herald and hark...

our upstairs neighbor who i was [this] close to introducing myself to... frightened me away by belting hark the herald angels sing in full operatic vibrato while bounding up and down the front entry stairs.



i just needed to borrow the laudry key. i locked MY laundry key in the laundry room.

i have aquired a cold, and i'm not sure if it's from the pools i've been jumping into at odd hours of the night... or a reaction to the few sporatic cigarettes i've smoked lately... or a reaction to the aforementioned pools? either way chicago is somehow giving me a severe sinus headache. good thing i am going to milwaukee this weekend.

i never thought i'd live to see the day when i would say 'good thing i'm going to milwaukee'

dear friends Nadine Reinke and Matt Austin will have pieces exhibited in the CoPA Exhibition opening up in Milwaukee this friday night at 7pm. Nadine has just finished a very lovely website, which features in addition to her work some really awesome photographers like my new favorite Gabi Vogt, and of course Zoe Bare.

monday i was very pleased to have been asked to the Marwen Arts Center by Kris Brailey as a guest artist to show some of my pinhole work. Kris is doing a workshop at Marwen for CPS teachers one of whom was Greg Foster-Rice's mom. A very sweet lady. Thanks Kris I had so much fun!

I've gotten alot of responces and injuries about my cameras so i thought i'd post some info on them below. enjoy!

one of my favorite cameras to shoot with right now is my converted Polaroid 220 land camera.




i have removed the face plate in order to override the automatic light meter. this lets me run the camera on bulb. i work with exposures from 3 secs- 5 mins. these cameras take pack polaroid (i use fuji fp-100) and before i loaded the film i put a brass pinhole on the inside of the aperature. this gives an interesting circular vignette to the image.









i do however love turning unusual objects into cameras as well and this one is a decorative planter i got at target. i just hammered a hole and attached a brass pinhole on top of that. this camera works with 11 x 14 paper negatives.












And to conclude something completely unrelated to photography for the sake of sanity... a music report! Katy and i were at the empty bottle on sunday, to see the lovely St. Vincent . Her tracks on myspace do not give justice to the energetic live performance of her and the band, check it out. well worth seeing live. I'm a sucker for eletric guitar with violin.

my sunshine

things i have foolishly taken apart and cannot put back together... this week.

i'm becoming a deconstructionist:

1. pentax smc 1:2 50mm lens

2. 80's era betsey johnson party dress

3. Sear's Roebuck Tower 120 camera

4. driver's side door to pink geo tracker

5. powerbook g4 (most concerned about this one)

sometimes i like to think that if i take it apart and put it back together all by myself, i'll understand how it works. i never get to that understanding.



i have spent the day scanning negatives from all my highschool travels shot with my pentax k1000 and the above 50mm lens which very unfortunately did not survive a particularly exasperating metra ride to Fox Lake last thanksgiving. so i figured what the hell, it's not working now... let's take it apart. it was interesting until i attempted to put it back together.

that camera has been to england, france, germany, italy, romania, hungary, austria, and the czech republic with me. we're rather attached. i don't care how much nicer any of my newer equiptment is... i still shoot with it, take it everywhere, and get what i want from it: my life on film.




i always preffered playing with legos when i was little. i was much better with legos.

i have erased the harddrive on my powerbook twice now and i have decided it is a lost cause.

the driver's side door to my car has decided it's about time to fall off.

my mother called me sobbing today because the cat died. this happened ironically in the middle of a long conversation with pete barerras about parents getting older and dying. looking at too many old photos. sam, niki, jane, kim and i in prague. never knew how good we had it. i would go back in a heartbeat if i could.

it's been a really strange few days. i hate hearing my mom cry.

Miss You!!!

dearest elise, i have but one request... can you bring me back a jar of nutella? they just make it better in italy. MUAH!





don't forget the skyline.



promise the clouds won't look this good in L.A.

dave eggers on photography...

i'm writing my final paper for my 20th century crit. class on John Currin (below) but i keep getting distracted because this amazing retrospective book of his that i'm using for research has shorts from Eggers scattered between the essays. this "go-getters" piece made me hurt in so many ways much like this class has caused me to.




spending so much focused time on discussing art, and what defines art, and how and why people make art... and the reason people think they have the authority to label and classify and qualify and quantify art makes me hurt. Jeff Wall's essays on modernism and photography as conceptual modern art... got me thinking about so much. why am i even taking pictures?

i don't know, up until this i've been in a constant cycle of act now think later. photograph now think later. photograph now analyze to death. premeditative photography never works out as well for me, or loses some meaning to me for some reason. i suppose i'll eleaborate on Jeff Wall later, because i honestly a week ago went to see his exhibit at the AI and bought his essays immediately... i've been re-reading the same essay for the past week trying to make sense of it and put it in relation to how i view my artist process.

the one thing i have concluded from this class in particular is that the way columbia teaches photography without philosophy is completey frustrating to me. i know we're in ways as much a technical trade school (especially the photography department) as an art school. but some of us are making art, and trying to understand how and why we're making art and trying to do that with no history or theory behind that is entirely unsettling. i guess i'm just surprised there isn't atleast something addressing the intellectual and psychological ramifications of making pictures... but that like many other things is just left for us to flounder about figuring out. but if generations of people sat down and discussed painting and what that meant to society then why isn't that happening more in this school for this artform?

i'm stepping off my soapbox because if that happened i don't know if i would even be able to deal with it... this class has made me realize how much i'd rather just be making and doing art right now and maybe i'll think about it later. hell some of the most refreshing "art pieces" i've seen lately have been stencils and tags scattered around logan square. and while all of this is bouncing around in my head i come across Dave Eggers' "Go- Getters"

"The woman is a young woman. She wants to make a living as a photographer, but at the moment she is temping at a company that publishes books about wetlands preservation. On her days off she takes pictures, and today she is sitting in her car, across the street from a small grocery store called The Go-Getters Market. The store is located in a very poor neighbourhood: the windows are barred and at night a roll-down steel door covers the storefront. The woman thus finds the name Go-Getters an interesting one, because it is clear that the customers of the market are anything but. They are drunkards and prostitutes and transients, and the young photographer thinks that if she can get the right picture of some of these people entering the store, she will make a picture that would be considered trenchant, or even poignant - either way the product of a sharp and observant eye. So she sits in her Toyota Camry, which her parents gave her because it was four years old and they wanted something new, and she waits for the right poor person to enter or leave the store. She has her window closed, but will open it when the right person appears, and then shoot that person under the sign that says Go-Getters. This, for the viewer of her photograph when it is displayed - first in a gallery, then in the hallway of a collector, and later in a museum when she has her retrospective - will prove that she, the photographer, has an exceptional eye for irony and hypocrisy, for the inequities and injustices of life, its absurdity perfect and absolute."

- we've all been there. we're all narcissists... this might just be THE reason why i sometimes feel like an asshole for calling myself "a photographer". then again most people are assholes. bet Dave Egger's an asshole but boy did he make me laugh.

my new favorite painting...

and pretty much how i feel...





John Currin's "Heartless"

something consciously unconscious

my pro-printing final: "chiara's sad pictures because the sun won't shine" (*a reflection on a really great year...).































I'm lookin to edit this down to 5 or 7 images that work well in a short sequence for a small portfolio to submit so i'd be interested in hearing anyone's opinion.


*inwhichilostmybestfriendandcreativepartnerhopewillandmotivationanysenseofgodorlosspulledthroughlikethewalkingdeadonlytofeelcompletelyinadequaitagainwhichisnowaprettystandardfeelingcompletelyinsecureanddistrustingwhenitcomestoanyoneespeciallymyselfwhenithinkofhowfastthesepastthreeyearspassedandwhatihavetoshowforitintheendbutafamilyineverseethatlovesmeanywaystotalstrangersmyparentsareoldnevershouldhavemarriedthereisnoloveeveryonearoundmeisinloveandnowicanreallysayitandmeanitimperfectlyhappybeingcompletelyalone.

misc. adventures in music, literature and fruit

things of note: sooooo last night susan, katy and i ventured to the empty bottle (ahhhem...to visit my adopted cat) and to see Mysteriam (the project of musicians that accompany at columbia's dance center. it was pretty surprising. i haven't seen alot of mostly electronic music played live, especially electronic percussion... it's still strange for me to see someone walk onto a stage with a macbook, but that aside they had this electronic percussion pad set up in the midst of a few cymbals.. like a normal kit would be. the drummer could play three different tones on this pad just by touching different places on it. i was just amazed. i WANT one. but the band was really good, full sound, swirling and looping plus video timed to the music. it was a trip.(although i still preffer the drummer on a conga, he blew me away when i auditioned last year) aaaaaand more places should bring back the photobooth! a good time was had by all.




i just finished reading Persepolis and its sequal. these are amazing illustrated autobiographies of the graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi. she grew up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution of 1979. i can't tell you how amazing and painful it is to read... told in illustrations through the eyes of a child, we can't even image what it would be like to live through war and revolution like that and she did at ten years old. ever since my middle eastern history classes i've been fascinated with Iranian culture. this is something to check out, if anything just for the style of illustration. it's childish and charming, and interesting to see marjane's character grow up through the sequel.













lastly, i would just like to state that i do not support GMO's and there happens to still be sitting on our kitchen shelf a very small watermelon. "a mini melon" if you will. it's been perched inside a nest of my coffee filters since about two weeks before Elise left for europe. its ominous pressense has been haunting me for awhile now. i could see it staring at me even while sitting in the livingroom... yet the longer it sat there the more afraid i was to pick it up and move it to the trash as it would most certainly disintegrate into a ball of stinky gelatinous mush mold as any other genetically untampered piece of fruit sitting for that long would... except for this one... until tonight. i finally broke down, 3am and halfway through a paper i needed a coffee filter. this melon would not stop me. it didn't. surprisely it has not molded yet thanks to the freakish developments of science... so elise i think i'm going to try to save this one until you get home.