Omaha Outtakes

The NY Times T Style Travel Magazine finally came out this Sunday with some photographs from the assignment I recently did for them in Omaha. I like the NY Times and it has a long history of a place to view good photographs. In my case they opted for refrigerator-magnet sized images. Not ideal, but a good reason to share a few I liked that didn't make the edit: the Brother's Lounge Artist, June Kaneko Bemis Art Center Storage Julie at the Bemis Art Center Downtown Omaha

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Bessemer, AL 2007

Greg Goes Solo

Hey Brian, The show is finally up. Looking at it for the first time all together as big prints gives me a feeling of accomplishment! It looks better than I expected. I am a bit freaked out about the opening being my first solo show and all. I am sad you can't be there! I hope all goes well in San Diego! have a burrito on Ocean Beach for me. Greg One of my favorite Chicagraphers, Greg Stimac has his first (of i'm sure many) solo shows opening this Friday. The details: Bucketrider Gallery 835 West Washington. Chicago Friday March 23 - April 28. Opens March 23rd, 6-9pm

Ohm is a Hologram

Returning home from Miami long enough to feed the cat, repack and head out to that other coast. I hope you west coasters can join me for a lecture at the Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla. I'll be giving away giggles, secrets, new pictures and lots of ums, likes, and kind of's. Thursday, March 22, 6 pm MCASD La Jolla Ohm is a Hologram from the excellent film THX 1138 viewed on route from Miami to Chicago

Battle of the Vowels... an O vs. an A

Chad Muthard stirs it up with his Final Four Photo March Madness. I'm honored to be included, though sad that I'm up up against good friend Todd Deutsch. Here's how the fight would begin btwn. a Chicagrapher and Minneographer. • Beer. Todd and I like beer and we have shared a few. I've certainly beat him in the tall beer department though I imagine he'll outlast me in quantity. Could be even here. • Todd's a dad, i'm not. Knowing this I imagine Todd has forearms of a lumberjack. Kids love to be tossed, thrown and have adults propell them through space with velocity. My bmx days will do little good over Todd's kid heavy workouts. • I would steal his soul with a candid 645 medium mallmart snapgraphic while Todd is distracted with the youngsters. Todd wouldn't even know what hit him. • While I'm winding my film Todd may have a secret weapon of a blog posting, defaming character asassination-ray. Drunken party pics, attacks on my work, inventive wikipedia editing and dissing my use of the words 'kind of' and 'like' could buckle my knees and send me off into a void of no-comments-on-my-posts, and banish me to the bottom-feeder of a google search. I imagine we'd more likely giggle over a beer and talk about lenses. The real war here was discovered this weekend in a discussion with Colleen Mullins at the SPE conference: • Is Minneagraphy/minneography spelled with an 'O' or an 'A'? ps. image courtesy of 9 hours of waiting standby for flights.

My Teachers: Bob Thall

When I first began to looking into graduate programs, my previous professor Andrew Borowiec (more on him later) suggested I look into the program at Columbia College. The first name I recognized on the faculty list, (and chair of the department) was Bob Thall. I can't recall where I first saw Bob's work, perhaps Andrew showed it to me, or maybe I came across his amazing book the New American Village, but I do recall being so struck that Bob had made so many of the pictures of urban Chicago Thomas Struth seemed to miss, sometimes just around the corner, others made some time before the fact. With his pictures in mind, my graduate school choices were become very clear.. In many graduate programs the first semester one in which it becomes clear that though you think you know a lot, in fact one knows so little. Class with Bob proved this. He challenged my foundation of thought in terms of process and motivation and pushed us to think far beyond anything comfortable or convenient. His book of photographs of Schaumburg, IL transformed the way I looked at suburbia and was a huge catalyst for my own projects. Some of my favorite Thallian moments: • Running into Bob in a Walgreens and being startled by the contents of his basket. • Bob equating a fellow students work to a recipe for soup. 'It's not like you would put the entire contents of the fridge into the soup, you have to choose your ingredients'. • Finding out that at any moment Bob has loaded 4x5 film holders on his person or within reach. This became evident while on a shoot on the roof of the Museum of Contemporary Art and Bob borrowing Matt Siber's camera view camera and running off to make some pictures. Of the many concepts I took was from Bob was to be patient, dilligent and that photography can be the result of a prolonged investigation of the subject. Bob has several books, The Perfect City, The New American Village, City Spaces, and recently At City's Edge. Projects developed while in class with: color street photographs, notifbutwhen video, early Copia

Kind of...

While listening to a podcast of photographer Chris Verene at CindyCenter I've noticed his liberal use of the phrase Kind Of. I've been doing a lot of lectures myself as of late and find myself using Kind Of a lot as well. Is Kind Of the new Like? Vote:

Yes Kind Of is much better than Like and creates sentences that are ambigious and trenchant at the same time.

No nothing will replace the exurberant use of the word Like in western language.

I am as ambivilent as this phrase suggests.

Chris Verene is an awesome photographer.

I'm Emerging...

Minneapolis, MN 2007 Honored to be listed in this months issue of Photo District News as one of the 2007 30 Emerging Photographers. I was nominated a few years back and got a big fat no, this time a big fat yes...persistence is my best friend (and a nomination by Martin Parr). You also may have seen my pictures accompanying a Bill McKibben story in this month's Mother Jones magazine. Pick one up, draw on my picture and send it to me. xo