I love this piece titled The Boys And The Subway by artist/illustrator Christoph Niemannon on the New York Times website. If you have kids who ride the subway you will too. (via Jen Bekman on IM across the office)

Aside: I wish the Times would give us an option for bigger pictures in art pieces like this one and in photo essays. The Boston Globe has a clunky but simple and functional space for photo essays with larger pictures called (appropriately, The Big Picture). How great would the above NYTimes essay be if the images were of decent size?

Also make sure to check out Nemann's book 100% Evil.

While not all the images in the series work for me, I admire the ambition that goes behind a series with a title as grandiose as After the Fall. And many of the individual images do speak to me. I wish more photographers would try tackling such projects of impossible scale. Chua is Malaysian by birth and is currently based in London.

Guy: I think it's over there.

Girl: I think it's over there.

Guy: Do you really want to go?

Girl: Not really.

Guy: Let's go back to the hotel.

Girl: Lets.

Guy: Where are you going?

Girl: To the subway.

Guy: The subway is over there.

Girl: No it's over there.

Guy: I'm sure it's over there.

Girl: Well I'm sure it's over there...

While we were drawing monsters today, Raul Andres told me a story which I transcribed.

When You Talk To The Seaweed

A very long time ago when there were no dinasaurs there were people riding monsters. No, no, sitting on the monsters on their backs and they would help them with their arms. The people had no cars but a lot a lot of toys everywhere and they ate no monsters, just broccoli but when they were sick they ate vitamins. When they were hot they ate flies and dragonflies and when they were cold they ate bumblebees. When they were inside they ate straw but usually they ate food outside at nighttime like a picnic. But the monsters had no mouths and the people put food on their backs with their arms.

The end.

2008 Lange Taylor Prize winner Carolyn Drake has been making beautiful photography all around Central Asia which is my favorite part of the world. Her pictures like no others I've seen from the area evoke the sights, sounds, and smells of the region.

A few weeks ago I pointed to a project called The Lams of Ludlow Street by Thomas Holton. A fire has damaged their building on Ludlow and Mr. Holton is helping them out with a set of benefit editions. A worthy cause.

Finnish photographer Markku Lahdesmaki's high profile editorial work doesn't do much for me, it's too finished and perfect in the way the editorial world demands, but I love many of his personal portfolios, especially the ones taken in Chinese Space Museums and in the Finnish countryside. (via my friend Tina who I've been trying to have lunch with for over a year even though we run into each other all the time)

I love that Faulkner sounds exactly like what you think Faulkner would sound like (Faulkner on college English and Faulkner accepting his Nobel). Hemingway on the other hand sounds nothing like what I expected. (Hemingway accepting the Nobel). I assumed Hemingway would sound something like Orson Wells.

Related: Teddy Roosevelt's voice

Ghost #1
The house, a solid four bedroom colonial on an acre of land in Buck’s Country, had been on the market for years, and each year the price had come down. The stain of death bothered Jenn’s parent’s but their immigrant’s love of the deal overcame any sense of trepidation. Each house they had owned since moving from Korea had been a little bigger than the last, but this one was two steps up the ladder.

Soon after moving in, Jenn, who was 8 at the time and who had heard nothing of the dark history of the place, would complain about a man whistling in the hallways. “Can you tell him to stop,” she would ask her mother. Her mother would shush her. Ghosts should be ignored. Later, through the network of 8-year-olds at school Jenn found out about the dad who had been murdered in the basement. Friends were scared to sleep over. She told the whistling man to go away and as suddenly as it started, it stopped. Four years later when her own father dropped dead of a heart attack in church, everyone blamed the ghost. To a certain extent, they still do.

Ghost #2
One of the previous owners of a house I lived in on Coronado Street in LA was a man named Fink. Fink had died in the tub and wasn’t found for several weeks. While I avoided tub baths in that house, I didn’t think much of the story until I found an old suitcase full of Fink family snapshots. Most were apparently taken by Mr. Fink himself. There was his shadow at the Rose Bowl, the shadow at the State Fair wearing a hat, the shadow wearing another hat at the Golden Gate Bridge. There was Fink's date at Chasens. Fink's cat. Another cat and another (Fink apparently had many cats). And at the bottom of the suitcase in an envelope, there was a single picture of Fink himself. A picture of Mr. Fink in a bubble bath wearing one of the saddest expressions I have ever seen.

Ghosts #3-#8
My grandmother was one of 11 children. Nine of her brothers and sisters died before her and she claimed to have had premonitions of each death. Her mother was also a frequent visitor in dreams.

Tio Gorgonio had come to her in a dream the night before he died. In the dream he was wearing his best suit, but without shoes. He did not speak when she called to him, but just waved and walked away.

At the very moment someone called to tell her of Tiberio's death, a wind blew up the curtains and slammed the doors of her house. It was a windless day.

With Tia Honda it was a nighttime vision of her sister alone on a bus carrying a live rooster. When my grandmother would call out her sister's name, Honda would turn towards her with a twinkle in her eyes, shush he,r and tell her to get off the bus.

When my grandmother would sleep in her blue rocker, she would dream it was Tio Nacho who was rocking her, and indeed even in the deepest sleep her rocking would never stop.

Her mother, Mama Juela, would show up in afternoon dreams as a 10 year old in a confirmation dress eating Polvorones.

More often than you might think, my grandmother woke up with tearstained pillows.

Ghost #9
Most of all I remember the silence. In the mid-90's I worked for for a movie producer for a few years and we had offices near the top of the old Gulf an Western building on Columbus Circle. The building was on its last legs (it was about to be gut-renovated, renamed, and clad it chintzy bronze by Donald Trump) and our offices were less than glamorous (and made less so by a boss who had a habit of punching holes in the walls), but we all had spectacular views.

One afternoon out of the corner of my eye I saw a man falling. He was out across Columbus Avenue. It was not a graceful fall. It happened in slow silence although the fall itself was incredibly fast. I was spared the impact by some intervening buildings but some officemates were not and I remember the startled yelps that echoed through the office. The man we later learned was a college professor. In the middle of a lecture, he had paused mid sentence, gone to the window, opened it, taken off his glasses and jumped.

A scrum of police cars and fire engines arrived quickly on scene. An ambulance showed up, and then men with power hoses. An hour later it was as if nothing had happened. When I walk that particular corner I always feel enveloped in the cold and helpless silence of that moment.

Ghost #10
My brother Christopher would probably enjoy being thought of as a ghost. He always had a thing for the supernatural although he was an intensely rational soul. In my dreams he is usually reading in the back of the room. I'll have been doing something else and will only notice him after a long time of being engrossed elsewhere. He is always 19 always with a fresh haircut. I try to ask him how he's been, but by the time I reach him, only the book remains, always with one of his elaborate homemade bookmarks. I collect the bookmark hoping that finding it missing he will have to pick up the book again, and I will have another chance at saying, 'Hey there little brother, I miss you'.

More Ghosts
I am in Maine for the week and ghosts are plentiful here. People talk of the ghost of a headless sea captain who roams Damariscove island, the ghost of a mother who lost her baby in the sea, and the ghost of a girl who walked into the woods one day and never returned. In thinking about ghosts I realized the ghosts that scare us are born of other people's tragedies, the things we can't understand, they are the mental form of our fears— a clumsy way of marking the unspeakable and warning us that danger is all around. But there are other types of ghosts, these are the ghosts conjured from our hardest memories, the ones that give shape to sadness. In their strange medicine of allowing us taste to loss anew, these ghosts provide deep comfort even if we must occasionally wake as my grandmother did with tearstained pillows.

Donald Weber has recently added work online to his ongoing Guggenheim Fellowship taken in the Komi Republic, Russia. After you look a these photos, some brutal, some beautiful, note that they were shot in May. Can't imagine what January would look like.

A reader named Mu Qian turned me on to the work of Zhuang Xueben who travelled the Tibetan regions of Amdo and Kham in the 1930s. I don't think it's just my history in this region that makes the pictures so fascinating. Anybody have any more good Xueben links or book references outside what is easily googleable?

another site

I haven't read or thought about this poem by Gwendolyn Brooks since high school but for reasons unexplained it has been running through my head all day:

THE POOL PLAYERS. SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

-Gwendolyn Brooks

Benoit Aquin's series titled "The Chinese Dust Bowl" is a sobering look at the consequences of over-exploitation of fragile environments. Be sure to also read the associated magazine article in the Canadian [pdf] Walrus Magazine. Today's NYTimes has a story about something similar happening in Spain. (via the always superb BLDG BLOG)

For all the art photography I look at some of the pictures that compel me the most are taken by robots. This view taken yesterday by the Phoenix Lander of of what is almost surely ice on Mars sent my little geek heart aflutter:

And since we are on the subject of Mars here are two other favorite images: below is the much reproduced sunset over Gusev crater (Spirit Rover):

and

A view into a deep pit crater on the side of a volcano taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter:

Somewhere in storage I have a big book of Mars images (including 3D images) produced by the Viking Landers which I picked up with grass cutting money after a visit to Nasa when I was around 12. The pictures might look fairly primitive compared to the ones coming through now, but there were very few single books that had a greater impact on my adolescence.

More adolescent geekery: ASCII Days

I don't buy into the whole idea of universality — the popular "it's a small world after all" belief that if you scratch the surface a bit we're all just plain folk who are the same underneath. Our culture, our families and our unique quirks mold our worlds and define the physics around which our lives revolve often blinding us to other worlds that exist beside us. I enjoy the work of artists who expose the intersections and rifts between worlds allowing us to peek into the unknowable territory that marks the boundaries of other people's lives. This is what Thomas Holton's The Lams of Ludlow Street does for me.

I think I'm going to make the reader question thing a regular feature so here's another one by a reader named Daniel, a NY transplant from Wisconsin, who I met at the recent photo festival in DUMBO: "One thing still bothers me about our conversation. You said you make contact sheets. Were you talking about old fashioned contact sheets or digital ones? Isn't it easer to just do view them on the computer?"

I do scan most of my 35mm film and I manage the files in Aperture but for project related photography I always make physical contact sheets (sometimes I now print them from the digital files because having them made traditionally is so darned expensive).

Why waste the paper when we can see everything bigger and better on screen? Mainly because I like to see the boundaries of the roll of film contained on sheet of paper. I rarely shoot more than one or two rolls of film in a day so a contact sheet represents a definable moment. Those edges of those days get lost on screen and make editing more difficult. I edit all my medium format film as contact sheets out of necessity as I don't own a decent medium format film scanner.

a large version of the contact sheet

Above is a contact sheet from Amdo. Most of my film had been ruined by being frozen so I was shooting parsimoniously. In the first couple of frames you can see I wandered off the road to check out a house-raising. I ended up staying in this village for a few days. The roll of film covers a day and a half.

You can download a large version of the contact sheet here if you want to check it out in more detail.

These are some of the resulting images: Number 10, Number 16, Number 18, Number 19, Number 25.

Got a question? Feel free to ask just email my first name at mexicanpictures.com

My dad was served as a doctor in the war we call the Vietnam war, the war the Vietnamese call The American War. He was there from 1966 to 1967. My dad's Kodachromes—there are hundreds of them—were my first sense of 'the other side of the world'. Many photos are of empty landscapes. There are shots taken from the backs of jeeps. The barracks. A whole roll is devoted to a praying mantis that lived in his dorm.
There are many shots of red dirt roads and palm trees. The palms and the red dirt must have made some deep psychic impression because during my trips there as a backpacker, my first impression was of a kind of overpowering and almost haunting dejavu. His photos largely turned away from the horrors he experienced. In the year he served more than 6,000 Americans died. 12,000 South Vietnamese died and 61,000 North Vietnamese. More than 30,000 were wounded. The hospital where he worked was one of the busiest in the country. When I was growing up we would sometimes talk about that year during long Texas car rides, but his answers to my questions always seemed like riddles to me. They still do.

Continue reading "My Dad's Vietnam 1966" »

Seyeon Yun is a Yale MFA student with several knockout projects. Incomplete Journey is a astute wander through Korea... The portfolio is split into three chapters and, as the title suggests, it feels that more chapters are on the way. Homecoming is an equally powerful project delving into the lives of war veterans. Yun is part of the Yale MFA group show at Danzinger Projects opening on May 27th.

I want a book about all the trees.

And can you find me a book about volcanos?

And leaves. I like books with all the kinds of leaves.

Don't forget shark books. Tiger sharks and hammer heads and sharks with teeth that eat other sharks.

And volcanos! You never get me volcano books.

Also one about salad.

Daddy does it cost a lota money to get a book about train stations?

I want a book with the blue fish and one with brown fish and one with silver fish.

And a book about chimneys! And peacocks! And armadillos!

Do you have a book about the third rail?

Can you get me all these books?

I want one book about streetsweepers and.. and.. and... a concertina wire book!

And maybe one about giants with lotsa lotsa pictures. Three giants!

I will find books about rodeos.

Can we organize my books so we can see the spine?

Daddy do you love books too?

Mark Powell is a prolific maker of compelling enigmatic images. If you hang out with Mark for any time you realize his world follows him around. Strange things happen. He has kind of a force field that creates mystery.

I hadn't checked in on his website for a while and found that it is full of new work.

If you happen to be at the New York Photo Festival be sure to check out Andrew Miksys' show called BAXT, an exploration of the Gypsy community of Lithuania. The exhibition coincides with the release of a book of the same title. Baxt is the Roma word for Fate. Many of the images on the web don't do the prints justice. For example one of the signature pieces of the show is a portrait of a crying bride. On the web you can't see that she is crying which mutes the impact of the image. The show is on display at the Nelson Hancock Gallery through July 5th.

The city of Wenchuan where the recent earthquake in China was centered lies only a few miles away from the Longmenshan fault. The fault severs Sichuan province on the diagonal cutting it roughly in half. From ground the land to the east of the fault appears flat, but if you fly above it, you will see the earth slopes down into a huge basin (geologists call this the Sichuan Basin). On the other side of the fault, to the west, the land immediately deforms and flatlands quickly become foothills and foothills abruptly become an imposing labyrinth of impossibly high mountains and deep river valleys.

Until about 40 years ago the city of Wenchuan was one of the last major Chinese outposts before getting into the serious mountains. It’s lies at 4347 feet above sea level. Respectable, but a drive up the road you start hitting passes that are at 15,000 feet, then 17,000 feet...a day up the road you hit a 19,000 foot pass and those are the passes, the low spots between the mountains. The landscape is beyond human scale. For hundreds of years this was were where China effectively ended. Beyond were various kingdoms and fiefdoms of tribal peoples such as the Miao, the Naxi, the Qiang, the Yi, the Lisu and the many tribes of people we now group under the title Tibetans. Chinese mythology is full of stories of the mountains being the home to demons and spirits and in many old Chinese maps these mountains and the imposing deserts to the north of them represent the ends of the earth. The people in the mountains spoke foreign languages, practiced a foreign religion, and were ethnically distinct from the Chinese.

Mao Zedong made a conscious decision to take control of Sichuan's mountains, as well as Tibet’s 3 primary kingdoms. This area represented to him, and to the majority of Chinese today, part of that country's manifest destiny. Mao's government sent tens of thousands of Chinese up into the highlands as part of an organized "education and cultural assimilation" campaign both to teach city people the value of manual labor and to bring Chinese culture to the region. Local culture was systematically destroyed, monasteries were blown up, local religion and language were banned, and small villages were turned into Chinese cities. Living standards for many improved, but at the cost of their cultural heritage. Instead of small self sustaining organic communities living in symbiosis with the land the Chinese built medium sized cities often on grids, they dammed the rivers and relied almost exclusively on imports from hundreds of miles away to feed and cloth the people of those cities. Today there is hardly a city in the region without a majority Chinese population and in most cities vernacular architecture and customs are rapidly being erased.

As the land in these areas is so steep and harsh, most cities lie in deep river valleys. Because flat land is at a premium cities are often spread out over the thin strip of land on both sides of river bottoms. There are hundreds of rivers as this is China’s watershed and up every river and tributary you will often find a town or two. For the most part, dams have tamed these rivers providing power and most cities are connected by roads to the outside world. But these are tenuous connections. Most cities often only have a single road that passes through and connections to other cities and the outside world have to pass through some of the most rugged landscape in the world. Still, bit by bit, the Chinese have tried to take control of the landscape. Twenty years ago a bus ride to Wenchuan from the mega-city of Chengdu was a 14 hour ordeal. Today there are major highways with many tunnels cutting through mountains and the trip only takes about 3 hours or at least it did before the earthquake struck.

Beyond Wenchuan the mountain roads get narrower and even in the best of times have to be cleared regularly of debris from almost daily rockslides and washouts. Virtually all of western Sichuan as well as the provinces further north and west were recently closed due to riots. The riots in which ethnic Tibetans revolted against Chinese authorities and Chinese setters were the result of years marginalization, a kind of soft apartheid in which non-Chinese speaking locals are inexorably losing control of their historical homeland. The protests (and the crackdown in response) have been going on for months now in an area twice the size of Texas which has been almost completely cut off from reporters and travelers (Nicholas Kristoff managed to get in a rare report from the region in today’s NY TImes) The largest roads into this area run through Sichuan and right now apparently those roads are closed which makes the isolation even more complete. In addition to destroying roads homes and schools, the earthquake damaged hundreds of tunnels, bridges, and dams.

Looking at the images coming out of China I’m of course horrified by the destruction and loss of life wrought by the earthquake, in fact I worry that the actual death toll is much much higher than officially reported. The mountains are full of small towns and in village after village local Chinese governments have had habit of bulldozing indigenous architecture and erecting Chinese style concrete apartment buildings. While sometimes the buildings will have a locally inspired fillip as a nod to the tourists they tend to essentially be cheap concrete boxes, constructed fast and dirty. Judging from the pictures of the disaster it is these structures which have failed so dramatically turning entire cities into rubble. Many of those cities will be totally cut of for some time. Traditional villages in this area were even 15 years ago much smaller, one story affairs often built of wood and less susceptible to catastrophe than concrete apartment blocks perched on steep mountain ledges and at the bottom of deep river canyons.

My suspicion and fear is that the government will use the the world’s sympathy for the quake victims and rightful admiration for the heroics of the People’s Liberation Army whose soldiers working under the worst of conditions to detract from the harsh crackdown on Tibetans in the region. I suspect it will take years to find out what has really happened inland from to epicenter to tribal communities devastated by this this quake. My hope is that the quake will give the government in Beijing pause about overdevelopment in a region so inherently fragile where life has always been tenuous. Perhaps they will even take lessons from the indigenous people who have managed to live in harmony with this harsh environment for centuries rather than taking on the Sisyphean task of rebuilding and controlling the uncontrollable.

Sometimes all it takes is a slight shift in perspective to make an ordinary photograph extraordinary.

If you have ever been to Ahmedabad in India you know it's characterized by it's crazy chaotic street life. It's a dense warren of a city, home to 5.6 million people, that has been around since the 11th century, so to see it empty is something. Frederic Delangle made a series of photos of Ahmedabad at night which exposes the city beyond the people. (via one of my favorite photography blogs, Hippolyte Bard)

I received a nice email the other day from Alejandro Cartagena, a Dominican born photographer, who has lived for many years in the city of my birth, and the city closest to my heart, Monterrey, Mexico. Cartagena was a researcher on one of my semi-obsessions, a book titled Nuevo Leon, Imagenes de Nuestra Memoria and he is also responsible for a photo project I've been meaning to post titled Lost Rivers . If you've spent much time in that part of the world you know the significance of the often empty river beds that lead off into nowhere. In fact Monterrey itself is split in half by a lost river, the Santa Catarina, that is a chaotic mix of sand, overgrown palms, squatter homes, markets, and soccer fields. But you don't have to have experience in Mexico's northern states, to appreciate the melancholy of photographs of rivers vanishing into the dust; some photographs speak for themselves.

Over at 20x200 we're introducing a piece by Kent Rogowski today in conjunction with the opening of his show Love = Love tonight at the Jen Bekman gallery.

In this project Rogowski makes montages from puzzles with landscape scenes. The results would make the Cubists proud. I think they're great.

Check out many more fun projects on the artist's website.

Have you ever stood on a beach and looked out over the water to some distant boat on the horizon and wondered about the people out there? I have, which is why I enjoy Mårten Lange's project The Sea so much. The little boats give scale to the sea's vastness, humanize the incomprehensible, and provide a space for your mind to fill with a story.

Lange is an editor at Farewell Books which specializes in delightful (but cheaply constructed) photo books.

raul andres: I am Pirate Raul. This is my treasure chest. We will bury it.

me: What's in that treasure chest?

Pirate Raul: GOLD! SILVER!

me: anything else?

Pirate Raul: and... and...bones! and coins! and... peg legs!

me: and?

Pirate Raul: rocks and shells and... chocolate!

me: and?

Pirate Raul: and... and... Cucumbers! Lots and lots of cucumbers!

The American tendency is to associate any display of skin with sex and because of this I imagine many here would have a hard time wrapping their minds around the traditional Japanese sentos (public baths) and onsens (hot springs) you find all over Japan. In the most traditional village sentos families, neighbors, and co-workers bathe together, male/female, young/old with everyone gloriously and unabashedly naked. During my visits to Japan I was sometimes invited to join friends for baths after work and was always struck by the family atmosphere in these places—everyone with their little washcloths resting on their heads washing, gossiping, and just enjoying the warm soak.

Hiroyo Kaneko's series titled Sentimental Education gives us a bit of the feel of these places. When I compare these nude figures to the contrived "we're all so so naked and we don't care!' figures in Ryan McGinley's recent work I'm reminded that often the best way to showcase someone's humanity is by catching them in the middle of their most ordinary daily rituals.

Related: Sento at 6th and Main by Gail Dubrow.

A blog reader named Stella wrote in asking about the story behind the picture above. I always like hearing the stories behind other people's images so I don't mind telling the stories behind mine. If you have a question about a particular picture, just email and I'll answer when I have a chance.

This photo was taken two years ago durning a Tibetan festival where herdsmen gather to celebrate and do business—literally to horse trade. The white horse was up for sale and it was initially the horse that drew me (I have a thing for pictures of white horses). So I was walked over and was enjoying the the back and forth discussion when the owner of the horse came over to check me out. We traded hellos and he obviously found me amusing. He asked if i was married or single. I said married. He asked me if I had children. I said I had one. He asked if it was a boy or a girl. I said a boy. He smiled and putting his fingers to his mouth, whistled loudly. "My son" he gestured. His son came over and gave him a big hug and I took this shot. Then I took a polaroid and gave it to them as thanks. The polaroids drew a crowd and I only had a few pieces of polaroid film left so I quickly exited. For the rest of the week I would be wandering around when I would hear the distinctive whistle, then I would look around and see the man in the distance. He would tip his hat to me and I would tip my hat back to him.

That's the story.

The print is available through my gallery in several editions as both as a traditional print and a platinum print.

Sometimes, on days like today, I will walk out past the creek along the rabbit trails, through the deep forest where the trees grow in a thick, to the clearing. I alone know the way to the single large rock that sits in the sun. It is as if the trees have stepped back to pay their respects. Climbing up top I close my eyes and and wander. I imagine the people who must have stopped and rested here through the ages. I imagine pre-cambrian oceans and I imagine the luminescent monsters that still hide in the depths. I imagine a couple touching fingers for the first time. I imagine births and deaths and all the things in-between. And when the world seems so full it will burst, almost always I will notice that I am not alone on my rock.

If I am quiet the clearing will come alive again full of buzzing things, hungry rabbits and the occasional snake. Deer munch on the blackberries that grow in the brambles on the forest’s edge and if I stay long enough fireflies appear telling me it is time to go home. While lure of seeing stars over the black silhouette of the forest against the fading blue of the sky is strong, I know if I stay too long, if it gets too dark I will be hopelessly lost and it would be better to sleep on that rock than it would be to venture into the maze of the forest in the blackness, so I run. I run from the cold of the night, from the unknown things in the dark, from everything, until I see the light of home. Then, when I am safe in bed, I will close my eyes and go back to my clearing revisiting the places I am already forgetting.