new piccie

new construction

here's the front and here's the back!

becky & leek flower

new construction

"the dream whisperers"

(front)

"the dream whisperers"

(inside)

new construction

"While the Blue Night Dropped on the World: 16 Barbs to the Back"

and i'm standing there in a gabardine suit, wondering wtf? and wtf with the briefcase, LOL!! when i don't even carry a purse? but most particularly, why am i holding what appears to be a cocktail? i put my nose down to the rim of the glass and take a sniff, but all i can tell is that it isn't gin. i put the glass down on a coaster and approach the woman who appears to be hosting this cocktail party.

i don't know what to say to her. i have no clue who she is...she is simultaneously thin & voluptuous (how does she do that?) her hair is pulled back all slick-like, and she's wearing a peg-dress that looks like this:



+ red lipstick and nail polish standing out against very white skin
+ cigarette holder
+ attitude
= ok, you win...

she clearly recognizes me from across the room. "oh ellen!! how fabulous to see you here! but don't you know? this is a COSTUME party, dear...where is your costume?"

and suddenly it's night time, and i'm standing, barefoot, outside in the mud in a drop-waist tulle dress. i can hear the cicadas & a crazy-croaking symphony of frogs in the marsh. i am worried about my costume...i MUST make one. yes, costume is at the top of the "to-do" list. and i begin collecting saw palmetto leaves, which have fallen to the ground...i tear them into pointed fronds and weave them into the tulle...i plaster them into place with mud and moss. it feels good.

i walk in my dress out to the night, i place my hands into the stream flowing, always flowing, and sink them into the mud all the way up to my wrists. and i can feel the wriggling presence of all the little things...i feel fish and salt and the phosphorescent mysteries of deep ocean. i feel the sun on my back at midnight. i feel rocks under my galloping hooves and my mother's teeth in the scruff of my neck.

i pull my hands from the river mud, and let them rinse in the running stream-water. and so watered, my hair begins to grow like vines, and i realize that everything on me and in me and around me is earth.

BIGGER (8 x 10) CAMERA!! YAY!

When I was 15 I got my first job. K, it sucked. But I was tired of being on my parents' leash and I wanted to be able to get the things I wanted without having to worry about whether or not they'd give me money for them.

My first place of employment was at a Red Barn burger joint. And my task for the whole first month I worked there was to shovel salt-laden, greasy-ass french fries into paper envelopes. I said it sucked, what did you expect? :P

LOL:


I did actually manage to save some money, but minimum wage back then was under $2.00 an hour, and I worked A LOT to save that money.

One day I decided to go shopping for school clothes. My mother gave me some cash -what she thought was appropriate to buy clothes for school. I went into this one totally kewl boutique, and immediately spotted an ankle-length purple velvet coat that was hung on display, up by the ceiling. I got the sales person to bring it down and I tried it on. It fit me PERFECTLY, and I totally fell in love with that thing. but it was a lot of money. mind you, I had the money, but to get that coat would've cost me everything I had saved and my mom's money, too.

I left the store without the coat.

And I went home and thought and thought about the coat. When I slept I dreamt about the coat. After a couple days how much I wanted that coat had only grown...and so I decided to go on ahead and spend all my money on it.

I went into the store and the coat was no longer hanging in its place by the ceiling. So I asked the sales person where she'd put it. And she told me that she'd sold it within an hour after I left the store. :( :( :( I never forgot the feelings associated with this experience, and 40 years later, if I recognize the "purple coat feeling" I will buy an item -even if stretches me financially.

Yesterday Mark showed me an ad on Craigslist for an affordable 8x10 camera... here it is:




and??? I thought all day at work about that damn camera...I came home and thought about it some more, and when I went to sleep, I dreamt about that camera... and so guess what? IT IS NOW MINE!

It's not a perfect object -there's a small hole in the bellows and it's a bit wobbly. but I already figured out how to stabilize the wiggle, and can make that stabilizing device in less than a day. and I can patch the hole in the bellows. plus, I can use my Schneider Kreutznach lens on there, so it's all good. AND, he threw in a couple of film holders, so I don't have to order them extra from ebay.

all told, this is a great deal, and the sassiness of my pix doesn't rely on having perfect gear anyway.

I AM SO HAPPY WITH MY NEW TOY!!
WWHHHEEEEEEEEEEE!!

from my shoot with kaylin

another plate...

more lindsey pix...

this is from the same shoot, obviously...

new work

i did a shoot with lindsey yesterday...at one point during the day, i had an idea based on how her hair looks -that it would be super sassy to to have her wet, with wet ringlets hanging down in front of her face. so i brought her a big glass of water and told her what my idea was.

she began gently dabbing her hair with water.
i said, "not damp, woman...WET!" and i excused myself to the darkroom to get/exchange plates, telling her that if she could be wet by the time i got back, that would be great! when i left she dumped the water on her head, melting her eye pencil. the eye-pencil burned her eyes, and she started crying black tears.

i began to tell her that she had black tears running down her face, then thought better of it. she wiped one side of her face, before i removed the lenscap and took the picture. :)

student work - Daniel Schales

I tried out a new assignment this term, "Animalz". I was a little worried about getting snapshots of kittens in baskets, LOL!! Anyhow, mostly people managed to add a sassy twist to the project. The 2 images below are by Daniel Schales. The first one reminds me of a fairy tale or a fable...but I'm not sure which one.



and



The model in both these pix is his wife; I'm assuming he thinks his wife is a fox. :)

student work - Mark Montoya

Mark is just amazing. He loves gadgetry & science, so he brought a lot to the table in terms of technical know-how and experimentation that I just loved. Part of the fun of watching him work, was seeing how he would torture himself for the next assignment. After having him in class for a year I finally said to him, "you know Mark, there is an 'excruciating' quality to everything you do...and something really clinical about your images."

On the last day of class he told me that he considered it his task for the next year to do work that wasn't excruciating, but I already know he can't do it. :P

Anyhow, if I had to choose my favorite pix of his, it would probably be his water-drops series. He built a machine that dropped the water and that was synchronized to the shutter release on the camera. Here is how they came out:



one of the kewl things we he noticed about the above image is how the mini-eye in the smaller drop is right-side up.

student work - Jessica Stirling

I decided it would be nice to post my favorite student work here...maybe for the next week or so.

These are my favorite images of the quarter. They were created by Jessica Stirling. the black dots in them are where she burnt the film with a lighter. They are also sepia toned.



and

"Drowning Samantha"

The Dream Whisperers

ACK!! separated from process. :)

I've been working on the image in the previous entry since Sunday, I think. The thing is just wrong. and I mean really wrong. ok, fine...I don't like it, LOL!!

Ok wrong why?

Well, for one thing, it doesn't say what I wanted it to. I wanted it to be about separation, about distance, and here I ended up with the people side by side.
I don't like the harshness of it.
Also, it is too much like what I always do...I put people side by side...and so it becomes a habit, and as such, a thing devoid of meaning.

The subject matter of this piece is DISTANCE (the subject is not supposed to be the people). You don't see distance in the image in yesterday's entry. It's a side by side set-up with nothing in between, and the image is not moving in any way, at least not to me.

The in between.
That junk stuff in the middle.
I wanted to focus on the interim junk...the things we believe are not important, that we dismiss or never see.

So I went back to the drawing board.
and literally. I use Museo Max paper; it's a lot like watercolor paper with an emulsion on there for digital printing. Well, I used to hand-color my silver prints with oil paint, so I thought I might enjoy adding color and features by hand instead of with Photoshop...I don't enjoy working in PS, and I think the color I add in PS looks shitty. So I bought myself some water-based color, and hand-treated a print.

So i finished this piece. Here it is:


"Separated at Birth"

It is definitely done. That is, this what it was supposed to be...now I have to figure out how I feel about it.

The book scraps are important to me.
they are fragments of meaning that when taken out of context have no meaning at all. and for me, text always underscores how little it actually transmits in terms of meaning that matters. I first started using text in 2000, when I did "Ravenous" -the back wall had over 100 book pages on it that had been dipped in dye and blood.

Anyhow, next image is already on the burner. I think I will work with the hand-treatments for awhile...I like it a lot!!

separated at birth

Student Wet Plates

So I dragged all my gear and chemistry into the school on Friday and did wet plates with my students. I have 12 Photo 2 students. Here is the result of a 6 hour class:

Here is my demo plate:



The following plate was poured and processed by Marissa (person on the left). The "antlers" showed up as a result of an incomplete collodion pour. I can't remember anymore who shot it. Thea, the person on the right says she thinks she looks like a coal miner.



The plate below was made by me and Sonja.



I can't remember who shot this plate, but that is Sonja on the left and my nose on the right.



Here are some mistake-plates. Thea made the one on the below, then Marissa rubbed her mouth off trying to remove something from the surface:



Ray made this one of Daniel, but I couldn't even see Daniel's face until I got home and buffed the surface a little with my sleeve:



I shot the image below of Kaylin. The image of Kaylin is a "mistake" plate because after it was finished, somebody drooled some heinous stuff onto the surface and tried to scratch it off...



I have never taught this before, and didn't realize how much there was to learn and remember. A number of exposures were made with plate holder in backwards, someone fixed before developing, someone else managed to get the plate holder sopping wet and the plates turned out a mess from that point forward. I don't think it is a process that works well in a group situation. 3 students is probably the most I can handle, considering the many steps involved, and the fact that they must also deal with the operation of an unfamiliar camera.

I like what this person wrote at the Photo-eye blog.

old negs

Off and on I purchase vintage negatives in bulk from Ebay. I then spend time looking through them, sometimes I used them to make new images that are then displayed in my Fragments gallery.

But sometimes I come across negatives that are just delicious, that I would never change because they are perfect just like they are. This is one of them:

yin yang

This image didn't make the cut for the website, but I still like it a lot. It's from the Marissa & Natasha shoot.