Richmond BART

Bright & early this morning, I drove a friend to Kaiser Richmond for an Unpleasant Procedure. I had a good chunk of time after bringing her in, so, naturally, I went out for a walk.

Right away, shiny signs pointed the way to BART. For all my years riding the Richmond line, I’d never seen the Richmond station, so I followed the signs past the Hacienda Grill & a beautiful old deco post office, & then through a new-looking affordable-housing village. When I came to the station, it, too, looked surprisingly new—freshly remodeled in the shape of a ship, to evoke the WWII shipyards that transformed Richmond.

All surfaces gleamed as if just painted, & in fact the parking lot was still very much under construction. I thought a picture including both the shiny ship station & the parking lot construction would be nice, but the light was all wrong for that, & my potential photographer for that shot turned out to have not just a phone in one hand, but a cigarette in the other.

There was hardly anyone around; we were between trains. Fortunately Photographer #2, a bored kid with a skateboard, was standing in the right place for a parking lot shot. I could not get a good read on his ethnicity, but “Middle Eastern” would seem to cover it. (Many competing ideas & acronyms exist for naming that region of the world; SWANA appears to have gained some traction but I never hear it in casual conversation, even in the PC crowd I run with.)

I wondered why he turned the camera vertical. Because I asked for a photo of myself & I’m vertical? I’d sort of hoped for a wide horizontal shot that would include part of the housing complex, but that wasn’t the moment to change my rule about letting photographers compose their own shots.

After that, I wandered further, eyes peeled for the Chinese restaurant that I knew must be nearby. I found it.

Cole Coffee & a video(!)

You can watch this without the sound, if you prefer (I do, slightly):

Well. Something different was bound to happen eventually. You could accuse me of having a short attention span, or lacking focus, or something harsh like that, but I prefer to think of it as having an open mind, paying attention to how things change, looking for openings & possibilities, & learning—always learning.

It was good for a while to not work on this project when it was rainy & gloomy out, fine to notice when I just didn’t feel like asking strangers to take my picture. But today I stuck my camera in a waterproof purse, opened my umbrella, & walked through the rain for a lunch date with a friend, who never showed up because she thought we were meeting at her studio, & I thought we were meeting at the cafe.

By the time I finished my sandwich, I knew we’d miscommunicated somehow & she wasn’t coming. I settled in to being alone with my tea, & thought about asking someone to take my picture, but it was really all wrong for that. Cafes are particular; people in them often wrap themselves in a little cocoon of daydreaming privacy that I tend to respect, having done much of the same myself.

I thought about how this project in one sense is a study of my time alone in public—a very specific slice of my life—& how cafe space is so much about that. Why not enlarge the parameters, just a little, to include how I see the world when out alone, what it looks & feels like to me when I’m not talking to strangers? Instead of having a project on/off switch for sunny extrovert vs. rainy introvert, how about a dimmer that allows for something in between?

Yarn & other bombs

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….

Ici, & some rules

I thought Ici would be a prime location for approaching patiently queued people, who would think it perfectly natural for one of the ice cream faithful to want a picture of herself at the shop. Much to my surprise there was no line outside, even though it was a gorgeous hot day. Probably because it was just before dinner time.

Peeking in the window, I spied my photographer sitting on the bench with no ice cream in his hands. Later I saw that he had been waiting for his friend who was getting ice cream.

Rose vanilla happens to be one of my favorite Ici flavors, so after getting my picture taken I went & stood indecisively in line for a moment, thinking about a scoop. Then, like everyone else who wasn’t there, I realized I’d be ruining my dinner.

I had sort of been hoping to have today’s picture show my surfer girl miniskirt, so that I would have proof & memory (two major functions of photography, right?) that the summer of 2010 was not totally unrelenting in its gray coldness. But my photographer was not interested in the skirt. Looking at this, it seems his compositional intent was to center my face smack in the middle of the picture.

Which brings me to the rules. An art project is really just a game I invent from scratch, & that includes making up all the rules to suit my purposes. I’ve been meaning to post them for a while. These are just to start with; I’m sure I will develop more. (I probably have more already & just can’t remember them all at once.) In no particular order:

1. No cropping or altering of the picture. What the photographer takes is what I post. I just do auto levels in Photoshop & that’s all. I post as many pictures as they shoot.

2. No directing the photographer unless they ask for it. Even if they ask for it, I try to give a minimum of guidance.

3. Maximum one photo shoot per day. There is no minimum. I do this when I feel like it.

4. I do photo shoots only when I am out in the world alone among strangers. If out with friends or in places where people know me, it doesn’t work. This is because the request has to seem as natural as possible. (In other words, if there are people around who know me, why would I ask a stranger to take the picture?)

5. Try not to ask shopkeepers, clerks, waiters, people who may feel obligated to be cooperative as part of their job. That doesn’t seem as interesting or completely fair either.

6. I’m not allowed to get neurotic or vain about what I wear or my appearance when leaving the house. This is not a fashion blog. The intent is to go about my normal business & be photographed as I am.

About the tags

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.