The past 3 months..

MAN OH MAN DOES TIME FLY!

This semester has been totally insane. I've had soooo much work to do, and have even gotten behind on a lot of things. My darkroom teacher is absolutely crazy. I'm convinced. She gives us assignments on top of the assignments we already get in my lecture class, which means twice as much shooting, and twice as much 

printing. OY! She keeps wanting us to join all these weird blogs and made a twitter just for our class, and no one has done any of them, but she keeps trying. She also contradicts a lot of things she says, and forgets half of it and just says "Oh I didn't say that, that's not right." OOOOOKKKAAAYYY....

Other than that class, I've really come to enjoy my painting class a lot. My teacher is in love with color. It's so great. She can sit there and talk to you about paint and colors all day if you asked her to. She's so laid back too, its a huge relief. All we do is come to class and paint and talk and listen to 50's music. I'm in the process of p

osting pictures of some of the stuff we've done so far. 

On another note, I've been seeing someone for the past couples months as well. :) 

His name is Pedro and he's an exceptionally good looking puerto rican man, (not that that really has anything to do with it, but he speaks spanish and lets face it, thats pretty damn hot.) He is so great, and so supportive. Things have been really good with us. (minus you know half my job thinking I'm a shady bitch....buuuut thats a different story). Ha. 

We've been having so many good times together, and finding lots of new things. We randomly came across this cute little diner not far from my apartment and I absolutely fell in love with it. It's quiet and has red vinal seats and mirrors surrounding the place. Surprisingly, I haven't taken any digital photographs of it yet. I'm currently documenting it and taking a series of photographs for my documentary assignment, but it might just turn into my final. (Again...haven't had the time to scan in any of my color stuff yet, and probably won't till after finals.) 

We have also been starting to go on bike rides together, (considering how the weather is of course). Pedro rides his bike everywhere to get around and he had an extra one he gave me. 

Pretty bad ass eh? Eventually I want to ride on the streets by the time summer comes, but I am terrified!  I don't want to get hit by a car and die! But it's been a lot of fun riding on the lake so far. We came across this bad ass skate park the other day, and I didn't have my camera and I was so upset. I will definitely be going back there soon. I've never seen so many fine dudes on skateboards and bikes on such a huge skate park! 

We also found this really dinky little movie theater that only had 4 theaters in it. It was so cute though.  It was by the Loyola campus so I assume a lot of college kids go there. 

AND

On Thursday, we went to see P.O.S, Dessa, Astranautalis, and F. Stokes. 

Man was that a great fuckin show. Pedro had never heard of them, but he was down to check them out, so that was fun. Astranautalis is crazy mother fucker, and I love him. His voice is so low and raspy and he just kept talkin to us about how if we hated our jobs, that we should just quit and become a rapper and drink a lot of whiskey. He even put on an epic freestyle for us. Dessa was amazing too. She got on the stage and said, "We're gunna sing some sad sad love songs, fuck yeah." P.O.S just blew my mind. I can't get over his lyrics man, it's insane. 

On a good note, I am allllmost finished with my black and white portfolio. I'm hoping I can have it done by the end of the week to show you guys!

Until next time....PAAAYYCE!

Keith Carter

What a freakin cool ass dude. I never thought I would see him right in front of me. 

For those of you who don't know anything about him, he's a self taught photographer from a small town in Texas. His mom was a photographer in the 50's, and he said he never paid attention as a kid, but that his mom would always turn their kitchen into a darkroom at night and print photographs to sell to the neighbors and locals around the area.

You can check out some of his work......here.

And thats not even the half of it! In a lot of his work he likes to create fantasy throughout his photographs, but also like nature and animals a lot too. I didn't know this but he did a lot of commercial work also and some bands have his photographs as their cd labels, and authors have them on their books, and that the Gap called him up once and asked him to make a photograph for their shoes. He showed us that photograph and he placed their shoes in the mouth of an alligator and sent it to them and got a call back saying, "this isn't what we're looking for." I just thought was hilarious. He also told us a story about how he got a call from the band The Hives one day wanting one of his photographs for their cd label. The photograph was of a man carrying his girlfriend on his back in a lake. (I've looked for this photograph online and can't seem to find it anywhere) They asked him if he had a release for the people in the photograph and he told them, "Well, no. I was walking around and saw this couple and just thought they were beautiful and just said... 'Stop' and made this photograph." He said, "Now this is the first thing they teach you at Columbia....never forget a release! But....I'm a dumbass," and he laughed. 

Throughout his lecture he gave a lot of great advice. He told us The 5 things to keep creativity:

1. We all need to work of others.

2. Make friends with uncertainty.

3. It's all about making choices.

4. Belong to a place, belong to something.

5. The full weight and mystery of your art rests upon the relationship between you and your subject.

He spoke a lot about what each of these means, and he even added, "You don't always need weed to be creative." 

He even showed us a sneak peak on what he was currently working on. He's doing a series of photographs of women with ridiculously long hair, (which let me tell you is incredible). Some of these women he found have hair as long as them!

He concluded with his lecture by saying, 

"Don't ever think you can't make a difference. Don't ever be afraid someone is going to "copy" you or think you're crazy, just do it. Take a secound to look around you, look in your backyard, your block, your street, it all starts there."

Why...

I've been struggling with a lot of things lately. 

I haven't really come across the answer yet. 

 

I saw photographs from Nan Goldin's book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency last week in class.

It inspired me so much. This woman took a piece of her life, photographed it, and put it out there for the world to see, showing us the relationships between men and women. Even though these were shot in the 80's, the same things still happens today.....different styles, and different worlds. She uses such a harsh flash indoors making a lot of her photographs orange and yellow, but it just adds more to the scene. If you get a chance, check this book out.