Category Archive

Last week, I explained why Hester Keijser and I made a newspaper instead of a traditional exhibition catalogue. One of our reasons was so that we could playfully distribute the information in the exhibition at no cost to the public; to unexpected and unexpecting people.

This week, Gemma Thorpe and I handed out 100 copies to people on the streets of Amsterdam.

This is 3,100 copies, not 100.

We began by rolling them into tubes, tied with string.

Giddy with anticipation.

We’d just been to see the Joel Sternfeld show and the excellent Arnon Gundberg exhibit Les vacances de Monsieur Grunberg at FOAM photo gallery.

FOAM wouldn’t allow us to leave copies in it’s reception, so we began distributing outside.

This man said he’d read it on the train.

We left a few copies in appealing bicycle baskets.

While I ate my chips and mayo, I handed them out on a street corner outside a jewelers.

This guy wanted one.

We stopped by a couple of weed coffeeshops …

… and left them in the magazine racks.

This lady was happy with her copy.

And so was the man at the Turkish Kebab House. We left a few more on his counter for his customers.

Know your audience. It was an English language publication after all.

As dusk fell, just a few more left to give out.

The final five went with us to the pub …

… where this man wanted to take our portrait. We said no, but his disappointment was allayed by a copy of the Cruel and Unusual newspaper.

And, not happy with one European country, the next day the final few copies got left at Manchester Piccadilly train station.

The man, the mystery, the telegraph pole. I got one shot of Blake before my battery died. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

Blake Andrews was impressed by my ability to find Sam Bond’s Garage without a GPS and I was impressed by the beer that came in mason jars. It’s a Eugene thing?

Meeting with Blake Andrews – just one and half hours shy of the end of PPOTR – ended up playing out like a debrief.

Like a beer-swilling psychotherapist, Blake asked questions and plumbed the depths of the trip. I saw with fresh eyes the particulars and the peculiars of the trip.

Blake and I looked over images by photographers I’d met along the way. I heard the sound of a jaw hitting the floor behind me; I realized some folk are not familiar with photographs of pregnant female prisoners, shanks, scars, dubious conditions and electrocution victims.

Somewhere in the mix, Blake suggested I was like Kevin Bacon. I had connected with the flesh and bloods behind the pixels and tweets. Six degrees or not, this has less to do with me and most to do with the generosity of others … and maybe a lot of mutual curiosity.

Intrigued by pictures of bloggers in their domestic environments, Blake said I should share them as a fun exercise. In order of appearance:

Michael Shaw

Andy Adams

Kevin Miyazaki (interrogated by Darren Hauck and Carlos Javier Ortiz)

Joerg Colberg

John Edwin Mason

Blake was only disappointed there weren’t more portraits. And, then as I thought of it, so was I.

Yes, photos of my time with Michael, Andy, Kevin, Joerg and John, but what about the blogger photo-ops I missed? Aline Smithson, Miki Johnson, Jakob Schiller, Bryan Formhals and James Pomerantz all avoided the attentions of my Lumix DMC-ZS7.

I was juggling so many activities on the trip that I didn’t think to photograph everyone. Why wasn’t I more aggressive at getting the pictures? I guess I’m not a photographer.

More photo-pholks that I missed my Terry Richardson moment with: Jeff Barnett-Winsby, Michael Mazzeo, Whitney Johnson, Lance Rosenfield, Michael Wichita, Louie Palu, Donald Weber, Max Whitakker, Lara Shipley, Tony Dolezal, Mikael Kennedy, Nancy McCrary, Robert Lyons, Greg Ruffing, Christopher Colville, and Brendan Seibel. All of these peeps are beautiful and talented people; legends now or legends-in-the-making.

In many things I succeeded on PPOTR, but in capturing on digital file the faces of those I met, I failed.

And think, I also met and interviewed 40 photographers.

My ventures got Blake to thinking about a couchsrufrer.org specifically for photo-pholk. Something like it may already exist. Certainly, the Facebook Flak Photo Network reaches a good few thousand immediately, but FPN was not established to support the wanderings and dalliances of photographers.

I reckon Blake needs to create a “Homeless Photographer App” making it easy for you to find that key under the gnome and crash on a couch far, far away.

If a dozen police officers are firing their guns into a stationary car and killing a citizen in the street then you’d presume they have good reason … and nothing to hide.

Why then did a Miami cop pull a gun on a couple after they’d recorded such an incident and why did Narces Benoit – the man who made the recording – have to hide his memory card under his tongue while police “threw the couple to the ground and smashed the cell phone that took the video“?

The NPPA reports:

Benoit, who was with his girlfriend, Ericka Davis, said police pulled him out of the car, put him face down on the pavement, guns pointed at the couples’ heads, handcuffed him, and smashed his cell phone. Then they put the smashed phone in his back pocket as he lay on the ground.

But Benoit had saved the video to his phone’s SIM card and hid the card in his mouth before the phone was smashed.

He was taken to a mobile command center, photographed, and questioned. Then police took him to headquarters and questioned him again, demanding the video. Benoit says he told police, “The phone’s broken.” He was later released.

“They wanted the video, that’s all they were concerned with,” Davis told CNN.

CNN has purchased the video, and have shown it on air along with Benoit’s interview.

The couple, who have hired a lawyer because, they say, they “want the right thing to be done,” said they saw police taking other people’s cell phones at the scene and smashing them as well, destroying evidence and intimidating witnesses.

Think on.