Rasheed Chappell performing at The Knitting Factory in Brooklyn last month.
Cool article in the Star-Ledger on the New Jersey hip-hop scene for which I shot this photo.
03
Jan 12
Demo Derby Day I
A slideshow of some of my favorite outtakes from the first day of the demo derby project. That was a good day!
11
Nov 11
Sit but don’t lie down
Took this picture of a day laborer taking a rest while waiting for work over the summer. When the police came by a little later, they told him to sit up.
06
Oct 11
An Immigrants’ Game
Here’s one from the vault. I took these photos and audio in the late summer and early fall of 2007, in what turned out to be my last days at my first newspaper gig. They are my first attempt both at a more long term project and at working with audio. When I left the paper, I felt that the work was incomplete, the audio terrible, and generally that it was not worth putting together. But time has a way of changing your feelings.
In all, I spent 11 afternoons with these mostly laborers in the rural New Jersey town where the paper was located. They would gather at the field each day after work and play for as long as the light would allow. The level of competition was really high, and occasionally a player or two from the local high school or middle school soccer team would join the fray, knowing it was the best game in town. As they played, they sometimes would yell the home country of a player, in place of his name, so that cries of “Ecuador” or “Argentino” would periodically be heard. I remember thinking what a contrast it was to the football or softball practices taking place in the nearby fields in this rural farmland of northwest New Jersey. Despite how they had arrived in America, or what their immigration status was, they were here, they were living. They were playing their game, and adding it to those other ones.
30
Sep 11
Scotland
A few photos from a trip to Scotland last year. The first few are from Glasgow, after landing, then the Highlands, and finally a few from Edinburgh.
23
Aug 11
Twenty years after the Crown Heights riots
A video from The Forward’s Nate Lavey on the Brooklyn neighborhood today, with some humble contributions by yours truly. (Link to The Forward’s article).
21
Jul 11
A brief storm
A brief storm swept through the neighborhood last week. Here is the tail end above one of our landmarks. Shot with my cell phone, unfortunately.
15
Jun 11
Greetings from Cambridge, MA
Some of my favorites from a little trip to the old country. They look like those old postcards from the town welcome center, so I rounded the edges.
28
May 11
Southern Wedding, Southern Camera, Expired Film
Here are a couple of photos I took at Tallu and Robbie’s wonderful wedding in Tennessee last weekend. It was the trial run for a 1961 Continette camera that I got while visiting my family in Chile last month. The film is expired Kodak Portra left over from the last big batch I bought before I discovered this digital stuff. It had been sitting in a ‘frige drawer since then. This is a much better use for it…and it’s nice to have that drawer back.
10
Mar 11
One Who Loves
Here is Amador. He is Cuban and though he has papers, I’m including him in the Undocumented project because really the title was always meant as a double entendre; and because the difference between him and someone without papers, seems so small as to be almost incidental. He’s lived the same life in shadows, worked the same factory-restaurant-cleaning jobs, been mistaken countless times on the street for someone without papers. He’s protested and marched both beside the paperless and on their behalf.
Born in Bautista’s Cuba four years before its end, Amador was raised in the infancy of The Revolution. In the ’80s, he went to Angola as a medic with Cuban troops fighting on the side of communist forces during that country’s endless civil war. Back in Cuba in the early 90s, he decided to come to America. His sister was dying of cancer in Florida. The small boat he and a handful of others took was picked up a few miles into the journey and Amador spent a year in Guantanamo, waiting, until he was finally released into the country. His sister died soon after their reunion and Amador left for Boston and then New York.
