Buy this: Springtown

I just received my copy of Rachael Dunville’s Springtown from photo-eye and, after only an hour or so with it, I’m in awe. I have looked at portraits, liked them, respected them, admired them, and that’s kind of where it’s ended for me. And then I looked at Rachael’s book, and the portrait became something else entirely.

I don’t know how to describe it, but here’s the closest analogy I can come up with: With some actors, I’m aware of a great performance, aware of their talent and skill and the unique set of traits and insights they’re bringing to a part, but no matter what they do, I’m still aware of that person, the actor, giving a performance. And then with other actors, I forget about them, and I’m pulled in by the character, and it isn’t until the credits roll that I think of the actor again.

So often, when I look at portraits, I feel like I’m looking at the subject look at the photographer, and I’m sort of spying on this interaction. But with Rachael Dunville’s photos, I feel like the subjects are looking at me. Rachael is gone, which means she’s really there, even more than she would be if I were aware of her.

Bottom line: I love this book, and I adore Rachael’s work, and I cannot think of a single thing you could do with twenty dollars that would be better than buying a copy of Springtown.

Copyright © Rachael Dunville

Things to do: Go to Shotgun Space on Halloween

I found out a couple weeks ago that my work would be in the Halloween group show at Shotgun Space, but I wasn’t sure who else would be included. This afternoon, I was pleased to learn that, in addition to a few of my JDPW pals whom I’d alerted to the call for entries, several of my blog friends are going to be in the show with me: Shawn Gust, Greg Wasserstrom, and Michael Werner, plus, the delightful Charity Vargas, whom I actually met in person (what a novelty!).

If you’re somebody else who found out about the call for entries through my blog (as opposed to through an e-mail from me), post a comment and let me know!

And if you’re in Los Angeles and looking for something to do on Halloween, head over to Shotgun Space (costumes encouraged but optional). Details:

Night of the Witches
Wednesday, October 31, 8–11 p.m.
Shotgun Space
2121 San Fernando Rd., Los Angeles

The best part of all: The prints will be sold in unlimited Ultrachrome editions of either 8 x 10 inches (for $25) or 13 x 19 inches (for $50).

Costumes, food, drinks, and affordable photographs. . . . Sure beats a bagful of candy and a stomachache.

Call me Other, but save the date: December 6

Launch party

What: A Field Guide to the North American Family launch party

Where: Housing Works Used Book Cafe, 126 Crosby Street, between Houston and Prince, NYC

When: Friday, November 2, 7–9 p.m.

The author, Garth Risk Hallberg, will be reading from the book and showing slides, and there will be free drinks and books for sale.

I can’t be there, so if you’re in New York, go for me?

If L.A. Weekly says it . . .

I keep meaning to mention that L.A. Weekly, the free alternative newsweekly in Los Angeles, has given Inside/Outside, my two-person show at Shotgun Space with Johanna Reed, a GO rating, which pretty much means what it says. There are listings and then there are GO listings.

If L.A. Weekly says to go, what are you waiting for? The show closes tomorrow.

Magnum blogroll

The Magnum Photos blog, adroitly run by Martin Fuchs, linked to me today, along with eighty-two others, many of whom are friends and, as Andrew would put it, inspirators. Check it out—lots and lots of good stuff there. You’re bound to find at least some sites you haven’t heard of before (unless your name is Jörg and you’ve read the entire Interweb).

The Golden State

On life at Qualcomm Stadium:

Acupuncturists set up a makeshift clinic, and signs guided stressed evacuees to yoga and meditation sessions offered elsewhere in the stadium. Crisis counseling and massage therapy also were made available.

Organizers did their best to keep evacuees plugged in electronically, with TV monitors put up throughout the facility and a cell-phone charging station on the concourse.

via Reuters

Maps

New Yorkers have a Google Map of the hip gallery scene in the Bowery Arts District courtesy of the Jen Bekman Gallery:



Amy Stein fans have a Google Map of her Stranded series:



And Southern Californians have this, courtesy of the Los Angeles Times:

California dreamin’

When I drove home from Venice last night, I took the Pacific Coast Highway, and thought to myself how calm it was. Surfers sitting on their boards in the water, waiting for a wave. Bikers congregated at Neptune’s Net (and when I say bikers, I don’t mean the Northern California cyclists—I mean guys and girls on Harleys and Hondas and Yamahas). Blue water and blue skies and slow-moving cars with license plates from Colorado and Ohio and Nebraska, with drivers and passengers all staring out their windows to the west.

When I went to bed around midnight, the winds were blowing and the dog was pacing. I awoke to pictures of Malibu burning, and thought of these words, which I read for the first time when I lived in Indiana, and which now, having lived in Southern California for six years, I know to be true:

There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sandstorms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to the flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.

I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew. I could see why. The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf. The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called “earthquake weather.” My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete. One day he would tell me that he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake.

—Joan Didion (from “Los Angeles Notebook,”
Slouching Towards Bethlehem)

Brian Vander Brug/Los Angeles Times

Norma Rae, Annie Hall, and Nicholson

I’ve been into photography since I got a Kodak Disc camera for my tenth birthday, but it’s really only been in the past two years that I’ve started to get more serious about it. This leaves me in the position of being thirty-four years old and just getting started. I look at most of my “emerging” peers, and they weren’t even born when I got my Kodak Disc. I was born under Nixon; they were born under Reagan or, Christ, even the first Bush. (I can hear S. laughing now; he was born under Hoover.)

I don’t think this really matters to me on its most basic level. Age has never been an issue for me, and you don’t have to look very far for proof of that. In many ways, I feel thankful that I’m not trying to find my voice as a photographer at the same time that I’m trying to figure out who I am as a person. I’m over that whole angst/ennui thing, and now I’m aware—very aware—of what I want to do and how little time I have to do it.

I sent Julia Dean an e-mail a couple weeks ago, thanking her for the wonderful classes she puts on at JDPW, and she replied saying that my e-mail couldn’t have come at a better time: She was just thinking that she hasn’t done enough, particularly where her nonprofit work is concerned. I haven’t yet replied, but when I do, I’ll say that no one worth her salt—and Julia’s worth her salt and then some—ever feels she’s done enough and that one lifetime isn’t adequate.

What I’m saying is, Norma Rae has osteoporosis, Annie Hall is hawking anti-aging cream on TV, and Nicholson is starting to look like a dirty old man instead of just dirty. I will blink and it’ll be over; I need to make sure I do all the things I want to do.

The result of this awareness, something that has only started to hit me in the past year or so, is that I sometimes have to pull back on the reins a bit. Case in point: Critical Mass is accepting entries, and I felt I had to do it, I had to get my work in front of those two hundred reviewers, and it had to be now. I paid my fifty dollars and started thinking about my work and which images I wanted to enter, and I realized I wasn’t ready. Not this year. Next year, maybe. But not this year. I e-mailed and withdrew and the sense of relief was incredible: I can take this at my own pace. I’m not in a race with kids still in undergrad. It doesn’t matter what anyone else was doing when she was my age.

It’s okay. And that’s the thing: When I was younger, it wouldn’t have been.

Field Guide

I just received my copy of A Field Guide to the North American Family, by Garth Risk Hallberg (Mark Batty Publisher, 2007), and even if I weren’t a part of this project, I would be blown away. It’s such a beautifully done book, and I’m really honored to be a part of it. If you haven’t yet ordered a copy, click here and do. Seriously.

Collect this: Plattsmouth, Nebraska, Carts #1

Just bought another fantastic print from 20x200. This time it’s Kate Bingaman-Burt’s Plattsmouth, Nebraska, Carts #1. Very cool.

Copyright © Kate Bingaman-Burt

Alec Soth interviewed by Michael David Murphy

via 2point8

Verner Soler

My friend Verner Soler, a photographer in Los Angeles, has recently updated his Web site—take a look here.

Copyright © Verner Soler

Verner was born and reared in Vrin, a village in Switzerland. At the age of twenty-two, he moved to Los Angeles, knowing no one in L.A. Much of what Verner does in his photography is preserve the things that are most important to him—his family, his home, his past—and I find that dichotomy (the urge to leave something and preserve it at the same time) compelling.

When I told him that I couldn’t even imagine how bizarre it must’ve been for him to move to L.A. from Vrin, he said:

L.A. was a huge culture shock to me. I was twenty-two years old at the time (a child) and barely spoke English. It was frightening in a lot of ways and still, for me, the thought of living out the rest of my life in the village was scarier. I never quite fit in there. Maybe because I always felt drawn to art and ideas and that wasn’t one of the eight things you could do there when you grow up (farmer, bricklayer, carpenter, mechanic, butcher, teacher, priest . . .). I actually became a teacher and taught school for half a year before realizing I just couldn’t do it.

Copyright © Verner Soler

That’s what it takes, you know? At twenty-two, he moved halfway around the world, from a village of a few hundred people to Los Angeles. A terrifying prospect. And yet the thought of living the rest of his life in Vrin was scarier.

We makes changes when there is no alternative.

Be sure to check out Verner’s work.

Copyright © Verner Soler

The War in Iraq through Photographers’ Eyes

The War in Iraq through Photographers’ Eyes, Part 1 of 3

The War in Iraq through Photographers’ Eyes, Part 2 of 3

The War in Iraq through Photographers’ Eyes, Part 3 of 3

via PDNPulse

Group show and Halloween party

What: Night of the Witches Group Show and Halloween Party
Who: You! And your friends!
When: Halloween, 8 to 11 p.m. (submission deadline: October 25)
Where: Shotgun Space, 2121 San Fernando Rd., Suite 11, Los Angeles
Why: To show great art, put on a great party, and provide archival-quality prints at an affordable price to the L.A. community.

Ian and Star invite you to participate in their inaugural Cartridge Group Show on October 31—a one-night-only, small-scale, affordable photo exhibition. And while they’re at it, they’re throwing a party to celebrate Halloween, you, and your wonderful photographs.

What should you submit? Send them up to three JPEGs (up to 13 x 19 inches @ 300 dpi). From the set they receive, they’ll select one hundred images and print them in monster grids to be plastered on the walls of Shotgun Space for the October 31 exhibition. The prints will be sold in unlimited Ultrachrome editions of either 8 x 10 inches (for $25) or 13 x 19 inches (for $50). Artists will receive $10 for each 8 x 10 and $20 for each 13 x 19 sold. If you’re into themes, Halloween and its associated season, autumn, are what they’re looking for. Having said that, they’re not really the types to disqualify anything, so if it’s good, send it.

For those in L.A., here’s how a Halloween party/exhibition works: You dress up in the best costume you can find and fill the pockets with money. (If your costume doesn’t have pockets, they suggest adding them for storage, or stuffing the hollow plastic sword you’ll be carrying.) Show up at Shotgun Space ready to spend money on photos for your home, play Edward Fortyhands, and dance to things other than “Monster Mash.”

Send your images to cartridge@shotgunspace.com by October 25. And you don’t have to live in L.A. to participate. [But why do you live anywhere else?—Ed.]

MacBook me

I’ve had enough of this PC world. Blue screens of death. Three-month-old hard drives that crash and have to be replaced. That damn hourglass.

I’ve finally done it: I’ve gone Mac. My new MacBook is on order and should arrive later this week. A little credit-card hocus-pocus—balance transfers and such—and I have 0 percent financing for four months, just long enough for me to pay it off interest-free.

Now if only getting rid of the current president were as easy as getting rid of my PC.

Copyright © Apple, Inc.

My kind of computer company, my kind of president

Copyright © Apple, Inc.

The meet cute

When Ian and Star asked me to be in a show, my head was in that isn’t-it-cool-that-I-have-my-first-show space. But very soon after, I realized that I needed to get my act together. We decided on the images that I would show, and then I had to get them ready. In a class at JDPW, the amazing Aline Smithson recommended that, as a way to keep costs down when you’re just starting to get your work shown in galleries, you can do the matting and framing yourself. I followed her suggestion, printed my own archival pigment prints on my Epson Stylus PHOTO R2400 at 12 x 18 inches, matted them using precut archival mats from Light Impressions, and framed them using black metal gallery frames from Dick Blick.

When I was done framing the eight images for the Shotgun Space show, and the three images for the White Wall Collective show, I told my boyfriend that I never wanted to frame my own work again. It wasn’t that the matting and framing was difficult—after the first one, it was actually pretty easy—and they looked good. But what occurred to me was that, even though Aline was right (it was an incredibly cost-effective way of doing it—I was able to print, mat, and frame each image for around twenty dollars), I felt as though I hadn’t followed through as well as I could have.

It reminded me of knitting. It’s been a while, but I used to knit pretty often, and I was really good all the way up until the finishing—the part where you have to sew together all the pieces. I hated the finishing part, and I never got good at it, because by that point I was just so damn impatient and ready to be done that I rushed through it. And that’s why my sweaters didn’t look half as good as Diane de Avalle-Arce’s sweaters did—well, that and the fact that Diane is the kind of woman who milks her own goats to make her own cheese and is inherently a better knitter than I am.

I didn’t care that much about knitting, so my lack of finishing skills wasn’t that big of a deal. But in case you hadn’t noticed, I do care about photography—and somehow the thought of spending all that time and effort working to make good photographs and editing them until they were just right, only to end up printing at a size that I chose because it’s what I could print myself and frame on the cheap . . . that just didn’t sit well with me.

So I recently began the process of looking at print services—more specifically, master printers, people who spend as much time getting the print just right as I spend getting the photo just right. I don’t have the kind of money to go to a place like Laumont, and I started looking around at places in L.A. and elsewhere. That’s when I came across West Coast Imaging. Their site is really clear, and they seemed like they might be a good fit for me. So I e-mailed them with a few questions on Wednesday night, and first thing Thursday morning I got a callback from Terrance Reimer, a custom printmaker. We connected this morning and talked for forty-five minutes, and I knew he was the guy (or at least the printmaker) for me. He was easy to talk to, happy to answer questions, passionate about photography, and enthused about my work, plus a photographer himself.

Today I uploaded images for him, and he’s going to print some free 8 x 10 proofs for me—two from the Chromira (one on Fujichrome Supergloss paper, and the other on Fujiflex Crystal Archive) and three from the Epson Stylus Pro 9800 (one on Crane Museo Silver Rag; one on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag; and the third on Hahnemuhle FineArt Pearl). I should have them in a week to ten days. And now I feel much better prepared. I can start thinking more seriously about the size that I want to print—right now I’m thinking of doing one edition at 20 x 30 inches, and maybe another edition at 30 x 45 inches.

Next step: Find a framer I can work with long-term. I think I’ll start by going in to Santa Monica and talking with the people at Allan Jeffries. I’ve had a couple things framed there in the past and been really happy with their work.

They should have Match.com for photographers, printers, and framers. eHarmony would be asking too much.

1x200

My Karolina Karlic print arrived from 20x200 today. (I knew I had bought the print as soon as I saw it for sale, but I didn’t know I was the first of two hundred. Cool.)

You know how many 8 1/2-x-11-inch pieces of paper you’ve held in your life? You know how many photographs you’ve made yourself on 8 1/2-x-11-inch pieces of paper? Well, even so, there’s something really incredible about getting home and finding a brown envelope propped up in the rosemary next to your mailbox, with an 8 1/2-x-11-inch photograph by Karolina Karlic inside.

I can’t stop looking at it.

Uncommon places

S. doesn’t spend much time looking back, although occasionally he tells wonderful stories about growing up in Los Angeles and the streetcar that ran down Santa Monica Boulevard and double features for ten cents. His approach is to find the humor in life. Which is a good thing, because I can meander into melancholy and get stuck there for a while if I’m not careful.

This afternoon he was over, teasing me about my crying. He had me laughing through tears at one point—the best kind of laughter. Besides, he said, in fifty years you’ll be eighty-four and your memory will be eighty-four, too, implying that I won’t even remember him fifty years from now.

We ended the afternoon lying here looking through my brand-new copy of Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places, a first for both of us. We talked about trips we want to take, places we’ve been or want to go.

I said, taking comfort from tragedy as seems to be my wont, “Besides, look at Alexandra Boulat—I could die before you, when I’m only forty-five and then you would be the one forgetting me.”

“I wouldn’t forget,” he said.

But he told me that, fifty years from now, I’ll have forgotten this afternoon spent laughing and crying and looking at Uncommon Places.

I won’t forget.

Fifty years

The show at Shotgun Space was last night, and it was a good time. I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to seeing people standing in front of one of my photographs pointing, talking, stepping back, moving up close. The gallery is on the second floor of the building, divided into two rooms that are separated by a sort of sitting area, overlooking the foyer downstairs. We hung out in that in-between space most of the night, talking to my friend, Tia Tuenge, and watching her smart-as-a-whip four-year-old, Ava, bring hors d’ouevres up from the foyer and run back down to get more.

We got home close to midnight, and I cried myself to sleep. Partly just because I’ve been operating on adrenalin for the past few weeks, trying to get ready for this show and the other two upcoming ones and stay current with my day job. But mostly because S. said something in passing about, “Fifty years from now, you’ll look back on your career . . .” and I realized that, even if he lives to be a hundred, he won’t be here in fifty years. This is not news to me—it’s something I think about every day—but it was the concrete example, the knowledge that, if I’m lucky enough to have a career that spans that long, I’ll be looking back on it without him.

I love photography. But I would put down my camera and never pick up another one again if I could have fifty years with S.

Copyright © 2003 Liz Kuball

Hey, Hot Shot! featured me!: The sequel

Hey, I’m featured on the HHS blog again this season, and wow, check out how cool they were to me (here)! It’s true what they say: Being featured on the HHS blog and named an Honorable Mention last season was what led to my two-person show in L.A., which opens tonight. Very cool.

Competitions are tough—you never know what the judges are looking for, and you put your work out there and keep your fingers crossed. No matter what, for me at least, the act of choosing which images I want to submit, combined with going through the process of submitting them, help me figure out what I’m trying to say. Plus, I always pay attention to who the jurors are, and with HHS, you get a whole panoply of jurors instead of just one, the way most competitions are structured. In my book, it’s worth it. But the good thing is, you don’t have to enter anything you don’t want to. If HHS isn’t your thing, figure out what is and move on.

Save the date: December 6 @ Gallery Bar

A Field Guide to the North American Family: The Exhibition, curated by the Humble Arts Foundation in collaboration with Mark Batty Publisher
December 6, 2007 through January 2, 2008
Gallery Bar
120 Orchard Street
New York, New York
Opening reception: Thursday, December 6, 7 p.m. to midnight (open wine bar, 7 to 8 p.m.)
Gallery hours: Monday through Friday, 1 to 6 p.m. and by appointment, 212.529.2266

Web site update

I’ve updated my Web site with some new photos in the In Store project. If you’re not in the habit of checking my Web site daily (hey, I know you have a life), click here to check it out.

Save the date: October 13 @ White Wall Gallery

Julia Dean

I know I’ve said this before on this blog, but it’s worth repeating: If you’re anywhere in Southern California, go to www.juliadean.com, look over the wide selection of courses and the phenomenal instructors, and sign up for a class. What the hell are you waiting for?

First of all, Julia Dean is the coolest person you’ll meet, and a wonderful photographer and teacher on top of that. And she surrounds herself with the best group of people—from the instructors she brings in, to her office staff (shout out to Natalie!), to her volunteers. And come on, she’s on the boardwalk in Venice. Can you beat that?

Plus, the students there are consistently good. Everybody is there to learn, there’s none of that competitve bullshit you get at so many places, and you walk away from classes feeling you’ve made some lifelong friends.

Can you tell I like the place?