Isolation

I am tired and not on my own keyboard: Spending the night at my parent’s apartment

I shall keep this short and sweet. I have had an interesting couple days. Right now my mind is almost blank. Here’s a photo of my father when he was young, next to the building that he grew up in. This was supposedly shot in 1967.

Next, is a photo I shot of him, in almost the same exact spot, 40 years later(last year).

Hot Day

So, instead of writing a review about cameras today, I decided to have a day full of action. I kicked an windowsill in, was a rock star, photographer, and I saw things in a new light.

The world is a crazy place. We all want different things.

PC Richard and son had a tremendous day today, owing to temperatures close to 100 degrees. They sold a whole lot of airconditioners. The store was jam-packed for the first time in a long time.

Some people carried air conditioners

Other times, air conditioners carried them.

Speaking as someone who is currently still part of the problem, one thing that all of this air-conditioning makes me think about is the carbon footprint that is make by the way we live. We always need the bigger TV, the better gaming system, the best job, the most money. We don’t realize the impact our ambition that is inherent to us as human beings has an impact upon the planet.

Because we are hot, because we are irate… because we have caused some degree of change in the environment and upset the equilibrium that naturally exists within our planet, we suffer. We either pay our money of to the electric company, the giant manufacturing companies, or we suffer the heat.
These air conditions take resources to produce, and cost money. There’s got to be a better way to do things. We can either learn to keep our cools and be levelheaded when the temperature is high, or we can come up with some better solution. How about a solar-powered air conditioner, that generates the power it needs to run from the sun? How about a housing structure that keeps the cool in, and the heat out during the summers, and something that keeps the house warm during the winter with a sustainable energy source? How about using some of the funding used to develop military technology, to develop a more efficient way to avoid a global energy crisis?

I’m sure all of this has been thought up before. We are in a world of billions of interconnected people. The problem lies not in the connections that we make, but in the way that they’re dealt with. The world I see is not solely my world- it is a world that belongs to everyone. We must live to make this world the best possible place that it can be. We should not be petty, or mean, or judgmental. We should forgive those who have done harm to us and we should do what’s right. We should offer comfort to those who are downtrodden. We should do our best to make each person we can influence into a better person, a happier person, instead of trying to compete with them.

The last photo I’ll show for the day is by far, one of my favorite photos. I took the photograph in the one split second that providence provided to me- I shot this photo while in the process helping with an air-conditioner installation. There’s a lot that makes it an interesting photograph, and by far, it’s one of my favorites.

Party in Bushwick

One of the things about summers in Brooklyn, is that there’s always a rooftop party somewhere.

As I reflect on my life as a photographer, it makes me wonder- will I always be the one to chronicle events? In chronicling them, does it keep me from experiencing them?

I often find that I hide behind my camera at parties, even when I’m there for fun and not as a job.
I go into ‘photographer mode’, where I’m more interested in capturing moments than experiencing them.

I am camera shy. Not in the conventional sense- I don’t mind having my picture taken, although it rarely comes out well. My camera shyness is something else- I am shy when I have my camera. I think it is because I channel my vision through a lens that I forget that there is a world that lies through it.

Grafitti Trucks & Nostalgia

One project I’m working on, is photographing trucks with graffiti. I don’t know whether I do it because of the aesthetic value of the image, or because graffiti trucks have a nostalgic value to me.

My father used to have a van which was perpetually covered with graffiti. It was a loud old grey Dodge van, ‘born’ sometime in the 70’s. Even though I spent a good deal of time traveling in it, I’ve forgotten a lot about it.

All I can remember now, is that the car was older than me, and was rarely ever kept clean, organized or neat. It looked and smelled funny, and ran loudly. It would often backfire, frightening pedestrians and passengers alike. It only sat three, which meant that when the whole family traveled together, my brother and I would need to split a seat. In spite of it’s many shortcomings, it did it’s, and worked for many years more than was expected. My father used it for work for over a decade.

The biggest problem with the van was that it always attracted attention, usually of the unwanted kind. It was a magnet for parking tickets, graffiti, and the jeers of my wealthy, snobby classmates. The tickets got fought in court, and the graffiti wasn’t terrible. It kept the insurance costs low, which was valuable given my family’s economic class. As for the jeers, I managed. It wasn’t as if my father’s van was the primary source of my classmate’s derisions. I was fat, smelly, and not at all trendy.

Luckily, things change.

Starting a blog.

To be honest, I’m not too familiar with the art of blogging. I haven’t written anything for an audience in over a year. I’m going to outline the direction that I intend this blog to follow, with a handy dandy bulleted list.

1. In my blog, the focus is on cameras and the ‘camera lifestyle’. I’ve always liked cameras- they’re nifty machines. Although the basic premise of a camera as a light-capturing box has remained somewhat intact, cameras have changed tremendously in the last decade. They can do more things, are easier to use, and no longer depend on having a set of darkroom skills. We are in a digital age that has made photography accessible to many more people. More people have cameras in hand, and more pictures are being taken now than ever! I intend to shed some light on the tools that take the pictures.

Among the various things that cameras capture, they freeze action, fashion, things, and places. I want to talk about the things that capture as well as the things that they have captured, whilst dreaming about the things they could capture. I want to expose to the public, a slice for the life of a freelance New York photographer.