If I Fell

I'm sure everyone's seen the Doomed photo by now, which made the rounds online yesterday and quickly become the subject of much hand-wringing and controversy.

Photo: R. Umar Abbasi

It showed up on Galata Bridge (a private Tumblr forum specializing in panhandling/commuting conflicts) and we had some fun using it to launch a photo sequence:

Vintage photo from Ampersand archive

Harold Hamilton, Skeleton of sea-elephant, from first Australasian Antarctic Expedition, c. 1911-14
Mitchell Library Collection, State Library of NSW

Brian Finke, from Truckers series, 2012

Andy J. Scott, Anwar's Chains

Daryl Peveto, Medical Marijuana for AARP

Stephen Tamiesie

Stephanie Gonot

Anne de Vries, My private party

David Benjamin Sherry, Quantum Light

Letha Wilson, Easter Appalachian Trail, 2010

Kevin Thrasher, from Common Ground series, 2010

Do You Want To Know A Secret?

Most photo enthusiasts in the Willamette Valley have a sense of where to look for photo exhibits. In Portland, the circuit includes Blue Sky, Hartman, Camerawork, PAM, PushDot, Newspace, iWitness, Ampersand, and a smattering of less regular spaces. In Eugene, Emerald Art Center, Dot Dotson's, Aperture, JSMA, and (recently) O'Brien Imaging are reliable exhibitors. All of these places put new photos on display roughly every month and are on the radar of anyone paying attention.

I recently visited two places not on the radar, and both deserve a visit.

Ditch Projects in Springfield is the most nondescript gallery in Oregon. There's no sign, no neighborhood even. To get there you drive through downtown Springfield, across the railroad tracks, and turn left down a dead-end road. Then you cross the eponymous ditch, turn right into the parking lot of a lumber yard, then right again into a cul-de-sac between two steel corrugated warehouses. It's door 165. I'd been there once before a few years ago but it still took me two separate trips to find it last week. And it's only open 4 hours per week on Saturdays. They don't make it easy.

Ditch Projects (photo from their site)

But if you can find it and it's open, Ditch is worthwhile. The space is huge and carefully tended, the managers well connected, and the exhibits display a variety of art from all around the country. I made a special trip last week because they were showing photos, Long Nights, Long Days by Peter Happel Christian. That show is now over, but another group photo show is due to open in February 2013. No other info on that available yet but I'm sure it'll be good. Supposedly the openings feature drinking games with hammer toss and bonfire. What's not to like? Above all I like the idea that such a space is hiding in Springfield, not exactly a national art Mecca. But they bring in national shows of all types with absolutely no publicity, and don't seem to give a shit who attends or even notices. Well Ditch, you've been noticed.

The other gallery of note is Black Box in Portland, in the flourishing Lower East Burnside district, right across the street from Doug Fir. This place has been around for more than a year but I haven't heard any buzz about it and no one I know has visited. It could be because like Ditch the hours are severely limited, only open Thursday and Friday afternoons. Until recently that's made it hard to synch with my visits from Eugene. But last week I finally got a peek inside, and it's worth checking out.

Black Box Gallery (photo from their site)

Todd Johnson runs his gallery a bit unusually, but in a way which might point toward the future. Every show is a group exhibit selected by a guest curator around a theme (a sampling here). A national call goes out, 20 images are picked, and that's where it gets interesting. Instead of sending prints to Black Box, photographers send hi-res files to Johnson, who prints and mounts every show himself using interchangeable framing materials. All photos are shown the same size and medium. An exhibition catalog is published for each show. After the show is done all unsold photos go into flat files for archiving/browsing. As with all group exhibits, shows can be a mixed bag, but I think most viewers will find something to like here. Anyway the gallery runs on an interesting model. If you haven't yet visited, Black Box is worth adding to your monthly circuit.

You Never Give Me Your Money

These could fit into a stocking. Just saying.

No longer available here.

Why Don't We Do It In The Road?

Some photographers are attracted to cooling towers. Some are drawn to pets or twins. For Dave Potter it's used condoms. 

I've known Dave as part of the Portland Grid Project for several years now. We all shoot the same grid square every month. But somehow he finds condoms and the rest of us don't. Believe me, it's not for lack of trying. If I saw something as intriguing as a used condom I would shoot it. But I never find them. But Dave is like old faithful. If there's a used condom discarded in the gutter in a certain part of town, you can count on him finding it and shooting it. 

The most recent grid was especially rich in material. It's a noisy, dark, industrial part of the city. Good for discreet protected sex. In a gravel parking lot near the airport, Dave found roughly 15 used condoms over the course of November. They came in all postures, colors, sizes, and degrees of decay. If only these rubbers could talk. Imagine the stories they would tell! 

Dave must have several hundred photos by now of various rubbers meeting the road, but I don't think anyone outside the grid project has seen them. What follows is a brief sampling.

Here, There, and Everywhere

"My interest in snapshot photography began because, every now and then, I would come across a picture that was startling in its directness. Made without pretense to art, these images were without artifice, and their simplicity gave them a special vitality. While there are certainly visual conventions among snapshots, at their best they are seemingly unmediated and unconditioned, the result of an accident or chance. This immediacy has become rarer and rarer as people are more and more exposed to images, and it indicates a path toward understanding, by contrast, what part of a typical photograph is the overlay of visual convention."

--Stephen Shore here

"Picasso famously said that it took him a lifetime to paint like a child. I takes many professional photographers that long to strip their pictures of artiness. How humbling to realize that simple mechanical reproduction can offer so much more than creative interpretation."  

--Alec Soth there

"It rarely occurs to such a photographer to take a picture of something, say a Venetian foundation, without a loved one standing directly in front of it and smiling into the lens. What artistic results he obtains are almost inevitably accidental and totally without self-consciousness. Perhaps because of his very artlessness, and his very numbers, this nameless picturetaker may in the end be the truest and most valuable recorder of our times."

--Jean Shepherd here

"I am a passionate lover of the snapshot, because of all photographic images it comes closest to the truth. The snapshot is a specific spiritual moment. It cannot be willed or desired to be achieved. It simply happens to certain people and not to others. Some people may never take a snapshot in their lives, though they take many pictures."

--Lisette Model there

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few."

--Shunryu Suzuki everywhere