Ansel Adams Coffee Can

Ansel Adams' 110th Birthday Today.

Young Ansel was dismissed from several private schools for his restlessness and inattentiveness, his father decided to pull him out of school in 1915, at the age of 12. Totally ADHD before they even had a label for it, he blew up like no photographer ever before.

Embracing art and commerce like the best of us, AA licensed an image to Hill Brothers Coffee to be reproduced on a coffee can! Genius!

I have had mixed emotions about AA's work over the years. Loved it, hated it, made fun of it, and then stood in awe of it once again. Like anything that is popular and complex, there are going to be a full range of emotions. But today, his birthday, I want to celebrate the Hills Brother's Coffee Can, seen above, with reproduced Winter Morning, Yosemite Valley, California, 1969 on the can itself.

And then this quote from Ansel, about his Imogen Cunningham's accusations of him being a sellout:

"In any case, I know she disapproved of that Hills Brothers coffee can that came out about 1968 - the one with one of my Yosemite snow scenes on it. She made that very clear. She sent me one of the cans with a marijuana plant growing in it! And then there was the television commercial I did for Datsun. For every test-drive a potential customer took, Datsun would have a seedling planted by the U.S. Forest Service. I thought it was a pretty good idea to get some trees planted, and if you have to have cars, at least Datsuns get good mileage. But Imogen didn't see it that way."

Who knew the history of photography could be so awesome...?

Sunday School

It kind of feels like Picasso's Guernica, but the After School Special version.

Details of a large scale public art project currently in progress at the UU church we go to. Dipped into the ever flowing river of parenthood, the one that never stops, and pulled these pieces out.

Scraping together some other bits and pieces of the year ahead and trying to tie up loose ends from 2011 this week...so maybe nothing to report on the blog...it may be quiet?

Stay tuned to Stereoscopy Photographs, it seems like all my attention and energy flows in that direction these days. And commercial photography of course...

Stereoscopy Photographs Have White Space

Remember to visit Stereoscopy Photographs.
Words and images and a shout out to the work that is inspiring it.
Visit it, see it, read it, follow it HERE.

JUXTAPOZ

Back when this project came out the publishers and I had hoped and kind of expected some type of blessing from the powers that be at JUXTAPOZ. Then it was not meant to be.

I was happily surprised to see this on their site Friday nite. Sometimes things take time.

See it HERE. Buy Sex Machines : Photographs and Interviews HERE.

Turn Your Dial To Tumblr

It is dark so early these days. I needed something to get me through the winter.

I wanted a place to collect images I am playing with and I wanted to see them with size and splendor.

When ECHO became this viral entity that was shared among the visually hungry high school / young adult tumblr crowd, it led me to their visually savvy world. The kids are using tumblr as an art gallery, a mood board, a way to toss things out and see them and think about them. Kind of like push pinning your photographs to your wall so you can think about them and keep them or kill them. This is what I need.

Now it's called .Stereoscopy Photographs.

It is located at http://timothyarchibald.tumblr.com/

Why did you call it that?

Follow it and find out. See it grow and evolve HERE.

Thankgiving Gift

Had a quick trip to LA last month where I got to visit with Jonathan Saunders.
Time passed and life caught up with me.
On the day after Thanksgiving I discovered his gift to me.
On 11.11.11, a date that echoes itself.
Thank you.
See the gift HERE.

Photographer Slugging Nazi With Camera

Was enjoying Tony's blog DROOL last night and could not resist blantantly ripping off, sharing the wonder of these photo literate comics created between July 1944 and 1946. The goal was to capitalize on kids interest in the growing hobby of photography, published by The U.S. Camera Publishing Company.

Any kid would love to see a girl braining a Nazi with an SLR, but I don't think even the most intense photo nerd would savor a comic version of the life of Matthew Brady or William Fox Talbot? Gimme the Riddler or something....geez....but there it is, part of history.

See the rest of this collection HERE.

What Is Going On In Atlanta?

So...what exactly are we doing in Atlanta? Isn't it a big Atlanta Celebrates Photography month? Is it true you are being tried for art crimes or some ethical violation? Well...yes and no...here is the deal:

Brian McGrath Davis, a grad student at Emory University approached me in the late spring about putting together a series of events at Emory based around my book/project ECHOLILIA/Sometimes I wonder, with both Eli and I in attendance.

Over the course of the summer we put together an expanded ECHOLILIA installation and a series of talks co-sponsored by ACP, Emory School of Medicine, and the Emory Center for Ethics. We are doing a bunch of stuff with various departments, but the two events open to the public are as follows:

A Conversation with Timothy Archibald
Thursday, October 27th at 6:00pm / Center for Ethics Commons, Room 102
Moderated by Dr. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, with introductory remarks by Dr. Paul Root Wolpe, Director of Center for Ethics and Dr. Ami Klin, Director of Marcus Autism Center.

Timothy Archibald / ECHOLILIA
Friday, October 28th at 7:00pm / Emory University School of Medicine, Room 110
Exhibit Opening, Artist Talk, and Reception

Read more about the event HERE.
ECHOLILIA for sale HERE.

Things To Do In Denver When...

I called up my friend LeRoy on the phone
I said, Buddy, I'm afraid to be alone
'Cause I got some weird ideas in my head
About things to do in Denver when you're dead

LeRoy says there's something you should know
Not everybody has a place to go
And home is just a place to hang your head
And dream of things to do in Denver when you're dead

-Warren Zevon 1991

Picture Society's Inagural Show 2011 goes off tommorrow night in Denver, curated by Sarah Lavigne and Julia Vandenoever, two great photo editors that I've had the good fortune to collaborate with. The show is also graced by the genius that is :

Annie Marie Musselman
Michael Lewis
Sara Forrest
Noelle Swan Gilbert
Susana Raab
Matt Slaby

Raab is a bff ( still...i think...we haven't spoken in a while?) and Lewis is a spirtual brother ( i hope...i thought he was at least..?). Everyone else? Well they are great artists whose work speaks for itself...and I'm priviledged to discover their work. Tommorrow night it goes off, with prints by Dave Woody.
Enjoy a Michael Lewis self portrait below.
Read more about Picture Society HERE.

Come On Feel The Noise : ACP 2011

Atlanta Celebrates Photography festival sprawls all over the fall in Atlanta, bringing all sorts of artists to town: Emmet Gowin, Martin Schoeller, Zoe Strauss and so many more great shows as well. The end of October opens ECHOLILIA / Sometimes I wonder at the Emory University School of Medicine with a lecture on the evening of the 28th by Elijah Archibald and myself. The event is sposored by a collaboration between the School of Medicine, ACP, and The Emory Center for Ethics. Wow.
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More details to come as we put together the expanded show and figure out what we are going to do with this experience....what are we going to talk about?

Stay tuned HERE.

So Many Things All At Once: Some Related, Some Not

One day in 2010 I was driving across the Bay Bridge during some day of career turmoil: a shoot had gone bad, the client was angry, I was losing the client and the friendly vibes I previously shared with them...the easy breezy nature of our relationship was fading. People were getting fired. New regimes were taking over and they were no longer enjoying what I had to offer.

At that moment my car's rear view mirror snapped off and fell on the dash. Wow...a moment of clarity. Everything looked clear ahead. No looking back. No chance to linger on the past. Just look out into the wide open space before you...no mirror to distract the view. What did it mean? Maybe nothing? But maybe a sign to just keep moving forward.

I was walking on the sidewalk to Dogpatch Studios in SF for the lecture on Social Networking. I feel a pull of rubber and glue and feel the strange disorientation that occurs when your heel breaks off of your shoe. Uh oh. What does it mean? Is it a sign? Should I go home? Is there just too much going on right now...too many lives being lead? Is this telling me something? Most likely no. I loved the shoes but they were $20 dollars...sometimes things fall apart.

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Heather Elder, Miki Johnson, Josh Bob and Christian Peacock all worked to put together this event. Originally I feared this event would rub me the wrong way. I was afraid the vibe of greed and capitalism would taint the creative medium that this social networking thing has always seemed to me to be. Sitting there listening to Miki introduce the concepts of the event and of her philosophy, you realize that this Social Networking thing isn't very new at all. It is deep and rooted in what makes us human. These ideas and concepts it is based on are universal...and touch on things that are universally satisfying. Miki and Heather were on the same page here and seemed to echo these points in various forms. Me? I just tried to talk about what I knew. Here are some points that stuck in my brain and still resonated in the days following:

Humans have a need to communicate that never goes away.
Everything of value in your life has grown from a conversation...whether that was via a phone or cave writing or a note passed in class.
The hunger for the "story" is a constant over time and nothing is more powerful.
There are as many stories as there are people, and all of our stories are uniquely important.

As I'm taking this all in Brooke Embry of Tidepool sends me a snapshot via text of the ECHOLILIA event she is hosting in LA. Here is a gallery, filled with people, thinking and looking and discussing the images my son and I put together for our project. Here in the gallery it isn't the whole installation, but a short sentence of 7 big and bold images, melancholy and fleshy all at once. I can't be there..neither can he...but someone can, and we can now peek into their experience. Our life can be shared there in LA, shared here in SF, and really you never run out of things to share. A real time real life status update. Please share!

I take in this moment and swallow it, cherish it. It is not epic and it's not mundane either. But it'll never really happen just like this again.

Top: APA Social Getworking Panel, Miki Johnson, Josh Bobb, Heather Elder and TA.
Bottom: Hazelle Withers at the ECHOLILIA show, 728 Alley in Santa Monica.

Time Travel Post Script

Metroland Magazine 2/2011

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So yes....you can try to download a bunch of music from the 1980's from itunes, sleep in the room you slept in during high school, eat at the dinner table with your parents and consume all the food you consumed from 1967 to 1989 and then some....but this whole Time Travel thing is all kinda blown if you bring along your kid. Cuz he is the proof that you can't really truly turn it all back now, can you?

E.A., Photography Invitational Exhibition 2/2011, Union College, Schenectady, N.Y.

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Wonderful time spent last week at the Union College Photography Invitational Exhibition in Schenectady N.Y. Clarissa Amaral's absorbingly human portraits, Raymond Felix's startling self portraits and our Echolilia work hung in the sprawling Visual Arts Atrium Gallery. So privileged to meet photographers Jeff Lansing and Frank Rapant for the first time and get to once again feel the good energy of photographer Mark McCarty and friends/mentors of thirty effing years Martin Benjamin and Donna Fitzgerald. Lisa Mitchell joined us for the day and captured it all like only a friend forever can. My former employer, Metroland Magazine, had a blurb about the show. Their words were so right on, I couldn't wait to share them:

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Archibald presents a lecture this afternoon about ECHOLILIA and it's candid images, which unveil aggression, isolation, intensity and creation between father and son with exquisite tenderness.

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This is the family tree of photography...for me. Thank you everyone who has helped it grow.

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Photography Invitational Exhibition 2/2011, Union College, Schenectady N.Y.

Time Travel Again

Schenectady N.Y. 1985

So...what is going on?
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Last week was spent racing to the finish line producing a totally fun ad which was to be shot this week. After a casting struggle, we found the perfect talent as the very last person to show up at our casting. He walks in the room, we tell him about the role. He takes a moment and really just transforms into the character. We shoot some shots but its hardly necessary. Boom...it ends in 4 minutes. I look around at the creatives in the casting, ask them if they want to see anything else? They looked kind of shocked:

No...I think we are good.
We thank him, the door closes, and we just look at each other :

Omg...that guy was everything we wanted.
When that happens....everyone knows. There isn't even a debate. It's a slam dunk and it is so exciting to witness.

Next week my son and I head to Schenectady N.Y.
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I was born there, discovered photography there, and left when I got out of school. Union College in Schenectady is hanging the ECHOLILIA installation in the exhibition Photography Invitational 2011, along with the work of Clarissa Amaral and Raymond Felix. Curated by my original photography teacher Martin Benjamin, the show looks so wonderful, spread out in their large Atrium Gallery. There will be a reception and lecture on Thursday the 24th. So much wonderful photography stuff to engage in, expose my kid to, get my parents to witness and share in.

I really never thought the family tree of photography would grow this large. For all of this I am thankful.

Info on the show HERE. Info on the lecture HERE.

Echolilia Invitations / Union College

Just got a stack of the invitations to Photography Invitational 2011 at The Atrium Gallery of Union College in Schenectady N.Y. Haunting and beautiful....drop me a line if you'd like one.

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The show feature the work of Clarissa Amaral , Raymond Felix as well as the Echolilia installation.

Read about the exhibition HERE.

ECHOLILIA Installation at Union College

The ECHOLILIA installation that we hung in Live Worms last month is being reworked and reconfigured to hang in a show opening January 3rd at The Arts Atrium Gallery, Union College, Schenectady, N.Y. The show also includes work by artists Clarissa Amaral and Raymond Felix. Of course ya' all know I was born there, correct?

Exhibit Co-ordinator and Photographer Frank Rapant and I shared some sketches on what shape it would take in the new space. We have 30 feet of wall space really allowing the show to open up and spread its wings into something different. I did some drawings ( shown here ) and shared them with Frank who now is making the thing come to life. The added space allows the images to form a line, a sentence, a mathematical equation that can be read from left to right. The show at Live Worms was interesting...but I was never sure if it really worked or not. Now this is getting closer to something that really works for me. Exciting stuff. Frank is still messing with the hanging but sent me a jpg of it as it goes up, at bottom.

Work In Progress Photo By Frank Rapant

There Are Times

E.A. + T.A. after Live Worms Opening, 11/7/2010

There are times when you are invisible...no matter what you do you can't get any attention.
We discussed that on this blog HERE.
Then...there are times when you are a magnet. This is one of those times.
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Here we have the Tidepool sponsored Taking Liberties show we were preparing for where we created a sort of ECHOLILIA installation...preceded by a book excerpt on TIME.com, followed by the neutron bomb of the NYT's story written by Jane Gross on the origins of the ECHOLILIA project. Jane cut to the heart of the project in a story so perceptive I can't deny I learned from it. Then we have all the ECHO books selling like never before and we realize CNN is promoting the book and the Tooth Fairy image from the project is now a button on the CNN homepage. And in this internet age these things hit like a grass fire and then stop in a minute and everyone moves on to the next thing...

But its not really the attention that is the thing...its the feedback. Hearing how the project hits people around the world in the Internet and in a gallery in North Beach is really an invaluable experience. So it's not just a sugar buzz, caffeine high...there is substance there...stuff to be learned. More on that in a future post. Just checking in for now and wanted to share these shots from the weekend.
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Bye.
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Taking Liberties at Live Worms, 10/5/2010

Taking Liberties : Friday 6:00 pm

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Pals Suz and Wes help create the Echolilia installation earlier today...Michael Tompert and Diane Eames have share some secret art below....

Taking Liberties: Erik Almas, Timothy Archibald & Michael Tompert
Friday Nite Big Bash at Live Worms, 1345 Grant in SF at 6:00pm on.

Lots of parking, nice cheap lots and street parking a plenty....we were there today and scouted it our for ya! Come to the bash and say hi...
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The Candidates, 10 / 2010

Ava Ahlstrand for Vice President

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Marc Bolibol for Vice President

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Mariell Kristine Micael for Vice President

Tired Of Hearing About This Yet?

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Well it just is really exciting and cool for me to see what springs from this ECHOLILIA project. Me just doing something is one thing...its fun for just me. Me doing something and seeing how people interpret it, question it, use it, get inspired by it, get grossed out by it...now that is really interesting. That's when it starts spreading and evolving. Let's see where this can go? That's the good stuff the project is opening up to now.

Scientific American had this inspired use of an image and then sent us to Portland to finish the story. Then, just as my laptop was being stolen from us at the Oakland Airport last month, Alison Zavos of Feature Shoot runs this inspired Q + A.

And I haven't even mentioned the exhibition forthcoming at Live Worms in North Beach...have I?

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Photographic Ground Zero : Pier 24

I was surprised I didn't know about this already. Sunday the SF Chronicle had a story written by Sam Whiting telling the tale of Andy Pilara. It starts like this:

In the small world of photography collecting, investment banker Andy Pilara was a complete unknown until the day he walked into San Francisco's Fraenkel Gallery and walked back out with the first picture he had ever bought, a Diane Arbus.
Seven years later, Pilara, 68, has built a collection of 20th century American documentary photography so vast and comprehensive that he had to rent a vacant warehouse on the Embarcadero just to display it.

A quick search revealed that Whitney Johnson at The New Yorker had blogged about it back in March. Where was I? A visit to the Pier 24 website states their intentions so eloquently I had to catch my breath:

Pier 24 has been designed to provide an environment that is open to the public in which photographic ideas, dialogue, and critical thought can be cultivated and shared with the community. Individuals, photographers, educators, collectors, and curators will be invited to explore a venue that is devoted primarily to photography of the 20th and 21st century. Our aspiration is to provide the opportunity to experience, study, and quietly contemplate the permanent photographic collection of the Pilara Foundation.

This gesture and statement seemed so generous, enlightened and so very San Francisco: a guy discovers the power of photography, has the means to collect it, and wants to share it with the world. There is nothing more to say.

Read the Chronicle story HERE. Visit Pier24.org HERE.

Photograph by Russell Yip/ San Francisco Chronicle