a Rousing Round of Q n A

Thank you for all your cards and letters, asking me a wide variety of questions. However, I could easily do without those death threats.

Q: Why do you post so many pictures on Flickr?
A1: Nobody likes me and I have a lot of free time.
A2: Ya gotta do something while you’re waiting to die.

Q: Are you obsessed with death?
A: Not exactly.

Q: You have some pretty strange themes. Are you connected to any secret societies?
A: I can’t really answer that truthfully.

Q: Are you homeless?
A: Not yet.

Q: When did you first start taking pictures?
A: About ten minutes after getting my first camera.

Q: Have you been taking photos for a long time?
A: Yes. I had my first camera years ago, a Minolta SRT-101 but gave it up when it was getting too expensive. I came back when I realized that digital photography was actually quite economical in the photo acquiring and editing stages.

Q: What was your first digital camera?
A: A $300 1.3MP Kodak piece of crap. It was horrible. The color casting was way off and I would have done better using a one-time disposable camera and scanning in my images. Or maybe even a Holga would have given me more consistent quality. Shortly afterwards, I purchased a more suitable camera, a Fuji S5000. I have had quite a few cameras and I seem to burn through them in less than two years each. I take a lot of pictures.

Q: Why do you take so many photos in cemeteries?
A: It’s where I learned how to take pictures, how to compose pictures. I used to take girls there, too.

Q: Do you have any background in art?
A: I would think it is pretty obvious that I do not. However, back around the 90s I was very active in mail art, specializing in rubber stamp art. I did some very sick artwork, which I’m sure doesn’t shock anybody viewing my stuff. It was great fun and I had mail art connections around the world. I wrote for a rubber stamp hobbyist magazine called “Rubberstampmadness” for a short while, personality profiles and ‘how to’ articles, even a series on the history of mail art. Learning how to create rubber stamp art, incorporating a magnificent technique called ‘masking,’ is where I started to get an idea about how to compose scenes. I remember back then reading a book on artistic composition and I couldn’t make heads nor tails of it.

Q: How would you classify your style of photography?
A: Free style. I started shooting up Detroit because I grew up in the city and was looking for something interesting to photograph. I had no idea what condition the city was in when I rekindled my photography interest. Basically, I just like to make pictures. For me the fun is in the process, with photography as a verb. I’ve developed my own style. While I veer off in the direction of death and destruction, I do not think I am a morbid person at all. In fact, I do not paint my fingernails black.

Q: Do you do any nude photography?
A: No. I find I get too aroused running around naked with a camera. Besides, I have no interest in spending a night in jail.

Mish-Mosh

It has been tough getting away for shots lately. I have swept through areas of the city a few times and what I see is not as compelling as it has been in the past. Detroit is struggling and it does appear that intense efforts are in place (and in action) to clean up a bit. Rather than leaving homes abandoned, doorless, with broken windows, just waiting for a little gas and a match to add it to the arson-fatality list, owners (or maybe concerned citizens) are boarding up the doors and windows.

A few weeks ago I was cruising through a neighborhood and spotted a house with the rear end self-dismantling (with the aid of gravity) so I stopped and shot it. "Why are you shooting my house!" came an loud and angry retort from the man who was boarding up the windows. I had not seen him when I pulled up.

With time constraints and with less brain-freeze photos, I haven't been getting into the city.

I'm working through all my old photos, seeing what I have, reprocessing the better ones in PhotoShop, and renaming each and every file so I can more easily find them, all 100,000+ photos. (These are ALL my photos, incl. the ones I never intended to use.) It's no wonder I have a small cemetery of spent digital cameras. Fuji S5000, Canon S50, Minolta-Dimage Z3, Lumix FZ8, Canon Power Shots (three models in the IS series), Canon Rebel, Lumix DMC-ZS7, plus a few others...

And when I'm not engaged in life-stuff or the above, I am reading/looking...all photography. My latest read is called "Image Makers - Image Takers," by Anne-Celine Jaeger. It is an interesting collection of short interviews with quite a few photographers (many whose photos I enjoy) in various fields of picture taking, discussing their motivations, probing their thoughts about photography. Each interview is about ten pages or so and the book is quite interesting.

And I'm waiting for a reprint of Walker Evan's seminal "American Photographs." Though I have seen most of these photos, I have never seen the original layout and order. Errata Editions has published some very rare and scarce photo books in much smaller format at "reasonable" prices ($40), small editions but copied directly from the original. I have mixed feelings about these because another I have, William Klein's "Life is Good...New York" and the reproductions are murky and very small. I've seen a few larger versions of some of the photos and the quality is in the reprint book is very disappointing. I don't know about publishing, but it does seem when they squashed down the images for this much smaller book, they didn't go back in and clean up the images, maybe resize them or something.

But Walker Evans is one of my favorites and a definite influence on how I was going to shoot up Detroit.