me to photography, yet I'm disappointed because there is nothing more I'd rather do than go and photograph the strangers that are my family in Italy. Who wants to jet me across the Atlantic every other weekend... any takers?

I'm also very excited because my Mom has given me my grandmothers photo albums to scan. I'm hoping to eventially be able to not only record these photographs but also my mom's stories of them.

With that being said Wisconsin is so wide-open and compressing at the same time it makes me very anxious if that even makes sense. I'm so glad to be back in the city and I've decided there are few things better than drunken bike rides at 4am with Jane and Asher.

the one thing bryce ever gave me in return...

was a renewed love for the outdoors. sometimes now, living in concrete i forget i used to pack a backpack full of snacks and books and spend the entirety of my days looking for a shadier, mossier tree to perch in.



with that being said i'm working on a few things from the first of what will hopefully be many camping excursions this summer. hell even a parking lot picnic was fun. nature photography was never really my thing and it rained for most of this camping trip but that weather must have been just for me. the night before i began photographing a certain kind of light the city gets post- mid afternoon storm. i think these images might evolve into something but until i've made even alittle sense of if polaroid will suffice.

there is nothing more invigorating than the stillness before a storm and i think i might start chasing that soon.

on solitude:

my roomate/otherhalf elise will be leaving me to galavant around europe for the next two months. i don't want to sound like a terrible person and i will miss her dearly, but i think i will enjoy this time alone. i need to just pull my shit together. this is the time.

i don't know when it happened because i always used to be a fiercely independant person. i was ready to move out when i was seventeen. somewhere along the way i grew incredibly dependant on having a "love" in my life. i got to a point where i was fully capable of taking care of myself so much so that the only thing i wanted to do was to take care of another person. enter string of emotionally and monitarily dependant and draining affairs with the opposite sex. when i begin to fall for someone they quickly become the most important thing in my life, and recently i've realised to the point in which i no longer care for my own well-being. i don't know when this happened but it's stopping right now. my mother is the most self-sacrificing human being i have ever met and i would like to think it's thanks to her big heart that i was born this way and not due to my own weakness.

so many of my friends have used their time in school as a limbo until the engagement, something to entertain themselves until they become wives and mothers. this is not a gateway for me and i'm not killing time until something/someone better comes along. this is it. this is what i want... my work is my life and my life is my work and it's always been that way for me. it was just too hard to see it until now. there hasn't been a single day i wake up and find no beauty in the world and when it's not in my hands my eyes are my camera. it's just that simple. i am revived and refocused.

i have commitment issuse at times, so i'll try this for now like so many others: here is yet another photoblog. let's hear it for instant gratification, this will be easier than a website while something more permanant is underconstruction. isn't that funny? exactly what i said i was done doing.