Moving out of the garden house..
Los Angeles, Calif. 2006
Sometimes when you blog…
…as much as I do, you need to take a full month off…to recharge.
Pasadena, Calif. 2005
Pasadena, Calif. 2005
Lotus Festival, Echo Park
Echo Park, Calif. 2004
Pasadena, Calif.
Pasadena, Calif. 2006
Pasadena, Calif. 2006
I would tell my 22 year old self, a freshman at Art Center, to stop being an idiot. I would tell him that in about a year and a half, you will figure out what all of this photography shit actually means to you, and while you won’t give up on complaining, you will at least start making work. I could explain that the frustration with a school and a town was irrelevant to what you wanted to do, so you might as well just make photographs.
For a year I couldn’t take pictures in Pasadena. It felt completely unphotographable to me, partially because it was just too convenient and partially because that early frustration just made it all look like utter crap to me. Then I moved and really only saw the place because I had to just kiss the ass end of it to get to my favorite sushi restaurant.
About two years later I found myself working on a project for the school, and for the City of Pasadena. I was to shoot a survey of architecture in the city, as some visual component to a lecture that was going to be given by Richard Koshalek. I believe it was meant to open a dialogue about the cheapening of the beauty of the existing building by making a entire city block an eight story brick of stucco.
Regardless, I found myself in that unphotographable city, making countless images. I would drive somewhere and park under an oak, and then walk and shoot until I was out of film. It was the kind of ‘collecting’ that I was doing prior to my Art Center beat down and that will hopefully always be a component of my practice.
There was nothing cerebral about the project, but it was enlightening for me. The photographs are always there. I would tell the 22 year old me to just stop complaining long enough to take them.
