Osama Esid, B&W Magazine, 2013

It's astounding how what was true just several weeks ago can so radically alter, but life can be a capricious bitch/bastard; friendships are made and lost, groups cohere then fragment, love turns unexpectedly to acrimony. The only constant is constant change. This should be reassuring, but it seldom is. Still, the sense we make of our lives, and the lives of those around us at a given point in time doesn't lose its valency, or poignancy for having moved past us. We can only aspire to meet life stride for stride, and to keep our hearts and heads in step with its sometimes perilous transformations.

"It is this capacity to combine the rich cultural history Esid comes from with the prospects for self-invention promised here that distinguish his homebound body of work. The banality of the elements he chooses to photograph does nothing to diminish his pictures' effects. What could be a more engaging, challenging image of liberty than a Muslim-American man standing atop his motorcycle, flaunting a headless eagle? In this portrait with its seemingly simplistic pieces, he conveys abundant signifiers- mindless freedom and issues of self-representation while precariously perched on a perilous vehicle. Would that we all could see that the things that make the most potent meanings are often as close at hand as home." full text: here

Art in the Age of Algorithmical Reproduction, or "Tragically Hip(stamatic)"

This winter I've watched now former friends literally pour their souls into wet collodion plate printing, and in the course of watching I've significantly damaged my internal organs by huffing the technique's requisite ether, bromide, silver nitrate, and etc.. It seemed not incidental that at the same time Hipstamatic (what a conflicted neologism that is) deployed their "Tintype SnapPak" app, which affords iphone users vaguely credible approximations of the process which consumed my gizzards and associates. I threw up just a little bit reading some copywriter's hyperventilations that this filter would ""capture the true essence of your subject with haunting clarity (of) this ancient lens." My instinctive reaction is to be revolted by something which will give one's breakfast at Denny's the patina of a Matthew Brady, but I'm inclined to reassess after this season's ongoing consequences. After grousing on Facebook, a photographer I greatly admire relayed this article from the Guardian U.K. whose author raised this point; "One of the problems I have with creative photographic processes and smartphone photo filters is that they are nostalgic, and place the aesthetic over the content. They also seem to surrender a large part of the creative process to the camera program." In this I recognized my own struggle to avoid mediating my own images- to the degree that any digital photographer can. I try to ask whether an image would have the same valency if it weren't rendered in some atypical color, or 'enhanced' by some other means. In many ways though, my work is stymied by the current glut of artificiality- I find it difficult to articulate a sensible alternative. A recent New York Times op ed by Christy Wampole titled "How to Live Without Irony" tried to account for photographer's (and who isn't right now?) attraction to contrivances. She noted that "nostalgia cycles have become so short that we even try to inject the present moment with sentimentality...by using certain digital filters to “pre-wash” photos with an aura of historicity." It is no longer enough to merely hold a moment- we require our every quotidian doing to appear sufficiently hip. To me, this belief that your life as it happens is somehow insufficient, and the consequent obsession to augment it somehow is just sad and ultimately vapid. But so also is clinging to fossilized constructs like 'truth,' or 'authenticity' that are themselves nostalgic and often outright dangerous depending on who is enforcing the definitions. The questions raised have so addled me that they've only served to rekindle my inclination to go live in a yurt on one of Ireland's Skelligs until all of this sorts itself out. app: here.