Category: Photography

Above is the cover for Critics at Work: Interviews 1993-2003, edited by Jeffrey J. Williams and published last month by NYU Press. I haven’t read it and as such can’t really recommend it, though it’s surely interesting. I present it here as it represents the first time my photography has been published and I actually got paid for it. Yup, that’s my photograph on the cover.

Chalk yet another one up to the power of the Internet, or at least to the power of Google, that a photo taken in another lifetime (well, okay, only 4 years ago!) and left for dead in the back alleys of this here web domain can be resuscitated thusly, and actually produce dividends. Not a huge windfall mind you, after all the publication run for this bound-to-be-bestseller is only around 5,000 I believe, but nothing to sneeze at either.

Here’s the original photo, taken on Velvia slide film with my Canon EOS. You’ll see that the designer flipped the image for the cover. Although I don’t know how the finished product looks, judging from the proofs the designer sent me last Fall, my photo actually wraps around to cover the spine and back cover of the book as well.

Savvy Hmmn readers will recognize that this isn’t the first time my Salton Sea photos have attracted publication attention. There certainly is something about the place that attracts art designers and the like (as these examples show), not to mention photographers of course. At any rate, whether Salton Sea photos or perhaps something a bit more interesting to me these days, let’s hope for a few more of these things. At the very least they help to raise Naoko’s tolerance level for all the cameras and film and negs and scanners, to say nothing of the time involved.

Picked this up a few years ago at a vintage photographs show in California. It’s a glass lantern stereo slide (technically a stereo glass diapositive) I bought with about 6 or so others, as well as an old wood stereo slide viewer, in a fortunately brief moment when I thought I might like to become a collector of these things. (If I remember correctly, the slides I bought, which were on the cheap and poor quality end of the scale, ran about $20 each.)

Thought, what the hell, let’s see how the Epson scanner’s transparency adapter handles it, and was pleasantly surprised by the results. Naturally from this view you get nothing of the stereo slide’s three-dimensional qualities, nor even that sense of the floating image that all slides seem to have if you hold them up to the light.

The scene is of the “hanging houses” above the Huecar Gorge in the ancient city of Cuença in central Spain, about 150km from Madrid (the caption says “Maison de Cuença sur les Rochers de Jugar). There’s what I assume is a date on the bottom right corner of the slide, along with a name which could be that of the photographer or publisher, but I can’t be sure if it says “1909” or “1919” (nor can I read the name). I’ve reproduced that part below. Anyone have an idea what is written there?

My father, Kaena Pt., Oahu, Hawaii, February 4, 2004. Bessa R2, CV 35mm f/2.8 ‘Pancake,’ Ilford HP5 Plus.

Just submitted this over at the Mirror Project. It’s a 100% crop of a picture I took of my father in Hawaii. Needless to say that’s me reflected in his left-hand sunglass frame. That’s Naoko holding Kaika reflected in the other frame. A couple of notes to self: 1) I should have exploited more those reflector Aviator sunglasses my dad wears all the time (and I mean, all the time, out of doors or in); and 2) I need to ask my dad the next time I talk to him whether anyone ever says to him, “Hey, you know you look just like the FBI sketch of the Unabomber?”