Notes From Nowhere

In my own view, every photo that I make is a portrait. In that sense, I have a lot of portraits of traffic cones (a small selection here), of mountains (a small selection here), of pieces of asphalt in Manhattan (here), and so on. In another sense, while working on these projects over the past few years, I’ve always seen them both as full fledged series standing on their own, and as “studies.” I find convincing what Robert Mapplethorpe once said about his flower series from his early years – that he sees those photographs as a preparation for his studio portraits.

So, over the next few years, I’m going to do a portrait series that includes humans. I’ll say some more about this later, but here are two samples of what I’m after. My interest is in people who do what they do with a sense of “agency,” not as mere subjects of whatever field they are in. So it is that character trait that I am after.

I can think of a number of reasons to move to a new apartment. One of them may be too many ex-girlfriends with shotguns infiltrating your neighborhood. Another, finding out how the street you live in would be compromised by the thermal damage caused by a nuclear explosion in the center of your city (just fill in town and weapon, and conveniently check your own place here; via Goeff Manaugh’s article on “Nuclear Urbanism,” here, which includes a map of Manhattan hit by the equivalent of a Nagasaki grade device).

For what it is worth, I’ll stay on the West Side (less smog, amongst other things), but move some 30 streets to the North.

Here comes a somewhat delayed “Happy Holidays.” As you can see from the photo above, I was busy with other things.

Seriously, a BIG thank you for coming here. Notes From Nowhere had close to half a million page views over the past twelve months. Given that I only write about things that I am personally interested in, and only post images that I made myself, this is all the more appreciated. I also value a lot the feedback via email (e.g., on the edit of the upcoming book – more on that in Feb). I’ll try to live up to all this in the coming months.

Last year’s New Year’s resolution (sleeping with the right curators, here) turned out to be over-ambitious. Honestly, I avoided curators altogether. But I’ll keep you posted on that, too.