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There is a wild collection of reactions I have gotten when "walking the earth" (that one is for you Kung Fu fans out there, or alternately, Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction fans) with my camera documenting my Photo-of-the-Day projects.
One Sunday afternoon in October of 2011, I sat around the dining room with my girlfriends and sighed, “I think I would give up everything else to be a photographer.” My friend Michelle, the superhero known to me as Ecumenical Girl or as The Project Ninja, looked at me and Claire and said, “OK, then. Photography. Starting tomorrow, you two will take one photo each day for one year and submit it to me. If you don’t, I get to take one thing from your house on that day, and…your fridge is looking pretty good to me right now.” Hilarious.
It wasn’t fear that fueled me, although I have always had a love affair with Frigidaires since I was little. In my house in Perú, you would not say, “Ponlo en el refrigerador.” You would say, “Ponlo en el Frigidaire.” The fridge and the sewing machine were name brand entities, not just electrodomésticos. But her comical threat would keep me company for 366 days (It was, I should mention, a leap year, so bonus props for that extra day!). And, I may be as lazy and ‘procrastinaty’ as the next person, but boy, do I love a challenge.
The next day, as I was heading to work, perky with the thought of my new charge, I heard the telltale scrape of rubber laboring on pavement: a flat tire. With no time to deal, the B-plan was to take the bus to work. As the chain of events forced me to be on the corner of Ashby and San Pablo waiting for the 49, I noticed the empty, fenced off lot on the corner. That is the thing about carrying your camera with you. That is the thing about intent. You focus. You ponder. Why does this scene catch your eye? You will find something beautiful / funny / strange / quirky / gross / amazing, if you just look and pause. I think in some ways carrying my Panasonic – or “my little Lumix,” as I like to call it – everyday slowed me down. It slowed me down in the right kind of way: just enough to appreciate the world as it unfolds around me each moment.
On that first day, “Fennel In Chains” was born – my first photo-of-the day. It keeps me company still, featured in a triptych of such sentimental value that I have hanging on my bedroom wall. It helps to remind me that the start of something is only a step, but then when you look back, that small step can be part of a greater something, which changes your life forever.
The rules for myself were simple. 1. Always keep the camera with me – like my friend Rosie who always had a mini Tapatio bottle in her purse to douse on anything we were having for lunch, even Zachary’s pizza. 2. Post the photo by midnight, as my self-imposed deadline. 3. Plan ahead if I want or go completely by instinct.
Some weeks I would give myself prompts to keep me entertained. Circles. The color blue. Gabled roofs. Or one week, when I was feeling fed up with attacks on marriage equality, I decided to do all the colors of the rainbow. Some days when I was worried about a friend, I would choose a photo subject in their honor. These were important. They carried with them the equivalent of a prayer, sent through the web for the universe to witness and hold.
You get to find out a lot about human psychology when you pull out a camera. Like at parties where you can tell the people that would rather look good for the photo than continue the conversation: instant smile, rather than the flailing lips of someone engrossed in a story. I think I come from the instant smile type of family. We have a tenacious radar for cameras and will strike a pose in a nanosecond. Now that every cell phone is a camera, human reaction is a bit diluted, but…not every camera is a cell phone. When I would bring out a real camera, I could see people’s notice. People need to know what is up, and a lot of them get nervous – like gazelles on the Serengeti that have just gotten a whiff of an unwelcomed feline predator. Necks stiff up in the air. Tension. What is this breach?
I usually get a lot of smiles too, and little kids are my favorite with their “Whaachoo’see?” Even the TSA agent at SFO paused and giggled, when I explained that I was photographing the escalator because I collect pictures of funny signage.
But then there is the Trader Joe's in Oakland that considers it “against store policy” to photograph a stack of pretty Argentine pears, and the feeling-awkward-but-trying-to-be-generous clerk says, “Well, you can keep the photos you have taken already.” Thanks! And on Winter Solstice at noon that year, I was walking around the Rockridge District and found some gorgeous shadows of the bare trees on the concrete sidewalk. I immediately was approached by a contractor getting out of his pickup truck, “Can I help you?” I love the veiled “Can I help you?” It hardly ever means that, and instead means a passive-aggressive, “Tell me what you are doing.”
But it is understood. You are in someone’s space, and you are documenting with a camera. It reminds me of a project I had to do for an architecture class when I was 19: stand in one space and sketch it, and textually describe its qualities. I stopped at the Hyatt Regency in downtown San Francisco on my way home from class, took the elevator to one of the high floors, and looked out to the atrium with my sketchbook. I was so deep in my project that I barely noticed the flurry of staff, moving around looking busy, until finally I realized some of them were watching me and pointing. It took a while before the bravest of the maids came up to me to ask and verify what the whole staff had surmised, “Are you from the management doing a site report?” Gazelles.
And one day last summer, I had a trifecta: my birthday, New York, and a completely subversive moment. I have been eyeing the sign on the gallery walls at the deYoung Museum for years, plotting that some day I would get the nerve to do the prohibited. I would never take a picture of art that is off limits, but a picture of the sign ordering not to take pictures of art that is off limits...? Photography has become the most fun and constantly gratifying scavenger hunt I have ever been on.
And yes, that is a picture of the wall at The Guggenheim!
One Sunday afternoon in October of 2011, I sat around the dining room with my girlfriends and sighed, “I think I would give up everything else to be a photographer.” My friend Michelle, the superhero known to me as Ecumenical Girl or as The Project Ninja, looked at me and Claire and said, “OK, then. Photography. Starting tomorrow, you two will take one photo each day for one year and submit it to me. If you don’t, I get to take one thing from your house on that day, and…your fridge is looking pretty good to me right now.” Hilarious.
It wasn’t fear that fueled me, although I have always had a love affair with Frigidaires since I was little. In my house in Perú, you would not say, “Ponlo en el refrigerador.” You would say, “Ponlo en el Frigidaire.” The fridge and the sewing machine were name brand entities, not just electrodomésticos. But her comical threat would keep me company for 366 days (It was, I should mention, a leap year, so bonus props for that extra day!). And, I may be as lazy and ‘procrastinaty’ as the next person, but boy, do I love a challenge.
The next day, as I was heading to work, perky with the thought of my new charge, I heard the telltale scrape of rubber laboring on pavement: a flat tire. With no time to deal, the B-plan was to take the bus to work. As the chain of events forced me to be on the corner of Ashby and San Pablo waiting for the 49, I noticed the empty, fenced off lot on the corner. That is the thing about carrying your camera with you. That is the thing about intent. You focus. You ponder. Why does this scene catch your eye? You will find something beautiful / funny / strange / quirky / gross / amazing, if you just look and pause. I think in some ways carrying my Panasonic – or “my little Lumix,” as I like to call it – everyday slowed me down. It slowed me down in the right kind of way: just enough to appreciate the world as it unfolds around me each moment.
On that first day, “Fennel In Chains” was born – my first photo-of-the day. It keeps me company still, featured in a triptych of such sentimental value that I have hanging on my bedroom wall. It helps to remind me that the start of something is only a step, but then when you look back, that small step can be part of a greater something, which changes your life forever.
The rules for myself were simple. 1. Always keep the camera with me – like my friend Rosie who always had a mini Tapatio bottle in her purse to douse on anything we were having for lunch, even Zachary’s pizza. 2. Post the photo by midnight, as my self-imposed deadline. 3. Plan ahead if I want or go completely by instinct.
Some weeks I would give myself prompts to keep me entertained. Circles. The color blue. Gabled roofs. Or one week, when I was feeling fed up with attacks on marriage equality, I decided to do all the colors of the rainbow. Some days when I was worried about a friend, I would choose a photo subject in their honor. These were important. They carried with them the equivalent of a prayer, sent through the web for the universe to witness and hold.
You get to find out a lot about human psychology when you pull out a camera. Like at parties where you can tell the people that would rather look good for the photo than continue the conversation: instant smile, rather than the flailing lips of someone engrossed in a story. I think I come from the instant smile type of family. We have a tenacious radar for cameras and will strike a pose in a nanosecond. Now that every cell phone is a camera, human reaction is a bit diluted, but…not every camera is a cell phone. When I would bring out a real camera, I could see people’s notice. People need to know what is up, and a lot of them get nervous – like gazelles on the Serengeti that have just gotten a whiff of an unwelcomed feline predator. Necks stiff up in the air. Tension. What is this breach?
I usually get a lot of smiles too, and little kids are my favorite with their “Whaachoo’see?” Even the TSA agent at SFO paused and giggled, when I explained that I was photographing the escalator because I collect pictures of funny signage.
But then there is the Trader Joe's in Oakland that considers it “against store policy” to photograph a stack of pretty Argentine pears, and the feeling-awkward-but-trying-to-be-generous clerk says, “Well, you can keep the photos you have taken already.” Thanks! And on Winter Solstice at noon that year, I was walking around the Rockridge District and found some gorgeous shadows of the bare trees on the concrete sidewalk. I immediately was approached by a contractor getting out of his pickup truck, “Can I help you?” I love the veiled “Can I help you?” It hardly ever means that, and instead means a passive-aggressive, “Tell me what you are doing.”
But it is understood. You are in someone’s space, and you are documenting with a camera. It reminds me of a project I had to do for an architecture class when I was 19: stand in one space and sketch it, and textually describe its qualities. I stopped at the Hyatt Regency in downtown San Francisco on my way home from class, took the elevator to one of the high floors, and looked out to the atrium with my sketchbook. I was so deep in my project that I barely noticed the flurry of staff, moving around looking busy, until finally I realized some of them were watching me and pointing. It took a while before the bravest of the maids came up to me to ask and verify what the whole staff had surmised, “Are you from the management doing a site report?” Gazelles.
And one day last summer, I had a trifecta: my birthday, New York, and a completely subversive moment. I have been eyeing the sign on the gallery walls at the deYoung Museum for years, plotting that some day I would get the nerve to do the prohibited. I would never take a picture of art that is off limits, but a picture of the sign ordering not to take pictures of art that is off limits...? Photography has become the most fun and constantly gratifying scavenger hunt I have ever been on.
And yes, that is a picture of the wall at The Guggenheim!
366 Project
https://www.flickr.com/photos/22996143@N06/sets/72157627792435455/
"Printed Matters" Project
https://www.flickr.com/photos/22996143@N06/sets/72157606981858908/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/22996143@N06/sets/72157627792435455/
"Printed Matters" Project
https://www.flickr.com/photos/22996143@N06/sets/72157606981858908/