June 2007 Archives

iPhonography

Perhaps this is the last blog in America (& the "developed" world?) to write a post about the iPhone, waiting just hours before its anticipated release tonight. Sure I've been an early adopter before of Apple technology (I bought an iPod the very first day they were released during college), but I won't be buying an iPhone today, or tomorrow.

People keep writing about the hype and glitz of this rollout from Apple. I've read something to the effect of "gosh I'm so !@#$%^& tired of all of the HYPE!," about a thousand times just this week alone. Uh, no you guys are not tired. You love it. I love it. The only thing I'm tired of is the word "hype," not the buzz. The buzz is All-American; it's our favorite national past time. The well orchestrated product launch! The cacophony of media coverage and screams/gripes about swollen price tags and expectations.

Regardless of wanting one or not, as a business owner and design fan I'm just happy to watch the way that a classy outfit who has a history of embracing design launches something cool. A couple of days ago I read this really disdainful PC guy's column full with all of this sarcasm about the coming revolution, etc., and it was just so dumb. The bigger point is that we are re-thinking this mostly useless device that ALL of us carry around everywhere, you fucking asshat! (Yes, you may feel free to use "asshat" dear readers - its my gift to you in honor of iPhone launch day).

Anyway, I'm not buying a 1st-generation iPhone because it demands too much of its potential users, which is completely backwards of how technology is supposed to work. Why should I need to re-arrange my life to take advantage of something that is supposed to make my life more cool/organized/shiny/musical/tactile? In order to support/pay Apple today I would have to cancel my service with Sprint ($175), get in a very, very long line for several hours ($500-ish, for my time), plop down my AMEX ($600), switch over to an inferior network ($80/month), and then cringe in 6 months when iPhone 2 comes out ($500, probably), which takes advantage of AT&T's much faster 3G network, comes with more features, applications, and a (hopefully) much larger capacity (8 GBs = less than 1900 songs, which is less than 1/6th of my iTunes music library, which doesn't even factor in putting a *gasp* movie on your iPhone).

My Sprint contract (everyone keeps saying how terrible AT&T is, but isn't that how we all feel...?) runs out in January so I'll wait and see. Even though I'll happily stay off the bandwagon for now, like most creative people I'm super excited to see the way that content explodes with a new generation of beautiful screens like the iPhone. The very thought of presenting multimedia photography projects on it make me weak in the knees, even though I'm pretty disgusted with how multimedia is growing up in the industry. But that screen! My pictures want a new home!

And so I'll end with my ill-informed theories: Apple will sell a shitload of iPhones over the next month. Verizon (who was offered the deal by Apple) will feel pretty stupid, and their CEO will resign under pressure. Apple will not capture anywhere near the same percentage of the marketplace with the iPhone as they have with the iPod, but it'll steadily grow up towards 2-3% over the next 24 months. iPhone 2 will be released just in time for Christmas, and its most significant new features (for its own sake) will be that it works with corporate exchange servers (because that is a GIANT share of the market). Additionally, the 2nd gen. will have more battery life, at least 1 new KILLER app that people fawn over, and more capacity (~10/20 GBs). But most importantly, the 2nd gen. iPhone will still not work with AT&T's 3G network. Lame. But I'll stay buy it, and a new pair of Shure headphones, which will have created a new iPhone version also just in time for Santa.

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Scattered thoughts, showers

The long drive home is always a great time to log some quality thinking, and so it was yesterday afternoon as I hopped from island to island back up to Miami from an assignment in Key West for Men's Journal (new client, sweet!). Roughly following, here are a few items from my train of thought...

HBO should be ashamed for (now officially) cancelling Deadwood, which was the best show on television, bar none. Incredibly well-written, shot, directed, and acted... and filled with such beautiful characters. Sigh...

Finding characters is just about one of the most rewarding ways to create lasting imagery. It was a real honor to spend 2 days with one of the most interesting characters I've met recently this weekend, Capt. Billy Rawson.

What ultimately counts towards pushing yourself forward creatively is finding the opportunities which will allow you to succeed and grow. Talent is not the x-factor, capitalizing on the right moment is the key.

Having the hotel clerk look at you sideways because he knows that you only spent about 13 hours total over 3 days time in the expensive room that you just paid for probably means that you are doing something right.

Being on a cool assignment is great, but getting a huge bonus such as learning how to scuba dive thrown in on top of that cool assignment is pretty damn close to perfect.

I need to re-read Hemingway, again.

More interesting photographers make more interesting photography. At least that's my theory...

Why is the 5D sensor four times harder to keep clean than the 1Ds's? Wtf?!

Gathering audio is an entirely separate skill and job, requiring an entirely separate payment and allotment of time.

It's disappointing to find out that the "Classic Malts of Scotland" is just a marketing campaign, and not an official distinction. Oban was my first love, then Lagavulin, but now I can't get enough Dalwhinnie.

In Florida, when it rains, it pours.

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Monday poem: Tony Towle

New York has been on my mind lately, as I heard recaps of the Magnum Festival events from friends and decided not to attend a party for Redux's 5th anniversary this week. More importantly though, the city has been floating around the girlfriend and I's thoughts as we look into the future and try to figure out which new place will be our next home as we tire of Miami and she moves towards her residency.

Who better than a New York poet to play with these ideas and memories, drawing a line through the thousand of hours I've waited in coffee shops ever so patiently for a tiny spark of inspiration to occur.

Tony Towle | In the Coffee Shop

the Mona Lisa, in the Village
at Bleecker and Seventh, a blip
from the middle ages
on the radar screen
of that young woman over there,
while she thinks of someone else.

I should have brought
something to read
because I have nothing to do now but write,
the way I used to
forty years ago, in the Figaro,
in the Village
at MacDougal and Bleecker, exhilarated
by loneliness, poverty, and paralyzing
indecision, and resolutely ignoring the fact
that everyone cool in there
could tell that I wasn't --
lost to what was happening
behind the overpriced coffee, 35 cents
for the fuel
to infiltrate oblivion;

and I waited for a girlfriend
and composed jejune little ironies
that I hoped would pass for poems,
and I had all the time in the world.

I could see the San Remo bar across the street
where I learned years later
real New York poets went
and drank real drinks;
but the San Remo has since disappeared
with everything else from 1960--
discarded, lost, or broken, or certainly
wouldn't fit me anymore,
except the sound advice
still gathering dust:

Think before you speak.
(Yes, I probably should have done that.)
A penny saved is a penny earned.
(That could have been made a bit clearer, perhaps.)
Don't be a complete idiot.
(Hey, I gave it a shot.)
You really should think about a career.
I'm thinking about it now
and there it is: involuntary barbs,
unasked-for opinions
and missed opportunities strewn
and rusting about the incorporeal field.

I told Diane I'd be here 'til six. Waiting
for a girlfriend literally is a great improvement
over afternoons at the Figaro;
and in fact it's cool to have a girlfriend at my age
I think amusedly to myself
behind the overpriced coffee,
2.95 to contemplate the traffic
fleeing down Seventh and into the past,
which brings me up to the present,
where I put down my pen, figuratively.

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Proof

"Music is the greatest proof of the existence of God" --Kurt Vonnegut

If I ever gave up photography (sigh) I would try to become an architect. And even if managed to make it to the top of either of those fields creatively, I would give them both up, and my mother, to have musical talent. I love Vonnegut for many reasons, but it’s the above quote that reminds me of him most often. In this space right here I would write about how much music means to me, using several lofty adjectives, etc. But music is more than that; its too much to fit words around in my life. So, in short, I totally agree with you Kurt.

My education in serious photojournalism came with a rebirth of the importance of jazz in my life, and there is nothing coincidental about that. My photo essay professor showed our class that there was an intrinsic and indistinguishable line between music and photography, between passions all, and we spent time in class and at his apartment looking through photo books and listening... Perres and Rollins, Eggleston and Parker, Richards and Mingus. Sylvia Plachy acknowledges this connection as immediately as you can in her incredible Unguided Tour, which comes with a flexible Tom Waits lp in the back cover.

Music and photography, and modern art, literature, architecture, wood-block printing, graphic design, and fashion are the same; connected. And it’s always been my greatest ambition to create images that express what I feel when listening to Mingus, Radiohead, or Waits. Some day I hope.

And even though this connection is so strong, so deep as to seem strange to even mention it out loud (imagine a fashion show without music), photography has a hard time capturing the essence of music. There are recent spectacular failures on the tip of my tongue, none so iconically as Leibovitz's American Music (though I do love that portrait of Waits). But I've lately been thinking too about Nat Geo's most recent attempts to try and explore American music itself, just this year with Harvey's Hip-Hop Planet, and several years ago with Allard's Blues Highway. Two incredible photographers who I admire; two projects that were almost completely without music, and instead taken down an anthropologic path (which makes sense for NGS, but god damn) of explication, of definition via props and geography. Looking back on Allard's work just now, years later, I find a little more poetry there than I remember, but there is nothing bigger or deeper in the American arts than the Delta blues, and the standard has to be monumental.

For my own part I have nothing that even comes close. Nothing as raw and visceral and poignant and propped in anticipation on a melodic edge between trite and abstraction. I don't even have a good pop song, let alone something like JSBX's "Blues X Man." But I'm going to keep trying; I have to. I really want to find a way to create an essay of images which is melodic and infectious, loud and resounding, rooted and new, and capable of amplifying something deep within the viewer. Like so many of us, I want to keep the faith.

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UK

Pointing out landmarks from the London Eye, including Parliament and Big Ben, above, and the Snowdon Mountain Railway makes its way up to the top, below. (Click here for a full gallery).

As previously reported, my recent trip to the UK was a great time. Usually on 2-week trips I get sort of anxious near the end to get back to my life, my work, my bed, etc., but on the move I felt great and would happily have kept going deeper into Scotland for another 2 weeks instead of returning home. It was just the 3 of us (my sister Amy, brother Michael, and I) with a basic plan of getting from London to Edinburgh in a roundabout way, trying to act more as travelers than tourists.

First stop: London. Though I really wanted to see London, I was immediately excited to leave it behind as soon as we landed on our first day. We stuck around for 2 days (laughably not long enough for people who aren't on a mission) doing most of what you'd expect: Tower of London, London Eye, parks, British Museum, pubs, pints, Tate Modern, St. Paul's, bridges. Luckily my college friend Megan happened to send me a note just before we left on the trip, and it was great to meet up with her, colleagues, and hubby to do some quality drinking (thanks babe!).

The morning of our 3rd day we made our way to Heathrow to rent a car (thanks so much London Underground for closing the Piccadilly Line... yes, fine, the subway in England is much cleaner than NYC, but who really cares since it never works!) for the second leg of the journey. I was pretty nervous about driving, wrong-sided-ness and all of that, and so happily got the full coverage insurance and an automatic (I drive a manual normally)... but holy shit wasn't that an expensive idea. And yes, let me pause here to say... the UK is hilariously, laugh out loud, then sob in your hands like a baby expensive right now, comparative to the U.S. dollar. Right, well, anyway... we got a car, a very fancy one (the only automatic they had as it turns out, despite our reservation), and struck a past West.

Ah, yes, going West, as young men and women. So romantic... if only the entire country wasn't so small and filled with weekenders pouring out of the city. We made our way for Stonehenge as I got acclimated to British driving, and left the decision in Mikey's hands as whether or not we would actually stop. He wisely chose to peek from the road (because its RIGHT next to the highway, strangely) and so we sped off refreshed at moving on to our destination for the day: Bath.

A resort town for hundreds of years because of its natural hot springs, and thus its name, Bath is just about the most boring place imaginable for a 16-year old kid like my brother. You basically can check out the Roman Baths and Abbey, eat something, and then you are done, and even then the baths are actually pretty lame. For some reason I thought the baths would be really, really interesting, but no... lame. I can see where with a big group of friends interested in just hanging out and drinking, Bath would be really great. But for our purposes, after a few short hours we were ready to head on.

We woke up the next morning outside of Cardiff and started heading to Northern Wales, which would become our favorite place during the whole trip. A large road soon became a small one, and then my trusty Nuvi (invaluable on this adventure) guided us to road A4459 heading NW towards the water. Calling A4459 a road is really, really misguided. It is more of a very narrow horse-cart path winding incredibly and beautiful up through forests, down vast pastures, and around tiny, tiny hamlets and farms. It was probably greatest driving experience of my life, and this is from someone who loves to drive. Eventually A4459 moved us to the ocean and we stopped for the first time that day to look over the water and cliffs dotted with sheep and horses.

For the next 2 days we drove and climbed all over Northern Wales, stopping at incredible castles, heading to the summit of Snowdon, and stocking up on local ales at the Super Tesco near our hotel. Though Caernarfon Castle is cool and not to be missed, we actually preferred Harlech Castle, further down the coast, which was much smaller and way less tourist friendly (thus allowing you to imagine yourself back in time way more easily). The journey up Snowdonia in the rack and pinion railway cars was cool, but our best moment came the last night when we drove out to Holy Island and watched the sunset over the rocks of a beach park outside of Holyhead, drinking a large delicious bottle of Wychcraft as the sun finally sank into the water and Ireland and the Isle of Man on the horizon.

Our last car trip took us back into England and over to York, which was another town not that interesting to my brother. Especially annoying is the beautifully gothic York Minster, whose trip to the top was expensive, exhausting, and totally worthless (the entire top of the tower is covered in chicken wire that is barely tall enough for me to stand up straight under). For most people over the age of 16, though, York is pretty charming with its narrow streets of shopping and pretty scenics on the river. We spent most of the night in a pub near our hotel playing monopoly (I won) and drinking pints of beer and coke (despite REPEATED efforts, Mikey did not taste a single drop of beer or whiskey on the trip... I guess there are worse things).

We hopped on the train the next morning heading for 3 days at our final destination: Edinburgh. Amy and I planned the trip so that we'd end up in a place that we thought would be really cool, and we were exactly right. Edinburgh is a great city, old and new, with tons to do and climb, and an energy in the air. The first day we climbed up to Arthur's Seat at Holyrood Park (have you picked up on the theme of climbing to the top of things?) and looked out over the entire region, seeing for dozens of miles. The descent had an unfortunate casualty, though, and my brand new flask safely tucked in my back pocket (with a lovely thistle right on the front) will never be the same for my short fall down a stupidly steep path. Luckily the Dalwhinnie I had filled it with was safe and sound.

The other two days passed in a similar happy way... trips to the castle (surprisingly lame), museums (the Whiskey museum was actually really cool), shops (finally some thinking about what to bring home as gifts). We climbed to the top of Carlton Hill, we ate some really wonderful food (Edinburgh is having a huge resurgence of dining apparently) that was all the better for the incredible amount of pub food we'd eaten previously (try Stac Polly (modern Scottish) on St. Mary's St). And on the last day we took a train out to North Berwick (a small coastal village) where Ross (a very cool friend of a friend) had welcomed us to show us around some of where he grew up. After the sites we set up for a lot more pints, many hands of cards, and a lesson in how to understand cricket, we took the last train home to Edinburgh. The next morning our trip ended with the long flight home, complete with delays in Atlanta. Ah, home, sweet home.

A foggy view of the North Sea coast, below, from a window in Tantallon Castle near North Berwick, Scotland.

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Briefs

I'm nearly caught up on everything post-trip (e-mails, laundry, etc.) but I wanted to make a few notes.

First and most importantly, my friend Stephanie Sinclair has recently launched an online charity print auction to benefit Azra Latif, a Pakistani girl who was severely disfigured when her brother-in-law threw acid on her face during an argument. Those helping Azra have already managed to secure medical treatment through a French NGO, but the print auction will go towards paying other related expenses during her recovery.

The auction features some amazing museum-quality prints donated by a group of very talented international photographers. In addition to the prints you can also simply donate money, so please take a look.

And now for the less-important bits: I'm wrapping up the final touches on the June JLPFL newsletter. If you are interested in receiving occasional updates please sign up for the newsletter here.

And lastly, I have a few dozen extra new promos (seen above, 2 versions back & front) that were mailed out in the last two weeks to clients. If any of you would like to check one out, I'd be happy to mail one off you to (U.S. only, sorry). Just send me an e-mail with your mailing address and begin to wait in anticipation.

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Monday poem: Cecilia Woloch

A quick 2 weeks later and I'm back in South Florida and at "work" once again. The trip, which I'll post about in more illustrated detail this week, was fantastic and the Siblings 3 (me, my sister Amy, and little brother Mikey) traveled very well together and had a great time exploring the UK.

Our vacation also returned me to a perfect place to react to the following piece by Cecilia Woloch, who is a poet that until this morning I knew nothing about. The title made me immediately recall an exercise in my middle school algebra class where we were given xeroxed images of traffic signs and asked to think about what they mean, and the ways in which so many signs all around us really mean or don't mean so many things. And in that way, the delicate balance of perception and perspective, a journey to a new place is the perfect way to reset my life back on what is actually worthwhile.

Cecilia Woloch | Slow Children at Play

All the quick children have gone inside, called
by their mothers to hurry-up-wash-your-hands
honey-dinner’s-getting-cold, just-wait-till-your-father-gets-home-
and only the slow children out on the lawns, marking off
paths between fireflies, making soft little sounds with their mouths, ohs
that glow and go out and glow. And their slow mothers flickering,
pale in the dusk, watching them turn in the gentle air, watching them
twirling, their arms spread wide, thinking, These are my children, thinking
Where is their dinner? Where has their father gone?

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