I wake up at 6am, fill my travel mug with black coffee, throw some leftovers into a yellow Dewalt© cooler and drive an hour and a half to an old high school where I have to wear a hard hat, dust mask and steal-toed boots. There is this young schoolteacher who is spending his summer working for a construction company. He has spent the last week stripping lead paint off the stair railings. You can tell that this guy is just visiting this life of hard, physical labor where the music choices fluctuate between ACDC and Lincoln Park and conversations are attempts to discredit the masculinity of the other workers. He laughs when the other men curse about their girls and bitch about their boss. I spend my days sanding walls and making sure the 65-year-old man (not my father) I work with isn’t fucking up my precious walls.

The past month I have been back and forth between New York City and West Glennville, Ny where I have been painting a school and staying with my brother and his family. Micah, my older brother, is a volunteer fire fighter and a recruiter for the Army. Most of the men in West Glenville are volunteers at the fire hall. Its a kind of men’s only club where they practice setting houses on fire, drinking beer and cutting the rooftops off of cars. It’s been fun being a guest to this All-American lifestyle. There is only one man in the neighborhood that doesn’t have a gun in his house. He is a lesser man. I’m the strange visiting artist brother who wears tight jeans and walks to the cemetery to make phone calls. (and then I have to explain what kind of work I do). To them, I’m some sort of exotic creature that knows some other existence outside the green hills of Upstate, Ny.

The Army gives Micah money to buy a few old cars to race in a demolition derby each year. The men at the fire hall spend a week stripping the cars down and finishing off the cage of beer left over from the firemen’s picnic the previous weekend. The day of the derby was cold and rainy. We all stood there waiting for our group to begin so we could get it over with and go home.

I left LA as soon as Boston lost in games six. I spent my first day back in Rochester getting my film processed and doing some quick contact scans. Here are a bunch of unedited images from the past three weeks where Graham and I drove from Rochester to Chicago, Nashville, Memphis, Oklahoma City, Albuquerque, Flagstaff, the Grand Canyon and finally to Los Angeles. I am not sure what happens next. I might head down to New York City or maybe back to Albuquerque to shoot some more of that incredibly strange but great place.

A broken windshield in the suburbs of Oklahoma City

Philippe de Sablet

Memorial Day in Chicago

Gio

Filth Mongers in Albuquerque

Cave Camping in Thousand Oaks

Flagstaff

Memorial Day in Chicago

Wet Shirt in Cave

Camping Oak Creek Canyon, NM

Thousand Oaks

Graham and his Hasselblad

Lizzy, Sam and the Rio Grande River

Hotel Party in Flagstaff

Oak Creek Canyon

Cactus in Albuquerque

Rio Grande River

Three more weeks of school, then it is all over…………

My man, Kenny D, is about to put out a mix tape. Earlier this week I did some promotional shots for him in the studio.

Weegee

Photography is full of questions. What can a photograph do? Gesture, expression, composition: these are things that we use to construct images, but how we move is what I really want to know. Make me move somewhere. Or don’t make me move. Sometimes I forget about my body and I focus on one thing. I can’t stop looking at it. Sometimes It makes me cringe. It might be a dead body on the ground or an old couple making out on their car. I think it is one of the only times that my mind is completely still. My brain is struck with such a harsh reality that It doesn’t know what to do and all I have is my vision. For some reason my eyes take on a mind of their own, like the sex drive a thirteen year old boy. Maybe our sight is the most corrupt.

I saw a pick up truck with nine people in it flip over like a football on one of Uganda’s only highways. I was in a van with 15 other kids in their early twenties. We pulled over and looked. We called the police station. They had to find the abulence driver, then he had to find gas for the abulence. Three of them died and I watched it happen. There is more to the story, but it doesn’t matter. I hardly ever see photographs that provoke such an out-of-body experience, actually, maybe never. I don’t think it is possible. We know the difference between representation and reality. As much as people say violent films and video games desensitive our youth, it isn’t true. We maybe be desensitived from horror films, but when it really happens, we know it.

Today in class, Owen Butler said, “You know an animal is sick when they aren’t alert. Maybe society is sick.” Yes, that is a very Owen thing to say, but it challenged me. Where do dogs get so much energy? He said the only people who are alert are the police, criminals and sometimes photographers. While he continued talking about the follies of today’s society, I began thinking about what drives my work. When am I most satisfied? Then he said the word “Impulse.” Impulse is an amazing thing. we can’t plan it, it just happens. I think I am trying to be impulsive, but it is harder than I thought, that is at least, trying to be impulsive. Jason Nocito seems like an impulsive photographer. In the the book Shoot: Photography of the Moment, Jason says something like, my standards for photographs have become verry low, I love every picture. That’s not exaclty what he said, but basically. His work on The Ego Has Landed is a faily democratic collection of photographs that he puts together to create things that might be realated to moments in time. This is when this happened.

Jason Nocito: A pile of clothes.A new haircut.

The photographs that I am working on for this quarter are based more on experience and not as much on containing a strong conceptual connection. I want to work backwards, make photographs, and see what emerges on the other side. I have been photographing Larson for over six months now and I need to work on something else for a little while, something that is not focused on one subject and that allows me to photograph the things that I find pleasure in. Three things that Owen seems to come back to every class are doing what feels good, something about irrational exuberance and most recently, impulse. I think they are all closely related, but until I can bring those back into my photographing of Larson, those photographs are on hold. He is not though.

Okay, new work. I thought Ron Jude’s lecture last week was amazing. Almost everything he talked about directly related to what I’ve been thinking about recently. What does a photograph do? What can it tell about a person or idea? Jude began talking about truncated narratives, or a group of photographs that do not complete a story or idea. I am not sure that photographs can really tell a complete story, but I want to push this idea to a place where situations, envirments and people are presented with little context. Although I am not trying to address anything specific, these photographs aren’t just comeing out of knowhere. Everything that I have been writing about are obviously things that are on my mind. I have been looking at crime scene photography, Weegee, Irwin Norling, Jack Kerouac, David Lynch, Harmony Korine, Michael Schmelling, Jason Nocito, Wolfgang Tillmans, Lars Tunbjork, Alfred Hitchcok, along with many other things that have been influenceing how I have been making photographs.

Irwin Norling

Irwin Norling

We stopped in Kentucky to get gas and use the rest rooms. It was getting dark. There was just enough light to make out the things not in the shadows. I walked to a small building that was in the lot next to the gas station. There was nothing inside but some garbage and a ceiling fan.

“It’s an urge and a necessity to photograph what I experience and what surrounds me.
It doesn’t matter who I’m with, where I am, what matters are the encounters, landscapes and details I have to relate to in my everyday life…

The work is driven by my own life, and my strong belief in the truth of what my eyes witness daily…

Life goes on.”

JH Engstrom