In Memoriam: Rosa Parks, civil rights icon, at age 92

Link

From Marcel

This Marcel took of me over a year ago on the island in the river. It's strange to see a photo of me. As a general rule, photographers hate to be photographed. Who knows why. I generally like being photographed. It's an oppertunity to look a person in the eye, and I find that very enjoyable. It's funny though, to be able to see clearly how you change and age.

Fall

This is fall. No that's circle effect is not some photoshop filter. Tricks like that are easier to do in-camera than on the computer. The trick? Just rotate the camera while your taking the picture. Theres and easy one, huh?

the Past

When I was younger I was really into building robots. Right before I pretty much got out of doing it I had gotten to the point where I was having custom surface mount PCB's manufactured for me out of seatle to create modular neural networks as rudimentary brains for walking robots. This little beast was tiny and walked on paperclip legs. Later he was outfitted with a high effenciency solar panel and sensors so that he could spend the day in my dorm on his own.

Some days I think about what might have happened if I had stuck down that path. I would be probably somewhere building artificial limbs, something I always thought of as probably quite rewarding. It's amazing how much the little things can change your whole life.

Of course, I know why I didn't continue down that road. The people bored me. There were some great ideas going around, but by and large I never got enough of the people-stimulation from the electronics-robotics crowd. I spent a summer semester at Carnegie Mellon where I whipped all the other geek roboticists in robot building with my eyes closed. Of course, while the 'cool kids' were at the back of the class talking to each other in spoken HTML and TCP commands, I was out courting the *hot* smart girls over at the art and humanities building where I landed and kissed my first *real* girlfriend. (Real as in, she didn't come in kit form over the internet).

Truth be told, my mind was cut out for the enginering sciences, but my heart wasn't. I simply needed more than flourescent overheads and late night take out. Not to mention I've always had a thing for really beautiful women. My archeology director durring my time on the Greek coast used to say that the "romance was in what you made of it". But after Carnegie Mellon, I lost the heart I had in robots. The romance of living your life as your primary employment simply got the best of me.

Now of course, I'm at the other extreme. Where romance is what I do on a daily basis. And instead of talk HTMl I speak ISO, glamour and high fashion. I was never one for moderation.

Holidays

The fall

Today is an incredibly beautifull fall day. The leaves are changing, the weather is crisp and clean. Too bad I have to work! Hopefully I won't lose this fall, like all the previous falls, to just over-working. Nope. I'm promising myself to get some quality time out in the country. Even if I have to rent a car just to get out of the city, I'm going to do it.

another

Racy!

This was for the magazine but now won't be used. :-( It's a hot shot and I am really pleasd with how it came out. This is a more racy version of a more toned down version. For the magazine it was for, it's actually pretty tame. Perhaps too tame? Who knows. The middle shots from the story were weak though. That's when everyone was fighting. Probably the best thing a photographer can do, is develop a sense of unbiased critique of his/her own work. It's important to be able to cut through the crap that people will tell you, "oh it's lovely! beautifull" or "Sucks, hate it!" and develop an accurate internal sense to be able to gauge your own work. You need to be able to measure yourself against yourself. Sychophancy is rampant in this lifestyle so even though people might say I'm pretty self critical, I think it's important to know honestly where you stand in relation to your peers and in relation to your potential. And I love this picture. It's HOT. (BTW: It's actually shot with just the modeling lights, not the flash). Oh yeah, and forgive the quality- it's a quick scan from a film. The film version is awesome.

Setback

So one thing I did for a magazine turns out, won't be used. It was the shoot I mentioned earlier where the team fell apart and while I was trying to work everyone was arguing and storming out. Yeah..... Well it doesn't really come as that great a shock. Generally you know this will be the outcome while on set. Either it's working, or it's not. And if it's not- you keep shooting and cross your fingers. But mentally you set it aside and start working on the next idea. None-the-less I got some great shots out of it for my book, and I can still shop it around. I'll put up the set in the next few days for you to check out. In the meantime, this is from something I did yesterday.

Sample commercial

Here's a sample from the commercial work that I seem to be constantly working on. It's cross processed obviously. But the effect works. It's a woman in a 'storm' on the phone. Ha!

Banks and Cows

On a different note, I've just figured out how to use my internet banking for my Czech Rep. bank this morning. It's a pretty long complicated process to get internet banking set up, it involves security chips and authorizations at the bank and then counter authorization with encrypted key signature and what not. But now it's up and running which is excellent because now I can start to pay my bills conveniently from my computer. Very nice. In contrast to the ridiculously over-simplified and thus confusing and dorky computer banking that I have for my bank in the states, this system is a real winner. Not only that but you can do just about anything you want with it, quickly and easilly. You don't have to worry about identity theft or people stealing your stuff because the authorization process is so long and complicated. It's quite nice. Ebanka, another Bank (not mine) has a special system where you get a pocket encryption device that generates a new and unique encrypted code every time you use it. Others have smart card chips that you need to plug into the computer first to get it to work.

As for cows, check this out:

http://www.delaval.com/Products/Movie_library/Cow_comfort_movies/default.htm

It's a company that makes products for cows to make their lives, and farmer's lives easier. They have really neat stuff like a robotic milking machine that milks cows whenever they want to be milked, and cow mat's that the cows actually line up to wait their turn to lay down on.

Aperture

So Apple has just announced Aperture. It's a raw digital workflow software with a host of improvements that supposidly makes it better than the other guys. The other guys being the stuff I use. (C1 Capture PRO, Photoshop CS1&2, BreezeBrowser) If it's half as cool as they are saying it is, I would buy a copy. But since I don't own a Mac, I won't. But if say by the end of the year it would turn out that I would say, need an extra tax deduction- I might make a brand spanking new G4 Powerbook a nessesary business expense. And by business expense I mean, justify it's purchase on the basis of work, and by justify for work I mean make excuses to buy it. And by make excuses to buy it i mean gimmie gimmie gimmie.

another

Black and white

I've been startin to scan old negatives on my new scanner. As I go along I find stuff I never remebered I had, and didn't know I liked so much. Take this one for instance. This is one of the first times I shot with Jana. It's beautiful and I didn't even know I had it! Look at how smooth those tones are. Would you believe, this shot is without any makeup? Nor retouching. Her skin is simply that perfect.

happiness

You know what I realize about getting older? The burden of responsiblity for being happy is really on yourself. You've got to find a way to be happy on your own, even without other people. Other people make the process much easier, but you've still got to find a way to do it in yourself, by yourself. Very difficult. But perhaps, that's actually the whole point.

old one of francis

Here is an older picture of Francis. Lovely huh?

Before Sunset

You know, I just finished watching before sunset for a second time. Seriously, if you're as sentimental as I am, I don't recommend watching it on a day when you have something you need to do. You'll probably just end up sitting there in a stupor for like an hour staring out the window. Most people probably wouldn't be fazed by it, but if your the right type it will seriously get you.

sunset

I will admit, this isn't the best picture there is of me. But behind me is perhaps one of the most perfect sunsets I've ever seen. This is what I mean by how France is so ludicrously photogenic from almost any angle. This is Lyon and Sophie is holding the camera.

But you know-

But you know what? With all the dreams that we have in our lives. All the moments of possiblity that flit in and out and around us? We fear making that leap into our own happiness. As we grow older, we fear the responsiblity of our own happiness. We fear following our dreams because eventaully, when we get down to the last couple dreams, the last few ones we grew up with. We are scared to death that perhaps these dreams are not more than dreams. The leaps of faith that this life puts infront of us, are so great, that we are tempted to never take them- fearing our failure. We would rather live out our lives out in a slow unrequited churn of evaporating potential and happyness, than take the risk. We would rather forever live in our memories, the sweet taste of what long ago was our future, than risk finding out that the one true, true thing, we had ever hoped for- was nothing more than just a fantasy. Why? Because who the hell are you if you don't have dreams? What the hell happens to a person when they simply run out of fantasy for tommorow?

But at the same time, what if you take that leap- and you do fly? Perhaps fear is nothing more than gods gesture of the path before us. Perhaps over comming fear is the only way we earn our destiney.

snapshot.

I think that perhaps photographers are people who are in search of one image that might, might just perhaps capture the essesnce of what is this thing that we call our lives. If I'll admit even one thing about this life, it would be that I sometimes feel completly overwhelmed by how absolutly beautiful and striking and amazing and incredible this life really is. The older I become, the more beautifull this life becomes. The more colors, the more love, the more moments, the more everything. It's the passion and the passing of sadness that just makes it so full of flavor. So just incredible. Some days you wake up and you feel absolutly just so blessed in every single way, that you can't even figure out what it is you should do next. Somedays you could simply lie there in bed. Never waking, never raising a finger, leg, or head. Because you are, and all around you is, the most beautiful thing, the most beautiful experince, you will ever know. Even loneliness is simply gods way of reflecting for you the fullness you really have in your life. Heartbreak, sorrow and solitude are but the sweetest sadness. Winter but breeds the love of summer roses. Solitude but nurtures the fullness of life.

Ida

I claim discovery of ida. Like columbus or the astronauts, I claim discovery. She's swedish, taller than me (!!) and has a great jaw. I met her in a bar around the corner from my house a couple months back durring the summer. I walked her into an agency about a month ago and they signed her immediatly. Now she's off to Asia in about six days. Neat-o. Good luck ida!

Fixed.

Hey guys, the archive on the right didn't work before, but now I've gotten it working. So enjoy browsing the past posts!

this life

I just finished reading, "before women had wings" by Connie May Fowler. I'll admit I don't read much these days because I'm so busy and because a good story affects me so deeply that sometimes I don't like the emotional intensity they can make you feel. I'm also a fast reader, which makes purchasing a book a something I rarely do as I never quite feel like paying for something I could quite concivably finish off before I reach the checkout. I like going to the library to, but it's never quite as seductive as a nice book store where comfy seats make it easy for you to simply gobble up whatevers around you. My sister and I when I was younger used to race each other through books, which I actually enjoyed quite a bit. To this day we are fast readers, and a thick novel that's well written rarely lasts longer than one afternoon. As for my sister though I suspect she's a bit faster than I am. She's quite an acomplished writer so it's something of her element. I don't get a chance to read as much of her stuff as I would like, but I'm very proud of her even if I don't get much of a chance to say so. Hear that sis? I'm proud of you to the very bottom of my heart and soul.

cover?

So I like this image as a possible cover. Possible. I'm not sure if they will even like the set. Shooting with a bad vibe leaves a bad taste in your mouth, and on the images. It's hard to look at something you shot, even if you shot it well, and like it when you remeber how acrid the environment it was shot in was.

Magazine shoot

My shoot yesterday for a magazine was a catastrophe- pretty much. The shots came out, but the team was fighting and throwing hissyfits for no reason. Sometimes you just can't control the people around you, and they simply lose sight of the reason why they are there in the first place. It definitely is a bad situation. In the future I'll probably just need to take the position of firing people immediately when they lose their perspective on the job.

Editorial

Well, I missed an editorial this month because on the day of the shoot my makeup artist was dreadfully ill, but in place of a full story the magazine which is printed out of China but distributes in about ten countries worldwide, used some of my older work. Here's a page:

lots

Alot of stuff is going on at the moment. Literally tons. I'm shooting the cover and editorial of HypeMagazine tommorow which is exciting. We've got a super girl with a huge gap in her teeth who looks stunning. I'm psyched. I was at backstage at the dior show about two weeks ago. Not much to say about that except that backstage all the models get mini-bottles of champagine with drinking lips to help them loosen up. Yesterday I assisted Ondrio Koh, a famous photographer here who had quite a bit of advice to share. I've also finaly managed to sell my mamiya 645 camera and I've made the jump to shooting 6x7 on a pentax. Tough to focus in low light, but the size of the negatives is freaking awesome. I also apparently got an editorial in a slovak magazine with some pictures I shot with Lucie K a while back. All in all I have potentially about three covers in the next two months that I have to work on. It's exciting although it pays pretty poorly. I've shifted pretty strongly into high-self-publicity mode to work on getting tear sheets before I move on to paris. Lots of work ahead.

dennison

car accident

I've always said this country will do it's best to kill you, and while everything thinks I'm just being dramatic, I'm as serious as a heart attack. My dear friend zuzu was in a car crash this week, and luckilly is doing okay in the hospital with minor injuries. Get well soon zuzu! (Here's a picture of the accident)

France

So I've decided to move to France in a year. Paris. It's not 100% but it's about 99% to be sure. I'm approaching the dreaded 5 year mark here in the Czech Republic. FIVE YEARS. That's a long time. In expatriate land, 5 years is the final make or break point before you simply become permanent. Typically the life of expats goes in cycles, 6 months, 1 year, two years and five years. At every cycle everyone simple leaves. Everyone who arrived at one time, simultaneous leaves at one time, at these interval periods. Most of the friends I had were from about two years ago, and yep- they are all cycling out. Most of the other people I knew cycled out a while ago. There are a few hanger-oners. Like myself. And as I come up to that five year mark, I know exactly what I have to do. Leave. Past five years and your no longer and expat, your just an immigrant. Expats keep calling themselves expats, but really they aren't. If you stay after five years, you stay forever. The reason is, that after five years all the youth and restless energy that you had which initially made you leave home and come to this place: is gone. Nobody wakes up eight and a half, or thirteen and three quarters years later and says, "huh, let me change my whole life entirely again". It doesn't happen.

As strange as it's going to sound, I've pretty much come to the conclusion that it was a mistake to come back to this place. Not this time, but years ago. When I moved back to Pittsburgh to finish school, I should really have stayed. I left only because my girlfriend whom I was living with in Pittsburgh at the time, had left me for school in Ohio. At the time I didn't have many or my own friends and certainly no life outside of my relationship, (Although I must say that Sara Doll was always there for me) and when my girlfriend decided to leave, I was so scared at the prospect of starting all over, in Pittsburgh, that I just left again- back to Prague.

Countless life altering decisions later, I attribute this moment as the decisive one that inevitably lead me to where I am now. Why was it a mistake? Well, because I think as much as I've spent the last years developing who I am as a photographer, as an expatriate, I've simultaneously pushed myself away from where I came from and who I was. This is of course a natural process, but only now can I really look back and see how many doors have been closed if only for the psychological reason that they only open 'one way'. If for example I wanted to go back to school and be an engineer, it's technically possible. Psychologically however, I simply don't have it in me to 'go back' and do it. In fact, I've become so Europeanized that I simply don't have it in me to 'go back' at all.

The expats out here that you meet whom have been away from more than 5 years talk about a feeling of homelesness. You expatriate long enough, and you become AN EXPATRIATE. Not an expat- expats are people who just dole around in bars wasting money, getting drunk, rewriting the introduction to their first novel a trillion times and generally losing years off their life with little or nothing to show for it. Expatriates though are people who give up on the idea of ever returning. They don't give up on their homes, they just give up ever having the psychological strength to 'get back'. Realizing the street you grew up on as a child is more foreign to you than a remote bullet torn village in Kosovo is an incredibly intense emotion. Essentially, you end up leaving your society behind. And by society, I mean dreams, holidays, norms, cultural aspects, slang, accents, vocabulary, dress, hobbies, etc... Everything. I have no idea anymore when Labor day is. Or mothers day. Or fathers day or Easter or even thanksgiving. (Although expats are quite strong holiday makers, the dates are generally irrelevant to us. Thanksgiving falls on whatever end of November weekend day we feel is convenient. Ask anyone and no one can tell you exactly when.) These things have no meaning outside your on society. I haven't had a fourth of July in almost half a decade. My parents haven't seen me for my birthday since I was 18 and some years send me cards with the wrong age!

But why is this a bad thing? It's not. It's natural. It's progression. The mistake is that you don't realize what comes AFTER all this. What happens is that you find a new life. You become a new person. Without the fourth of July, you find new holidays. Without clear guidance about your future, (highschool, college, gradschool, internship, PhD, professional practice) your future is something you stubble onto. It is much more difficult to make it as an expatriate. Societies are not fond of people who leave their everything for something they know nothing about. Expatriate bars are filled with failed dreamers. People spend fifteen years without ever managing to save one cent. Hospitals are nightmares you avoid. Dentists are visits you never make. Do you know what happens to expatriates who develop mental illnesses while abroad? Nothing. I've seen it happen. Able minded and adept individuals who simply one day fall off the cart, and then disappear. They aren't gone. Because we run into them occasionally and they are homeless and they are wearing clothing that doesn't fit. Borrowing money they will never return.

The alternative is immigration, assimilation. You pick a place, a society, and you join it. You don't spend a decade in bars drinking cheap beer. You learn the language. You get your papers. You marry. You buy property. You have children. You raise them. And you never look back.

When we leave our homes because we want to escape the predetermined order one is supposed to follow to success in America: highschool, college, masters, internship, post-grad, PhD., professional practice, marriage, house, children, college, retirement, old age. We do it out of a precocious naivete that tricks us into thinking we can actually get 'outside' the box. But the truth is, there is no 'outside' the box. No, 'outside' of society. You either fail miserably and die poor, penniless and alone of some affliction easily cured or treated by your native health care system, or you merely pick the predetermined life order set by the cultural norms of some other society and deal with that. You'll never get out of having your dreams and ideals bound by the society in which you live. In America, you'll make more money and enjoy less of it. In Europe you'll make less but enjoy it more. The poison is the same, the only difference, the only semblance of freedom you will ever get, is that as an expatriate you're blessed with the insipid choice of picking exactly which poison you wish to take.

The trick is, and what one would hope that the entire experience of 'living' would impress upon you, is that the poison really isn't all that bad. Out here, everyone you meet is an extraordinary person simply because they are extra-ordinary. There are very few people who are extraordinary because they are amazing. The people that expatriates condescend to when drunk at bars- family back home, old girlfriends married and pregnant, at the truly extraordinary. They are extraordinary because they are amazing. Not because they are extra-ordinary. The thing is, the poison isn't all that bad because being normal, really just isn't all that bad. That roadmap we get as kids? The one with education through a PhD and a job as a professional? That's simply, not a bad life. The difference between the people who stay at home and the people who leave, is that while the people at home look up to us as glamorous, as courageous, as interesting. The truth is, we just weren't smart enough to realize happiness is not a place, but rather a state of mind. Oh this does occur to us. Eventually. That's why most expatriates spend their twenties and thirties drunk and in a cloud of Mary-Jane. We're the ones that missed the boat on the most obvious epiphany in our entire lives. For all those women expatriates I've meet in bars who don't need marriage and don't want kids: die alone in underfunded foreign institutionalized government care. To all those male expatriates I've meet in bars who can't commit and don't want kids: die alone in underfunded foreign institutionalized government care. The truth is, when this party does eventually stop- there won't be a single person around who remebers your name or even cares.

And so, to come full circle and bring this epic blog post to a close, the answer is that we move on. We might be escapee's of normalcy in our own society, but this doesn't mean we can avoid normalcy forever. Eventually we must become something of what our, or another society expects of us. We must marry, procreate, save, invest, live, eat, and grow older. The other thing, is that we must come to this conclusion fairly early on, and begin the process before it's psychologically too late. Just as foreign expatriates in the USA can't jump in and start at 'highschool', we can't just move to a new place and 'jump right in'. In every society there are certain 'benchmarks' we are expected to have attained by a certain age. It is difficult or impossible to 'go back' and 'catch up' on what we lost or let pass us by. Time is a river that flows but one way.

What this means for me, is that it is time for me to move on. Probably Paris. Possibly London. Maybe Spain (although not so likely). What weighs heavily on me is that the next place will likely be at least another half-decade odyssey. In my line of work, fame is for middle age, and up till thirty or fourth its all blood, sweat and tears. I'm okay with that of course, but it does mean I'll need to dig my heels in and keep my head down. It also means that I'll need to assimilate. As home is pretty unlikely, I will have to pick a place, and then become it. Language, life and all. But that's okay. When you can't go home, you've got to go somewhere; and when you go somewhere, it might as well be home.

back

Hey, I spent some vacation time in France, and now I'm back. Nothing much new to report except: work work work! No surprise there huh?