Book Review Photo Shoot

Ok, ok, ok...enough angst and scribbles on sheets of paper and kids looking mystical. Let's comfort ourselves in the fantasy of assignment work : catering, a great crew, days to prepare and manifest the shots just the way we want'em ...the type of control that never happens in day to day life. Photography Editor Randi Silberman of Spectrum Magazine bought Shannon Amos's idea of renting out a decked-out Mid Century Modern Eichler home rather than build sets for a series of photo illustrations we were putting together. We got beautifull light and a house full of props and it was supposed to be a piece of cake ...correct? Well...it never is, I always gotta freak out about something...

photo of amos and archibald by erich morton

Letter, Tooth & Paper Mask

I made both of these images this week. They don't really go together, but I liked the idea that maybe the boy was imagining what the tooth fairy would look like.

Winter & Spring

Roger Ballen Bootleg?

NYPH08 went down last week and everyone is buzzing about the Roger Ballen lecture.

Anyone out there have a transcript or a video of this important moment in the history of photography?

Read about the lecture by Michael David Murphy HERE. Read more about Ballen's philosophy on Colin Pantall's blog HERE.

Obviously I like his work. It seems that in photography, there always needs to be a boogyman, a badguy, the scary kid...it almost is an archetype. The last big one was Joel Peter Witkin, whose work at this point seems comforting and familiar. Messing with body parts, reconfiguring corpses, propping up bodies for his art historical homages, and photographing disfigured people with this attitude of revering and honoring them. Ballen's work is the new boogyman, the new scary kid. Absolutely un-empathetic, his subjects seem like they couldn't really consent to what they are participating in, even if they could understand it. It's crossing all of these lines, and is still seeming to come from an authentic place. It's for all of these reasons, these mixed emotions, that I am fascinated by it.

Card To The Teacher

Equilibrium Again

Gun, Hug, Mom, Wow.

6:15 am

5/11/08

Hijacked Exhibition at Australian Centre for Photography

The exhibition, book and all around mulit media extravaganza that is Hijacked : Volume One is now out as a book, closed as an exhibition, but alive on the net via snapshots, press and Jack Pam videos that appear here, there and everywhere on the net and all.

An interesting collection of work: alot of what I refer to as contemporary street photography, kind of real found moments with the feel of a nod to the snapshot aesthetic. My two pieces, ( Notes From The Appointment + Band Aid, 2007 and Self Portrait with Envelope and Prescription, 2007 ) seen at bottom on the right hand side, seemed out of place in the book due to their conceptual nature, but I always enjoy being the odd one out. The exhibit seemed to make them fit in just fine though...these are always two very different things. Here are some shots from the exhibit, lucky to find my work among the snaps.

Here is who is who:

Australian photographers:Greta Anderson, Duncan Barnes, Karron Bridges, Sean Cordeiro, and Claire Healy, Michael Gray, David Griggs, Caitlin Harrison, Nathalie Latham, Mark McPherson, James Mellon, Graham Miller, Martin Mischkulnig,Fiona Morris ,Tony Nathan ,Jack Pam ,Emily Portmann ,Brad Rimmer, Janelle Ryan, Flavia Schuster ,Juha Tolonen, Joshua Webb, Toni Wilkinson ,Gareth Willis

American photographers: Timothy Archibald, Angela Boatwright, Alana Celii, Nick Chatfield-Taylor, Brian Cross, Todd Fisher, Jonathan Gitelson ,Dean Karr ,Lisa Kereszi ,Jason Lazarus, Suzy Poling , Robin Schwartz ,Tod Seelie ,Sarah Small, Amy Stein , Jennifer Juniper Stratford, Bill Sullivan , Shen Wei, Grant Willing, Ed Zipco

And The Hijacked Book...

And then there is the book, edited by Mark McPherson and Max Pam. The press kit sez:
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“The most important book of photographs to come out of Australia in the past five years … Hijacked defines the shape of things to come.”
-Alasdair Foster, Director, Australian Centre for Photography
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Is it true? I dunno, I haven't got a copy yet. But some of my buds are in the book so that is always cool.

Equilibrium 2

Walking thru the park with the Mom of my son's friend. Her son was recently expelled from his after school program for placing a bag over a fellow student's head. When interviewed about the act, he explained that he was trying to kill her in her sleep. The Mom, of course, was called immediately. He can't really explain why he responded in that way, but was expelled for one day.

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The light is beautiful right now. The air feels great and smells like jasmine. It's five o'clock, the shadows are long, we pass a couple in their late twenties, laying on a blanket on the grass playing with their baby. She points them out and laughs:

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They really don't even see it coming, do they? They really have no idea.

15 People Meditating On The Grass

And me doing it in my room, Phoenix, Arizona.

Thanks to great work by killer photographers Mike Taft and Steve Craft for putting the shoots together and solving all the problems out in the 100 degree sunshine.

Note From The Party

I'm away in Phoenix, AZ for 3 days, working on a story for On Earth Magazine...real people, real places, I'm looking forward to pulling out of real life and entering the bubble of this project. Above is a note to my wife at a party yesterday.

Blood Test 5/08