Receipt Haiku

Home

I'm home for 5 days for a break in the midst of this great commercial project that is happily inhabiting all of September. We are on a break, swapping out Art Directors, being rejoined by producer Kara Snider. After she kicked major ass across middle America, we let The T Is Silent leave on an art-making sabbatical, to be replaced by Suzy Poling, just home from making art in the UK. Tuesday we all fly to Miami to start again...what glamorous lives we lead! Not really, but it sounds great on paper. Shooting the whole job with natural light, a control panel, and a hand held camera...have not broken a tripod out yet. Really the most un-commercial commercial job I've ever been involved in...it is such a great time, lots of work for sure, but the freedom of the job is lost on no one.

y

It's kind of tricky to switch gears from days in which my only obligation is to take photographs and stick a fork with food in my mouth, to these days at home that involve waking up with the kids, getting them what they need emotionally and physically, having a relationship with Cheri, with the kids, and dealing with all the real relationships that exist outside of the bubble of the long, on-the-road photo shoot. Its an adjustment, and I find myself anxious for the simplicity of the photo shoot: someone is there to work out the details, food is always around, the subjects are new and we are all fascinated with each other....we are all in love with each other for the bubble of the shoot, and then it's time to go. Then home, the adjustment starts. It takes a few days home for the pleasures and satisfactions of all the rich stuff, the complex emotions that are what home is about to really sink in.

y

No pics from the project, but here is a piece about my own home I put together this morning, above.

Quiet Blog

Unfortunately, no sneak peeks from the current project I'm working on throughout September.
We just need to be below the radar for a while. It may be quiet here for a while, but I'll be back with good stuff, I promise.

Today I did get a chance to witness my son losing his front tooth, below:

13 Pegs and 2 Holes In Lite Brite Page

Interview ( with myself )

So, what is with the scanner?

TA: I guess I'm trying to find a way to show the stuff of my life in the most un emotional, objective, clean documentative way that I can. I want to be able to look at this stuff, with one less decision in the mix. Do you like it?

Hmmm, well, it gets a bit tiresome, it starts to look like a gimmick, but I'll accept it, see where it goes.

TA: Cool. Then, this other thing is that all my friends are telling me I should be shooting this on film. I was all into going in that direction...I wanted these things to look beautiful as well, thus film, but then someone came over my place the other day and she showed me this project by Ari Marcopoulos, and she said that his whole thing was not elitist: he wanted to only make images that could be processed by Walgreens or something like that. His project was his family, his 2 boys, so now...I'm back to embracing the digital, the scanner, stickers, lick-on-tattoos, etc.

I see. Talking yourself into the lazy way out, huh?

TA: Yeah, totally.

Pictures From Home, 8/21/07

Niagara Undertones

I had so much fun on Monday afternoon as a guest lecturer at San Francisco Art Institutes' "Finding Your Subject" photo class. I was asked to put together a slide show on the projects that preceded "Sex Machines", so I had to dig thru a bunch of early work and try to find the link between all of these projects. Worked on it Sunday, nervously went over it on Monday morning and then hustled over to the SFAI to deal with the talk . I was a bit suspicious: the entire speaking gig had been arranged via blackberry emails while I was chasing my kids around at the park on Saturday morning: "Please show up at noon, room 16a. No need to call, just come by"

Sunday night it struck me. This was possibly a set up. A large scale practical joke arranged by lord knows who, devised to punish and humiliate me for lord knows what...maybe for taking myself too seriously."Hahahaha...Sex Machine guy....hahaha...yeah, please come and discuss the depth of your work....hahahaha....." But it was too late: I already told all my friends I was doing this talk.

We find room 16a up a narrow stairway. We knock on the door, the room is dark. I dunno...this can't be the place. A friendly looking guy approaches. Who is that guy in the feed cap? Looks kinda like the guy working the beer concession at the ball park. Ok...um, I'll have two more please. Oh, it's Magnum photographer, Sleeping By The Mississippi and Niagara author Alec Soth! He's running the class five days a week, 9 am to 4 pm, for two weeks. The students come in and come out two weeks later, enlightened. Sounds like boot camp, basic training, and Minor White all wrapped up in one.

Just to get to the heart of the matter over lunch, I blurt out the question that his been on my mind for months now: " What is up with those naked people in Niagara?"

And there, with a bite of tuna sandwich on his plate, a bowl of macaroni and cheese between us, he addresses it as if I was asking him if I could borrow his lawnmower. Straight up, no apologies, I got my answer. Niagara was about love: the honeymoon at Niagara Falls, the hotel rooms, the love letters, the wedding rings...and then these undertones of sexuality, specifically relating to the penis. Every naked couple in the book...the man is exposed, the woman is tastefully covered. Soth photographs himself awkwardly in the mirror of a hotel room, tilting his body and exposing himself, reflected in the hotel bathroom mirror. "Niagara...it sounds like Viagra, then the falls are this rushing explosion of water, a fluid, a force", he straightforwardly explains.

I drove home and looked thru the book. The theory holds up. Like listening to Dark Side of The Moon and watching Wizard of Oz simultaneously, you just gotta go home and try it. You'll never look at the book the same way again.

alec soth ( center) and sfai class

top photo of falls by alec soth, excerpted from Niagra