The really big news of August 2008 is that I finished the big edit… the process that I’d thought would only take two or three months ended up taking over a year. And who knew- looking at over half a million pictures, multiple times, actually takes a while… especially when the rest of life and work keep getting in the way…†

See, the problem is that during my first few years of really intense photographing, I would only do a quick first edit of my pictures, deleting the blatantly out of focus ones… Everything else I kept, without making the time to go back and decide “Ok, of these nine hundred dance photos – which are the best hundred? and of those, which are the best twenty? and which of those might go in a portfolio?” – so there was a lot of sorting to get caught up on.†

Now it’s done. And it’s just in the last year that the software and hardware has really gotten powerful enough that I can look over my whole archive in a smooth and manageable way. Now I’ll keep up with the editing as I go, and you can expect some more frequent updates on this site…

In July, I found myself heading back towards europe for some family time. My mother now lives in the Geneva area, and I hadn’t been out there to visit her since she left Washington DC. I’m hoping to branch out into finding work in both Geneva and DC, because I don’t visit either of my parents often enough.†

After Geneva, my mother and I rendezvoused with the rest of the family in normandy at La Porte Rouge. At the earlier family reunion, I’d taken a ton of photos, and my mother had made a great little book of them as a gift for my grandparents. This time, after many years of completely integrating my work and personal lives, I was determined to try to pry them apart a bit, so no pictures… It’s hard, because good candid portraits are always there to be taken… but it’s an exhausting zone to always be in, so I used the excuse that I couldn’t take any pictures while I was busy holding my new baby cousins. (This was of course a blatant lie, because I’ve taken plenty of good pictures while holding my friend’s twins, or with a dancer climbing on my shoulders for that matter) -†

But on the Philly photographic front, one of the highlights of July was working with Sebastienne Mundheim on photos for her upcoming Sea of Birds piece. The things that she makes out of very simple materials are really wonderful… She was a bit frazzled at the time, but the piece apparently came together to wide acclaim at the Live Arts Festival, and people told me many great things about it, but sadly I missed it myself, as I was scrambling to redo this website and hers wasn’t among the list of shows that I was assigned to by the festival this year…

I was getting ready to engage with the festival in two different ways- both more as a professional in photographing it, limiting myself to only actually photographing the shows that I was getting paid to shoot (even though in the past, some of the best gems were the ones that I’d thrown myself into unpaid) and also as a “performer”, as we’d decided to hold some more dance/photo sessions for How Philly Moves as a performance event in the festival.

May 2008 was mostly focused on preparing for that proposal for How Philly Moves… with breaks for things like Meg Foley’s Slip, which was gorgeous.†

Meanwhile, on the admin side, I was making some real progress… the giant backlog of pictures was looking a little bit less imposing… getting there, s.l.o.w.l.y….

In April 2008, James and I were finalists for a sizeable SEPTA commission to create a dance-themed public art installation for the newly renovated 46th and Market station. The plan was to integrate photography and sculpture, and I had this crazy idea of holding a series of citywide photoshoots, open to anyone who self-identified as a dancer, and integrating all of these images into the piece.

People got really excited about these photo sessions. So much so, that we put all of our effort into orchestrating two test photo shoots, and focused on that rather than the actual presentation to the panel that we needed to actually win the commission! †So we didn’t end up getting the commission, but with such a great response, I decided that I’d go looking for other ways to continue the project… and so we’ll see where it goes – www.howphillymoves.org

March 2008 held another one of those memorable weekends… the really crazy ones that I keep on telling myself that I won’t do anymore- but then again I do some of my best work when in that frantic mode…

The veterans at IVAW were planning a march from the Constitution Center to Valley Forge. I wanted to photograph the whole thing for them, but I also had a few other commitments. So here’s how it played out:

Friday night was an exciting shoot where I got to photograph the most excellent Dito Van Riegersberg to create a promotional illustration for Azuka Theatre’s upcoming production of Hedwig and The Angry Inch. After throwing myself around on the stage at Plays and Players chasing after Dito, I got a little bit of sleep and headed over to the Constitution Center for the beginning of the march.

The trick with photographing marches is that while everyone else is marching, you have to sprint. Because you want to be ahead of them. And then they get ahead of you. So you run back up front. And photograph parts of the march, and eventually fall to the back. And run back up front. And then as you’re just slowing down to a leisurely pace and walking with one of the marchers, you see the potential for the next shot, but you have to be a couple hundred yards ahead before they get to that next turn, so you sprint again… so essentially, over two days, I sprinted the majority of 23 miles. I’m generally been one of the least athletic people you’ve ever met, but when there’s pictures to be taken and the adrenaline’s flowing, I tend to go go go… it’s just the next days that I start to regret it…†

I ran with them all the way to the evening campsite in Bryn Mawr, and then caught a ride back into town to go photograph the Gogol Bordello concert at the Electric Factory. Three more hours of sleep and back on the road to catch the crew as they were getting up. I followed the march for much of the morning, and then was intercepted and ferried away to Swarthmore to photograph a dance piece by Sasha Welsh. Then straight back to the tail end of the march.†

†

Once it was over, I was pretty sore.

This is also the month when James Peniston and I were working on our proposal for How Philly Moves. James is also a co-proprietor of Studio 34, the beautiful new community space that opened this month, just two blocks south of my house. If you’re ever in west philly, check them out, it’s a gorgeous space with many wonderful things happening….

I felt like things were moving in super slow motion- like I was paying the price for the many years of running non stop at super speed, and now the catching up was just going slow slow slow. I spent every bit of time between jobs plugging away at the big backlog of archive photos, and there was still a lot more to go.

I kept my creative brain going by inviting friends over to sit for some light painting portraits, and by going out and catching the West Philly Orchestra’s rowdy show as many times as I could…

While I was primarily laying low and doing my own work, I did run up to NYC for a little corporate portrait photographer gig – gotta pay those bills, right?

Back at home, there was not too much to report, but I did have a great experience working on the CD cover for Joshua Marcus‘ new record ‘Reverse The Charges’ – it involved some quality time in the dark in his basement, doing some light-paintings of a cardboard sculpture by Beth Nixon, with a painting by Jack Ohly in the background. Wonderful combination of wonderful artists… and now the record is out and it’s gorgeous, so you should check it out…

Another month, another friend releasing another great new record… If you’re not familiar with Amy Pickard, you should be.†

That short film on my archive by photo archivist / filmmaker John Pettit ended up winning third place in First Person Arts’ competition. Here it is:

While I still wasn’t really ready to be heading back out on the road, the rest of the world wasn’t waiting, and my friends at the Coalition of Immokalee Workers were on the move in Miami. It was one of those crazy brief jaunts down, little sleep, lots of photos.

October means Open Studio Tours in Philly, and the Inquirer’s Matt Blanchard was kind enough to give me a shout-out in their POST preview:†ìÖ you shouldnít miss photographer Jacques-Jean Tiziou, known for his brilliant photos of the Fringe Festivalì – a bit ironic that this praise came right after I had to sit out the Festival – but I’d be back the next year…

A couple of friends had some big things going on this month- James Peniston unveiled his Keys to Community sculpture at 4th and Arch, and Gillian Grassie released her album Serpentine. Meanwhile, I was getting an itch to photograph concerts again (I did a lot of this in highschool), and had a lot of fun photographing She Wants Revenge at the Trocadero. Their show full of dramatic spotlights and haze reminded me a lot of Mark O’Maley’s lighting in the Reactionaries pieces…

At the end of the month, in a bit of a role reversal, I had my turn in front of the camera as John Pettit filmed me for First Person Arts’ five day five minute documentary competition. He’d been assigned me as a subject rather randomly, and by complete coincidence it turns out that he works as a photo archivist, and the object that I’d chosen for their “object of my affection” theme was in fact my photo archive… the world is full of funny coincidences…

As the Live Arts / Fringe Festival rolled around, it was really hard to stand back and not photograph it this year. However I had to make a point to take a break from it, because I had really been burning myself out with doing so many projects like this. Most people assumed that the Festival was a ‘cash cow’ for me, when in fact their budgets weren’t even covering my basic costs, and I was sinking thousands of my savings into doing this super intense documentation of it all.†

It was totally worth it the first year around as a portfolio building thing and networking opportunity, but I kept on doing it the next three years mostly because I’d completely fallen in love with the community and hadn’t taken the time to stop and reevaluate what I was doing businesswise… meanwhile I still hadn’t made the time to sit down and edit the photos from the two festivals past and update this website, so… time to calm down a bit.†

It was a lot cheaper to buy an all access pass and see lots of shows than it was to photograph the festival the way that I had been in the past, so that’d what I did. After many years of being all consumed by the photography thing, it was time to try out this whole being a regular person thing, and so I left the camera at home and became an audience member. And also somehow got roped into being a performer during Miro Dance Theatre’s Principles of Uncertainty. That’s me there with the big drum in the middle of this photo by Aaron Igler, and also in this image by Matthew Hollerbush.