ROSS EVERTSON, PHOTO (BLOG, INFO)

Seeing as this seems to be the time of the year to make lists, here it is.

1. I’m lazy.
A few other items on this list will speak to this, but really, most of the time I find it hard to be bothered. My thoughts, opinions and ideas have other venues already.

2. I write down most things I would probably consider blogging about.
As a compulsive notebook purchaser, carrier, and user—most things get logged physically. I am aware that it is a huge pain in the ass to go through five different 100 page notebooks to find where I listed the fibonacci series as related to type size in scale, 1/2 scale and 1/4 scale. I would probably just make a little laminated card to toss on my desk before I would blog it (which seems to contradict reason #1).

3. I’m rarely compelled to make incomplete projects “public.”
This is not because I am particularly private about what I am working on, but rather due to my complete inconsistency I have little to no audience and what I do have I tend to talk with individually on a near daily basis. It was nice of them to humor me and add me to their feed reader, though.

4. I have ADD.
It would be really easy to make a stupid attention-span joke here.

5. The only time I really feel like blogging is when I am either on my bike,
in my car or about to fall asleep.
This is classic ADD loser/procrastinator behavior. The motivation miraculously appears when there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.

6. I don’t need the validation.
Or maybe I am just pretty good at convincing myself I don’t.

7. It’s too easy to be negative.
Being acerbic and rude was my “default” for quite a while—until I realized I just don’t care.

8. I resent technology…
…but yet I love my computer. The overwhelming amount of social networking sites, applications and other nerdery that are just vehicles for advertising and zombie bites makes me sad. Even though blogs are easy to hate, they can be among the least annoying because my favorites are usually individuals without insane levels of ad-integration.

9. I always think of how I need to fix the comment formatting.
I mean, really.

10. Other people do it better.
Let’s give me the benefit of the doubt and say I have a unique, valuable opinion. In this Ross-Topia of thought, all other 9 reasons would still apply and that can be difficult to overcome. Then there are the people in the world making interesting connections and plenty of other people to blog about those people.

I wouldn’t say that I don’t see the value of blogging—for personal reasons or for an audience—but the nature of it has never really made sense for the way I process my ideas and other information. Why I am compelled to continue to try? I have no idea, but 2008 is already shaping up to be strangely different.

There is a very bloggable project I am working on. I am getting married and moving to another country. There is a fair amount of interesting things that are going to happen—that I happen to know about in advance.

Eight pages of things that could have been blogged.

Los Angeles, 2005

While attending Art Center I took part in a course that was linked to the United Nations through the school’s program named DesignMatters. The course involved working with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that were involved in some way with achieving the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. A variety of organizations came to the school to talk about the work that they were doing, how it related to the MDGs and the kind of projects they imagined us creating with/for them.

During the second week of the class another completely unrelated group of students were folding into our class, and that still left only 12 students—and for some reason—4 instructors. All of us, both those enrolled intentionally and unintentionally were then to pick a specific organization to work with.

We could work with Surfrider Foundation, Planned Parenthood and a few other national and local orgs. I went back and forth for a while, considering for whom my work might be best suited. Originally I considered Planned Parenthood, which in a sense would be at the root of the solution to most of the problems put forth by the MDGs (which include eradicated poverty and hunger, improving maternal health and reducing child mortality). It turned out that logistically I wasn’t going to be able to work with them, so I turned to PATH (People Assisting the Homeless) in Los Angeles—mainly because they are supported by both Annette Bening and Rhonda Flemming.

At first I was reluctant to work with a homeless organization because there is no shortage of photographers who are interested in doing a cliché turning of their lens towards the less fortunate. However, after meeting with some of the staff at PATH (their offices are lined with shallow dof photographs of homeless people) I learned a few things that changed my perception of the homeless situation in Los Angeles. The most important revelation being the fact that the highway off-ramp panhandling types only make up about 10% of the 90k+ homeless pop. in LA. This suggested that, well, the problem is bigger than what we see and more importantly we really have no idea what a “homeless life” is really like.

To that end I worked on a project where I provided point and shoot cameras to some of the temporary residents of PATH to show what it was like for the other 90%. I would not claim this to be a brilliant new paradigm in photojournalism, as it has been done many times before (and managed and executed with much more success), but it was worth a whirl. For fear of failure of that project I also worked on something on the side—a project called Disappear Here.

The idea behind the project was to peel back just a single layer, instead of going right to the source like I attempted with the initial project. I simply just began to photograph all of the specific places that I had seen a homeless person occupying. Sometimes the locations had traces of a human’s presence from apple cores to clothing to shit. I wasn’t looking for anything specific, there were no rules to selecting a space, I just made the photographs of where someone had been. I don’t mean that to be as overwrought as it sounds. Simply put, I saw the next layer beyond the people to be the place.

By focusing on those specific locations I had known to have been occupied, it forced me to look at those places as something more than a random corner or a square meter of sidewalk, which felt to me to be enough for this project.

View the project here.

Pasadena, Calif. 2006

Since I am not very consistent with my blog posts, I will steal a comment I made on Christian’s blog regarding Joerg’s question What Makes a Great Photo?

I don’t respond to single photographs the way some people do. If they are funny or ironic or insightful or informative I will appreciate them as such. But really, one image out of context really does nothing for me relative to a series or body of work.

In my opinion one of the most wonderful things about photography is how it can document a persons perspective, or a particular take on a place or idea. Sometimes that is supremely boring (my recent photographs near crushingly boring levels), but as a whole I hope they speak to something far more interesting.

The point of “hero” photographs in advertising and editorial photography makes complete sense, and are necessary since most magazines aren’t interested in publishing Ross’s 20 favorite photographs from the shoot. When it comes to making my own work, however, I have the opportunity to be as slow and deliberate with my description of something as possible.

When it comes to “strife photography” I am a detached, immovable object. It’s not that I lack empathy, I am not a sociopath. It is the photography of said plight that isn’t engaging.I coined the term strife photography while I was at Art Center. I was looking for a more all encompassing term than simply “war photography”. It encompasses any documentary work that might not fetishize, but aesthetizes the unpleasant nature of a given situation, whether it be the war in Iraq or a holler in Appalachia. From war to the poor.

©Susan Meiselas

At the terrible photography “conference” Photo LA (basically a photo gallery bazaar) three years ago my experience was saved by a lecture from photographer Susan Meiselas. She showed work from Carnival Strippers (I believe she was there promoting a new edition), as well as Nicaragua and more recent projects. Her work is the kind of war photography that I ‘like’ to see. Straight, dead pan images with little to no romance and as objective as photographically possible (I know, I know). Strife is no place for style, war even less so.

Who else spoke at this conference? None other than the captain of colorful strife, Steve McCurry, famous for the “Afghan Girl” photograph that graced the cover of National Geographic. A girl with a dusty face and amazing eyes now defined Afghanistan for an entire country. Only years later, when McCurry set out to relocate and reshoot the girl, with the two image shown together did that photograph serve any real illustrative purpose to the strife of those living in Afghanistan.

©Steve McCurry

Prior to that it amounted to pretty travel photography. From the lecture it is actually hard to imagine him in a different light, something other than a really pretty travel photographer. In one breath there is a dramatic story of a treacherous border crossing with film sewn into clothes, and in the next a revealing statement about ethnocentric lack of engagement–after a number of trips he never bothered to learn any of the native language.

©Shelby Lee Adams

In contrast, Shelby Lee Adams is very involved with his subjects. He is connected to them geographically and is well liked by a fair amount of them, if we are to believe the documentary about his work in Appalachia, The True Meaning of Pictures. The difficult thing about Adams though, is that even though he calls himself a documentary photographer, he is (to go by this body of work) more of a portraitist. Everything is set up to a degree (some more than others) and everything is lit. There is a fair amount of editorializing going on in the images as well, which pushes it even further out of the documentary realm.

The lines for all of this are very vague, especially since I have done a poor job of defining what I believe “strife photography” really is. What started as basically a snide remark as turned into a partial framework for how I view all documentary photography. The big question being is it actually effective, or is it just attractive?

Oh and borderline strife photographer James Natchtwey won a TED award.