vintage
Photography Art Show at Chop Salon: Auto Archeology East Bay
I’m happy to announce my next photography show, coming up very soon! I will have a series of photographs of found autos from around the East Bay on display at Chop Salon hair salon. I have the editing almost done; it’s down to two sets of images, and I’ve got to pick which one to print tomorrow. It’s definitely down to the wire but I expect the show to be all hung and ready for the reception, Friday Evening, November 6. I will be up through the end of December. I will update with start time and more details in the next day or two.
The first set consists of complete broadsides of cars found parked on the street. Set B includes cropped cars. I’m not sure which it will be at the moment, but I’m leaning towards A. I’ll be including the nine square format shots of cropped cars from the last show (yes, sadly none sold from that), and I’m thinking the complete cars will provide the right amount of contrast. Here is the first set.
Here is the second set.
The Old Plymouth
Old Plymouth off Broadway #3
I have a soft spot in my heart for Pontiac. Ever since word of its demise, I have been meaning to take a picture of the sign at the dealership on Auto Row in Oakland. I finally got around to it the other day. And while I was driving around looking for a place to park, I saw some other photo ops on the side streets. This old Plymouth was in beautiful shape. And as I just commented over on flickr, I have to admit I find it very sexy in a zaftig sort of way.
Fingado Art Gallery Opening
This is the final set of images I will have in a group photography show that opens Friday at Fingado Art Gallery. Nine is quite a few but the prints are not very big, just 12 inches square. I printed them at Dickerman Prints and had them mounted on aluminum at General Graphics, both in San Francisco. They came out very nice, and I’m pretty excited about it.
It has been an interesting project to try to print and prepare for presentation a small set of photographs. In a way, it seems easier than simply showing things on the web. I think the reason for this is that a physical show has, by its very nature, physical limitations and boundaries. A small set of images allows one to focus on them and the process of getting them where you want them to be. By contrast, putting things up on flickr or another such site is pretty much wide open in terms of numbers and organization. One can drown in a sea of possibilities.
This was my thought about what’s going on with this series of photos. The starting point is an exploration of color. Not color simpliciter, but as it relates to memory, history and the fictional narratives they constitute. The combination of color shifts and vintage subjects recall a generic past and, paradoxically, place the viewer within a fictitious historical narrative by playing upon her memories and nostalgic sensibilities. The deportation is paradoxical since taken literally, these narratives describe a logical impossibility. The images waver between recalling a past as it was, and a decayed, dissolving past as it comes to us. On one hand we are presented with something recalling a snapshot from the family drawer, a snapshot whose color as shifted over time, but whose referent we can conjure through memory as pristine. On the other hand, the subject is captured and presented not as it was in the past, but as it is now, in the present. It is the color, as it were, of the subject itself which has shifted over time rather than the photograph.
My First Gallery Show
El Cerrito, CA 2008. I have no idea what kind of car this is. All the chrome and make and model plates were missing. Still, I love the red accents. Especially with the curtains in the background.
Well, it looks like I’ll be having my first gallery show this summer. I’m really excited about it, and will pass details along when thing are finalized. I want to thank Frank Synopsis for inviting me to participate and helping make it happen. I have been sharing stuff on flickr for awhile now and felt like I got a good response to my photographic efforts. I don’t engage in quite the promotional efforts that are required to put up huge numbers in views, faves, comments, etc. there. But I think moving on to printing and showing physical stuff to people is an important next step.
I have done a first round of printing experiments using dickermanprints.com inSan Francisco. The printing came out great and I received great feedback from the master printers regarding everything from color correction to composition and mounting.
The hardest part may well be selecting a small set of photos, about six, from the first cut of candidates!
Suitcase 4
Suitcase 4, originally uploaded by neocles.
I’m slowly making my way through photographing the items in my mother’s apartment. I only vaguely remember the suitcase. It was not used very often. In fact, the only time I remember it being used was when my mom visited Greece once. When we moved my mother up here we just packed it full of curtains she had made for her house. She would not let me throw them away.
The chair and end table are part of a set purchased when we moved into a new house my dad had built on Griffith Way in Fresno, back in 1967. There are two chairs and couch which, unfortunately, were reupholstered around 1980. The sofa was cobalt blue and I’ll never forget that thing. But I can’t quite picture the original color of the chairs.
The furniture all has to be gotten rid of soon. I was all ready for that. But now I feel more sad about seeing it all go. I had a fantasy while I was going through stuff the other day that I could move my mom back into her house in Fresno and find a wonderful, reliable, relatively inexpensive 24/7 live-in caretaker for her. Then all the power objects could stay together for another couple years. But these childish dreams must be left behind…
Blue Cadillac, El Cerrito #2
boxes and arrows
Mom’s Western Holly
A bit tragic. The stove was in mom’s house in Fresno. The renters swapped it out with the Wedgewood that I had stored in the garage there, and left it out in the elements for a couple months. When I found out, I brought it up to the Bay Area and stored it at my work place for a couple years. I fretted about it and wondered where I could move it. I called some old stove restorers to see about having it serviced and cleaned up. They didn’t want to work on it, but said they would take it off my hands for parts, for free. I said “no”. I eventually had to it move out back of the shop wrapped in plastic for several months. But eventually the wrapping failed, and it got wet and started to rust. The other day, a couple scavengers from the neighborhood came by in an old Datsun pickup and asked if we wanted to get rid of it and a crappy old refrigerator that was sitting with it. At this point, I was no longer able to justify spending a lot of money trying to fix it up, and I had no place to install it, or to store it. I gave it to them. Another little piece of my life lost in the mists of time.
Dented blue Chevy Impala parked on the street in Oakland
Dented blue Chevy Impala parked on the street in Oakland 1, originally uploaded by neocles.
The path my photographic work has taken and this whole thing of my shooting old cars is difficult for me to understand. The thing is, i don’t really like cars that much. Well, that’s not completely true. I like the idea of cars, just not the reality. While i have threatened to buy an old ‘63 Ranchero and drive around listening to Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys really loud, I guess I’m too practical and environmentally conscious to actually do it.
And I am not really a “car guy” just like I am not really a “sports guy”. I’m not quite butch enough for that. I’ll be perfectly happy when cars no longer have internal combustion engines, don’t accelerate as quickly, and generally seem more like wussy cars than muscle cars. I’m fine with that.
But the idea of owning my first car again, a black ‘69 Firebird with blah, blah, engine, and turbo-blah-blah transmission, and so on, just has an enduring allure. Old cool cars just are still cool to me.
When i reflect on this for more than three or four seconds, I start to worry that it’s really just the result of getting old. The maturation process. The way of nature. I am reminded of being in my 20’s and being into contemporary design and avant garde everything with a zeal akin to that expressed in the manifestos of the Italian Futurists. I saw older people, parents of friends, with “antique” furniture, and thought, “yuck. how could anyone stand to fill their house with this absolutely hideous stuff”. This might seem curious considering that even then I was getting into deco, which I thought of as closely related to modernism.
And it still holds. A Model T is not particularly interesting to me. Not to photograph, not to own, not to daydream about. A Chevy Impala like the one above, on the other hand, is incredibly sexy. Those fins are amazing, the curves, sublime.
Thus one question is, is my appreciation for mid-century design, vintage (or what gets called “retro” even if the object discussed is an original piece) cars, houses, diners, lamps, matchbooks, etc., perfectly analogous to my friend’s parents’ penchant for 19th century Colonial Revival? Yikes! Has the next generation moved on to the next tidal wave of futurism rising up to inundate the 20th century and its nostalgic devotees? Somehow, I can’t help thinking that design from generation to generation, it’s value, and the social patterns that allow for succession to take place, are not simply subjective. That some things are just better than what came before or after. That it’s not just my pathetic nostalgia for the icons of my childhood that leads me to value these objects more than those.
This little mid-life crisis has deflected me from the original question at hand: why cars? It doesn’t appear I’m much closer to answering this. There are number of candidate answers: since I like the idea of cars more than the reality of cars, taking pictures of them wholly satisfies my desires regarding them; or having accepted, even embraced, the demise of the car as we know it, photographing them serves as a way to honor and document the final days before their disappearance; or perhaps they are just easy to shoot–especially when one routinely crops off one end or the other–making for easy points on flickr; or perhaps all of the above. It’s hard to say…. I suppose before too long i will have found every cool car in and around Albany and I’ll have to figure out something else to get fixated on.
tweets
- My mother's two sisters, Thea Thespina (left) and Thea Maria (right) on either side of Theophanis when we visited... http://ff.im/-gYrPs
- Misty Mountains, Mystical Morning http://ff.im/-gwt4w
- Alkher Illa Doffor (The Nectar Remix) by Cheb I Sabbah http://ff.im/-gvl41
- #facebook is having serious problems loading this morning.
- Warm Shift by Jon Hassell http://ff.im/-g6hR5
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