Since I discovered my friend Suzie Ham’s blog I have wanted to share her photos on Sociotree. Her work conveys some of the qualities I find essential to photography. Suzie’s photographs draw our attention to glimpses of reality that usually get ignored, making the most simple things interesting. I thought it would be great to interview her and we exchanged a few e-mails in the last weeks. You can also visit her website and blog. To view larger images click in each picture.

How did you get started in photography and how long have you been taking pictures?

I started photographing approx. 6-7 years ago while getting my undergrad degree at Rutgers. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to major in English so I started taking classes at Mason Gross, and I’ve been taking photos ever since!

What is your process when taking pictures? 

I tend to photograph seemingly arbitrary things. Sometimes I have something very specific that I want to catch – like a fire – but I’m not going to start a fire for the sake of taking its picture! I am usually influenced by what I am presently reading/researching. Lately I’ve been watching a lot of X-Files and reading a book (co-authors Zizek and John Milbank) –  that is taking up all my brain space. Metaphysics, materialism, mental illness, cosmic sadness, etc. My processes and my thoughts are always scatterbrained and I can go for weeks without developing any film but I try to take at least one photo a day (no matter how uninspired and crappy I feel)!

So do you prefer to work with film? What do you think is the difference between your digital and analog work? 

I like the instant nature of digital but I like the quality of film…these days though with all the software out there you can make digital look like film – I also like shooting with a polaroid bc it is easy – thats also why I’m a big fan of point and shoots. The only time I really break out my other cameras is when I have a nice long day to shoot – my usual methods include shooting film and then scanning it so I have a digital archive of my images.

In your blog you often carefully and deliberately arrange your pictures creating certain relations between them. Elaborate on this and in the significance of the viewer’s participation when looking at your work. What role does the spectator have?

I enjoy editing my photos almost as much as the initial moment of capture. There is nothing like finding relationships between images bc it brings some kind of cohesion to my mad and frazzled process. I also enjoy finding similarities, paradoxes, and relationships between my older work and my newer work and putting them together. As far as viewer participation, I guess I don’t really take that into account. Its neither important nor unimportant for me. I think we are all self-indulgent to some degree in respect to our work and that’s okay, but at the same time I’m grateful for anyone taking their time to look at my photos.

Any photographers that you are inspired by?

My favorite photographers are W. Eggleston, Wolfgang Tillmans, Alec Soth, and many others. I am also highly influenced by other artists and filmmakers.

You captured some beautiful moments in your last trip to Iceland. How do cities influence your work?

Thanks! Sometimes I am very specific in what I am looking for. For example I’ve been obsessed with the blue lagoon for the past few years and was very much looking forward to photographing it. Though sometimes that can backfire because we imagine such a thing that doesn’t really exist. I’m always looking for new and mundane things simultaneously and cities are so varied in what they offer – from architecture (industrial or romantic or both) to interesting candy wrappers – all of those things are great. Also different places have different histories and mysteries which inspire me. (sorry to rhyme.)

Julia recently sent me a really awesome and I’ve been eager to put it up. Put together on tape, I actually had to hunt down a tape player and had a pretty hard time finding one, but always so much more fun that digital mixes. Never forget physical media!

Featuring 2 sides of thought-out picks, speckled with folk, miniature dance parties and local legends. Put this mix on in your room with a black light and lean back in your lazy boy.

Winter of the Sea Onion Mixtape - Side A

Winter of the Sea Onion Mixtape - Side B

Poster by Jamie Morren

[Update] Right after finishing this post, my friend Jamie sent me over this poster he made for his show at Zebulon last night. I really like it’s simplicity, but also the hand painted font is really awesome as well. Check out his band AOI. Thanks Jamie!

Neon Indian

I was having a conversation with my brother at one of his recent shows that gave me the idea for this post. His band Happy People was playing a show at Piano’s bar in the Lower East Side, a section of wall was patched with an array of concert posters, each fighting for their own space. The question we were discussing was, Do posters still have an affect on you seeing a new/unheard band? If you see a really cool poster, which I did that night, are you going to come to check them out or at least search online for their site? Perhaps in the pre-facebook/myspace days, but what effect does really cool poster work have on our perception of a bands music. I feel like I couldn’t really answer this question without any feedback, so I thought I would put it out there for an audience. What do you guys think? Does  a really crummy band with good accompanied art sound better? Does a really good band with crummy art sound worse? If the poster used to play the role that Facebook and Twitter now play as an announcement tool, what role do they have now? Here is a compilation of some really cool posters from past and present, including the one I picked up at Pianos that night.

The High Strung

Big Beat

The Walkmen

Caribou

Revolution Summer

Neon Indian

Sun Ra

The Destructors

Dubious Liftings

Lightning Bolt

A little late, but I have been meaning to write about an event in Bushwick, Brooklyn I went to a couple of weeks ago. Centotto, a gallery run in the apartment of Paul D’Agostino. Paul has been running this gallery for a number of years but this was the first show I made it to, and it definitely caught my interest. Paul invited curators and artists to participate by submitting a work of art or something they considered art to the show. However, the works were not to be revealed until the night of the opening, and everyone (including Paul) was completely unaware of what we were in for. As the unveiling took place, dramatic classical music was played on speakers to heighten the anticipation.

What did we see? Well, there are a couple of photos in this post, or you could visit the gallery yourself, which would probably be a lot better. But there will be something missing, the stories that accompanied each work in the show.  As the pieces were unveiled, the pieces were put into the personal contexts of the people who submitted them. Some addressed why a piece was important work of art, or simply why it was dear to them? Upon revealing the piece he submitted, a rusty, warped old nail possibly hunders of years old, D’Agostino described how the nail was ripped out of a beam in an old house or barn in Italy during his time living there. Another woman talked about how she saved a poster from an exhibition of Andy Warhol and Jean Michel Basquiat and how the neighborhood that show took place in (Soho) was no longer the art haven that it used to be. Another person talked about a rock that he took from a German street, and yet another a cigarette pack that an artist friend painting on and left on his kitchen table. All of this put a question in my mind… can the quality of art be measured by observation? Or is an object only as good as the story that accompanies it? What do you think?

P.S. Despite being in the presence of a print by Warhol, my favorite piece was a painted cigarette pack, left on the table of a friend after a Christmas dinner.

Courtesy Roman Abramovich: The First Unveiling
Centotto Galleria 

Mireia Villa is an artist from Barcelona who I met in New York during one of her stays in Brooklyn. Last December, a few days before leaving New York, she held an intimate exhibition in an apartment in Brooklyn with the portraits she had made of her friends in New York. She called it “See You,” as if she was trying to grasp those last moments in this city by capturing her friendships that she made here. The event was a farewell, and so I wandered around the apartment where the drawings were hanging from the walls and ceiling feeling a bit sad another friend was leaving. I felt bad I did not find the time to write a post about it, and I thought it was never late to show some of those drawings. Using just watercolors, Mireia works spontaneously playing with the mystery that involves trying to find in the paper someone you know. As she told me, it is as if with each brushstroke you get closer or further from the subject. When I asked her about the differences between making a portrait of a friend and a unknown person, she said with friends she is more free to distort the subject and gives them a more grotesque aspect. Thanks Mireia and we miss you!

Last week I went for my monthly Second Friday walk through the heart of Williamsburg and wanted to do a post about some work I saw at Pierogi Gallery by Dawn Clement. It stood out among the work that I had seen that night, except maybe a painting by an artist that called me a thief for taking a photo. She jarringly reminded me that “it ‘s Copywritten!”. Anyway, back to Dawn Clement. I haven’t seen still life work that has actually put my mind to work in a long time, not unless I am looking through the history books. Using ink-based mural-sized drawings reflect on a small setup of objects that are setup in the room for you to observe, consisting of placed objects and some sculptures of her own. I noticed myself going back and forth between the setup and the drawing, the latter making me focus on the details of the objects and seeing them in new light. Check it out.

This week, I thought I would write about a musician that I have been coming across on my way to work in the Union Square Subway Station. I’ve seen him a few times and is one of my favorite New York Metro musicians. The instrument he plays, the kora, is particularly sparkling and spirited and, for me, speaks well to the movement of people at rush hour, without making it more intense than it already is (I like the free jazz band that plays there, but it doesn’t exactly ease the nerves after a long day).  The song I’ve posted up here is called “Kadija” off the album titled “My Family- Mandinka Traditional music from Senegal”, featuring a number of musicians, including Béla Fleck. So I finally decided to pick up one of the cd-rs that he had for sale, and since I like it so much I wanted to share a piece of it with you. Unfortunately I cannot share the whole thing, but you can go to his site or pick up a cd-r of your own if you see him at 14th st.

Kadija

On my way back to New York from Christmas in Spain I stop by Valencia to see my friends Sara and Julio. They had just moved into a great new studio space in the neighbourhood of Ruzafa where they work on graphic design and photography under the name of Estudio Julio Alonso (or you can visit their new Tumblr here). For their first public event they created a few flyers that included Sara´s photographs. I had been wanting to share her work in Sociotree for a long time, and this series seemed like a great way to do it.

Sara and I grew up together and I have always felt captivated by her singular way of looking into things. Her work explores the peripheries of perception with a subtle beauty. I feel these pictures summarize some of the most interesting qualities of her work, such as the delicacy of her images, a perfectionism that can be at the same time playful, and her talent to expose the beauty of the familiar. Evocative images that allow our gaze to pause for a moment to look in repose.

From m-inspira, sweet type. Created by two young graphic and industrial designers from Valencia, Spain, the series of letters was created with sugar and gelatin and are edible.

(via colossal)

The time has come once more for the moment of the year that I look forward to the most. Where Santa comes racing on his synth-powered sleigh with low drones of sound blasting him in speed around the world. You will find in your fire place this year, a glowing, kryptonite-laden mix, digitally crafted by Cristian Subirá (aka Summer Recreation Camp).  I present to you, Merry Synthmas Volume II, as awesome as ever.

 Merry Synthmas Vol. II – Cristian Subirá