max s. gerber(the latest shot)

here we are, another july 2nd. that means today is the birthday of my good friend amy macwilliamson. i could go on and on about amy’s many talents and the depth of her photographic vision, and i probably have. for now, though, i will depart from my norm and favor brevity over endless rambling. suffice it to say that i’m even prouder to call amy my friend today than i was seventeen years ago when we first met. her pictures and her point of view and her friendship have always been an inspiration. she’s one of those people who deserves to be widely recognized and made filthy rich.

happy birthday, amy!

norma is my mother’s neighbor. she walked by while i was setting up in the alley to film my brother and his wife on father’s day. many people who walk by photo sets jokingly say “hey, you gonna take my picture, too?” i always answer yes to this question, and find that when you actually do it they become much less brave. i think the photo above is norma’s feeling on the picture-taking process. i can’t say i blame her. actually, these days, that expression sums up quite a bit for me.

my brother and his wife are having a baby daughter in september. my father, who lives in new york, has not seen them since before emiko got pregnant, so i thought it’d be nice to make a video for him for father’s day. also, i figure it serves to mark my brother’s first “official” father’s day - or is that a pre-father’s day? either way, i’m to be an uncle soon and as such it’s my right to subject everyone to time in front of the camera. at the moment, the leading contender for baby names falls to “willamina”. so here’s my brother james and emiko and willa - t-minus three months.

of course, my brother approaches impending fatherhood with his usual humility.

and just in case it’s unclear, that phrase he says at the very end is “chocolate cake and fred segal’s.”

click the play button below.

i made this video at the competition, just to show how fast these solves really are. this might look like it’s sped up, but everything is in real time, i swear.

(music by merle travis, available here.)

today brings us sebastien, alex, joseph, devin, salman and julie. (julie helped organize the event, and gave me a space to shoot - thanks, julie!)

today’s installment brings you jeremy (or, as we like to call him “supermanpants”, who won the one-handed solve competition), shelley (current record holder for fastest female blindfold solve (1 min 29 seconds, including time spent memorizing!)), michael and brandon.

today’s crop of speedcubers: cameron, sam, wei eileen, bradley and phillip. just for the record, phillip won the contest with a nine second solve.

several years ago pam fogg sent me on an assignment to photograph dan knights. at the time dan was the world champion speedcuber. that means he can solve a rubik’s cube in about twelve seconds. i had had a cube as a kid, like most people of my generation, and like most people who considered themselves to be smart kids, i did the only natural thing at the time: got rid of the annoying puzzle that taunted me by being unsolvable. years passed and i forgot all about it. what i didn’t know was that there was a growing subculture dedicated to the cube, which has since become retro-80s-nostalgia.

so i was assigned to shoot dan, and before i drove up to san francisco i went to toys r us and bought a ten dollar cube just to play around with. i was frustrated almost immediately. still, i liked the simple feel of how it moved and the sound it made, and i’m a big believer in fidget toys, things just to keep you busy waiting in line or whatnot. dan showed me the basics of how the cube was put together. the internet put the rest of the pieces in place and soon i could solve the thing in just around five minutes. i have to admit,  i was kind of proud of myself, even though a good friend of my girlfriend at the time said to her in horror, “what happened to your boyfriend?” i figured once i knew how to solve it i could put the thing down, stop torturing those around me. then i wanted to get faster. so i practiced finger triggers and memorized more algorithms. i gave cubes as birthday presents. it only caught on once. (thanks, russ, for being an even bigger nerd than me)

at one point the madness had to stop. to get to where dan knights is you’d have to memorize literally hundreds of algorithms. frankly, i’m way too lazy for that. so i got reasonably good at it and stopped trying to improve my speed. my best time is 55 seconds, but i generally average around 1 min 10 seconds, depending.

i carry the cube with me in my camera bag. sometimes i’d pull it out and ask my subjects if they’d take a pic with it. i’ve asked this of celebrities, scientists, politicians and authors. it’s surprising how many people (who normally hate having their photo taken) are downright delighted to spend another couple minutes in front of the camera playing with an 80s era toy.

early last month i logged on to facebook to find that even the internet knows what a big geek i am. over in the corner of the page was an advertisement for a rubik’s cube competition being held at the discovery science center in santa ana, california. a building, i might add, that is shaped like a giant cube. the event was sponsored by the caltech cube club, who ignored my inquiries until it was too late. a couple days before the event i just called over to the museum itself, got transferred to their PR department and talked to a woman named julie who seemed thrilled at the notion of me coming to photograph the participants. thanks, julie! i’ve said terrible things about publicists in the past (which are mostly true), but you’re absolutely one of the good ones.

so here, and over the next few days, are some of the speedcubers who were gracious enough to be photographed. thanks, everyone!

today we have tyler (above), and chase, benjamin, juan and brenton.

twenty years ago anissa ayala was a 16 year old girl who had just found that she had developed a very aggressive form of leukemia. at the time the national donor registry had very few names and with no matches on the donor list, and no matches in the family, the ayalas made an unusual decision. mary and abe decided to have another child, hoping that that child would somehow be a match for anissa. it was a longshot, to be sure, the odds of a match were less than 25%.

in 1990 marissa ayala was born and was a perfect donor. the bone marrow transplant was a success and anissa remains cancer free to this day. now 19, marissa lives with her parents while going to school and anissa, now 37, works for the leukemia and lymphoma society.

when marissa was born the ayala’s decision to have a new child to save their daughter was met with outrage as much as anything else. there were threats made, and accusations of farming babies for spare parts. still, the family’s love for marissa is clear, and clearly not just related to saving anissa’s life.

many people spend a great deal of time struggling with indecision, wishing that their lives somehow had a predetermined direction or some built-in meaning. we try to find this through our work, through our friends, through love and desire, through religion. imagine if you were marissa ayala, and you actually were born for a very specific reason. would that make life easier or harder? what if you knew that the thing you were born to do had already been done, that it had, in fact, been done before you could even remember. would that change things? would you struggle with indirection and indecision like the rest of us who only hope that we have a purpose? we go through our lives manufacturing our own reasons for living, for getting up in the morning, for getting out of bed, for going to work and getting things done. then every once in a while there are people for whom the reasons truly are built-in to who and why they are.

my thanks to florence nash at people magazine for the assignment, and of course, to cpl. bennett for his gracious assistance.

here’s the photo they used, as it appeared in the magazine.

at the end of march i went to san francisco to be a speaker at the CASE editor’s conference. i hadn’t been to san francisco for a long while, except for a couple times where i’d have a shoot there, fly up to oakland in the morning, drive straight to the location, do the job, and drive straight back to the airport. that hardly qualifies as a visit.

this time it was nice to take a few days for myself in the city after my speaking duties were done. i got to have dinner at chez panisse, which satisfied my deep-rooted inner food nerd. i was gratified to see that chez panisse is built like a california craftsman house, so it felt very much like home to me. i live in pasadena, where you can’t throw a rock without hitting a craftsman house. on top of that i got to finally meet pam fogg and matt jennings from middlebury. they’ve been hiring me for a long time now, and have been great supporters over the years. i rarely get to actually meet the people i work for in person. usually they find that i’m much shorter in real life.

in addition to all that i got to hang out with amy macwilliamson, who i’ve long maintained is one of the best people on earth. this is backed up by hard evidence and the testimony of countless others, and the plain fact that she’s simply a kick ass photographer. amy takes better pictures in bright sun than anyone i know. try it. grab yourself a camera, go outside in the middle of the day and try to take some portraits. then go inside and look at them. notice how utterly crappy they are. then go look at amy’s pictures. then feel bad for yourself.

amy has a nice house in a neighborhood in san francisco i forget the name of. she has a cool funky office (see above), and a garden where edible things grow and are cultivated. i can never seem to keep plants alive, though i really like the idea of having fruit trees. peaches maybe, or avocados. amy’s also got a fiance named scott, who i got to meet for the first time. i’ve heard so much about scott over the years, i can’t believe i hadn’t met him before. they’re getting married in less than a month, so i have another excuse to go visit.

in a two-for-one special, amy happens to live over the fence from my old buddy matt. matt was the first person i met at college, actually. i haven’t seen matt in ages, either, since he’s a bigtime rockstar and never home. luckily, though, the 28th of march was matt’s birthday and he happened to get back from tour the night before, so when i was poking around in amy’s garden admiring the foliage i looked up to find matt yelling at me from over the fence. we didn’t have much time to visit but we all hung out in matt’s kitchen for a few minutes before i had to fly home. as usual with matt, the conversation was about dissatisfaction and 80s hair bands. though not about dissatisfaction with 80s hair bands, because we all have a deep and abiding appreciation of such things.

happy birthday, mattie. try to get some rest.