Pobereskin

As usual, Russ Widstrand is a tough act to follow.  Especially as Russ has a bent for surrealistic conceptual photography, it’s a problem for me being a location photographer without a studio.  I can’t simply conceptualize and whip up an image in my studio the way Russ can. Well, actually, I have a 5,490,383,247,360,000 square foot studio, I call it Earth.  So I spent the better part of the day puttering around in a small corner of my studio… Chicago… trying to photograph things that would dovetail with his theme anyway.  I was looking for a fish market  but I wasn’t in the right neighborhood, I was downtown.  Lots of skyscrapers, though.  As I wandered the streets of Chicago I kept thinking about a snapshot I’d made about seven or eight years ago of the seafood department manager at a King’s supermarket in Short Hills, NJ.  That was no help, either. So, I spent the day wandering aimlessly thinking of  pink cats and fish.  All that meandering made me hungry because pink and fish kinda reminded me of canned salmon and I hadn’t eaten lunch, so I went home and made myself a sandwich.  A late lunch it was, but being properly fed and while free-associating, I recalled an image I’d made in California, at the Monterey Aquarium, a pink jellyfish!  You might think that pulling an image from my files is easy, but not this time.  It was pretty hard to find, a fairly unusual occurrence, I had to sweat to come-up with this one.  I think it’s Miller Time.  

I’m fascinated by faces, that’s one of the reasons that environmental portraiture became such a large part of my business.  However, I’m also fascinated by the faceless.  A couple of my previous postings to the game have been faceless… the campaign poster with the face of the politician torn away, a portrait of a friend with his hands covering his face… it’s almost more telling that way. When I first saw Bob’s image of the Corvette headlight it was a small thumbnail image on the main game screen, the color manipulated to abstraction, I immediately thought it was a fencer’s mask.  Turned out, upon clicking to enlarge it, that it was a car headlight.  Russ must have thought the same thing initially, and he made an image of a fencer’s mask to respond to Bob’s. This image, a Lion Dancer* in the Chinese New Year parade in New York City’s Chinatown, transforms the celebrant into a faceless icon, yet there is a face.  It’s somewhat an abstraction as the face is alienized by its inherent unfamiliarity; intense colors; the profile view with only one eye and the motion blur created by both the subject and the photographer being in motion at the same time, yet some detail frozen by a portable flash unit I was using (yes, flash in daylight). *In this post I call it a Lion Dancer yet in the title I call it a Dragon Dancer.  Why the inconsistency?  The popular notion, at least in my perception, is dragon, hence the title.  But it’s actually a lion in Chinese folklore.  As perception changes, the original title remains the same. Backstory:  A few years ago I spent a day in New York City’s Chinatown making pictures of the celebrations, the first day and the last day. I was lucky to make a contact who was able to get me inside the bars (marchers at the front of the parade use wooden bars to push back the crowds that would otherwise overwhelm the lion dancers). One of the guys in the parade was a telephone installer who had done the installation of a PBX network for a major stock picture company (not the one I’m contracted to) and as soon as I mentioned I was shooting for stock, that was it, I was in! You really can’t get better luck than that. I spent the better part of the day walking             backwards and making lots and lots of pictures of the parade. My assistant kept feeding me loaded cameras with different lenses and flash units with fresh batteries so I could shoot really fast and I wouldn’t have to do anything but concentrate on making pictures. The photography went very well, I got some great stuff. I also nearly got my foot blown off! Doug was so busy changing film and lenses and keeping everything in the bag in the bag, that he never warned me (I guess because he didn’t notice) that I was standing on a mat of freshly lit firecrackers. Not only was there a lot of noise under foot, but there was this burning sensation as well. By the time I realized what was happening it was all over… my left foot was both burning and soaking wet. The firecrackers had blown a huge hole in the sole of my left shoe, and I was standing in a puddle. Kung hei fat choi!