Arbus Shots We Never Get To See

After seeing a few photographs by Diane Arbus that I had never really seen before last week at Fraenkel Gallery in SF, I began thinking about this photograph above "Two Girls in Identical Raincoats, Central Park, N.Y.C, 1969". This image was in the first printing of the Diane Arbus monograph but removed from subsequent printings. When I was in college the professor, Marc Hessle, had a copy of the early book he carried around with him constantly. I remember looking at his copy, noticing the image above, loving it, and never seeing it again or in other copies of the book. He explained that the family of the girls didn't like the inclusion of the photograph and asked that it be removed. Doing a search online for information about this shot and the exclusion, I couldn't find anything...but fortunately found the shot in a classic Google moment.

Does anyone know the story behind the removal of this image? For everyone else, please enjoy.

Three Legged Pair

Kind of thought of as a partner to the image below, made earlier in the year:

Home Lab : A Shark

My son shot a shark at an aquarium and printed it out on the desktop printer.
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This is the photograph.

John Madden, Errol Morris, Diane Arbus

I was going to do this post that was all about photographing TV football guy John Madden for TIME last week, while on the set of an Errol Morris TV commercial that Morris was filming. It sounded like it would make a good post, being there in the shadow of the man who really has balanced Art and Commerce and everyone knows it...and that is documentary film maker and TV commercial director Errol Morris, not John Madden. But..I did kind of walk away from the shoot thinking that Madden was really an actor, deep inside, who has created this character that all of America ( well the football-loving part of America ) can relate to. After watching Madden perform for the video cameras...there was no question. He stepped amidst my Kino Flo lights and I whispered to him " Wow...I didn't realize you were such an actor," and he whispers back " I'm not...I'm just being myself, " and we both knew he was lying as he digs in, takes direction, and delivers this John Madden character. It seemed like a timeless performance. That shot can be seen below.

Above, a great Diane Arbus shot I saw for the first time yesterday at Fraenkel Gallery in SF. Click on it and see it big. Below, Madden.

CA! well, no....

Communication Arts Photo Annual appears in mailboxes around the nation this week. Always the big thing that all working photographers are aspiring to get into to spread the word of their great work and commercial viability. Of course I always try to get in that thing...but no luck this year, sorry to say.

What did show up in the mailbox yesterday was the book that was produced for HIJACKED Volume One, Australia and America. I've blogged about it previously when the exhibition was at the ACP, and then in NY...and by now I forgot the book was even the thing they were trying to put together in the first place. It's kind of striking and beautifull, as cliched as those words tend to be when discussing a photography book. Weird feeling seeing these images that are directly about my life published in this kind of glossy coffee table book...kind of felt naked for a moment, but there is lots of stuff in there to distract the masses: 2 essays, interviews with every artist, and stuff from lots of pals who've crossed pathes with this blog: Zipco, Poling, Small, Juniper and others. It's fun to look at and far, far away from the world of photography commerce. Really, its better! Spend your money and buy it HERE.

Behavior Modification / Three Kittens

Home Lab Part 3

Inside And Outside

Two pictures I didn't know what to do with...but sometimes when you've been away from a project you just need to start somewhere.

Home Lab Part 2

Home Photo Lab Envelope, July 2008

Colorado Springs

Spent days in the wilderness last week, came home, celebrated the 4th of July and a long weekend, and then headed out to Colorado Springs to photograph Olympic Greco-Roman wrestler T.C. Dantzler. Bad vibes on the horizon: all of this travel was upsetting my domestic balance, this sense of equilibrium my wife and kids and I try to maintain was slipping away. Dantzler and his wife were on the verge of having a baby at any moment, and once that occured...things would need to be rescheduled and no one really knew if the shot could be done at all at that point. We get to Colorado and it is pouring rain.

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The crew was Suzy Poling, Christina Kiffney and myself. A kind of massive day amidst 3 locations, finishing the shoot at the Olympic Training Center where we build a studio out of wrestling dummies and wrestling mats. We are done, its been a long couple of days. How to shift gears after the shoot? A beer? Food? I dunno. Kind of lost, kind of brain dead, we drive thru the town. See a giant inflatable ice cream cone on the roof of BJ's Velvet Freeze, we pull over for ice cream. Here, right next door to the ice cream place is The Crystal Sage Healing Center. The sign reads "Chakra Re-alignments : $20." Do we really need ice cream?

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We walk in to the Center and Poling orders directly from the sign: "Two please. Let him go first, he's never done this before."

Another Commercial Break

If you have a blog and you have "sitemeter" and a comments page, you have a pretty good idea what your audience is hungry for. What gets the hits? What gets the links? What gets all the smart readers onto their keyboards and typing insightful comments? At this blog, the hits peak and the readers chime in with all the Echolilia excavations: weird pictures of kids, pictures of pills, scans of partially legible scribblings, attempted views into the psyche of a kid. What gets everyone's eyes rolling? What gets hits that time in at 1 second or less? It's this commercial stuff I plug every now and then...that is what the readers have little or no patience for. Colin Pantall sends a private email stating: "You don't have to limit yourself to being a marketing machine!!"

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But I do....I do.

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I'm up in Colorado Springs photographing Olympic wrestler T.C. Dantzler for a few days after last weeks Yosemite project, so my access to kids, scans, etc has been kept to a minimum. I'll need to keep this commercial stuff rolling this week...just bear with me....

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Above, a project created with Shannon Amos for Randi Silbermann of Spectrum Magazine.

Ansel Adams, wtf?

Last Wednesday I'm staring at El Capitan from Glacier Point in Yosemite as the setting sun changes the color of the rock surface: its golden, now its pink, the shadows slide along it with the pace of a solar eclipse. The atmosphere above is blue in a perfect gradation. It appears lunar, metaphorical and just simply profound...it has all the qualities in it...I don't even need to interpret it. My camera is around my neck, a junky digital creation that will be out of date in a year. I don't even look thru the camera. I simply push the button in the general direction of the rock. I didn't really do a thing, I just was a witness.

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The following two days are just about picturemaking: driving, no cell phones, no blogging, no email, but its a job, so the pace is still frantic. A nice frantic.

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