Why Bother Taking Pictures Anymore When There Is Google Street View?

In current issue of Harper's there is a wonderful little feature on Jon Rafman's collection of Google Street View images. This is brilliant (buy the book). We all use street view to scout locations and this and that, but Rafman takes it to the next level. This is such a wonderful portrayal of America in so many ways. Not only does it comment on what the the notion of the once romantic great American road trip has been reduced to, but also touches upon on our dependance of the internet, what the internet allows us to see and perhaps the things that many Americans dont see because they are boxed in and removed from society within the confines of their automobile, and not to mention, either too busy texting while they drive or focused on their stupid little GPS navigation devices to see what is right out the window. I cant help but think, why bother picking up a camera anymore when nearly every street and corner in America and soon, I imagine, the rest of the world will exist in the greatest document of 21st Century American society...Google. Oh, the internet.


Some of my favorites....

One Of The Greatest Feelings In The World Is Hitting A Home Run

Baseball fever. Yes. Let's go Phils. I miss playing. Terribly so. Stopped playing in college after freshman year. Decided to focus on my art. Killed me to quit. But had to. Stephen Shore. Best pictures of baseball. Ever. Need one. To go next to the collection of Ty Cobb and Philly A's photos. That fill the walls of my bedroom. Floor to ceiling. Here are Shore's.

The Last Days Of Gourmet

Kevin DeMaria, my good friend, my homie, my main man, my brother from another mother and my best drinking buddy was an Art Director at Gourmet Magazine and took these beautiful photographs in final days at the magazine. Please visit the site The Last Days of Gourmet to see all the images.












"October 5th, 2009 In shock and disbelief, using garbage pails for long exposures, I took these photos of the last days at Gourmet. Although at times it was hard for me to shoot the common places in the offices at Gourmet, I knew I needed to document where I loved working for the last 8 years. It was a unique opportunity to have worked with such amazingly talented people in such a friendly work environment. Gourmet became my family and I will always look back proud to have been part of such an amazing magazine."
- Kevin DeMaria


Kevin also has an amazing collection of vintage photographs and more of his photographs can be seen here, here, here and here.

The Pain Of The Long Distance Runner

I just can't stop thinking about it.



Steve McQueen's Hunger is the best movie of the year and Michael Fassbender's performance as Bobby Sands is extraordinary. Fassbender reminds us that acting is a performance in which the body and its movements can reveal the heart and spirit of a character in a language devoid of words (minus the 24 minute "Last Super"-esque conversation, 17 of those 24 shot as a single take!). The actor's bodies and the months of starvation, denial and ability to suppress pain and discomfort until the very end, until running across the finish line, in my mind is a performance in itself. I felt as though Fassbender himself was near death as he lay in that bed. And Jesus fucking Christ, the scene in which the guard walks down the hall splashing bleach on the piss puddles, walks back, then comes down the hall again mopping the piss and bleach back into the cells until the camera itself can no longer endure watching any longer and it falls to the black floor and proceeds down the hall, the screen turns black with bursts of light from the reflection of the lights on the ceiling in the remains of the piss puddles, symbolizing the flickering and on the brink of death Irish prisoners in the British Maze prison during a 1981 hunger strike. This scene with obvious Kubrick, Truffaut and Sam Fuller influences is one of the most beautiful and painful scenes I have ever witnessed. Hunger is performance art and a painting that Steve McQueen kissed and molded into one of the most powerful films of the decade. And I will let someone else talk about the significance of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay....

A Silent World

James Castle (1899-1977) was born deaf and never learned to speak, read or write, and refused to be taught to communicate in any of the accepted forms of signing or finger spelling (he was kicked out of the School For Deaf and Blind). Instead, he used his art as a way of communicating and making sense of the world. Castle lived with his parents on their southern Idaho farm all his life, as a man he lived in one of the family's barns and slept on the floor. His drawings were made by using stove soot mixed with his own saliva and applied with the tips of sharpened sticks on whatever form of paper he could find ranging from butcher paper, matchbook covers, cardboard, and mail-order catalogs. Castle lived in a world all his own. He experienced his surroundings with a unique and sophisticated sensitivity, never learning to read or write, words and letters were just abstract forms and shapes, as the instinctual urge to communicate and record the human experience was done so through his own visual language. Thought to be autistic, there is a blurred distinction in Castle's work between the inanimate and the animate, he treated objects like chairs, doorways and beds the same he did humans.

Castle is one of my favorite artists and there are days when I wish I could have lived in his world.

When Photographers Make Films

I recently watched David LaPachelle's Rize and I couldn't stop thinking about the Robert Polidori quote posted on Alec Soth's blog sometime ago. When Soth asked "Where are the people?" in reference to the plethora of images taken in a post Katrina New Orleans and many comments were made about Polidori's work, which is devoid of people, Polidori responded saying he believes, "That you should take stills of what doesn’t seem to move, and take movies or videos of does. It’s my opinion that people come off better in movies." I was fascinated by this statement then and I still am today. I have had an idea for a short film for some time now and like all of my projects, when I can't not do it any longer and the ideas and vision have consumed me, I give in and let the new project take me. Lately I have needed a break from photography, sometimes I get sick of talking about it, sick of the shows, sick of all the gossiping and phoniness, etc, and it takes away from the purity of it for me, just the simple beauty of seeing and creating. I am in the early stages of writing a screen play and am very excited about diving into a new medium, all instinct and guts.

The Original Punk Rock Art

I was a huge fan of Raymond Pettibon's work years before I even knew who he was. I first started listening to Black Flag in 5th grade when the only other punk rock kid at my school, who was a 10th grader, started lending me all his tapes. I used to wander the halls at my school as an elementary student when I should have been on my way to gym or lunch and that is how I met Tae. Whenever I would go wandering I usually found him sitting by himself drawing or with his headphones on. In hindsight it was pretty cool of him to hang out with me (some little kid basically) and let me borrow all his music, sometimes I called him on the phone after school and we would talk about music for a while. Most early 80s hardcore albums were pretty cool, but the Black Flag album art took it to the next level. Yes, Pettibon and Greg Ginn (guitarist) are brothers, but the art and music seemed to come from the same place. Sitting in my room listening to my boombox for hours after school I realized that what I felt when I listened to music I could also feel and express in art, and ideas and feelings are not limited to any particular medium. This music took over my life all through middle and high school and I have closets full of limited edition colored 7",zines, t-shirts and stacks of flyers. Here are some of Pettibon's flyers for Black Flag shows. And yes, Rollins killed Black Flag but his journals in Get In The Van are amazing.

Madness. It Just Makes No Sense At All

Noel's frustration about the Magnum photographers' advice to young photographers collected by Alec for the Magnum blog has gotten me thinking. First off, I should be packing, I have to be out of my apt at the end of the month, but I am a procrastinator, so fuck it. Second off, no disrespect, no beef, I have no intentions of offending anyone or starting some photo blog blah blah gossip. With that said, Alec is one of the most generous and caring real deal guys in the game today and he must receive a ton of emails from young photographers seeking advice. I know, because several years ago, I was one of those young photographers writing him for advice. To this day Alec's advice has stuck with me over the years and through the challenges. Now I get emails from young guns asking me for the same advice. To be perfectly honest, those feelings of anxiety and uncertainty that are the theme in these emails, never go away, they just evolve and over time you become used to them. Whether trying to find photographers to assist for so you can pay your rent or feeling unsure how the critics are going to respond to your next solo show or trying to find new clients so you can pay the office space, assistants, retouchers, printers, etc; it never really ends no matter what level you are at, over the years I have discovered that is the one true solid thing about the game. Perhaps that is why there were so many vague answers, we are all always trying to answer the same big question in one form or another and we never really know what is next. As you climb the ladder, challenges don't somehow magically sort themselves out, in fact, Biggie's words couldnt be more true: "More money, more problems." That is the gift and curse of this life we have chosen, there will always be details to figure out along the journey. And of course there is the fear we all have (my greatest fear)....what if one day I just can't hack it anymore, the talent dries up and no matter how hard I try all I can come up with is just crap. It happened to Papa Hem and he put a shotgun to his head because he couldn't take it anymore. And speaking of Hem, this gets me back to where I started. Advice for young photographers.





And so I ask, what happened to the tough guy artists? Guys like Mailer stabbing people in bars, Buk drinking 5 bottles of wine during a poetry reading, De Kooning sleeping in the gutters, crazy Hem stepping into the ring with a bull thinking he was a matador and Hunter's days with the Hell's Angels. These guys are my heros. In my eyes the most important thing about being an artist is living. I wish I could go back to school now and read all the books all over again, listen to the lectures again, take Intro to Photo with Phil Perkis again, having lived and experienced what I have in the last 5 years. It would all make sense. But maybe the Gods made it this way and this is what keeps things interesting. And so I say: live every fucking second to the absolute extreme. These guys were brave and fearless and their approach to life was so vulnerably evident in their work. I tell the photographers who write me to live their lives, do as many drugs as possible, drink as much as you can, fall in love, have your heart broken, get into a fight, go to the hospital, take that trip to where ever it is that curiosity is leading you, make it happen, sacrifice everything you have to do it, jump off that cliff, don't look back, if you don't take that leap and risk falling (failing) you will never know what could be. Somehow I have been lucky and something has always caught me, and something will catch you too as it has caught the ones before us and will catch the ones after us. When Scorsesse made Raging Bull, he said he filmed everyday as if it was his last day and he would never shoot again. Those are great words, allow that to happen. I am a fuck up and I could never hack a 9-5 job for the rest of my life, I just can't, I am not built that way. And so I drift, I live this life as an artist, I get stressed the fuck out and most days I am hustling nonstop working my ass off, but everyday is a true gift, everyday I get to jump off that cliff. I figure the details out on my way down, the greatest line Jay-Z ever had was, "Difficult takes a day, impossible takes a week." You must give yourself to this life. And really it is all the same thing, my life is my love is my art. All of the times I have had my heart broken by the woman I love, the fights and the beatings I have taken in the bars, somehow just making rent on the last day of the month, waking up last New Years Day in an alley on top of a steam vent in New Orleans and then barging into the wrong hotel and kicking down the door of the room I thought was mine, almost being murdered, losing countless women and friends because of this thing inside me that has taken over me, this burning addiction to create, to do my art, whatever it is, let it happen. So my friends, young and old, the rookies and the seasoned veterans, the nobodies and the stars, I will see you all on the way down, and I will look you in the eye and smile because we know what it feels like to fly through that air...it is the greatest feeling in the world.


above pic-me in the emergency room getting things stitched up after a recent bar fight

Bobby And My Mom

I recently reviewed Paul Fusco's RFK (Aperture) for photo-eye magazine and it is now online. When I first came across this book, I immediately thought of my mother. She was 20 years old in 1968 and was very much involved with the political and social events of those times. My mother is a good story teller, so before I wrote this review I called her up and asked her if she could tell me about Bobby and the events surrounding his death. We spoke for over an hour, my mother repeatedly broke into tears as she remembered those times. Here is a sample from my conversation with my mother:

When I asked her what Bobby’s death felt like, she told me, “You know how it feels when you really, really want something? Well I really wanted in 1968 for the country to change. I wanted equality and improvement in education, housing and jobs for African Americans, because even though there were these laws there was still tremendous inequity. I wanted the war to end, I wanted the country to come together and move forward in a positive way and Bobby Kennedy meant that could happen, he was the hope, he was the key, he was it, and when he died those hopes were dashed. And on the heels of MLK’s death weeks before it felt like the country was falling apart. Everything was falling apart.”

Read the complete review and many other interesting articles and interviews over at photo-eye magazine.

I could understand some of those tears. Because, right now, I have never cared more about an election in all my life. It has never mattered more to me and my generation, than right now. And, it is as if good were running against evil, and part of me that is so scared that our country might fuck it all up, because, after all, we are human and it is our nature.

More Roy Ferdinand!

Images courtesy of Martina Batan.