j. [circles]

this is my beautiful friend, who i love to photograph. that's pretty much all there is to it.

tonight i've been playing with speckles and circles. it's not particularly original, perhaps, but it sort of fits my mood at the moment. and, as my best teacher said eight billion times during college, 'everything's been done'.

there are these beautiful, weird cattails down the road from my house - i want to paint them.

good night, everyone... still working on the photography benefit for haiti. i think we've decided to make it an online auction, pretty much just like switchcities did. watch for it!

expired [film]

i've shot many rolls of film since fall and hadn't had any way to process the color... until now! i just got my expired color film back from the lab and was very excited about the results. one of the amazing and irreplaceable things about film is that when it's old or damaged, you can get some interesting color, grain, and contrast shifts. i happen to love how the color begins to skew and fade with age and can't wait to see what happens when i process the 30-year-old black and white rolls on monday!

these are from a shoot i did as a collaboration with my friend jozef. working with former classmates is always wonderful for me because collaborating and sharing ideas is one of the things i miss most about college. A. was our wonderful model who is being very patient with me - i still haven't gotten her a cd of the digital ones... or posted them anywhere for that matter... bah!

during this shoot i was testing out the hasselblad owned by the studio i work at - but i'm not sure which of these film shots are from it or from my trusty seagull. i couldn't quite get the hang of the hasselblad - i'm going to try again soon.

these next ones are from chanukah. i was in bellingham visiting my family and it snowed! my little sister talya has always been one of my favorite subjects.

[caption id="attachment_52" align="alignnone" width="448" caption="talya later made a snow penguin - i wish i had a picture of that!"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_53" align="alignnone" width="448" caption="on our way from the car to cafe avellino on a peaceful sunday morning"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_54" align="alignnone" width="448" caption="i guess this one should have been first - this is when the snow began to fall"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_55" align="alignnone" width="448" caption="this face = love"][/caption]

well, i guess that's all for now - but not for long! have a good weekend!

poem-lets

i'm hoping that the creation of this blog will bring me back to journaling - which i haven't been doing as often as i'd like. i'm pretty sure that that has something to do with the fact that the vast majority of my most recent work is on the computer, and not in any tangible form. i don't want to be redundant on here and post all the things i've already posted on facebook and flickr... but to introduce my blog i have decided to add my most recent project - an unprecedented collection of self-portraits. it used to be that i refused to be photographed, but with the encouragement of a friend and fellow photographer i decided to give it a go.

[caption id="attachment_27" align="aligncenter" width="497" caption="who knows what temperatures these nightmares evenly soften?"][/caption]

it turned out that self-portraiture allowed me a canvas for what i like to call poem-lets... these are created by snipping words from magazines and newspapers, and even other people's poems and letters, and pasted down in the order that expresses what i am thinking at the time. before now i've always just put the poem-lets on collaged pictures from various sources, but this time i've added them to my own images.

[caption id="attachment_28" align="aligncenter" width="497" caption="i'm more like a duck"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_31" align="aligncenter" width="497" caption="change is melting in the minds of the frustrated"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_32" align="aligncenter" width="497" caption="we lost her, and every because and better"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_33" align="aligncenter" width="497" caption="you can wash your flaws"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_35" align="aligncenter" width="497" caption="from 'la' by francesca lia block"][/caption]

this one was inspired by a short story called 'La' in one of my favorite books, 'Girl Goddess #9,' by the amazing Francesca Lia Block. i have never really found another author to rival her luscious, visual prose-poems. these books carried me through my adolescence when, typically for a fifteen-year-old, nothing about me seemed beautiful, and through a time of my life when it seemed like i would never be happy or free.

[caption id="attachment_36" align="aligncenter" width="497" caption="now a band of rebels, again, again"][/caption]

i was reading 'Time' magazine when i made the poem-let on the left; mostly about the war in afghanistan. it's hard for me to hear about places like afghanistan, or really any sad and scary place. it's such a human impulse to hide behind denial, because it's such a great defense mechanism.

but i am reading this really beautifully written book called 'i live here' by Mia Kirshner (one of my favorite actresses from the L word). everyone's heard of afghanistan, but i'd never really known about the horrors in places like chechnya or burma. these places don't seem to filter into our daily knowledge, and yet things are happening in those places daily that deserve just as much attention as afghanistan does. i really admire mia for this deeply touching book.

[caption id="attachment_37" align="aligncenter" width="497" caption="on the inside i would be sold for this"][/caption]

well this is the end of my very first blog post! i sent in a few rolls of film to be processed (color, which i've never done before with my twin-lens), so hopefully i'll be able to post those sometime soon.

thanks to anyone who is reading this and comments and constructive criticism is always appreciated - but be nice. <3