Instamatica

Oh, there are so many things to love about Polaroids. What I am loving right now is the way the shiny "scanned" border is always the same frame, and you have to get it right the first time - I'm taking a break from editing post-shot, and it's nice.

Here are some shots from the weekend.

Fauxlaroids

A New Profile Picture

You may notice that I have a new profile picture. The old one, while sentimental (it was taken when I was really, really happy - in Croatia with Kate and some friends and miles of coast ahead of us), was getting a little stale. This photo was taken by Emerson College student Rebecca Knell in an alley off the Boston Commons.

Learning is Fun

I designed and implemented a new class at Emerson's Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies called The Literature of Photography. It's a class of 19 freshmen, about half writing majors and half arts majors. We are reading the usual suspects: Sontag, Barthes, Berger, Calvino. We also write poetry, study and critique narrative photography (what photography isn't, somehow, narrative?), and go into back alleys and take pictures of each other.

You can find some of my students' work on our Tumblr site. I will continue to brag about them as the semester goes on, I'm sure.

Jess Getting Ready

I grabbed Kate's camera and became the impromptu photographer for the "getting ready" segment of Jess and Melinda's wedding in Portland, Oregon. I think the camera loves Jess as much as Melinda loves Jess. We had a fun time while Jess got her hair and makeup all settled and got into her dress. Then it was off to the Hoyt Arboretum to meet Mindy and get hitched. It was supposed to rain all day, but it held off completely until the "minister" - our friend Dan, recently ordained with the Universal Church of Life - pronounced Jess and Melinda married. At that very second a light mist dusted the crowd, sparkling like glitter in the still-sunny sky. Try not tearing up when something like THAT happens at a wedding!

Jess & Melinda's Wedding Weekend

Jess and Melinda got married! Here is a "Polaroid" (a la iPhone software) of Jess getting ready (more of those soon). And here is one of Jess and Joe at the wedding site, working hard...

One Last Look...

This is the view from the deck off the attic bedroom in the house Kate and I rented in Wellfleet for the week of our wedding. Every morning we awoke to the sound of seagulls and the view of the oystermen wading out in their boots. I sure did like it there.

Night Falls

on another summer season in Provincetown.

Wedding Pictures

Here is a peek at our wedding pictures, taken by our most talented friend, Margaret Singer. You can see more of her work at margaretsinger.com or at her blog.

I Knew There Was a Reason I Kept Those White Go-go Boots

Carnival 2009: Peace, Love, and Go-go Boots.

If you know me, you know that I love Provincetown. And Carnival in Provincetown is one of my favorite days of the year. The glamour. The characters. The attention to fun. The fact that everyone is throwing beads and candy and blowing kisses and hugging strangers. The fact that everyone wants their picture taken all day long. And this year, the fact that I got to wear my white go-go boots and hot pink halter dress with the silver threads. Scratchy...but worth it!

This float blasted "Let the Sun Shine In."

I should mention that it was about 95 degrees. It was a good day to be wearing as little as possible.


Julia hurls herself upon the boob float.



Excuse me officer, are you cruising my wife?









And afterwards, we happily wait in line for sandwiches at Farlands.

Lantern Festival, Jamaica Plain

The Forest Hills Cemetery hosts an annual Lantern Festival on the day the doors open between the living and the dead. (It's a Buddhist ritual.) My aunt, Carolyn Dunn, passed away a few days before our festival this year. I decorated a lantern for her and set it afloat.

Night Swim

I went on vacation with two other artists from the Colony.

The pool was very nice.

(PS: Click on the image to see how different the color is in the original image. Can someone tell me why the color/contrast sucks so bad on photos uploaded to Blogger? Is there some trick to this that I'm not getting?)

Coke Is It

I've been writing a lot about Coca-cola lately. Specifically my experience drinking too much Coca-cola in Bolivia. When you're writing about Coke, you really start to notice how very omni-present that white wave is. I liked the juxtaposition of the street-level mural of "Costa Rican life" and this huge tower of a Coke...kinda sums up some of the thoughts on cultural imperialism and the seductive powers of the hobble-skirt bottle...

I Can't Throw a Rock at my Bookshelf

without hitting a book about Burma.



A student gave me Amy Tan's Saving Fish from Drowning on the last day of class. I started it on the plane. It's a book I've been wanting to read. When I was in Burma I had dinner with a tour guide who was incredibly well-read (before we left we rounded up every single book we could part with to give him as thank-you gifts) and he didn't have anything nice to say about this book. He wasn't exactly clear why he disliked it so much, but he clearly thought she had missed the mark when it came to illuminating the situation in Burma. The book is about a group of American tourists who get abducted while on a tour at Inle Lake. My impression of what was objectionable? Tourists aren't the ones who have to worry about getting abducted in Burma! They just prance around the country and go home. If they piss off the junta, the junta shuffles them off to the airport and sends them on their way. BURMESE are the ones who go missing, folks.

I'm a little more than half-way through. When I think of Amy Tan I picture her as I saw her at the PEN gala one year, in a hot pink prom dress slow-dancing with her dog. This makes me forget how serious and talented of a writer she is. The writing's good. I'm into the story. The characters are complicated. So far I'm really liking this book. But what do I know?

For whatever reason, I decided to break up chunks of novel-reading time with short pieces from the 2007 edition of Best American Nonrequired Reading, that clever anthology Dave Eggers does. Four essays in, I turn the page to Scott Carrier's "Rock the Junta," and boom, this reader's back in Burma. Is the universe trying to tell me something?

Well, stuff's going on. It's just too fucking nuts. Aung San Suu Kyi was recently accused of breaking the terms of her house arrest. Some American tried to swim onto her property. Government set-up? Very possibly. Her current sentence was up on May 27 - she was finally going to be released after 6 years. (This time.) Now she's on trial again, back in Insein prison, and every time she arranges for a lawyer to represent her, the junta's like, Oops! We're revoking your license to practice law! Sorry! Muaa ha ha ha.

I'm constantly amazed that this is still going on, that the junta can do whatever they want and get away with it. Hillary Clinton's all, "We call for Aung San Suu Kyi's immediate and unconditional release." Thanks, we'll keep that in mind. Obama's like, we will show our opposition by renewing those economic sanctions that haven't done a thing to change the power structure in Burma. Take that, junta!

Though I suppose all I'm doing is sitting here reading books.

If you like a good story, just follow what's going on in Burma.


If you want another opinion or two of mine? See what I wrote for The Smart Set just after the 2007 protests.

Double Dosing

As proclaimed in my bio over there on the right, My identity is that of a writer. Photography is a secondary fun-generator. (Not that it's always fun. Sometimes, when the person I'm taking a portrait of turns out blurry while the background is annoyingly sharp, I lose my cool a little bit. But even one killer picture in a shoot gives a thrill.)

However, when I really buckle down and get writing, as I have here at the Colony, I don't feel as much of an urge to take pictures. For a year, maybe two years, it was the other way around. But writing has always nagged me in a way that photography doesn't. (Thus the career choice.) So back I go.



The creative process of the two arts is immensely different for me. One involves thinking thinking thinking, and the other involves shutting off the verbal part of the brain and seeing. But once I'm knee-deep in a story, the words in my brain form and bump around no matter what I'm doing or where I am. So for the moment, this photography blog might be more about writing and the photographs might be a little raw. Such things happen when you try to double dose.

I forgot to install Photoshop on my new hard drive (the old one crashed and burned) before I left anyway.