Happy New Year - Two From Tod Papageorge

New Year's Eve, Studio 54, New York


New Year's Eve, Times Square, New York

The Junk In My Trunk

The junk drawer in my home is full of 5 years of assorted bits of collected riffraff. It measures 18 by 24 inches and is about 4 inches deep with rarely seen and occasionally used treasure .

Memento Mori - Goodbye To Chester

We had to say goodbye to our dog Chester yesterday. He was just shy of 16 and like all faithful and loving pets he asked for very little and gave so much back in return. We will miss him dearly.

Golf Is Painful

I spent some time hitting golf balls at a driving range today. I tortured myself and I tortured the turf even more. Below are four pictures of the grass beneath my feet.

Snappy Holiday

Now It's Dark

It's warm here in South Carolina in the evening. And it's quiet. I've had a bit of fun creeping around making pictures while experimenting with high I.S.O's. No tripod or strobes. Only a camera and a bit of wine.

Smartly Tossed Out Of Pet Smart

More and more places have adopted a no photography policy these days. This is both an unfortunate and ironic appendage of these awkward times. Today my son and I were kicked out of Pet Smart. Apparently they have a "no photographing policy." Of course I have a "yes photographing policy" so the thoughtful manager and myself were unable to see eye to eye. I'm not certain what they are afraid of but in the end I did manage to sneak out these controversial and damning pictures of fish swimming and birds roosting on a branch. Look if you dare!

I and I 95

I just finished a long drive. We left New York Saturday morning right after the first real snow of the year. It took 13 hours to get to the bottom of South Carolina. The drive was an uneventful trudge. There were a few occasional moments of delight as various surprises were spotted from the window. At 70 mph they disappeared as quickly as they appeared. It feels relatively balmy here. No Snow or ice.

Chauncey Hare - "Interior America"

Hare's book of domestic photographs, made in Western Pennsylvania and Oakland, California, was published by Aperture in 1978. The pictures are drenched with seventies photo aesthetics; hard flash, wide angle lense, and casual compositions. Many of the photographs feel like scouting pictures from various locations in "Silence of The Lambs" The best of them are more humorous than they are bleak. And much of them are down right depressing. Hare has had a somewhat odd and unique career history. Only a small amount of his work has been published and it rarely shows up in galleries or museums.

"Chauncey Hare does not define himself as a photographer, but instead an engineer, a family therapist and, above all, a protester. Funded by three Guggenheim Fellowships and three National Endowment Fellowships, he spent only a short period of his life making photographs. Frustrated by the photo art world, he photographed only intermittently to 1985, when he stopped making photographs altogether. He has an engineering degree from Columbia University, an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, a Masters Degree in Organization Development from Pepperdine University, and a Masters Degree in Clinical Psychology from Sierra University. He and his wife Judith Wyatt are co-authors of the denial-breaking clinical handbook Work Abuse: How to Recognize and Survive It (1997). As a licensed family therapist Hare now helps working people – in person, on the phone, and on the internet."

Quote Of the Day - Weegee

"To me, pictures are like blintzes – ya gotta get ‘em while they’re hot." - Weegee

It

Things We Need To Know

I found myself this Sunday hanging out for a bit in a nice old P.S in Brooklyn. I had some time and a camera and since it was Sunday and the school was mostly locked up and barely occupied I had free but limited space to roam.

More Phone Fractals

Once in about every one hundred exposures or so my camera phone seems to arbitrarily reconstruct the image in to a series of rectangles or tiles. No two are ever exactly arranged the same way and it continues to make for a nice surprise.