Shawn Records

Shawn Records was in L.A. last night, on an editorial assignment for W magazine, and we were able to meet up. (If Shawn’s ever where you live, be sure to spend a couple hours with him. You won’t be disappointed.) I picked him up at his motel on Hollywood Boulevard and we went to Shotgun Space to see the group show, in which he has a few (beautiful) images. The show looked great, and I was glad he got a chance to see the gallery while he was in town for less than forty-eight hours.

Went to Starbucks for a quick coffee (hot chocolate for me, of course), and talked shop. Or, more accurately, he talked shop (i.e., answering all my questions about his editorial and commercial work, his process, etc.) and I listened intently. Then he was off to Ralphs to snag a toothbrush and a Hostess cherry pie (a travel ritual for him, he said). He seemed pretty happy with the whole setup—the W gig, the cheap motel, the cherry pie—and I could see why.

Now I really can’t wait to see the photo when it appears in W. I’ll be sure to post about it when it does.

P.S. Thanks, Shawn!

Portrait Month

I’m a big fan of FDR’s “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” bit, and so I hereby announce that December is Portrait Month on my blog. Throughout the entire month of December—no time off for Hanukkah, Christmas, or Kwanzaa—I’ll be approaching at least one stranger every day and asking to make his portrait. I’ll post the daily results on this blog, for better or worse.

If time allows, I’ll also do some posting about portrait photographers whose work I respect, admire, dislike, or otherwise have a strong feeling about. No guarantees about that part, but I do guarantee a portrait a day.

Tune in, sports fans, to see the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. Can you think of a more appropriate way to spend the holidays? Neither can I.

Meet Boo Radley

Copyright © 2007 Liz Kuball

Participant

The winners of Hey, Hot Shot! have been announced, and not only did I not make it into the top ten, but I have been demoted from Honorable Mention to participant. C’est la vie.

The good news is that the ten winners are all amazing. Two of them are, to my mind, the real standouts of the bunch.

The first, and the person whose work I can’t think of enough superlatives for, is Jennifer Boomer. Take the time to go to her Web site and check out her Greetings from Dutch Harbor series (here). In some ways, it reminds me of an Alaska version of Simon Roberts’s Motherland, and not just because of the snow. I can’t wait to see how HHS catapults Jennifer’s career.

Copyright © Jennifer Boomer

The second is Todd Forsgren, whose photos of birds caught in nets are so different from anything I’ve seen before. It’s not the kind of work I’m usually drawn to but it grabbed me and won’t let go, kind of like the nets did to the birds.

Copyright © Todd Forsgren

Congratulations to all the winners, and a commiserative pint—beer or ice cream, take your pick—for the also-rans.

I say who, I say when, I say how much

I have a great affinity for writers: I work with them, I used to want to be one, and I’m in love with one. Anyone who does anything freelance—and I’ve made my living as a freelancer for the past seven years—knows that nothing is more valuable than calling the shots. Kit De Luca said it best: “We say who, we say when, we say how much.” Saying who and when is important, but saying how much is maybe the most important, because the “how much” part is where you can lose it all—and by “it,” I mean your self-respect. If you do the job for less than the job is worth, or less than you’re worth, you’re giving yourself away, and then you’re not just a hooker, you’re a whore.

This video is, to me, an excellent explanation of why the writers are striking and why we should support them. It’s also a lesson in how not, as photographers, to give our work away.

via A Photo Editor

Interview with Timothy Briner

Really wonderful, long interview with Timothy Briner over on [EV+/–] Exposure Compensation.

I think the Boonville project that Tim is doing is brilliant, and I really dig his honesty and straightforwardness about his struggles and successes.

via Conscientious

Holy fuck, Zoe Strauss!

Zoe Strauss, who is about the realest deal going, has been awarded a fifty-thousand-dollar no-strings-attached United States Artists fellowship for her photography. Zoe said on her blog what I said aloud when I first read about the award elsewhere: Holy fuck! A huge, happy congratulations to Zoe, the coolest kid on the photographic block.

Tag

I’ve always thought those memes that tend to circulate the blogosphere like chain letters did my elementary school were kind of silly, but when I read S.’s comparison of it to a game of tag and the Internet as one big playground, I figured what the hell. Apparently, I, too, have been tagged, and because tag requires the buy-in of all the kids on the playground—besides, I’ve never been one to let a good game die—here goes.

The Rules

• Link to the blog of the person who tagged you. [I’ve already linked the hell out of S., but for good measure, click here to go to his blog.]
• Post these rules on your blog. [Done.]
• List seven random and/or weird facts about yourself. [See below.]
• Tag seven random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs. [S. put a question mark after random, because, I’m sure he was thinking, “What the hell is a random person?” I’ll let the wording slide. But here’s my list of tagged people: Lane Collins, Shawn Gust, Ben Huff, Shannon Kuhns, Jennifer Loeber, Susana Raab, Amy Stein.]
• Let each person know that he has been tagged by posting a comment on his blog. [That’s where I’m drawing the line. I believe in an all-volunteer tag game; I’m not into drafting people who don’t want to be drafted. I’ll distribute the propaganda and try to get them to enlist, but that’s as far as I’ll go.]

My Answers

1. I almost hit Donald Sutherland in the parking lot of Sav-On Drugs on Santa Monica Boulevard.
2. I turned down a job offer to teach in my hometown because, when I used my illegal copy of the master key to the school district (long story) to get into the classroom where I would be teaching, the key broke off in the lock. The broken-off key has been on my keychain ever since.
3. My standard order at Neptune’s Net on the Pacific Coast Highway, known for its fresh seafood, is a grilled-cheese sandwich.
4. I sat in the same row as Senator Edward Kennedy at a performance of The Producers, and all I could think to say when I had to climb over him to get into my seat was, “Senator Kennedy, I’ve always admired you and your brothers.” How frickin’ unoriginal could I be? Plus, what about Eunice?
5. I believed in Santa Claus until the second grade.
6. On a Sunday afternoon, I was on my way out of Big 5 Sporting Goods on Wilshire Boulevard. When I was about 15 feet from the door, Jon Voight walked in. He was incredibly tall, wore a long coat, and was lit from behind by the bright sunlight outside. When I saw him, I gasped, stopped dead in my tracks, and said, under my breath, “Midnight cowboy.”
7. I once bought a Jeep Grand Wagoneer over the Internet.

Tag! You’re it!

Shawn Gust

It worked out: I met up with Shawn Gust tonight in Los Angeles, and although I knew he’d be a cool guy, he was even cooler than I thought he’d be.

He was driving from Idaho down to San Diego, with his brother Thor and Thor’s two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Leila. When they got out of their van, I immediately recognized them from this image.

Copyright © Shawn Gust

So here’s what it’s like to have dinner with me: I’ll offer to pay for you and your traveling companions, you’ll say I don’t have to, I’ll insist, and two minutes later, I’ll see the sign on the wall that says Cash Only, and I’ll be like, “Um, so the dinner thing . . . actually, I’m not buying—I don’t have enough cash.” Jesus.

Dinner was Philippe’s: French-dipped sandwiches on paper plates, peanut shells on the floor, Corona for Shawn, Coke for me. We talked about their trip and then, of course, photography. What he’s working on, what he’s shot so far on the trip, people he’s met. We walked outside afterward, and on the way back to their van, we passed a security guard who was watching the parking lots for the restaurant. Shawn said the guy would make a good picture. We talked for a little, and then he said he was going to go ask the guard if he could make his portrait. I went along to watch, because it’s a well-established fact that I’m terrified of taking people’s pictures, and I wanted to see how someone who does it so well would work.

We walked up to the guard. Shawn said, “Hey, how’s it goin’?”

The guard said, “Fine.”

Shawn said, “I’m on a road trip from Idaho and I’m taking pictures of people I meet along the way, and I’m wondering if I could take your picture.”

The guy sat there, silent. Then he said, “Of the cars?”

“No,” Shawn said. “I can see cars anywhere. I just want to take a picture of you.”

Again, the guy sat there, with a look on his face like, “What the hell does this guy want with me?”

This is the point at which I would’ve started babbling, filling the silence, trying to defend myself, explain myself, blah blah blah. But Shawn just stood there and didn’t say a word. My mouth was hanging open.

Finally, the guard said, “Okay.”

“Okay,” Shawn said. “I’ll go get my camera.”

We walked back to the van, and Shawn got his equipment together. Again, this is when I would’ve been rushing, scrambling, feeling like, “Shit, I’d better hurry before this guy changes his mind.” But he took his time. He moved quickly, but he didn’t rush.

When we got back to the guy, Shawn introduced himself, and then he started setting up his camera. While he took a meter reading, he let me look through the lens. I’d never looked through a large-format camera before—such a different experience from a 35mm. The meter said he needed a two-second exposure, so he told the guy that he needed him to hold very still and to just do his best. On the first shot, when Shawn told him he was ready, the guy nodded for the entire two seconds. The second shot, Shawn waited for him to stop nodding, and then he exposed the image, and I can’t wait to see what it looks like.

He wanted to take my picture, too, and I obliged. We talked a little longer, and Thor and Leila caught crickets in the parking lot. Crickets in a parking lot in downtown L.A.? It was as if Idaho had come pouring out of that van with Shawn and Thor and Leila, and though Los Angeles is always beautiful and magical to me, it was even more so tonight.

My only regret was that S., who so wanted to meet Shawn, had a class to teach and couldn’t join us. He would’ve been thrilled to be there. And I would’ve wanted to see the picture Shawn would’ve made of him.

It was a remarkable night in so many ways, but most of all in this realization: As I watched Shawn talk to the guard, set up his camera, and take the picture, I was in awe. But when I got into my car and headed down Grand Avenue, back to USC, it hit me: I could do that. I don’t mean that I could be as good as Shawn is, or that I would interact with people in the same way (I couldn’t, even if I tried). But I could do that. I could approach strangers and take their pictures, and if I did it a lot, I think I could eventually do it well.

Blog-World-Meets-Real-World Week

It's Blog-World-Meets-Real-World Week for me. Sunday it was Amy, and today, I checked my voicemail and heard, “Liz Kuball. This is Shawn Gust.” Mr. Gust is leaving today for a road trip to San Diego, and he was calling so we could make plans to meet up on Thursday in Los Angeles. I cannot wait to sit across a table from him and have a beer and talk.

My peeps

In what was my first non-electronic communication with a photographer whose work I admire (to put it mildly) and whom I met through this odd thing called blogging, I had the pleasure of talking on the phone this afternoon with Amy Stein, who, when I e-mailed her with a question about photography last week (as I’ve done before) suggested that it would be easier just to talk than to e-mail. After a few days of phone tag, we finally connected, just as S. was due to stop by after a long day at a writers’ workshop he was leading, and I kept him waiting for forty-five minutes while I was on the phone. (I mean, S. is great and all, but I wasn’t about to put off a chance to talk with Amy Stein.)

The question was regarding when and whether to apply to Review Santa Fe, given my perpetual sense that I’m trying to run before I can walk. The answer, in the end, was yes. But the most compelling reason for me was the relationships Amy made with other photographers while she was there. As someone trying to go this without the context of a formal education, the more of a sense of community I can build for myself, the better. Showing your work to other photographers is nice, but it’s more than that: It’s having people to turn to when you have questions; being able to help those same people in turn; and learning from their work (how they edit their images, how they arrange them and present them).

Blogging has given me a taste of that community—well, maybe somewhere in size between the free taste on a pink plastic spoon you get at Baskin-Robbins and a single scoop on a sugar cone. (Mint chocolate chip.) The very fact that I was talking with Amy, and planning to get together next month when she’s out in L.A., is testament of that. I’ve e-mailed Susana Raab more than once and been met with nothing but generosity and honest advice (plus, she put up with my fawning over the fact that she’s friends with Simon Roberts, whom she met at, yep, Review Santa Fe). Andrew Hetherington, too—about as open and honest as you can get. Armando Bellmas, the kindest guy in the world—plus, his enthusiasm for photography is like a drug: addictive. And I consider Ben Huff and Shawn Gust true friends. These are people I know only because of blogging, and that sense of community I have with them is, for me at least, real. But still, I’d love to be able to sit and talk with these people—and with other photographers—and that’s what something like Review Santa Fe can offer. No, it’s not the only way to meet up with great photographers—and it’s really tough to get in, so this may all be just be a bunch of talk. But applying is worth my time. And if I get in, all the better.

P.S. Thanks, Amy!

Pot, kettle, black

I don’t have a storage unit (unless you count my parents’ basement back east), but if e-mails were hard copies, I could fill a small-town library with my messages. This is not, under normal circumstances, a problem. But when I made the move to Mac, I had to use Outlook2Mac to get all my Outlook e-mails over to Mail. The bulk of it was easy enough—I got all my work e-mails transferred pretty quickly. Where I ran into trouble was all my personal messages, primarily the 11,256 e-mails (I am not exaggerating) that I have sent to or received from my boyfriend over the past four and a half years.

It started innocently enough: Every frickin’ e-mail when you’re infatuated with someone is loaded with meaning and sentimentality, and you don’t want to let any of that slip through the cracks. But somewhere along the way, communication becomes less about proclaiming your undying love and describing precisely what you’ll do to him when you see him, and more about “See you at 1?” or “OTD” (short for “out the door”). And yet, when you’ve started saving every message you send and receive, where do you draw the line? Apparently, if you’re me, you don’t.

And so when it took Outlook2Mac one week to export all those messages, I figured it must just be a crappy program—it didn’t occur to me that maybe, just maybe, I’d gone too far. In fact, it wasn’t until I tried to import the messages into Mail and found that Mail was forced to “close unexpectedly” (three times in a row) that I started to think, “Maybe this is a bit much.” So have I culled through them and saved only the best? No. I’ve broken down my e-mails by year—2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007—and I’m importing one year at a time.

Maybe I’ll go through them and delete the messages that don’t make me cry. That could be a good line in the sand. Tears, save it. Anything else, delete.

Brian Ulrich talk

via 2point8

Hey, that’s me!

Nothing like waking up to see your own photo in your inbox. Very cool.

Get yourself over to Hey, Hot Shot! and enter already. The deadline is Saturday.

Collect this: Prospect Park

Just bought another super-cool print from 20x200. This time it’s Joseph O. Holmes’s Prospect Park. This is exactly how I like my snow: in a photograph.

Copyright © Joseph O. Holmes

Even someone seeking a sugar daddy can afford twenty bucks for a print. Come on, what are you waiting for?

Wanted: Sugar daddy

So on this whole issue of printing and framing: How the hell do people pay for it? Is everyone a trust-fund kid? I mean, more power to you if you’ve got that kind of lineage. But if you’re not independently wealthy, how do you make it all work?

I’ve made the declaration here before that I’m only going to print and show my photographs in the sizes that I want, and that I’m going to have them professionally framed, because why skimp on the final stage of the process? Yeah, yeah . . . that’s all great in theory. But for an upcoming event, where I might be able to show about ten images (maybe more, but ten was a number I pulled out of thin air), I figured out that just the printing alone would cost me $750. And then the framing would, I have to imagine, be at least another $800 to $1,000. I’d love to be able to do this, and S. is saying go for it, you might as well, but S. isn’t the one on the line for my $30,000 credit-card debt or $40,000 student loan or $15,000 car loan. Sure, I have good credit, which means that the credit-card debt is only at 3.5 percent, the student loan is at 2.75 percent, and the car loan is at 0 percent, and I make more interest on my savings (such as it is) than I pay out on my debt. But still, that’s a lot of money to owe. And do I really need to be adding onto this with another couple grand? It’s not like I’m Zoe, who was almost able to pay off her $9,000 credit-card debt with the money she earned at her Silverstein show. (Go, Zoe!)

So I want to know: For those of you who are now relatively established (by that, I mean, you’ve got gallery representation, you’re regularly selling your work, you’re supporting yourself financially on your work in one way or another), how did you do it before you got to that point? And for those of you who are in the same boat I’m in (Ben, Shawn), how do you do it now—and how much debt, if any, are you willing to go into for this?

Prints and frames and portraits

I got the proofs from West Coast Imaging, and I’m pretty sure I’m going with the Crane Museo Silver Rag. The Hahnemuhle FineArt Pearl is another serious possibility, and the Hahnemuhle Photo Rag is close in line behind that. (The two Chromira prints on Fuji papers—the Fujichrome Supergloss and the Fujiflex Crystal Archive—weren’t right for me at all.) I’m generally a fan of matte papers, and I thought the Hahnemuhle Photo Rag would’ve been my favorite, but there’s a texture to it that I find distracting. The two pearl papers are really nice—the Crane one is slightly creamier, so the whites aren’t as bright white as they are on the Hahnemuhle, which is sort of the only question in my mind: Which do I prefer?

I haven’t gotten in touch with any framers yet. I have a list of a few places in L.A. I need to visit, not only to see what’s out there, but to get price quotes. I can’t afford to be any more in debt than I am right now, so I need to find someplace that’ll do a good job for as little money as possible. At least one place on my list is, I’m sure, beyond my budget. They make beautiful wood frames, though, with equally beautiful shipping crates to send your work in. For now, cardboard boxes and lots of bubble wrap is going to have to do.

Meanwhile, I had the opportunity to have my portfolio reviewed by someone whose opinion about photography I respect, and it was a great experience. I learned so much about my work, not only based on suggestions he had for directions I could go with it, but also in terms of the few things he said that I disagreed with: When I disagreed with him, it helped me refine, for myself, what I believe and why. The main point, for me, was that I better defined what the In Store project is about. It’s not about the buildings where we store our stuff (although they are a part of it); instead, it’s about what we store and why. The buildings are what they are, and I’m pleased with some of the photographs I’ve taken of them. But the project really came alive for me when I was able to see beyond the walls and doors, and photograph the stuff itself (I’m thinking, in particular, of the images of the trophy—numbers 35 and 36 on my Web site). I learned in the portfolio review that I could still use the images of the buildings, as sort of a framework for the rest of the project.

So basically, much of what I’ve done so far is lay the foundation. Now I need to get inside the places and photograph their contents. It’s possible I’ll take portraits of people with their stuff, an idea I entertained a while back and then dismissed (mainly, I think, because photographing people scares the shit out of me). Facing that fear of making portraits is something I need to do. It’s one thing not to go in a particular direction because you’ve decided it’s not right for the project; it’s another not to go there because you’re afraid.

I have a lot more work ahead of me—which is good, because I’m in love with this project (and that’s not an exaggeration).