Contact Prints

Point and Shoot Ideas

2009-05-09T15:53:00.010-04:00

In the interest of trying to loosen up, I went ahead and got a little digital point and shoot, that is just about good enough to put together a decent looking print. This will mark the second "loosening" of the system (hilariously, a Fuji 67 was the first attempt). But I've been feeling like I'm in a rut lately, so I wanted to just have a camera that I could carry with me at all times, and to think about making pictures with people in them.

Still trying to work out what I want to get out of using this camera. The first advantage is that I've been getting closer to things than I usually do with the large format, and, while I'm still not in love with inkjet printing, it is sort of interesting to shoot more instinctively and edit after the fact.

So, while I sort through how these images are going to work in with my other work, a selection of the digital work.

IMAGES

Los Angeles, 2009

Los Angeles, 2009

Miami, 2009

Miami, 2009

New York, 2009

New York, 2009

New York, 2009

New York, 2009

New York, 2009

New York, 2009

New York, 2009

New York, 2009

Streetview Article!

2008-09-09T19:10:00.004-04:00

I should have done this months ago when it came out, but I wrote a version of the Street View article for Triple Canopy.

Street View Article

I'm really, really happy with how it turned out, and the presentation on the site is actually pretty amazing.

Windows and Trees/Mountain of Ash

2008-01-17T17:36:00.000-05:00

These pictures are from a group I've mentally labelled as Windows/Trees, even though that is probably a misnomer. The initial images from this group are a picture I took in LA, immediately after the wildfires in the Spring, and a subsequent picture taken in Long Island, of landscape and houses seen through a break in some trees. This went on to inform most of process this summer, which involved sneaking around in suburban parks which border immediately next to people's houses, and photographing through the woods. The effect is not exactly voyeuristic, though there are some elements of that. Rather, they become a bit more about alienating from the domesticity of suburban living, similar, I feel, to what I'm trying to say with my night photography. There are also images of both the discoveries within the park, where nature comes so close to humanity, and scans from the burned park. Arguably, the burning of the park is where humanity comes too close to nature.

IMAGES
Massapequa, 2007
Los Angeles, 2007
Massapequa, 2007
Los Angeles, 2007
Massapequa, 2007
Brooklyn, 2007
Brooklyn, 2007
Brooklyn, 2007
Massapequa, 2007
Los Angeles, 2007
Los Angeles, 2007
Los Angeles, 2007
Los Angeles, 2007
Los Angeles, 2007
Los Angeles, 2007
Massapequa, 2007
Massapequa, 2007
Massapequa, 2007
Brooklyn, 2007
Massapequa, 2007
Massapequa, 2007

Massapequa, 2007

2008-01-17T16:59:00.001-05:00

Massapequa, 2007

Los Angeles, 2007

2008-01-17T16:58:00.001-05:00

Los Angeles, 2007

Massapequa, 2007

2008-01-17T16:48:00.000-05:00

Massapequa, 2007

Los Angeles, 2007

2008-01-17T16:26:00.000-05:00

Los Angeles, 2007

Massapequa, 2007

2008-01-17T16:25:00.000-05:00

Massapequa, 2007

Brooklyn, 2007

2008-01-17T16:22:00.000-05:00

Brooklyn, 2007

2008-01-17T16:21:00.001-05:00

Brooklyn, 2007

2008-01-17T16:18:00.002-05:00

Brooklyn, 2007

Massapequa, 2007

2008-01-17T16:18:00.001-05:00

Massapequa, 2007

Los Angeles, 2007

2008-01-17T16:17:00.001-05:00

Los Angeles, 2007

2008-01-17T16:16:00.000-05:00

Los Angeles, 2007

2008-01-17T16:09:00.000-05:00

Los Angeles, 2007

2008-01-17T16:03:00.003-05:00

Los Angeles, 2007

2008-01-17T16:03:00.001-05:00

Los Angeles, 2007

2008-01-17T16:01:00.002-05:00

Los Angeles, 2007

Massapequa, 2007

2008-01-17T16:01:00.001-05:00

Massapequa, 2007

2008-01-17T15:59:00.000-05:00

Massapequa, 2007

2008-01-17T15:58:00.002-05:00

Massapequa, 2007

Brooklyn, 2007

2008-01-17T15:58:00.001-05:00

Brooklyn, 2007

Massapequa, 2007

2008-01-17T15:57:00.001-05:00

Massapequa, 2007

2008-01-17T15:55:00.000-05:00

Massapequa, 2007

Brooklyn Waterfront

2008-01-17T14:40:00.000-05:00

So last spring I woke up crazily early on a Saturday morning, just after sunrise and walked down to Dumbo in the fog and early light, with my camera. I rarely photograph in actual New York City, I guess because the visual world of the urban environment isn't something I'm very interested in making pictures with. Perhaps it's the lack of trees.

Anyway, the pictures below are from that morning, in the muggy, Brooklyn air. I'm not sure what these pictures are for, or how to think about them with my other work, but they're something I've been thinking about, especially the angle of view looking down on things.

IMAGES
Brooklyn, 2007
Brooklyn, 2007
Brooklyn, 2007

Brooklyn, 2007

2008-01-17T14:39:00.000-05:00

Brooklyn, 2007

2008-01-17T14:37:00.001-05:00

Brooklyn, 2007

2008-01-17T14:33:00.000-05:00

Brooklyn, 2007

More Google Street View Images

2007-10-16T16:33:00.001-04:00

Just a couple google street view images, from Houston this time, that I had sitting around. I'm working on rewriting my original thoughts about this concept, so I thought I should walk around the virtual world some more. As I go about collecting (photographing) these images, it's notable that I'm making things that seem fairly generic with respect to geography and look. Whether this speaks to a tone in my own way of looking at the world, or points to a limitation of the form (same general type of location, etc). I guess the next step is to see if I can get someone else to participate in this with me.

IMAGES
Houston, 2007
Houston, 2007
Houston, 2007
Houston, 2007
Houston, 2007
Houston, 2007
Houston, 2007
Houston, 2007
Houston, 2007
Houston, 2007
Houston, 2007
Houston, 2007

Houston, 2007

2007-10-16T16:25:00.001-04:00

Houston, 2007

2007-10-16T16:00:00.001-04:00

Houston, 2007

2007-10-16T15:59:00.003-04:00

Houston, 2007

2007-10-16T15:59:00.001-04:00

Houston, 2007

2007-10-16T15:57:00.001-04:00

Houston, 2007

2007-10-16T15:55:00.001-04:00

Houston, 2007

2007-10-16T15:44:00.001-04:00

Houston, 2007

2007-10-16T15:43:00.001-04:00

Houston, 2007

2007-10-16T15:37:00.000-04:00

Houston, 2007

2007-10-16T15:25:00.001-04:00

Houston, 2007

2007-10-16T15:23:00.000-04:00

Houston, 2007

2007-10-16T13:39:00.000-04:00

Houston, 2007

Mountain of Ash

2007-08-31T14:59:00.000-04:00

These are some images I made earlier this year in Griffith Park in Los Angeles, right after the big fire that left parts of the park completely destroyed. I went in the mid afternoon with my friend Peter, and we snuck into the park, through the zone marked by the fire department (LAFD, I assume?) and hiked up the hill.

Except for the image with the iconic Griffith Park Observatory, these pictures don't have much to do with the park, or the fire itself, but rather use them as the setting for my own thoughts and fears. In retrospect, I think having just finished Cormac McCarthy's The Road and far from home, the apocalypse in general was on my mind that afternoon, even in the gorgeous LA spring. Speaking to my friends Stephen and Andrew last week, Stephen called this work catastrophilia, and I can't really argue with that.

The other idea to come out of these images for me was the idea of how urban and suburban parks create strange interfaces between natural and human worlds. In particular, the idea of using arrangements of trees as windows has been something I've been pursuing this summer, shooting in a park in Long Island. More on that to come, as I start making prints from those negatives.

Thanks to Peter (other Peter) for making these scans in a pinch.

IMAGES
Los Angeles, 2007
Los Angeles, 2007
Los Angeles, 2007
Los Angeles, 2007
Los Angeles, 2007
Los Angeles, 2007
Los Angeles, 2007
Los Angeles, 2007
Los Angeles, 2007

Los Angeles, 2007

2007-08-31T14:46:00.000-04:00

Los Angeles, 2007

2007-08-31T14:45:00.003-04:00

Los Angeles, 2007

2007-08-31T14:45:00.001-04:00

Los Angeles, 2007

2007-08-31T14:44:00.001-04:00

Los Angeles, 2007

2007-08-31T14:43:00.001-04:00

Los Angeles, 2007

2007-08-31T14:42:00.001-04:00

Los Angeles, 2007

2007-08-31T14:41:00.001-04:00

Los Angeles, 2007

2007-08-31T14:40:00.001-04:00

Los Angeles, 2007

2007-08-31T14:39:00.000-04:00

Los Angeles, 2007

The Big Brother Project

2007-07-03T10:49:00.000-04:00

The other night, I was at the bar with my friend Stephen and Dan, and the subject of the new google streetview software came up. That's the database connected to google maps where-in real panoramic photographs of some selected locations are available for various map locations. From reading on the internet, it looks like this data was produced by exhaustively photographing some pre-determined streets with a 360 degree bank of cameras mounted on top of various cars, essentially documenting entire cities, albeit currently only from a single point of view.

Now, issues of privacy and how massive computer aided documentation affects the public vs. interior lives of regular people aside, a big thing that we talked about was the idea that, contained within this mindless, exhaustive dataset, would be great pictures, street and landscape photography as "good" as anything produced by any of my favorite photographers, Lee Friedlander, Gary Winogrand, Stephen Shore, whoever, really. Indeed, there should be, hidden in the admittedly huge amounts of noise, whole bodies of work, ripe for editing, cropping, curating and re-interpreting. After all, a photographer currently uses time and light to cull from the infinite world of light around her to create images on paper, so if a machine or corporation has created a version of this infinite space (although admittedly a much smaller subset of infinity than even the possibilities of even the small world available to anyone), is this different than photography as we think of it, or merely another tool.

So, with this in mind, and in conjunction with my already existing love for photographs from cars, I went in and started looking through the maps of some of the cities google has already crawled, looking for images I'd edit from the noise of the google maps database. Beginning this quick experiment, there were a few interesting surprises.

- Because of the way the images are digitally composited, lens flares become these amazing stalks of light that seem to interact with the corporeal world.

- Similarly, there are times when one of the cameras will color shift from the others, and because of the compositing again, occasionally a ghostly magenta wall will appear in the middle of the landscape.

- The cameras do also create a blurring affect similar to my drive-by images, but with motion blur in multiple strange directions.

Essentially, some of the most interesting parts of these images are where fidelity to what a real world image might look like fall apart, in the artifacts of the compositing algorithm, in where the mindless perfection of the machine returns unexpected results.

For better or for worse, all of this starts to approach a world where all images of the real world can be expressed by providing google with latitude, longitude, orientation, angle from the horizon and magnification. Which reminds me of an old joke, which I will paraphrase horribly because I can't really remember the set-up:

A guy dies and goes to Purgatory, which is a waiting room that no one ever seems to leave. All of a sudden, from across the room, someone shouts "27!" and the whole room bursts into laughter. A few minutes later, someone else shouts "66!" and once again, everyone cracks up. Puzzled, he asks his neighbor what's going on.

"Well, we've all been here in purgatory for so long, we've told all the jokes there are to tell. So we went ahead an gave them all numbers, so we can save time and just shout out the number of the joke we want to tell," says his neighbor.

The man is puzzled by all of this, but, since he's new in Purgatory and wants to make friends, he decides to make a go of it. "99!" he shouts out. The room is totally silent and people look sort of puzzled. Embarassed, he wonders what's going on. Not more than a minute later, someone else shouts "99!" once again to peals of laughter. Once again, he turns to his neighbor, "Hey, how come no one laughed when I told that joke?"

"Well, it's not so much the joke, it's how he tells it!"

IMAGES
Miami, 2007
Denver, 2007
Miami, 2007
Denver, 2007
Miami, 2007
Denver, 2007
Long Island, 2007
Miami, 2007
Miami, 2007
Denver, 2007

Miami, 2007

2007-07-03T10:47:00.000-04:00

Miami, 2007

Denver, 2007

2007-07-03T10:44:00.003-04:00

Denver, 2007

Miami, 2007

2007-07-03T10:44:00.001-04:00

Miami, 2007

Denver, 2007

2007-07-03T10:43:00.002-04:00

Denver, 2007

Miami, 2007

2007-07-03T10:43:00.001-04:00

Miami, 2007

Denver, 2007

2007-07-03T10:42:00.002-04:00

Denver, 2007

Long Island, 2007

2007-07-03T10:42:00.001-04:00

Long Island, 2007

Miami, 2007

2007-07-03T10:41:00.002-04:00

Miami, 2007

2007-07-03T10:41:00.001-04:00

Miami, 2007

Denver, 2007

2007-07-03T10:36:00.000-04:00

Denver, 2007

The Sun Sets on One Town, the Sun Rises on Another Town

2006-10-27T15:22:00.000-04:00

STATEMENT
In day and night, an American town has an odd character if you look at things the right way. Trees are monuments, and a window is more sinister than a shadow. These are the suburbs of strange dreams, where trees glow with the nobility of a portrait of a king, and each window is a new oddity. In day and night, light and color are only as real as the mind interprets, and photographic film and paper record these oddities, pushing the truth of a memory as far as the dreaming mind requires.

IMAGES
Queens, 2002
Ann Arbor, 2006
Brooklyn, 2006
Los Angeles, 2006
Los Angeles, 2006
Philadelphia, 2006
San Diego, 2005
Los Angeles, 2006
Ann Arbor, 2006
Long Island, 2005
Long Island, 2004
Brooklyn, 2006
San Diego, 2005
Los Angeles, 2006
Los Angeles, 2006

Queens, 2002

2006-10-27T15:21:00.000-04:00

Queens, 2002

Ann Arbor, 2006

2006-10-27T15:20:00.000-04:00

Ann Arbor, 2006

Brooklyn, 2006

2006-10-27T15:19:00.000-04:00

Brooklyn, 2006

Los Angeles, 2006

2006-10-27T15:18:00.000-04:00

Los Angeles, 2006

2006-10-27T15:17:00.000-04:00

Los Angeles, 2006

Philadelphia, 2006

2006-10-27T15:15:00.000-04:00

Philadelphia, 2006

San Diego, 2005

2006-10-27T15:14:00.000-04:00

San Diego, 2005

Los Angeles, 2006

2006-10-27T15:12:00.000-04:00

Los Angeles, 2006

Ann Arbor, 2006

2006-10-27T15:10:00.000-04:00

Ann Arbor, 2006

Long Island, 2005

2006-10-27T15:09:00.000-04:00

Long Island, 2005

Long Island, 2004

2006-10-27T15:07:00.000-04:00

Long Island, 2004

Brooklyn, 2006

2006-10-27T15:05:00.000-04:00

Brooklyn, 2006

San Diego, 2005

2006-10-27T15:04:00.000-04:00

San Diego, 2005

Los Angeles, 2006

2006-10-27T15:01:00.000-04:00

Los Angeles, 2006

2006-10-25T16:52:00.000-04:00

Los Angeles, 2006

Portfolios

2006-07-28T15:24:00.000-04:00

So I finally got around to editing together and writing about a short selection of the night work and the driveby project that I've been putting off scanning. Many of these are elsewhere on the site, but these are mostly new scans. Actually, I think they're all new scans. Anyway, if you want to start from the top:

Drive By
Night

Drive-By Portfolio

2006-07-28T15:22:00.000-04:00

STATEMENT
Sitting shotgun is really the best way to travel. It’s only by leaning back and letting your eyes go slightly out of focus that the trees and wires and telephone poles really start to talk to you.

If you stare out the window of a car going 65 miles an hour, any single portion of the landscape flies by at the edge of perception. Where an eye can only report back to consciousness at its unrelenting pace, a camera can only consider one precise frame at a time. And from a car traveling the right speed and going the right places, each blade of grass becomes a brushstroke, and a tree is a sudden statement of clarity out of nowhere.

A camera shows the hazy majesty of the road; a moment revealed with your head against the window and static on the radio.

Andrew Ti, 2006

IMAGES
Untitled (Long Island, New York, 2004)
Untitled (Los Angeles, California, 2005)
Untitled (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2006)
Untitled (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2005)
Untitled (Hudson, New York, 2005)
Untitled (Detroit, Michigan, 2006)
Untitled (San Diego, California, 2005)
Untitled (near Toronto, Ontario, 2005)
Untitled (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2005)
Untitled (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2006)
Untitled (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2005)
Untitled (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2005)
Untitled (near Toronto, Ontario, 2005)
Untitled (near Toronto, Ontario, 2005)
Untitled (Long Island, New York, 2004)
Untitled (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2006)
Untitled (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2006)
Untitled (San Diego, California, 2005)
Untitled (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2006)
Untitled (Los Angeles, California, 2005)

2006-07-28T15:19:00.000-04:00

Long Island, 2004

2006-07-28T15:16:00.001-04:00

Los Angeles, 2005

2006-07-28T15:16:00.000-04:00

Ann Arbor, 2006

2006-07-28T15:15:00.004-04:00

Ann Arbor, 2005

2006-07-28T15:15:00.003-04:00

Hudson, 2005

2006-07-28T15:15:00.002-04:00

Detroit, 2006

2006-07-28T15:15:00.001-04:00

San Diego, 2005

2006-07-28T15:15:00.000-04:00

Canada, 2005

2006-07-28T15:14:00.005-04:00

Ann Arbor, 2005

2006-07-28T15:14:00.004-04:00

Ann Arbor, 2006

2006-07-28T15:14:00.003-04:00

Ann Arbor, 2005

2006-07-28T15:14:00.002-04:00

Ann Arbor, 2005

2006-07-28T15:14:00.001-04:00

Canada, 2005

2006-07-28T15:14:00.000-04:00

Canada, 2005

2006-07-28T15:13:00.001-04:00

Long Island, 2004

2006-07-28T15:13:00.000-04:00

Ann Arbor, 2006

2006-07-28T15:12:00.001-04:00

Ann Arbor, 2006

2006-07-28T15:12:00.000-04:00

San Diego, 2005

2006-07-28T15:11:00.001-04:00

Ann Arbor, 2006

2006-07-28T15:11:00.000-04:00

Los Angeles, 2005