the photographer who came in from the cold…
the cover shot
I went to ground a couple months back in order to get some things done.
Having the show in Chicago was a treat. I didn’t fall in the river or get blown out into Lake Michigan or anything, which was good. I did get about five hours of unencumbered time on that Saturday. A quick visit to a Radio Shack on Michigan resulted in new ear buds, a fortifying cup of coffee at Cafe Descartes gave me a chance to formulate a plan of sorts, and Miles Davis provided my own private soundtrack for visiting Chicago through a viewfinder. A couple hundred photographs later, I was a happy guy.
To a point.
Seeing my photograph, alongside the others, in a real gallery and not in a space of my own making, awakened something in me. Most of my photographic life has been spent in some variation of servitude– school photo companies, the studio portrait mills, alt weeklies, whoever hired me to shoot whatever freelance gig– and I had all but forgotten who I was as a photographer, and it wasn’t until the Augenblick show and that jazzy Saturday afternoon on the crowded, living streets of Chicago that I remembered.
Today I opened a box containing the result of my remembering. It was the first copy of my new book.
How to Milk a Wooden Cow is the title, and it contains 35 of my photographs. Some of them have appeared here, some have appeared elsewhere on the Web, but nobody but yours truly had seen them all before, and certainly not grouped together like this. I’m proud of it, even if I forgot to run spell-check on the intro. yeesh.
The observant reader, and I consider every one of you to be above average, will note that the photo at the top of this entry carries my name, and of course the book does as well, so if you’re among the people who really didn’t know my name before, now you do. Not that it matters much, and it’s not like I’m world famous or anything, but I guess I’m finally stepping out a little from behind the Cog persona to take credit for my work.
Or, you know, blame, if that’s your thing. Either way, I sort of feel like the photographer who came in from the cold.
So click on the link, take a look at the preview, and if you think you’d like to encourage this sort of behavior, order a copy of your very own. You can be the first on your block, and you’ll have my undying gratitude.
Augenblick…
I’ve only been to Chicago once. It was on The Great Western Camping Trip three years back, and we hit Chicago a glancing blow, on our way from Indiana Dunes to the Wisconsin Dells. It was mostly traffic. The Boy took many photos of the backs of large trucks, and I discovered my dream job, being a Chicago area toll booth operator. Apparently they conjure the toll prices out of thin air, as we never paid the same amount twice, and I think I could get used to such power.
It is not to be, though. I hear the toll booths are mostly automated now, no doubt staffed by random number generators. Ah, what could have been.
In a couple of weeks I’ll have the opportunity to see what it’s like currently, because I’ll be in town for the opening of Augenblick: A Moment in Time. You know, I have to admire a show that carries its own translation in its title, but that’s irrelevant right now; What’s important is the fact of the show’s existence: 44 photographs from photographers in more than a dozen countries hanging in the Scharpenberg Gallery, on the fourth floor of Dank Haus in the Lincoln Park area, the physical end result of a show that was conceived, discussed, planned, submitted, and curated almost entirely in email.
postcard announcing the show, soon to be a collector’s item
I say almost entirely, because I know there were a few phone calls, at least one talking Mark Roberts off the ledge after his printer developed smearing issues. There may have been more, but I had to go to class.
There will be an opening reception held from 6-9 p.m., Friday, May 7 at the gallery. The show will hang until June 12, open to the public from 11a.m.-3p.m. every Saturday and available by appointment on weekdays if, you know, you live in the Chicago area and write a popular knitting blog and homeschool most of your kids and need some place to take them to get some culture.
Just saying.
If you can’t make the exhibit, and I certainly understand that, you also have the opportunity to own a small print of each of the photographs on display, plus about 60 more, all between the covers of this year’s PDML Annual, edited by Mark Roberts with some input he had to drag out of three other guys, and including a foreword by yours truly. All profits from sales of the book will go to CureSearch to help with the fight against childhood cancer.
A limited number of the books will be on hand at the opening reception for the show, and some of the photographers in the exhibit will be present as well, willing to sign copies of the book, so we’re talking the best of both worlds here, plus the opportunity to drop some loose change on some great prints. Win win win, you know?
Bonus: If I sell my print, I’ll be able to pay the tolls.
See you there.
my annual flower photo…
dangerously close to a pecan log..
OK, yeah, my fingers got all twitchy when Salinger went running through the rye.
But really, what with Styron and Updike and Vonnegut on the board, the tally for author obits was threatening to skew my tag cloud. You know, if I had a tag cloud.
So I continued to lurk in the darker corners of the tubeworks, popping out now and again from behind my camera to chip a bon mot into someone’s comment box, usually deleting it before hitting the POST button. It’s the thought that counts, right?
It was a great entertainment to me that I had stopped writing here and nobody had noticed. The longer it went the funnier it became, but hey, it was starting to feel as if I had one of those lengthy leases on a billboard in some guy’s south forty fronting the Interstate and had neglected to remind passersby that they were dangerously close to a pecan log, should they wish to speed up. I think it was Geddy Lee who said, “ten bucks is ten bucks.”
Baby Girl is now official, if you’re keeping score. We’re Mommy and Daddy and she turned three a couple months back, with all that entails; exorcist-level tantrums, toilet obsession, sweetness off the scale, and twirly dresses for miss princesses. The Boy is mostly gentle, if not exactly understanding of her emotional demands. It’s like having a little Spock in attendance. The Vulcan one.
My writing energy has been diverted in an effort to irrigate the desert of my academic career. Compare and contrast Warhol and Velasquez, please, and use examples. Last week, 1500 words on Eve Online, and gauge my immersion, thanks. Describe an emerging tech. APA Style. Watch those citations. Precious little has been left in the pipes for The Flies.
But at least the camera still works. I’ll have a photograph hanging in an actual gallery in Chicago in a few weeks, and it’s time to start rifling through the hamper for loose change again, because the second in our planned series of photo annuals is at the printer, foreword by yours truly, details to follow.
And now, your moment of awww:
isolation…
