Chicago for Domino

We shot Chicago's shopping (and pastry!) scene this month's Domino Magazine with their fabulous columnist Rita Konig. Follow the link for the listings, but for the pictures, you're going to have to buy the magazine!

We're finishing up another story for the magazine tomorrow, so if you need an excuse to subscribe...

Summertime Already?

A month has gone by while we've been busy shooting, teaching, and learning Spanish. The little bit I've learned in my six-week intensive course has already given us so much--portraits, places, access--that we could never have talked our way into with hand gestures. I'm going to do my homework one of these days, so ¡Ojo!

We've added a new artist to our Art Project: Shaun El C. Leonardo. This triple threat: painter, sculptor, and performance artist was introduced to the Network by Alejandro Almanza Pereda. He's at work on his next piece "Hard Targets - Masculinity and American Sports" for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. You can view more from this shoot here. Kodak has generously supplied us with a case of film to keep this project going, and we have two more artist portraits here in New York coming up this month.

Finally, with the talented, imaginative, and patient designer Sandra Garcia, we have been re-designing our logo and promo cards. Drop us a note if you want us to send you one when we ship 'em out next week.

Busy week! Colorado, Kansas & Chicago

We're off to photograph three small stories across the Midwest!

First things first, we'll celebrate Kit Nichols and Charnan Lewis's wedding this weekend in Washington Square Park. I'm going to photograph the happy couple in their wedding clothes on the F line where they met (only in New York!), then when we arrive, James will create a wacky, joyous portrait of them in the Washington Mews to match their wacky, joyous love for one another. So far props include: a flute, some balloons, a sock monkey, a rocking horse, and a copy of Bartheme's 60 Stories. If you know either of them, these items will not surprise you.

Then on Sunday it's off to Colorado for Men's Journal to make two portraits in the Denver area. I can't wait to share those stories with you when the magazine comes out--the shoot list cracks me up.

On Monday night, James is headed to Kansas to photograph Wilson Lake, a gorgeous mountain biker's paradise right in the middle of the state in the middle of the country. I'm stepping aside to let James's dad be his right hand man for two days. Take your father to work day! I know they are going to have a great time out there, and no one knows Kansas like Jim Owens.

On Wednesday night, James will join me in Chicago for a Domino shoot on Thursday. We're planning to stay the weekend and enjoy Joe's loft and a long weekend off tooling around Chicago. Anybody know any great wine stores?

Alejandro in Brooklyn

As promised, here's the scoop on Alejandro's next show:

My Little / Membrane, curated by Zeljka Himbele-Kozul and William Heath, opens at NURTUREart Gallery at 910 Grand Street in Williamsburg on May 9th. Featured artists include Michele Beck and Jorge Calvo, Thomas Doyle, Bethany Jean Fancher, Vlatka Horvat, Yuliya Lanina, Janell Olah, Jihyun Park, Anna Stein, David McQueen, Alejandro Almanza Pereda, and Traci Tullius.

Talk next Friday at IFA

I'm participating in a panel at the Institute of Fine Arts (1 East 78th Street) on Friday, May 9th as the second part of a symposium called Forms of Seeing: Imaging, Boundaries, and Technologies. My panel, called "Technologies," meets from 1:00 to 2:30. I will be giving a brief talk (with powerpoint!) on my research into politics, abolition, and daguerreotypes in the 1850s, followed by Q&A. If you want to come early or stay late, good panels, discussions, and lunch with other researchers from across the disciplines will be happening all day, all free. Click through the link for the schedule.

Art Project, notes

Derick Melander is showing at Repetti Gallery in Long Island City, Queens, opening next Saturday night, May 3rd. It's a three person show with Laura Paulini and Penelope Umbrico entitled, The One and the Many. I mentioned that we have been gleefully working with Derick on our Art Project in a previous post. I can't wait to see his new work. You'll find directions to the gallery here.

Video of Parson's PDN30 event

We were part of a seminar "Strategies for the Young Working Photographer" hosted by PDN featuring yours truly, along with two other emerging photographers and two editors at Parsons on March 10th. They have posted a video of the (entire, hour-long) panel and Q&A here.

Alejandro Almanza Pereda for Art Project

We photographed sculptor Alejandro Almanza Pereda in Mexico City as part of our artist network project. We've been photographing artists in their studios since November. We then ask each subject to name an artist who has inspired or excited them, and then we photograph that person, and so on and on. Alejandro came to us through sculptor Derick Melander, whose work you can see here. Right now, we're looking forward to two new names on the shoot list next month. In the meantime, check out Alejandro's work, and our photographs of him. He has a show coming up in NYC, so stay tuned.

52 images of you

Friends of 545 rock! Cheers to you all....check out the photos here!

"Check out these 297 Talented Photographers"

Rob Haggart over at A Photo Editor has put together a slide show of photography he likes. I like these photos too. Can you spot the Morgan & Owens shot?

Movies that read like photos: eh-hem, thoughts on Jesse James, the assasination of...

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford exposes my weakness for movies that reach beyond the actors, the action, and the actuality. It reels together 10,000 images worthy of each and every still moment. I went into the movie skeptical of the joyride, the big-screen-cinestravaganza that the actors might offer; I grew tired, I rallied, I hit pause and walked away...and returning I saw an image stilled and choreographed. Stunning.

It redeemed. I watched it again, stopping the frames again and again in my head, all the while being taken away to a land I grew up near and only flirted with in my few trips outside Kansas City, sometimes perched up on the front-seat armrest of my family's station wagon. (Yes, it was the eighties, the wagon was big, very big, and I think it was a Buick; and while I am thankful to have never experienced the tragedy of hurling headlong into the windshield, I can't imagine a childhood car-trip memory without that front seat view.) In my nostalgic, wink-eyed memory I didn't have cowboy boots with spurs, or even a cowboy hat, but I did have a BB gun in the car, and I did make my dad pull over next to that pond alongside Highway 169, I think it was, to hunt bull frogs. It's one of many childhood memories on the way to St. Paul, Kansas, where my grandfather ran the area's general store, or was it a hardware store?

There is a LOT of this land in The Assassination of Jesse James; it's an experience that is skillfully wrought into every visual moment of the film, and every stream of this consciousness made the movie, the narrative, (the trance), and abandoned me to my senses and my memories.

Having shot road trip stories in rural Kansas and Oklahoma--our most recent of the two traces parts of Route 66 that my dad traveled while courting my mother in the late 50's and early 60's--I have to admit, not all nostalgia must be avoided.

This Weekend: Tucson, AZ

I'm off to meet my new baby niece, Emma Ruth Shipley, in Tucson, Arizona. James will be here, so if you have a poker game in the works, give him a call.

I'm rereading Hawthorne on the plane, so I'll leave you with a quote from the House of the Seven Gables. In this quote, Holgrave, the daguerreotypist, is trying to woo the beautiful young Phoebe into his studio.

"There is a wonderful insight in heaven's broad and simple sunshine. While we give it credit for depicting the merest surface, it actually brings out the secret character with a truth that no painter would ever venture upon, even could he detect it. There is at least no flattery in my humble line of art."

I love that Hawthorne suggests that truths and secret characters lurk just beneath the surface of everyday life, and that sunshine can expose, and photography can capture, our secret characters. Portraiture seems, in this light, almost a religious vocation. Or in this case, a great pick-up line.

Of course, for Hawthorne, writers do it better.

Have a great weekend!

Morgan & Owens in T: The New York Times Style Magazine

If you missed our photographs of Las Pozas, Edward James's surrealist wonderland in Xilitla, Mexico, you can find the story on the T Magazine website.

We shot for most of the twenty-four hours we spent in Don Eduardo's jungle. Here are a few more.

On Robert Frank

Charlie LeDuff at Vanity Fair has written a profile on Robert Frank that includes this beautiful portrait of the master at 83 years old.



Is there an American photographer today that could not cite him as an inspiration?

This Weekend: Chicago and D.C.

We're off to Chicago tonight for two days of shooting. Looks like it's going to be bad weather in cool locations.

On Saturday, we drop in on Melissa's wedding in D.C. I can't wait to stay in the Tabard Inn again. What is it about old hotels that I find so relaxing? Melissa being Melissa, her wedding is synchronized with the cherry blossom weekend. Wow.

Be sure and pick up the T: New York Times Style Magazine on Sunday. It's the travel issue, but if you need another good reason, you'll find our shots from Xilitla.

If you're going to be in Brooklyn, Thursday night could be a weekend in itself. There's the opening party of Brownstone Brooklyn's very own photography gallery on Bond Street from 6-9, followed by Sunset Rubdown at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple, with a mission: Sunset Rubdown need you for a polaroid project. Have fun!