December 2006 Archives

The cold open

And then, just as suddenly, signs that the holidays are drawing to a close are everywhere. College football is on night after night, tickets for potentially lame New Year's Eve celebrations are at the ready, garbage men grimly face hauling away the packaging from the billions of presents we got each other (that we didn't need), and most Americans have already begun to frown at the idea of returning to work next week (with a terrific hangover) to start another year... all except for freelance editorial photographers.

While the hangovers may be aplenty for us merry few (thousands), the calendar year usually begins with the deafening sound of phones not ringing. Sigh, its true; January is the loneliest month of year in magazine publishing.

My official freelance career began in a January, and that was a most decidedly, and completely empty month to be sure. But every year since, and even while I've been lucky and proud to add new clients and photograph more days in each subsequent year, January still sticks out as by far the safest year to get lost in some foreign country and not worrying about missing any calls.

This is not superstition talking, though I occasionally do come to believe in, and pray to, the freelance photography gods. What experience has taught me is that the reason why my phone doesn't ring in the beginning of the year is that there is no one on the other end to dial the number. Moreover, if I am working in January, its because I was already assigned that job a month ago, which is because magazine picture editors don't seem to do much work in January. Like none. The ones unlucky enough to be in the office are otherwise occupied and busy furiously filling out contest entries for their dozens of contributors. Sometime in early February they seem to all return to pick up the phones and frenzied pace they left stacked high on their desk before the holidays.

There are other hot and cold months depending on who you talk to and where you live. I've had some really abysmal July's, for instance. Also, in terms of Florida photography, January is probably the best time of the year for many commercial shooters who do the bulk of their catalog shooting on the empty (but still warm) beaches during high season down in Miami Beach. Fashion and product makes me want to gag, so I'll be spending my January finishing the move, trying to breathe some luck into a couple of contest entries, and gearing up some energy for a great 2007!

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That sprawling New York shit

Full disclosure: I'm a magazine photographer who does not subscribe to even a single magazine. I used to, up to maybe 5 titles during college, back in the days when there were several publications that I dreamt of someday working for (and now have), but not anymore. I don't even get the New York Times these days... mostly unread, the daily paper's main role at home is filling up my recycling box. (I'm one of those annoying news consumers cited in survey after survey who now almost exclusively rely on the internet). The sad fact is that our entire household, discounting Fortune Small Business which now comes free to all AMEX business card holders, receives just 1 magazine: the New Yorker.

Every couple of months I feel pretty ashamed (about not really participating in the full cycle of the publishing industry)... and I make an effort to spend extra time in my local bookstores reading up on magazines, paying special attention to my clients. But at the end of every such session I am never inspired to purchase a new subscription. I want to feel that way, I really do. But with the thought of another growing stack in my office I'm content to steal away the girlfriend's newest issue of the New Yorker and devour it on a plane ride to the next assignment.

It's not that I love the New Yorker; I flatly don't. But I do respect it, and I am inspired by the way that its long-form articles are allowed to breathe and digress and take the complicated and longer path towards a finish line that most publications avoid like plague. What I mean is that you can find yourself hundreds of miles away suddenly in the middle of a New Yorker piece from where it began, mapping out some passionate aside that the writer feels (unselfconsciously) needs to be touched on, before flitting back into the main stride of the feature. To me, this is how life is, and its also where the vast majority of my freelance jobs are never allowed to venture. I love the sprawling nature of the magazine article, the way its little bits can inspire interest in other related, or unrelated, topics and events. I love the way that it allows us to chose our own avenue into being interested in the story and subject. And most of all, I love that it, like all good fiction, contains a knowing wink to the audience about the process of its creation; a sort of meta-tip of the hat.

There are lots of other magazines that contain writing like this, I know... but they just aren't in my house. I read The Believer from time to time (talk about a wink), and other literary-cum-current events titles (Harpers, Atlantic Monthly, etc). But none of them give me the same inspiration of freedom from the 60-second broadcast journalism bullshit that has become so inanely pervasive and influential in our media culture.

The analog to this post is pretty obvious in my own work... the photography that I care about most, and has always sustained my faith in my job, is the same sprawling, strange, and hard to digest imagery that doesn't fit well within the assigned box my clients create. Out takes and odd images created on the periphery of my assignments, filled with more questions and ellipses than answers and exclamation points, will always be what ultimately makes the most long-term sense to my understanding of any given story I work on. Part of that is most definitely the role my ego plays in the eternal dog fight in my head between story and subjectivity, but I deeply believe there is something more.

The world is so vastly connected and complicated, each day more than the last, that we need pictures that simply won't pretend to be composed in black and white, but are instead proudly shaded in grey. Great photography should let go of the things and focus on thoughts, complicated, beautiful, and sprawling.

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Ho, ho, ho, mofos

The move is done, or at least mostly (~98%) done... thank god. Everyone agrees that the new apartment is much better, and I concur, but the girlfriend and I are already starting to miss things about our old digs, and especially our crazy neighborhood. There was something so interesting and strange about living in Wynwood and watching it slowly change before your eyes. Our small piece of Miami Shores is much better on paper (very convenient to our favorite grocery store, my bank, my gym, my brother's, dry cleaning, the interstate, Starbucks, restaurants, shopping, etc.) and so I'm sure we'll really appreciate all of that with time.

There are only 2 boxes left to be opened in our new garage, and they are both mine. I've been waiting for the rest of the new office furniture to arrive before I make the final push to finish the improved working space, and since that got here today I guess now I have to make good on the promise. We ordered all of this new stuff from CB2 on Wednesday evening, and I guess because everyone is in Xmas-hyper drive it arrived early this afternoon without us paying for extra shipping.

The painting is done. Family is in town. Judy's wisdom teeth are gone. I'm just about done with shopping. My life is all short sentences. Commas are bad.

It's been so stressful moving, painting, traveling, finishing off several freelance jobs, and the rest of the holiday stuff, that I've been forcing myself to really close off to everything but one single thought. Bird by bird. I planned to create a series of time-exposures to document our moving process... but even that was too complicated for my current state of mind, and I ended up only making 1 short episode in the loft.

But anyway, its over. The girlfriend and I are very happy. Christmas is here. And to all a good night...

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Death and taxes, and moving

Things are going to be slow on the blog for the next couple of weeks. As previously reported, the girlfriend and I are moving (not that far, just to Miami Shores) into a new apartment and I'll be without an office or internet for a few days. Yes, we are leaving our swanky loft in the not-so-swank (but getting swankier all the time) Wynwood Arts District. It's been fun, but we are excited to get some more room for the both of us (walk-in closets and giant hot tub for her, garage and better office space for me).

I had a wicked physical suggestion that I'm getting older last night while painting the living room... during college my best friend Bissey and I moved into a new apartment, went straight to Home Depot to get paint and supplies, then grabbed a couple of cases of beer, and proceeded to paint pretty much the entire house in one all-night session. Last night I got about 3 large walls "done" (2 coats and trimmed) in 6 hours... sigh. I'm not even that old. Good thing there is a gym walking distance away from our new home.

Some apologies: Judy and I wanted to send Christmas cards out this year. We bought them and made lists... 6 weeks ago. They were pretty cute. Look out for them next year. To my accountant: things have been really busy lately and I'm not quite finished with my tax stuff for our meeting on Tuesday. Please be patient. To Blueeyes Magazine fans: The new issue is coming, really, I promise it is. It's just taking a long time to tie off loose ends.

If I don't get back to say it in the next week, let me wish you all a happy holidays to you and yours. Be safe, have fun.

Lastly, and because she says that I never take pictures of her... here is what the girlfriend looks like while she is waiting patiently for me to shoot long time exposures of the night sky over our neighborhood:

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Too much art

Finally on the other side of several assignments lined up neatly in a row (thanks scheduling gods) and the long, strange blur of the Art Basel Miami Beach insanely gigantic art fair, I'm back at blogging speed. I'm sitting in another Panera Bread in another city, having just finished a 3-day shoot for ESPN the Magazine that I'll write about soon (probably), and am feeling pretty good. Tonight I'll fly home to start packing with the girlfriend for our move this weekend. And somewhere in the next week I'll scramble to shop and check off the rest of our Xmas list. (For the record: I'm still quite upset that my family decided to do presents this year... I much preferred last year when we 86'd the gift giving and just spent time with each other. After all, we all have way too much shit already!)

A couple of weeks ago I received a phone call that I had been waiting on for most of the year: "Hi, we would like to hire you to cover Art Basel for us." The call came from a new client, Architectural Digest, and I was really excited that they wanted me to photograph not only something very specific to the magazine, a series of talks that their editor-in-chief was moderating, but to also document the fair at large however I saw fit (which I was planning to do for myself anyway). It’s really a beautiful thing when you are assigned to cover something that you are personally excited and passionate about!

A woman poses for a snapshot with a zebra at an art installation by Federico Uribe entitled "Human Nature" at La Comunidad.

For those of you who don't know what Art Basel is... it’s basically the Super Bowl of art fairs held annually in Switzerland (summer) and Miami Beach (winter). The Miami Beach half has been gaining ground and attention in recent years, and 2006's version felt perched on the edge of becoming the big thing. In my little world, the emerging Wynwood Arts District in Miami, the Basel festival has been breathlessly anticipated all year by the artists, galleries, and restaurant owners. For the first time basically ever, my neighborhood had traffic and taxis and impromptu parking lots advertised by guys holding cardboard signs. The experience of having your neighborhood invaded by armies of denim, sneaker, and scarf-clad hipsters was pretty insane and somewhat gratifying.

My 4-day gig began Thursday morning with a long line filled with media from all over the world waiting to be credentialed. Due to somewhat vague media rules on AB's website, no one seemed quite sure what they needed in order to receive a press pass for the event. Some people protectively held letters on stationery, others had only their passports. Neither seemed to be enough, and each person was basically forced to plead their case to a grumpy set of temporary staff members manning the media table. Eventually after 12 or 13 explanations that I was a freelance photographer working for an architecture magazine, (here is my card, here is my letter, here is my ID, please give me a fucking press pass!), I was finally given a form to fill out and put into another line where 15 minutes later we filed into another room and continued the song and dance yet again. Eventually I was photographed, given a 50 lb. bag filled with "media stuff" and a catalog of the fair (sweet!), and I was off... until I found out that media wasn't allowed to enter the fair for another full hour.

My assignment was both extremely easy and entirely impossible to complete. Shooting the daily talks held by my client was cake... mostly because the venue where they were held was so restrictive that there was only so much I could even do. On the other hand... my attempts to capture the art fair at large were laughably short of the bigger picture of the whole fair. There was simply just way, way, way too much art. Way too much. This year's ABMB contained several hundred thousand pieces of art held in dozens of galleries, satellite fairs, and buildings that dotted every part of the city. At the main exhibition hall at the Miami Beach convention center, there was so much art there alone that even though I went through there every day I never saw the same stuff more than twice.

5 connected views of Art Basel from the skywalk between halls D & A at the Miami Beach convention center. Click image for much larger view.

And while it was great to see so much art, and discover new artists whose work was very interesting and inspiring, after 4 days of Basel my eyes needed a big break. Though I'm biased, my favorite part of the whole experience was everything outside of the main Basel exhibition at the convention center, which was mostly filled with work from famous artists and art patrons more interested in price tags than passion. Miami's Design District was somewhat of a disappointment to me as well due to the large percentage of private VIP-only gallery events held there that kept the public at a distance from the art, which seems pretty counter-intuitive to the idea of an art fair itself.

In my own neighborhood it was a much better experience. A couple dozen new galleries suddenly appeared out of thin air and the art displayed amplified the vibe of Wynwood's emerging scene to create an energizing and engaging Saturday night. My main regret was that I was too busy with other assignments in addition to Basel to get to several items that were on my "not to be missed" list, including a couple of the satellite fairs and even Photo Miami, which is pretty shameful. Next year, next year.

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There and back again

This year has been my first full year of serious travel in getting to the majority of my assignments. Of course to a degree I've traveled to shoot for clients my entire career, but that was mostly the jumping in a car and driving down the street (or a few hundred miles away) variety. Now I've arrived, oh glorious day, to the wicked fly-half-way-across-the-country-and-back-in-the-same-day type of business travel and I gotta tell you, it really beats the hell out of you.

For instance... on Friday I woke up before 6 a.m. after a late night shooting politics the day before for Newsweek (late shooting, and even later processing the digital files once home) and got ready to head to the airport for my early flight to Houston. I arrived just before lunch time feeling pretty shitty and in very serious need of 2 or 3 giant americanos. This is my 4th time to Houston this year and so I know the layout and my route at IAH pretty well... gate, bathroom, coffee, rental car shuttle (no baggage), rental car counter, off to my assignment. I had some time to kill before my assignment so I drove to a shopping mall that is most of the way to where I was headed and found a Starbucks (T-Mobile hotspot + coffee!) to caption and transmit my selects from the previous day's assignment.

After I was finished I had just enough time to check out the congruent Barnes & Noble (magazine rack, non-fiction section), before heading out early to arrive to my assignment (also for Newsweek) at 3 p.m. The shoot, which was probably the most surreal story I've worked on in a really long time (I'd love to elaborate, but I can't yet), was over promptly at 5 p.m. (I had to decline an invitation to eat dinner w/ the family at Olive Garden) and I joined rush hour traffic all the way through Houston (I was in the SW suburbs of the city, and IAH is in the NE corner) to get the airport. US-59 to I-610 to I-10 to I-45 to Hardy Toll Rd. back to the rental car center almost exactly 1:30 until my flight at 7:15 p.m.

Because of all of the shitty weather in the country on Friday, my flight was slightly delayed, and because of other cancellations first class was full (no upgrade chance) along with the entirety of coach. I got back to Miami International at 10:30 p.m. still feeling pretty shitty though happy that the shoot went well, got my car from the parking deck (Dolphin garage), jumped on the 112, and was home 12 minutes later. Total time spent in Houston: 8 hours.

So that is interesting and challenging and there is an aspect to the crazy in and out of that sort of job that I like (having local knowledge about airports, the best place to eat or pee, favorite art galleries to check in on, etc). But damn... a 16 hour day that includes 5 hours of time in a cramped plane is a rough day. First and foremost I'm encouraged by the idea that my editors are willing to send me to Houston or Minneapolis or St. Barths on assignment, thus expanding the geographic range that I've been deemed worthy to cover. But at the same time, if you don't get smart about traveling, about keeping your equipment and organization skills in check, life can get pretty hellish as you hop around our nation's fine air transportation network.

My only bit of advice is to make sure you become a free member of all of the major carriers' (who operate out of your main airport) medallion clubs. I've made platinum medallion on American this year (in only 8 months, since I forgot to join until March), which means that I am often able to bump up to first class if there is room. Even if FC is said to be only a shadow of its former luxury, it still makes all of the difference in the world. Not only is there enough room for one to comfortably work on a laptop (thus getting work done while stuck in the air, leaving less work to do once home with a girlfriend), but you may also arrive back home in somewhat less of a dilapidated state.

What should be stressed about my example Houston assignment is that it was a very smooth run. I didn't have any baggage, so there was nothing to go wrong there (though I did set off "bag checks" on both ends of my security gauntlet. My flights left and arrived relatively on time. The rental car agency didn't screw up, lose, or make me wait 45 minutes for me to get a vehicle (there are obviously the same "clubs" to join in the rental car world, but I haven't really gone that far yet). It all went well, and that is a good day in of itself. Other times, and especially while traveling through Atlanta (hiss, hiss), that is not the case at all... and your single 16 hour day is suddenly a 36 hour, two day extravaganza of fun!

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