Carpineto cross

Another one from Carpineto della Nora, Italy.

diamond heart

No "jewel hearts" here, no sir.

The Rog + cat

Roger mans the electronic pianos in The Appreciation Post, but sometimes he lets his American flag t-shirt cat play a few bars. It's much like Toonces the Driving Cat, but with Moogs.

jewel heart

This image started as a digital picture I took by setting my camera on rapid-fire and waving it around. The actual image I captured is only half of what you see. What I'm saying is, imagine a line going down the middle of the image. One half of that is what the camera actually captured. I took that picture, made a copy, reversed it, and put the two together, and that's what you see above.

To me it looks like a chest cavity, or maybe a throat, with a heart dangling by a thread, and the heart has jewelry impaled in it and hanging from it.

This is probably one of my favorite things I've ever made. First of all, it looks really cool. Secondably, it's just crazy to me that I captured such a great image in such a haphazard way, and that I knew exactly what to do with it when I saw it. I like when things like that happen.

The Mansion Show pt. two

It's been almost a week. I think that's the longest I've gone without making a new post since I started this thing. I have a good excuse though. I was preparing my work for The Mansion Show reception, which happened this past Friday. It was good. Between the 5 other artists and me, there ended up being 50 pieces total. A lot more people came than I expected. All the work seemed to be very well-received.

All my pieces in the show were from my Deconstructure series. In the top image are six 11x14 prints. The Beebe Estate is a historic (and haunted) building, and they don't allow you to attach anything to the walls. So they have chains (probably borrowed from the ghosts) hanging down from the moulding, from which you can hang your work on hooks. This makes hanging your work properly an infuriating process, but it ends up looking pretty badass. With the chains and all.

In the second image are ten 16x20 prints. I had originally wanted these to be frameless; just the prints mounted on black board. But the day after I hung them up, the humidity in the building caused the boards to start warping. So the morning of the reception I rushed out to buy frames, put all the prints in them, and hung them back up. I'm not a fan of having glass over them, because the images are very tactile-looking, and printed on matte paper, and having shiny glass over them totally nullifies that effect. But there wasn't really anything else I could do to prevent them from warping, and I guess it does look pretty good despite the glare.

Know what else looks good? Hot pink walls. I'm mounting all my black & white prints on hot pink board from now on. I'll also give out snap bracelets at all future shows.

shed

Last week I talked about how I plan to take a walk down the train tracks and take pictures of stuff. This picture is almost like that. When I take the train, I like to set my camera to rapid-fire and hold it up to the window. Usually I get one or two pictures I like out of every one- or two-hundred I take like this. This is one photo that grabbed my attention.

I don't know what's going on here. It seems to be some kind of shed plopped down in the middle of a fence. It's not just a wall with a door in it, it's actually a three-dimensional structure that someone built at the edge of their backyard.

There are a lot of weird things about it. It's much bigger than a regular shed. You could fit a fleet of lawnmowers in there. Its placement is strange. Why was it built in the middle of a fence, rather than just in the yard? And If you assume that the fence is the boundary between these folks' land and the rail area, why does it straddle the two? (You can't tell from the picture, but the structure comes out beyond the fence). Baffling.

I like the blurry, out-of-focus quality of the picture. Yeah, any photo that's blurry and out-of-focus can seem dreeeaaammmliiiiike. But I think this photo works well because of the composition, this odd monument in the middle of the frame with the fence sections stretching to the sides, and the sharpness and richness of the trees and sky compared to the blurriness and dull brown + yellow/green of the lower half. I probably wouldn't hang it on the wall, but I like it.

nana

My great-grandmother. It's a picture of a picture, manipulated with a glass lens while I took the photo.

railroad spikes

Earlier today I found these railroad spikes arranged exactly how they appear here, while walking down the train tracks in West Concord. They were on an old cement boarding ramp, the last remaining part of an old train station (besides the old rails). Here's a picture. It's that thing on the left:


There's a project I've been meaning to do for the past two years, but have never gotten around to, and that's to take the train outbound from Boston, get off somewhere and start walking back with my camera. You see so much interesting stuff from the train. Stuff you can only see from the train. Once in a while I'll be riding the train past roads that I've driven down many times, but I'll see things that I'd never see from a car. Even things I can see from the road, I see from a new perspective on the rail. Even something as simple as the back of a building that I've walked into from the front a thousand times. It's weirdly mind-warping sometimes.

Also, there's often a lot of just really strange debris lying along the train tracks. I've seen junked-out cars half-submerged in foggy bogs. I've seen a ramshackle Cinderella pumpkin carriage made out of metal and wood. Last year I saw a bunch of dudes fighting pitbulls behind an abandoned warehouse in Baltimore. P.S. never go to Baltimore. The entire time we were going through there I thought that any second it was going to turn into that scene from Children Of Men where the people are throwing rocks at Clive Owen while he's looking out the train window.

P.S.S. I look a lot like Clive Owen.

P.S.S.S. Sorry if you're from Baltimore. Sorry that your city is horrible!

folk punk

Eric made some barechested new friends during Bread & Roses' set at BratFest '06.

restoration

My grandparents at their wedding.

deconstructures pt. three

I've been working on my photos for The Mansion Show. Here are two negatives I scratched out. They're intended to fit together. Like this!


I scanned the negatives and then combined them in Photoshop. There's no digital trickery, except for lowering the opacity so both images are visible, and fixing the brightness and contrast a little bit because the exposure of the negatives is really bad. This is the first time I've done this digitally, and I think it looks really good, even if it doesn't look quite the same as if I had printed it in the darkroom. I actually did make a print of this in the darkroom today, but I just couldn't get it right. The image above is what I was going for. But with the crappily-exposed negatives I'm working with, I don't think it's even possible to darkroom-print it as well as this.

bigfoot

Back in this entry, I posted a piece I made starring this here little girl. I had found her picture on some strips of film in my grandmother's basement. I just recently re-found those negatives, and I scanned them. Here's that little girl in color, and only slightly less scratched up. I wish I knew who she was.


I also mentioned that on the same roll of film there were some pictures from a monster truck rally. I wasn't joking...

AWESOME

AWESOME

AWESOME

AWESOME

rogues gallery pt. two

I was amiss when I didn't include Eric in the last post. Here he is taking a load off on yonder stoop, looking penny-wise and hoity-toity before an eventide's dose of carousing.



Meanwhile, our newest hero, Roger, looks more gussied up than a speakeasy harlot. But don't be hoodwinked by the looks of this insufferable dandy; he's a whiz on that keytrumpet.

rogues gallery

Way back when, this fella by the go-by Paz had it in his noodle to conjure a portrait of hisself looking dapper and rakish, and clasping a banjo at a jaunty slant. It was a capital thought, but that idear soon opened up a whole can o' worms. And that can was a biggun. And all those can-worms started a-wigglin' something fierce til they was like a twister on the plain, makin' a royal mess of things the magnitude of which weren't seen since Teapot Dome....



After catching a gander at what Paz had done, this scrappy gent by the name'a Michael, flush with the spirit of oneupmanship, presently followed suit with a photo-graph of his own. As you'd reckon, he portrays hisself with an ill countenance, as a ne'er-do-well is wont to do.



Well I tell ya, that got my dander up, sure as tarnation. I followed posthaste with three of my own pi'chers, illustrating the breadth of my imagined musical acumen.



Madder'n a boiled owl, Christian set to with this gem, a pithy rejoinder if ever there was one.



"Poppycock!", hollered Melanie, ragamuffin that she is, and sent us all runnin' for the dinner bell with this inspired tableau.



Spry ol' Michael, ever the cock-of-the-walk, would not be outdone. Sure as Samson, he heaved the old one-two with this humdinger. Our humours besmirched, I figger'd that this donnybrook had all but hit the hay like a milkmaid after a barn dance.



But forthwith a strapping young buck entered the fray. Justin, never one to wither in the face of fisticuffs, pulled himself up by the bootstraps and exclaimed, with vim and vigour, "I'll have my druthers too!"

And he did, by and by.
And sweet those druthers were.

home front

Like the last post says, I'm going to be in a show in June. If you want to come to the reception on June 6th, the Beebe Estate website has driving directions.

Directions by MBTA:
1) Take the Orange line outbound to Oak Grove.
2) Catch the #136 or #137 bus towards Reading or Wakefield (not Malden Station, which is the southbound direction). Take this into Melrose center (about an 8 minute ride), and get off at Foster St. (YMCA stop).
3) Walk two blocks west on West Foster to Beebe Estate, which is a large Greek Revival style white house on the north side. There is a sign for it. Take a look at the website, beebeestate.org for a photo of the estate.

I'll have 4 pieces in the show. They'll be mostly skyscrapers, with a few smokestacks thrown in. The image above won't be in the show, but it's along the lines of what I've been working on lately; more deconstructures.

I made this yesterday, probably the quickest one I've ever done. It's a 35mm negative, scratched up, then scanned with a negative scanner. Negative scanners are pretty much the best things ever invented.

The Mansion Show

flip car

A flipped-over car in Bridgewater, MA.
35mm

village rooftop

I guess there's kind of an architectural theme around here lately. This picture was taken in 2001 in the mountains above the village of Carpineto della Nora in Italy, where my great-grandfather was born and where I still have a good number of relatives.

deserted room

Inside of an abandoned house in Maynard, MA.
35mm black and white.

red house

I took this picture from a bit further away than it looks. The image above is cropped in a little bit. The right and left sides still look a little bendy. It looks bulgy in the middle, like it's a round house. If I knew anything about photography, I'd probably know what kind of lens prevents this from happening. Do yooooooouuuu know?

CIB

Concord Independent Battery in the Patriots Day Parade in Concord, MA, last Monday. My grandfather was a member of the CIB for a long time, and because of this he knows a whole lot about firing cannons. (He's somewhere in that picture). He even has a small cannon of his own. Here's my dad kabooming it at my aunt's wedding last year.

bronchitis

I've had bronchitis for the past week. This picture illustrates what I've felt like lately. Like I've had a human head in my chest and I've been trying to cough it up.

This is an old print I made by exposing a negative of my brother through an x-ray of my chest that I laid over the paper. The x-ray is from one of the two times I broke my collarbone when I was 13. You can see it up in the lefthand corner. It hurt. Those dark oblong shapes are clips that were on the smock they put on me. If only I had lined them up so they looked like horns on my bro's head. That would more accurately portray the evilness of the bronchitisaurus that is living inside me right now.

(While I was searching for "bronchitisaurus", I found THIS, which is probably the best video game ever made.)

smile up

The image is from a magazine. I held a magnifying glass in front of the camera lens to get the swooshy effect. Shot on 35mm black and white.

angel tape

A little angel garden statue. Pieces of scotch tape on the negative and then printed.

Onda Blue

A laundromat in Siena, Italy. The dryers look like they were made by Playskool, and the waves are a great touch. Almost as awesome as LIVING ROOM. Or awesomer I guess, since you can actually tell these ones are waves. I washed my clothes here and then went back to awesomely being in Italy!

chop tree

Trees are ripping me off.

Movers & Shakers

Last year the shirtless wonders from Movers & Shakers wanted some pictures of their rocking selves. We went up on the roof and I used my photographic machinery to capture their likenesses.

The top shot is my favorite from the shoot. My camera couldn't pick their faces out of the dark very well, so I ended up photoshopping them to an almost Top Model degree. If I had had a light up there I could've lit it better, but oh well. I really like the setting and composition, and I think it really works as a "band photo", so I thought it was worth sharing.

Matt made the giant portraits and pasted them to cardboard. Not much else to say about it. It was a great idea.

Sadly, Mikey, the drummer, plummeted to his doom shortly after we finished. Matt and Dan soldiered on, propping up his piece of cardboard at the back of the stage during shows. Somehow it just wasn't the same and they eventually replaced him, but never forgot him. RIP Mikey.

hand

I've done some bad things. I used to eat ham and cheese sandwiches in the darkroom. I used to put my bare hands in photo chemicals. I tried not to do these things at the same time, but who knows if I did or not? When you're hungry and impatient, you sometimes do things you know you shouldn't, and then you get brain damage.

I scattered some contrast filters on a piece of photo paper and exposed it for a split second under the enlarger. Secondably, I got my hand all developy and pressed it down on the paper for a minute or so. Then I dunked the whole piece of paper into the developer for a few seconds, then quickly moved it to the stop bath and then the fixer. I think I took it out of the fixer after not very long, because it's a little purple in some spots. Ta da.

hobo fortress

I think these are the remains of some kind of insane and once-mighty hobo fortress.

wave wall

Hang ten living room.

chandelier

It's got a good energy.