Category: Fine Art

f295 Symposium kick off!

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Last Sunday, I attended the first sold out show to be held at B&H’s 60+ seat Event’s Space. Over 80 people showed up at 10:30am to learn more about Lensless, Alternative and Adaptive Photographic Processes! In other words, a lot of people showed up to a NON-digital photographic event!

This was a preview of the f295 Symposium that will be taking place in Pittsburgh from May 28th – June 1st 2008. If you have any interest in Pinhole or Toy cameras or thought it would be cool to learn any of the alternative photographic processes from albumen to ziatype, well this event is not to be missed!

I attended last year’s symposium, and it was an amazing 4 days of exhibitions, lectures and round-table discussions, workshops, and networking focused on the in-depth exploration of alternative photographic processes. I met a lot of talented artists, was inspired by the speakers, and attended a wonderful workshop where I made my own Daguerreotype!

This year, right off the bat, the Holga Tintype Workshop has my alternative creative juices flowing! It was really great to see so many people show up on Sunday and for those of you who constantly ask when film will die? My answer is N E V E R!

The speakers this Sunday included Laura Blacklow, Martha Casanave, Jill Enfield, Jessica Ferguson, Scott McMahon, Erin Malone, Tom Persinger, Kelly Anderson-Staley, and Jerry Spagnoli. Photos of the event can be found here.

The featured speakers in Pittsburgh will be:
Martha Casanave, Jill Enfield, Jessica Ferguson, Robert Hirsch, Jerry Spagnoli, Keith Taylor, and Ilan Wolff.
There are 40 more slots available for the early bird registration discount of $120 for the Symposium.

The Workshops Registration will start around 2/16 and will be available only to attendees of the symposium.
The featured Workshops are:

I hope to see you there!

Sutro Baths part 2

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Joe Reifer Andy Frazer Andy Frazer Shawn Peterson
Shawn Peterson Sutro 7 - Gabriel Biderman - Ricoh GRD 28mm lens 3 min. f/4 ISO 64 Sutro 8 - Gabriel Biderman - Ricoh GRD 28mm lens 3 min. f/5.6 ISO 64 Sutro 3 - Gabriel Biderman - Mamiya 7 65mm lens Tri-X 400 8 min. f/11

Modern ruins, labyrinthine structures, wind blown cypress trees clinging to the cliff, and caves and paths that lead to Land’s End; this is the Sutro Baths that I’ve been fascinated with since I was first taken to Ocean Beach as a young child.
The Sutro ruins on the outskirts of San Francisco are where we’d often take the dog hiking along the paths above or exploring the abandoned remains below. This probably set in place my future fascination for Ruinism. The Sutro Baths are no secret and have been welcoming the public and the Pacific in one way or another for over 110 years.
Built with iron, wood, and glass in the grandiose manner of London’s Crystal Palace, the grand opening to the public was held on March 14, 1896. The Industrial Age was in full swing and this engineering masterpiece had taken only 6 years to build at the cost of $1 million. It was the dream of the eccentric Adolph Sutro, who had just finished a lackluster 2 year term as San Francisco’s 24th mayor. The extravagant public bathhouse was the world’s largest indoor swimming pool at that time and was inspired by the ancient baths of Rome. Visitors to the baths had 7 different swimming pools to choose from, one freshwater and six salt water bathes, ranging in temperature from 80 degrees to sea temperature. During high tides, water would flow directly into the pools from the Pacific, recycling 2 million gallons of water in an hour. During low tides, a powerful turbine water pump, built inside a cave at sea level, could be switched on from a control room to fill the tanks at a rate of 6,000 gallons a minute. Over 20,000 swimsuits were for rent and the facility could hold over 10,000 people at a time. To see an Edison Manufacturing Co short film of the Giant Slide at the Sutro Baths from from 1897 click here.
If you preferred not to swim, the bathhouse also incorporated a museum displaying some of the finest Egyptian artifacts outside of Egypt as well as Sutro’s varied personal collection of his travels. An 8,000 person Concert Hall and an ice-skating rink were also part of the Sutro Baths.

Five hundred dressing rooms … spacious elevators and broad staircases … pavilions, balustrades, promenades, alcoves and corridors adorned with tropical plants, fountains, flowers, pictures, … the collected treasure of foreign travels… a portico with four Ionic columns and pilasters which lead to a noble staircase, wide, gradual of ascent, bordered with broad-leaved palms, the flowering pomegranate, fragrant magnolias … [touching] the very rim of the reveling waves.

However, due to the high operating and maintenance costs, the Sutro Baths closed its doors in 1966. During its demolition, a suspicious fire broke out and left the Baths in the ruins that you can see today.
What has fascinated me most is how little the ruins have changed. They are maintained by the National Park Service and very little is off limits for urban exploration.
Our “exploration” led to the photos that were taken on November 24th. It was a full moon, and my father and I met fellow nocturnalists Joe Reifer, Andy Frazer, and Shawn Peterson as the few clouds were breaking through to reveal the ruins of Sutro. We spent over 4 hours shooting, flashlights popping, and exposures being calculated. Armed with tripods, our exposures were running 2-8 minutes, with plenty of opportunity to soak in the true atmosphere of the baths. I’ve spent a lot of time at Sutro, but on a clear night with old and new friends, we explored the timeless time of Sutro.
To check out more of Joe Reifer work click here.
Andy Frazer’s blog on the night can be found here.
More of Shawn Peterson’s nightwork can is here.

To see some great photos from old Sutro Baths or read more about its history check out these sights:

Sutro Baths
Cliffhouse Project
Sutro’s
Outsidelands
Wikipedia

Seizing the Moments

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On a recent trip to San Francisco, I got together with a bunch of Nocturnal guys and celebrated the Full Moon with a night shoot at the Sutro Bath ruins at Ocean Beach. I have to say that it was the warmest night I have ever spent on that beach. The moon was shining bright, the tide was pulling in, and the continual crashing of the waves brought a truly spiritual feeling to the evening.

Even though I was with 4 other guys, we all spread out and searched for our shots. I always have considered myself a solo shooter but I have really enjoyed being out with like-minded souls lately.
When you leave your camera open on a tripod for 3-15 minutes at a time, it’s comforting to have some friends with you. You’ll also be surprised with the type of conversations that arise in the wee hours of a long photoshoot. This got me thinking about the most common question a photographer is asked in life: What type of photography do you do?

Frequent pigeonholing answers for me have been – fine art photography, pinhole photography, travel photography, and night photography. But in reality, like a method actor, I enjoy the process of photography. The film, the developing, the darkroom, the lightroom, the time, and all the magic that comes from creating an image.

Good friend, and fellow pinhole photographer, Tom Persinger, recently debated TOP’s Mike Johnston over the importance of capturing the moment or moments. When most people pick up a camera and press the shutter, they try to capture a moment in time.
We all love that. It’s difficult though, your child doesn’t smile, or the moment is fleeting and gone by the time you raise the camera to your eye and trying to recreate it is, well, contrived. Without us realizing it, when we press the shutter, we are dealing with fractions of seconds and how do you click on the right one?
Henri Cartier-Bresson proved there was a fine art to capturing the decisive moment and became famous capturing 1/60th of a second his whole life. He was a very prolific photographer but when you think of the moments he captured during the 45 years of shooting at 1/60 of a second it probably amounted to 15 minutes! Geesh, I can do that easily in one or two exposures! When you take pinhole or night photographs, you are no longer dealing with fractions of seconds but often minutes and hours of time.
Tom Persinger says: The artifacts of motion revealed by extended exposures show the world as fundamentally impermanent and constantly changing.
He refers to this as a continuity of moments. For example, an airplane can fly through the sky and you will have the lights permanently recorded as a light trail in your shot. Instead of capturing the moment, you are seizing time itself! Why are there star trails in night shots? Well the earth is moving constantly and when you take a picture including the sky for over 8 minutes on a clear night, you’ve captured the earth revolving! Pretty cool, eh?

So I guess that makes me a photographer of time. And instead of seizing the moment, let’s seize the moments and capture the essence of the subject matter!
Stay tuned for a little history of the Sutro Baths and the rest of the group’s shots from that night.

Red Hook Nights

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Visitation St Beard St Warehouse sugar factory boat
beard lady liberty diamond trolley 2 gabe trolley
water taxi 2 Red Hook House sunnys

“We gotta do a night shoot!”

These were words I spoke to my good friend, awesome photographer, and fellow industry man Andre Costantini, over the last 6 months. You see, we’re neighbors here in Brooklyn, but we also travel so much that it’s sometimes easier coordinating on the road than it is seeing each other in Brooklyn!
However, in early October, we finally got our schedules straightened out and went out for a 4+ hour night photo shoot in the nearby neighborhood of Red Hook.

Founded by the Dutch in 1636, Red Hook still remains one of the most unique and isolated neighborhoods that Brooklyn has to offer. The Waterfront days of the Longshoreman, when Red Hook boasted 21,000 people, were starting to decline when Robert Moses finished building the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and the Battery Tunnel in the early 1950’s – effectively cutting off Red Hook from the rest of Brooklyn. Along with the loss of the dock jobs to New Jersey soon after, Brooklynites began to disappear from the Hook. Red Hook now harbors 11,000 residents, most of whom are activists and artists drawn to the old world charm and astounding waterfront views. Because of its isolation, Red Hook has remained relatively unchanged. It is home to the largest concentration of Civil War warehouses in New York and offers the closest full frontal views of Lady Liberty herself as she faces Red Hook and looks towards the statue of Minerva at Greenwood Cemetery.
Al Capone got his start as a small time criminal in Red Hook, along with his wound that led to his nickname “Scarface”. Red Hook also has been a literary inspiration to: “On the Waterfront” by Budd Shulberg, “A View from the Bridge” by Arthur Miller, “Last Exit to Brooklyn” by Hubert Selby Jr, and “The Horror at Red Hook” by H.P. Lovecraft.

Looking for photographic inspiration, Andre and I started out around 8pm with tripods and cameras in hand. Andre was shooting with the Nikon D200 and a variety of Tamron lenses and I had my trusty Mamiya 7 with the 65mm lens loaded with black and white TriX 400 film. Knowing that it was going to be a busy night we decided to energize up with some excellent burgers at the scrumpdiddlyumptious restaurant/diner named Hope and Anchor. With burgers and Brooklyn beers in our bellies, we set forth!
The first shot of the night was Andre’s “Visitation St” sign with what seemed to be a rebar cane hanging from it! The cobblestone streets led us to the recently refurbished and “gallerized” Beard St Warehouses, which can be seen in the second photo. Behind the Warehouses lie the remains of the Sugar Refinery as well as a small dock where some of the locals anchor their boats, as seen in photo number 3.
The second row of photos leads off with the old trolley tracks that lay between the Beard Warehouses. In the distance you can see the pillars where the water taxi drops off tourists as well as Lady Liberty dressed in white light. The tracks actually lead to two abandoned trolleys cars that were once owned by Bob Diamond. A modern day Don Quixote, Bob discovered one of the world’s oldest subway stations under Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn in 1980. Built in 1844 by the Long Island Railroad, it was quickly abandoned, sealed, and forgotten by 1861. Bob had hoped to reopen the station and connect it with a trolley service to Red Hook as there’s no subway line that comes close to the neighborhood. It was never funded and Bob’s trolleys lie in a beautiful state of ruinism behind the Fairway Market that moved into the Van Brunt warehouse. This beautifully revitalized pre Civil War coffee warehouse now holds a vast amount of fresh food and veggies as well as killer lofts above. The middle two shots are Andre’s take on the trolley as well as documenting me demonstrating my night shooting techniques!
The first image on the last row is a Michael Kenna inspired shot of the Water Taxi docks in Red Hook. 26 Reed St is the next photo. This original Red Hook house is Ralph Balzano’s car shop and Men’s club for the locals. Speaking of locals, Ralph’s brother Sunny owns the bar in the last photo. Sunny’s great-great-grandfather opened this bar in 1890 and I can only assume that is Sunny’s car parked in front!
It was a great shoot that ended around 2:30am with a little nightcap at The Bait and Tackle Bar.

For further reading on Red Hook History check out:
http://www.redhookwaterfront.com/_hi.main/index.html
For further info on Bob Diamond’s abandoned subway discovery:
http://www.forgotten-ny.com/TROLLEYS/redhook/redhook.html
http://www.forgotten-ny.com/SUBWAYS/tunnel/tunnel.html
And to learn more Night Photography shooting techniques follow my man Joe Reifer’s inspiring nightshots and super informative blog at:
http://www.joereifer.com/words/?cat=9
To see more of Andre’s work click here.