Another Newsletter
This Reminds Me of That
I have a problem! I’m incapable of small talk. Incapable— wrong word, I suck at it. But I think that’s why people often open up to me one on one. Everyone is going through something. Usually a picture, painting, fragment of a poem or song pop into my head during these talks. The use of these references helps me explain my perspective. I’ve used these fragments I have shored against my ruins… I’m doing it already. That’s TS Eliot’s, The Waste Land.
Lately I’ve been reading and hearing people talk about loneliness. The most recent article I read compared the harmfulness of it to smoking two packs of cigs a day. I’ve been having discussions with people like this for over a year. Anthony Hernandez’s - Waiting, Sitting, Fishing, And Some Automobiles came to mind.
(click each photo to see it uncropped. everything in bold is linked)
It’s why I wanted to start this newsletter. I’m constantly sending references over text or the million apps we use to communicate now. It’s one way I like to try and stay connected to people in my life.
I’ve been following my friend
Substack, Monologue the last several months. I love his writing and it made me think— maybe I could go back to where I started— the blog. Make something more long form visual to share. Emailed to you. Viewed on the big screen.Maybe this first blog entry will be like the sometimes shitty pilot of an otherwise great series. Stay with me.
Mike Mills’ mostly autobiographical film Beginners (2011) tells his (played by Ewan McGregor) and his father’s (Christopher Plummer who won an Oscar) story using photographs, iconography and drawings throughout the film.
You point, I’ll drive. Watch the trailer and look out for the curtains. They remind me of a picture I took in LA in 2012.
I’ve watched Beginners more than a dozen times. This is how my brain works. How I try to explain... anything… everything to anyone. My sisters tell me I’m a breathing non sequitur. The movie is shot in Neutra’s Lovell Health House. Shot in. You only see the interiors. Mills used most of his parents’ furniture and lighting. It has a French New Wave feel to it. The clothes, interiors and how it’s shot.
You Already Knew…
I started out back in 2006 posting my work to a blogspot in the style of a photo diary. A free form stream of pictures— nights out, shows, friends, landscapes and still lifes. I wasn’t sure if anyone was looking at it. People were looking at it. In the beginning you had to check back to see if a blog had been updated. I remember starting my day checking a few to see if anything was new. jjjjound, Hedi Slimane photo diary, CobraSnake, ArabParrot and ACL. Several years later my photo diary blog led to Sam Shipley and Jeff Halmos publishing my first book, Everyone Must Be Announced. A 13 year long career making commercial and personal work, publishing books and zines. To then showing other photographers work in exhibitions here in New York and in Paris. And more recently selling and buying art, art books and prints for hotels and people.
Taking pictures was a way for me to feel more comfortable socially. I wanted to be out every night making new friends and talking to people. Feeling connected and hearing what everyone around me was thinking— about what was happening in the world, in New York, in their lives. I miss that.
Around 2016, New York felt like it was changing again. The financial crisis had ended. People started to move away. Musicians left first. All art aspires to be music. The culture was bound to shift if music wasn’t at the center of it. We all know, the apps changed how we went to dinner, dated and looked at pictures. Which changed how we looked at ourselves, each other.
Then of course 2020 and all of the events of the last five years pushed more of my friends farther out. I don’t blame them. There is so much to be browbeaten about, daily. It’s not just creatives that left. The perpetually late to the game NYT just published this about how college grad workers are leaving too. Maybe New York will swing back the other way and I’ll find myself lost in Soho after midnight like in Scorsese’s After Hours (1985). Just google it, this is getting too long.
After seeing the tenth article about our American loneliness epidemic I thought of a Joel Meyerowitz 1965 print that was shown at Howard Greenberg back in 2017. Maybe we’ve always felt alone. Are we more aware of it now? Did technology accelerate it?
Stick around…
As you can see, this won’t be just about photography. Plenty of people already do that and do it well. Another Newsletter (working title) will be more visual. Like everything I’ve made, it’ll pair text and image. I’ll show some of my work and share what I’m seeing out there. Places I think are worth going back to. Something I’d like to buy. And post about the accomplishments of people I like.
Speaking of which - Carl Phillips won the Pulitzer recently for Poetry. He teaches it at Wash U in St Louis. Imagine walking in to your class the next morning and that’s your teacher? Carl and I have collaborated on several projects. Dialogues (2014) paired poetry and photography. Carl was featured in one and we made a zine called Pacific Peace Piece. The title is from a Bill Evans song. Let it play while you read this rest of this.
It featured the following poem below. It’s one I always reread.
The Greatest Colors for the Emptiest Parts of the World
Sure, I used to say his name like a truth that, just
by saying it aloud, I could make more true, which
makes no more sense than having called it sorrow,
when it was only the rain making the branches hang
more heavily, so that some of them, sometimes,
even touched the ground … I see that now. I can
see how easy it is to confuse estrangement with
what comes before that, what’s really just another
form of being lost, having meant to spell out—
wordlessly, handlessly—I’m falling, not Sir,
I fell. As for emptiness spilling where no one
ever wanted it to, and becoming compassion, as
for how that happens— What if all we do is all we
can do? what if longing, annihilation, regret are all this
life’s ever going to be, a little music thrown across and
under it, ghost song from a cricket box when the last
crickets have again gone silent, now, or be still forever,
as the gathering crowd, ungathering, slowly backs away?Carl and I caught up back in December. We talked about the state of loneliness and erosion of society. Fun. The lack of trust in media, law enforcement, gov etc… that younger people have a difficult time talking about vulnerability. Carl said he's often asked by his students how he had found permission to write about or dare to speak of abstractions like love. He said it had never occurred to him to “ask permission”. It made me think about much of what is being produced for the big and small screen. Carl thought it all started with Jawbreaker and Seinfeld, mocking others for having real feelings. I can see that trend in what I mostly try and watch today. The Diplomat felt like Homeland light. Yes I know it’s the same showrunner for all the factoids out there. I liked how real and current the plot was- international relations between the US, UK, Russian etc.. but why does it have to be funny or snarky? Not everything has to be a dark comedy? Probably a reaction to the last 5+ years? A collective zone out?
What I’ve Seen…
The Rauschenberg show at Gladstone. Some of this work hasn’t been seen. This show seemed like it fit the narrative of something great reminding me of something else, also great.
Avedon at Gagosian - line to get in stretched three blocks. Sceney. My friend hated that. Left 3 mins after we got in. I think whatever the reason, I was happy so many people went to see a photography exhibit. I liked how they installed the show. Friends of the gallery each picked out an Avedon print for his centennial. Hillary Clinton and Tom Ford chose themselves. Funny because those were the two worst portraits exhibited.
Below in the middle is a picture I took, bookended by a print of Gloria Vanderbilt. I hadn’t seen it before. Everything about it was great. The composition. The grandness of what I’m assuming is her home and at the same time, it felt candid. A moment that maybe happened between posed or set up shots.
Leonard Baby
I caught his show at Fortnight Institute a few months back. I loved it immediately. I tried to buy this one but it was already gone.
What I read about his process made me think a little bit of what draws me to take pictures. He references often ignored or overlooked moments in film.
The paintings made me think of the Tina Barney show I’d seen recently at Kasmin. Pictures she made from early in her career. 1976 - 1980.
They felt personal.
The cropping and style reminded me a little of Mark Cohen’s pictures from Dark Knees. Wish I’d bought the book when it came out. He had a show at Danziger. We’re on a roll. This is how envision the newsletter looking moving forward.
But Barney’s show really made me think about an exhibition Annie Leibovitz had way back in 2006 at the Brooklyn Museum. I went with my parents. The show was early personal pictures of family and her partner Susan Sontag. Her commercial work is of course great, especially the early portraits.
But the window into her life and the installation of hundreds of dark room prints stayed with me all these years. She documented it prolifically. I think back to it a lot.
And art experiences feel like a money grab. But let the initial tinge of eyeroll you’re probably doing right now wash over you and look again. I’ve always liked Hockney’s assemblage of polaroids. This is that 10x. Closes June 4th. More about it here.
I’d buy this…
The color of the polaroids reminded me of this imported German Market 1990 Mercedes 300D Turbo 4Matic. Unavailable in the US in ‘90. This example was imported. The monochromatic blue inside and out, also makes it the perfect car for a future Mike Mills movie. Up for auction on The MB Market
Have you ever gotten to the bottom of a large salad and thought to yourself… is this it?
I hope my way of thinking— that something great reminds me of something else that’s also great is going to make you want to read my next post. It’ll be about getting sick and trying to figure out why. I’ve been doing that the last two months. I’m alright. But navigating the healthcare system has been tougher than believing Meghan Markle and Harry were being chased for two hours by paps in Manhattan. Was it a 14 mph car chase?