Print Lives : On Earth Magazine, Summer 2013

Inspired spread here in the current issue of On Earth Magazine. This is my spread, but every spread in the issue is striking.

Dream design/photo team of Gail Ghezzi and Gail Henry always seem to deliver the unexpected yet beautiful. This is on the newsstand now, or read the story HERE.

Welcome To This Open Bubble With No Air

This is how it goes down in Brazil:

Popular Photography magazine publishes an edition in Brazil that includes ECHOLILIA. It hits the newstands and subscribers mailboxes. A blog know as HYPENESS grabs it, does a quick Google search, cranks out a small gallery of ECHOLILIA with text and it spreads like wild fire. Suddenly your site is getting 1900 hits a day, for days upon days. Copies of ECHO are selling as never before. Everyone in Brazil is friending you on FB. Parents, teenagers, teachers, very little of it has to do with photography. It seems like it's about something else. The universal greeting, in translation, seems to be "Big Hugs".

The big daily has EPOCA, a weekly magazine. They license the story and it publishes in hard copy. The internet love and hate machine starts all over again. I'm charmed, I'm thankful, but it seems so far away.

I need the love and hate here and now!

Here is a sample:

I know, I am not your friend, but I would like to be.
I know that you don´t know me, but you will... (haunted by your son's pictures)

Welcome to this open bubble with no air, hugs.

-JD

I personally would find it sad to use my son as a guinea pig on meaningless photos.
-Anonymous

Welcome, my family was very moved and happy with your photos. It's really a wonderful job. I am the father of an autistic and also love taking his picture!
Big hug!!
-RF

my good friend
look at the sky
i blinked for your kind face
right now
you can hear my salutation
-SK

I recently came upon your 'Echolilia'. I was intrigued by the subject as I work with high schoolers with autism. Spending five days a week seven hours a day with autistic kids, I couldn't help but to feel very moved by your photographs of your son. I know that the initial goal was to find an emotional bridge between you and your son, but I think you also succeeded in translating a certain code to autism. One that shows how people with autism absorb the world through their senses in a completely unique way. Thank you for sharing something so very personal.

-SO

I discovered you thanks to the recent Popular Photography issue that features your Echolilia project. I must say, it is a beautiful and very moving project. Also incredibly inspiring ! How many people can take something that is a difficulty ("The series began with capturing habits that had driven Archibald crazy") and turn it into a positive, revealing, incredible thing ("we had this mutual sense of discovery") ?
Bless you for being that person.
-AK

I saw your work, and frozen my head.
You are and your son are just amazing.
-LG

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So is any of this true?
Do people really want to hug me? Are we really "amazing"? Did I really use someone as a guinea pig?

Well no, of course not.

But it is a good example of what can happen when an art project sneaks out of the little art world and somehow reaches the masses. At that point it's not really about art anymore, it's about something else.

And what that is I just don't know, but I thankfully accept it.
 

 

I Want That Storybook Life





This can't be the place.

The GPS tells me we are here, but we look around and it doesn't feel right.

Where is the romance? Where is the quaint? Where are the cottages designed to make you want to run away from the world and hide in, live in...the place to lead your new storybook life?

All we see is a framed out shed made of two by fours, a rain tarp, maybe a trailer hitch...none of these pieces are adding up.

Enter Jay Shafer. Shouting hello over the locked gate, he opens the door and leads us in. Now...if you look here...and only here...you'll have your storybook life. And then some. Don't look to the right or left, and certainly ignore the man behind the curtain.

Of course, I eat it all up. Shafer's backround as an artist has taught him how to build this quality home that delivers the projected fantasy...so strongly that you actually see the size as an asset, not a liability. The contruction feels and is the real thing...and the design is even more.

See more of his inspiring work with Four Lights Houses HERE.

Quick Trip To LA

A quick trip to Los Angeles with a shout out to Chris Burden, Jimmy Page, and the wonder of Urban Light at LACMA.

More to come.

April Showers Bring May Spam Options



Spam.
Constant Contact.
Email Blast.
Direct Social Marketing.
None of these things sound even the least bit postive. Even the euphemisms are jarring. But every month I share a handful of options with my reps and every month we send forth a spam.

We check the numbers of emails opened vs. the number of emails sent out. Then follow the "click throughs". These numbers are abysmal. Totally depressing. But every month something...maybe little maybe not so little, seems to come calling the next day.

Though now for sure I've jinxed it. Here are this month's options...and our keeper up top.

Peace.




     

 

Autism Week On Lenscratch

Aline Smithson's popular blog LENSCRATCH is devoted this past week to photographs about Autism.

A sub-genre I never would have predicted defining itself, it is here and it's most likely not going away.

 

Featuring the work of Bruce Hall, Charles Mintz, Reathel Geary and myself. Not wanting to steal the thunder of LENSCRATCH, I'll let her showcase the work of these photographers. It's all great stuff to be found at the links below.

 

For me, ECHOLILIA has almost become the neighborhood kid I let play at the house and then next thing you know he is a teenageer living in the basement. The project certainly has a life of it's own that goes beyond anything I see in the work at this point. It's almost become simply a phenomena that I observe from the distance. I'm older, Eli is older and the world has turned.

 

Aline Smithson asked for an essay that didn't really introduce the project, but something that reflected on it. I wanted to share the essay here:

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ECHOLILIA ended up being the project, as clichéd as it sounds, that literally changed everything for me. In some ways good, some ways not so good. But it did begin a domino effect that is still tumbling to this day.

A collection of photographs I worked on collaboratively with my son and all shot in our home, these simple photographs were raw and primitive. They reminded me of a beginning student’s photo project: simple props, window lighting, just a Dad making photographs with his son in this quiet child mindset. The results seemed to be photographs made out of nothing except the ability to pay attention and listen to someone else.

The results didn’t look like my photographs as all. But being the greedy artist I am, always looking for something new, I immediately took credit for these unusual looking images.

Being a photographer with contacts in the magazine and newspaper world, I was able to get this body of work in front of magazine photo editors with a brief introduction to our process, as well as my reluctant use of the word “Autism”, a term I was wary to admit to in the beginning. The internet sends messages to an unprecedented audience these days. As the series was published, I began receiving notes from parents as well as the kids themselves, from around the world, telling me that they are seeing their son, or themselves, in this series of photographs. Parents sent me snapshots of their kids that could have easily fit into the pages of my project: the notes, the body language, the in-door nudity, the hyper focus on an everyday object…parents around the world were snapping photographs of their autistic kid’s obsessions and behaviors. This was part of the process of trying to figure their kids out. It occurred to me then that I really had done nothing new with this project. I simply was doing what any parent would do, but I had an eye for good light and possibly a better camera.

Eli and I stopped photographing ECHOLILIA when we realized we were done. We had nothing left to discover together with photography…we had built a bridge of sorts and didn’t really need this tool anymore. My current series “Stereoscopy Photographs” looks at his brother’s role in the family, and how he has to navigate with this larger than life older brother that is tuned differently than he. Eli appears in this project at times, but this time it’s different. I’m no longer working with him. We did that already. At this point if he appears, I’m simply looking at him, as any parent would look at their kid. Just a photograph, nothing more. We don’t have to be digging for something. We can just be.

Tune into Autism Week on Lenscratch:

BRUCE HALL : Jack Knows Water

Reathel Geary : Waiting for Griffin

Charles Mintz : The Album Project

Timothy Archibald : ECHOLILIA and Stereoscopy Photographs




 

The History Of Photography, Chapter 782

What qualifies for The History Of Photography these days?

Well if not this, then nothing:

Photographer Sandra-Lee Phipps, knee deep in leveling the ATL with her landmark exhibition SAFE at Whitespace Gallery somehow elbows up to the mythical Mike Brodie, signing the final copies of his quickly sold-out, long awaited book.

Money had changed hands amidst the ethernet and the next thing you know Brodie is etching my name upon a copy of his book A Period of Juvenile Prosperity published by Twin Palms Press. I am assuming her husband photographer Russell Kaye was involved with driving the getaway car...or something like that.

Then all returned to the SAFE exhibition, thus making a History of Photography Tri-fecta. Below, a startlingly beautiful photograph from Sandra-Lee Phipps' exhibtion SAFE.

This is revisionist history I'm sure, but needed to be noted.

All these people are bringing it. Enjoy.