THE THINKINGS OF THE OTHERS

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This is the first film I ever made, back in 1983. The camera was a 1950s Kodak Brownie that was basically a metal box with a "gun sight" on the top to use as a viewfinder. I reassembled (and let's be fair, substantially reworked) the film for this presentation, which I hope you'll enjoy. If you knew me back then, you may be in this film yourself. If you didn't...well, consider this an opportunity to step through a portal into another world...a world of many, many mustaches....

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I've got a couple of man-in-the-street quotes in today's The New York Times article about the mayoral election. It mentions my Monday Facebook status ("Mike, the more you call me, the less likely I am to vote for you,' which got more positive reaction than any update in months) but no, the Times is not watching my Facebook page for interesting quotes. I was interviewed by a reporter outside my polling place.

She asked who I was voting for, and I said Thompson, and she asked why. I said I was disgusted and embarrassed by Bloomberg's campaign. He spent obscene amounts of money, much of it unnecessarily negative and often completely untrue. I mentioned my status update and the response it received, and she wrote it down carefully, then asked my name and age.

And I answered, "40." I'm not 40. I haven't been 40 in nearly half a decade. I wasn't shaving years off my age for vanity's sake (or not consciously, anyway), and in almost every respect, things are better now for me than they were when I was 40. I just get that math wrong sometimes. Just like when I say "next month" and mean November even though it hasn't been "next month" for nearly a week. I know, intellectually, that it's 2009, but my spatial sense of time tells me we're about halfway through this decade.

Meanwhile, despite all his spending, Bloomberg barely squeaked by. Did you vote? I would have loved to see him lose, although I'm a lot more upset about Corzine. What happened to everyone who was so excited about "change" last year? Did they think we were finished? I'm very worried about what Christie will do in NJ, but aside from his oligarchical tendencies, Bloomberg hasn't been a terrible mayor and did successfully lead us out of Giuliani Time. Perhaps he will be chastened by this result and work a bit harder to represent the city as a whole.

Anyway. This is my second appearance in the paper this year (the first was thanks to my work with the AIA Guide to New York City). I have been traveling a lot lately, mostly for Journalism Online, but still managing to play music, and will be hosting the Ponkiesburg Pickin' Party every Sunday.

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Emily and I went down to Toronto on Friday to learn how to inject some glamour into our photography. Apparently, not making people look like fucking monsters is key.

The ride to Toronto is endless, so we had a chance to talk shop. Emily's been working for a bunch of wedding photographers already -- the kind that ask $5000 for a wedding, charge for everything else on top of it, and then run off without paying their assistants. Jerks.

I've always envisioned running my photo business with a different set of principles, which go something like this:

1. Don't suck.

2. Images should be free. I take photos to share experiences, stories, excitement. The moments captured don't belong to me -- they belong to us. Thus, most of the stuff I shoot I release under Creative Commons. Take it, use it, modify it, do awesome things with it: that's how culture evolves.

3. Treat your clients awesome. The people I photograph are my friends. They share with me some of the most important moments of their lives. The least I can do is give them the freedom to share their stories with friends, lovers, strangers on the internet. My goal is to make sharing easier, not to charge through the nose for prints, DVD's, etc. Charging for prints is so 1800's.

4. Wide angles are key. Yes they can make people look like monsters, but look at the excitement on their faces! I'm OK with sacrificing a bit of aesthetic perfection to capture a bit of awesome.

5. Fuck fashion shoots. A wedding is not America's next top model. Most things in life aren't. Let's see people happy and laughing and making out on the streets.

6. Let's see each other in new ways. We already have a thousand cliched ways of seeing the stuff around us. Repetition is deadly. Let's find all sorts of crazy new ways to be, let's take off our clothes and dance.

7. Watermarks and borders can die a slow, awful death.

I told Emily these things and I joked that my goal is to make absolutely no money from my photography. We laughed, but then I went home and punched some numbers into a spreadsheet and as it turns out it's all true. All revenue I made this year has been eaten up by equipment depreciation and other losses -- I haven't even begun to cover the cost of the cameras and lenses I own.

So let's find out how long I can hold on to my principles. The moment I start watermarking my images you can come over and punch me in the face.

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So as you may have noticed, I've been traveling a hell of a lot lately. It's been a few years since I had to do the road warrior thing and frankly, it's not as bad as it used to be, if only because I have (some) more control over my time.

I have a bunch of air-travel survival rules, one of which is, never check luggage. Not only does it add time to your trip (and, nowadays, fees), it adds the risk of having your luggage disappear. And sometimes that's not even the airline's fault: I am in Seattle today thanks to a last-minute phone call that I got while waiting for my flight home to JFK. If I had checked luggage it would probably still be circling the carousel in Queens, and I'd be trying to find a clothing store open at 8am instead of drinking coffee and puttering online.

Anyway, the moronic rules banning liquids in carry-on luggage have made this more difficult. I could never decide whether to put little bottles in a plastic bag, or just buy the necessaries when I got where I was going. The former is wasteful and stupid and is one more thing to worry about at the security line and I am all about getting through that nonsense as quickly as possible. The latter saves time at the airport but adds it later on, and it's also expensive and wasteful.

I have finally found the right answer: no liquid toiletries. Basically you have to go back to the early part of the last century for the answers: tooth powder and shaving soap. I made my own tooth powder using this recipe (I left out the lemon peel since I was in a hurry and it's just for flavoring). You can order shaving soap (and the other accoutrements) from a few places online, and it does make for a more pleasant (and more environmental) experience than canned shaving cream.

So with those two additions to my travel kit, I have been able to go straight through security without having to open any bags or take anything out that could get left behind or forgotten, and go straight from the plane to a cab or rental car without riding the luggage carousel.