About

Statement:

I’m a New York based abstract photographer. My works capture the texture and energy of urban areas from seemingly mundane objects. I love to wander around industrial areas and take pictures of street art and the rusty, grunged up, decaying objects that are often next to it.

I’ve tried painting the photos that I’ve taken, but it just doesn’t look as good. Nature and decay does a better job of making art than I can ever do, so I just record the process.

The Process:

Making these photos is a multilayered process. Each phase inspires me at different times and pulls at me for different reasons. Here are the steps that go into making this stuff:

• Deciding the location
  • I plan a trip to a place that has a lot of street art (see this map for examples). Those areas are usually the best for having buildings and sidewalks with character. The industrial area of Williamsburg is always reliable as well as SoHo.
  • Or I keep my camera on me and whip it out when I find something that catches my interest. I’ve caught some of my most interesting textures when I was in the country, at the beach or on vacation.
• Out and about
  • Things that catch my attention: decaying signs, melting plastic, graffiti, construction materials, ripped signage, interesting patterns on bricks and walls, fading paint, rust, gouges.
  • When I look at this stuff, I try to pull a story out of it. It’s the same thing as picking patterns out of the clouds. But I know that I can take a photo and make it look more like closer to the image that pops in my head.
  • All of my photos are taken in macro mode. I don’t have a great manual focus feature on my camera, so I usually have to take the same image 5 times before it gets a clear shot.
  • It is pretty awkward when I find a wall or decayed item that I want to photograph and people are around. Here’s a photo of me taking pictures while in a graveyard. My friend was taking photos of me doing this and the people staring at me to make me feel even more self conscious.
• Editing time
  • I upload all my photos into iPhoto, where the majority of the photos will remain untouched. Only a small percentage of the photos I take are good enough to be edited into a full piece of work.
  • While in iPhoto, I mess with the levels, saturation, brightness, contrast, exposure and color balance until I have something that isn’t a dead giveaway from what it was and can stand as its own piece of work.
  • Once in a blue moon I’ll do additional color editing in photoshop, but I won’t paint over anything or use photoshop effects. I consider that cheating. Somehow this makes sense in my head.
• Final touches
  • After the photos are edited, I separate them by groups. I have a ton of individual photos that I still have to upload and many other photos that look really good but don’t quite fit into sets. This rounds down the photos that end up the site considerably.
  • Then I post them to this site (usually dozens at a time) and let everyone know that new photos are up on twitter, facebook and friendfeed.
• Getting the photos into the real world
  • Based on demand or when I scrounge up enough money, I go to a print shop in the city to have the photos printed.  When I first started printing the photos I made the deadly mistake of using copy shops and kinkos to print the photos.  They don’t care about DPI, etc there and the photos come out pixelated.  Now I pay more but get much better photos from the professionals.
  • I always get nervous that the photos won’t be clear if they are blown up, but I have seen samples where they are blown up to 4 feet wide and it looks fine.  Note to self: get a crazy camera with lots of zoom features and megapixels so that the photos can be even bigger.
  • My dream is to have all of these on canvas but it’s $18/square foot for photo printing on canvas and costs almost $100 to get the canvas framed.  To make a 30″x40″ photo, the cost of printing and framing is about $250-$300.  I haven’t had any luck with the online printing companies, but if you have a suggestion please let me know!
  • More often than the canvas printing I’ll have prints made and I’ll acquire clean black frames with thick white matting (3″ or so on each side).  Ai Friedman seems to always have a 50% off sale with its picture frames, much to my delight.
  • I’ve hit up coffee shops, boutiques, art shows and smaller galleries to display my art.  I’m not the biggest fan of ‘the system’, where the stores take 30-50% commission and you have to lay out all of your production costs with hopes of someone buying art off the wall.  I’m a bigger fan of the ideas that are in Chris Guillebeau’s Unconventional Guide to Art and Money, where the idea of connecting directly with your customers through social networking is shared.  If you’re still reading this than it means that my plans of sucking you in have been successful!
  • Right now I’m still deciding how to sell my photos online.  If you’re interested in buying one, contact me and we’ll work something out that is around 20-25% over the cost of production.

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