Just so you know it’s not all ice cream & beaches around here… sometimes I have to sit in the Kaiser waiting room, too.
This was definitely the weirdest place yet to solicit a photograph; I had to say, “Excuse me, I know it’s a little weird, but, would you mind taking a picture of me?”
She did not ask me why or what for.
I picked her because everybody else was doing something, & she was just sitting there, waiting patiently.
Someone very successfully yarnbombed this prominently placed signpost in the neighborhood. The spot gets a ton of foot traffic & also a perfect captive audience as people stand around waiting for the bus or the ATM. After running my post office & bank errands, I thought the yarnbomb would provide a good co-subject for a photo shoot.
Unfortunately, this shoot was a bomb in other ways:
(1) It was kinda forced; I broke my own rule about only doing this when I feel like it, & therefore (2) asked the wrong person to shoot, he said no & I couldn’t even get excited about someone finally saying no, because he was so obviously in a hurry, of course he was gonna say no. This is kind of interesting though: if you’re paying attention, you know who will say yes, & so that’s who you ask.
(3) Asked a second person, he shot a couple & then actually grimaced when he looked at them. I immediately blamed the screen blotches (what was one blob along a skinny line has now become two blobs with no line, go figure), but he was actually concerned about (4) the flash on the reflective street sign.
(5) Nevertheless the blobs confused things just enough so that I went home & ordered a new camera. What can I say, my will was weak & cameras are cheap. So much for the idea that this project wasn’t supposed to cost anything, but I had to remind myself that I’ve come a long, long way as far as the economic sustainability of artmaking: the $158 I dropped on the camera (including, incredibly, its 4GB memory card) is miniscule compared to the thousands I used to spend on projects & equipment back when I was young & foolish.
The whole early dusk, rain & cold, flash photography thing is not so great. I am wondering if this might be a fair-weather project. (After all, seasonal is one of my new core artmaking values.) Or maybe the new camera will help morale; or maybe I’ll figure out a more winter-appropriate way of doing this.
One thing’s for sure: breaking rules really lights up in bright neon the soundness of the rules & the values behind them—in this case, how the energy/vibe/flow aspect of this project is almost the whole thing. If I don’t wholeheartedly want to do it, if I’m not actually available for it, why & how on earth would it work?
Hopefully you get what I mean by “energy/vibe/flow” & “available”; I’m sure some clever art writer has coined a specific academic term for this, something that sounds intellectual & serious & just not so Berkeley, but I don’t happen to know it, & anyway, I fucking live here. The locavore aesthetic for me includes talking local; if I’m making art in Berkeley it doesn’t make any sense for me to talk about it like a New Yorker. (You can if you want, especially if that’s how you actually talk. Despite my posturing I actually am academy-friendly & curious to know what the terms are, so don’t be scared to comment!)
Well. Apparently I do feel like getting up on my navel-gazing soapbox, even if I don’t feel like doing my little photoshoots. It might be a long winter….
By this time I was thinking I should look for an older African American man, but then I spotted today’s photographer, a plump woman with close-cropped graying hair, waiting at the bus stop. “I’m not good with electronics,” she cautioned me. I assured her that it was really easy, gave her instructions, & she tried a couple shots. I showed her the results, saying “See, you did it!” Still she preferred giving all credit to the camera: “It’s one of those wonder machines.” (Remember what I was saying before about younger people being more comfortable with technology?)
I was picking up olives at the Cheeseboard & looked for a photographer there, but found nobody suitable. Fortunately I was passing by another famous collective on my way back to the car & found, yep, another white woman sitting at a table outside, amiably unoccupied. At least she was older—I’d been noticing that the “younger” tag is getting quite large.
I wonder what’s up with picking younger people? Do I feel that they will somehow be more cooperative or respectful toward someone older who is asking a favor? Am I less likely to want to impose on older people, out of respect & deference? Do I identify with younger people more? Am I just part of the overall youth-obsessed culture in which older people are invisible? Am I more confident that younger people will know how to use my camera? What is it? I admit, this one has me stumped.
I’m amused by how much of my public alone time apparently revolves around food.
After all the mulling in the last couple posts, I did fall into the overthinking pit when choosing today’s photographer. I cased out the men of color around me: two of them were completely wrapped up in conversation (not with each other, in case you were wondering) & the third was in a wheelchair. I wondered about the guy in the wheelchair. I couldn’t guess by looking whether his manual abilities included picture-taking; his hands were very small & soft-looking, & his wheelchair was the kind you steer with a little joystick-type toggle. I know I wouldn’t have wanted to take anybody’s picture for them when my hands were at their worst (I had heinous repetitive stress issues a few years ago). In the end I just decided to leave him alone.
Question: do able-bodied people ever ask obviously disabled people to take their pictures for them?
My photographer ended up being a cleancut white guy standing near me, who was completely unengaged in any kind of distracting activity, unlike the myriad readers, sleepers, & avid conversationalists sitting all around. He wore a casual jacket & backpack over his very pressed shirt & tie.
When I asked him to take the picture he almost seemed embarrassed; I couldn’t understand why until I saw that he had very shaky hands. He said something sort of apologetic about how it was hard to take the picture with shaking hands, or on a moving train, or maybe he implied both.
I said it was okay & he tried a second one. I was noticing what a nervous type he was, maybe really shy or something, & felt a little sorry for him. Talking to strangers, not for him, nope. Quite a contrast between his calm, self-possessed posture before I approached him, & the palpable nervousness that rose so quickly to the surface.
I decided to tag each photo with rough demographics, based purely on my impression of my photographers’ race, gender & age. Age is a really hard one so I just have “younger” for anyone who seems younger than me & “older” for anyone who seems older than me. So far I have yet to ask anyone who feels like “my age” but whenever I do, that’s what I’ll put for them. Visual/social perception of race & gender are of course tricky things, & I’m sure I’ll guess wrong especially on race. But it’s already interesting to see that I am totally predictable: in my world it’s the white women who always get asked to do small favors like this. I haven’t really decided whether to try to buck that or not. I sort of think that if I just keep picking the “best” candidate every time, eventually the tag cloud will scream white female in giant letters.
Of course, now that I’ve said that, I might not want to ask any more white women.
This is probably the “worst” photo yet, technically speaking; my photographer was a little distracted & happened to take the picture just as the train jostled us all around a bend.
Which brings me to the choosing of the photographer: usually, I think, when scouting out a person to take a picture for us, we are looking for openness, friendliness, & a certain degree of idleness or leisure. We don’t bug the person who is obviously in a hurry or otherwise occupied.
In this case I let other factors influence me: I picked the person who was sitting where I thought the best angle would be for taking the picture. Somehow though, he was also the most approachable of the candidates. As it happens, in the picture you can actually see someone I considered asking, but didn’t—a guy who seemed a bit aloof, preoccupied more than actually occupied. I didn’t overthink all of this at the time, just looked around & took a psychic hit on the various people. Near the aloof guy was another guy who was scruffy, dirty, unkempt in a way that seemed to extend beyond the merely physical. Other candidates not chosen were a young woman studiously applying make-up, her mother(?) who looked even more aloof & closed than aloof guy, & a younger mom engrossed with her small daughter.
My photographer was a bespectacled college student with his math homework spread out on the seat next to him. He had just gotten on & I figured (wrongly, as it turns out) he was not deep into his work yet. When I said, “Excuse me,” he obviously thought I wanted him to clear the seat for me, then was subtly relieved to be asked to take a picture instead of surrendering his workspace. He was obliging enough, but as you can see from the photo his heart was not exactly in it. When he glanced at the result I could almost see him making the split-second decision that the shot was good enough to release him from this small obligation, & he would rather get back to his math than offer another shot.
