bill foreman writes some of the best songs you’ll ever hear. heartbreaking, complex, layered and soulful songs. i was lucky enough to get the chance to record one of them when he was in town a few months back, crashing on my couch for the night while attending a teaching conference.
click the video above to hear bill sing his tune, “san diego”.
visit bill here. he deserves your time, your money and your respect.
i probably watch more TV than is good for me. certainly my DVR has more of a backlog at any given point than i can comfortably manage. if i were a different kind of person i’d blame my parents – a showbiz family who, as i was growing up, not only had a television set in every room (including their bathroom), but would sleep with the TV on, too. on several occasions i would attempt to turn it off after they fell asleep, but they’d just simply wake up, turn it back on and go to sleep again. eventually i had to settle for very carefully and subtly turning the volume down. my father claims that he can only fall asleep if there’s something on that he wants to watch.
this week, of course, the big TV news is that lost is finally over. yes, i am a die-hard lost fan. it covers absolutely everything i love about fantastical stories, and everything i hate about real life (i.e., camping, being stuck outdoors). nick warner is a theoretical physicist at USC, but you can find him on the DVD extras of lost’s fifth season, espousing on the physics of time travel. it’s something the producers put together called “lost university”. it consists of warner and a couple other physicists talking about some of the theoretical science that gets woven into the show.
so, is there real science on lost? eh. . .mostly not. just things stretched and used as plot devices or to make characters sound smart, or (my favorite reason) to show a sense of wonder that could come from actual things applied in a fantastical manner. for nick warner, i think that’s the point, too. they’re not discussing lost as a serious scientific treatise, but i think the hope is that the show (and the “lost university” DVD extras) might get people who would otherwise ignore such things to be interested in science. at the theoretical level, physics really could sound indistinguishable from magic to some of us.
warner says that the key factor in deciding whether he contributes to things like this (or anything involving the intersection of science and the entertainment industry) is the question: “will this make me look like an idiot?”
good advice. perhaps i should apply the same thinking to photography.
[and just in case any of you are paying attention and have become annoyed with the subject heading for this (and similar posts). . .yes, i am aware that i've hardly kept up the scientist posts weekly. in my defense it was entirely my intention to do so, and trust me, i've got a long, long backlog of scientist pictures to do it . . . but, you know. . .things get in the way. so they're not going to be weekly, of course, but i'm keeping the damn title. just because.]
lately most of the things i do that seem to work out do so in no small part because of the influence, assistance and efforts of paul. for nearly every picture i publish there’s a similar shot with paul in it, standing in place of the final subject. here are a collection of those, from recent shoots and long misplaced scraps of pixels on distant corners of old hard drives.
today is paul’s birthday, so this post is in honor of all those things that happen behind the scenes. it is very likely he will be horrified by these, so in that case i apologize in advance. thanks, paul, for always making me seem like i know what i’m doing.
some photo shoots happen so quickly i don’t have time to figure out much about the people in front of the camera. very often a shoot occurs when the story is not quite finalized, and i rarely get to see a draft of anything before the subject and i share our sparse few minutes together. in an ideal world the photograph would be free of distractions, there wouldn’t be schedules weighing down on everyone, no handlers nearby, no nervous people hoping not to ruffle feathers. in an ideal world i’d get the chance to spend actual quality time with each subject before, during and after our task of making pictures. sadly, the ideal world is a far off place. in some situations – increasingly common in the media-savvy world that absolutely everyone seems to inhabit these days – you only have a scant few minutes, and any talk not directly pertaining to the logistics of making the picture happen (and happen fast) fall by the wayside out of necessity.
that being said, i’m afraid i don’t know much about LP and his wife, bobbi. i know LP was an accountant, now retired, that he enjoys fishing, and that he somehow didn’t seem to mind much standing on a piece of steel in the middle of some grass, even if it made everyone else around him nervous.
it seems my mother has appointed me the unofficial, implied future custodian of the photo archives of the family. there really is nothing more sacred to her than the giant stash of photos overflowing a box in her living room. most days when i visit my mother i return home with envelopes full of things. newspaper clippings, usually – she loves newspaper clippings – but sometimes the envelopes are full of really amazing things.
last week i returned with two envelopes older than myself. they were full of negatives by mary ellen mark.
in the spring of 1972, a year before i was born, mary ellen pitched a story to life magazine on my mother. at the time my mother was managing carly simon and diane keaton. she had recently left her post as the first female executive at playboy. she was in charge of booking entertainment for all the playboy clubs across the country. during this time, she tells me, oscar peterson taught her about jazz, and she briefly dated gerry mulligan. apparently i was very nearly the child of mort sahl instead of bill gerber.
for one reason or another, as so often happens in magazines, even almost forty years ago, the story never ran. for one reason or another, my mother ended up with two big envelopes of negatives shot by mary ellen mark. negatives in yellowed old sleeves, with no proof sheets attached, just a log sheet from the photo department at LIFE magazine, a small piece of photo history itself. yellowed, old envelopes of the history of my family. i don’t know why or how these negatives ended up in my mother’s possession rather than in mary ellen’s archives. i keep meaning to ask her, but somehow always forget.
i’ve been looking at this collection of old negatives, angry at myself for trading away my darkroom years ago. the sleeves are so yellowed it’s hard to make out what’s on the film without removing it, and even though i’ve handled countless thousands of bare negatives over the last fifteen years these somehow seem different. like i don’t want to disturb them, maybe. it feels like even though they’ve been sitting in a filing cabinet in my parent’s house for more than thirty years they somehow don’t – or shouldn’t – belong to me.
this month sees the magazine cover debut of my adorable and chubby niece, willamina. i got an assignment to photograph harvey karp, a pediatrician and author of the “happiest baby” series of books and DVDs. it’s all about the five S’s, people. (swaddling, side/stomach positioning, shushing, swinging and sucking) harvey teaches parents how to calm crying babies, which in turn calms frazzled parents.
we wanted a baby for the shoot, but harvey’s own son was 27 years old. that wasn’t exactly the right visual, obviously. luckily having recently become an uncle i was able to provide a baby, and spend some quality time with my niece as well. my sister-in-law (see below) got a free instructional DVD, too.
many years ago when i was working for greg heisler i remember seeing a time magazine cover up on the wall of the studio. he had photographed his own daughter for it and that always struck me as a really great thing. this isn’t quite the same, but it’s a start. hopefully there will be many more in the future.
below are the layouts used in the magazine (i tease my brother that willa looks like kuato from total recall in that cover picture, all scrunched up and wrinkled!) as a bonus there’s willa with her mother in a test shot, and with her charming and talented uncle, as well (thanks to paul). as an extra special bonus, a short video of corporal bennett singing a cowboy lullaby about pooping. you’re welcome, internet.
i’m very pleased to be a part of collect.give, a wonderful site launched by the incomparable kevin miyazaki. collect.give is a place where photographers offer small editions of small prints (letter size or less) for a low price and donate the proceeds to a charity of their choice. as of the first of march the site has raised over $5000 for various non-profit organizations. i’m offering a print from my series of burned book pages, with the money going to support camp del corazon. prints could be yours for the low, low price of just $40.
home from the conference in florida – a success, i think – and scrambling through a busy week. another busy week to follow after this one. there’s much to update here but i’ve been distracted by offline things, scheduling shoots and logistical matters. soon, though, i promise. in the meantime, this was the view in the aisle across from my seat flying back to orlando. in a layover in the phoenix airport i got to partake of the pleasures of a tamale burrito (a tamale inside of a burrito? mexico’s answer to the turducken) which, aside from being rather starchy, wasn’t half bad. there are certainly worse things to eat in airports.
anyway, my sincerest thanks to everyone at the children’s hospital of philadelphia who made my experience at the conference so pleasant. i gave the final plenary talk on the final night of the conference to a really big room. kinda nerve wracking, but it seemed well received. (thanks gil, tina and natasha! and thanks to the good folks at it’s my heart for letting me commandeer the table next to them to sell and sign books.)
this week i’m headed off to orlando to the cardiology 2010 conference. i’ll be speaking and signing books there saturday night (2.13.10) at the disney contemporary resort. if you’re in the neighborhood please stop by and say hello!
as part of my presentation to the conference i made this short film. this conference is mostly a medical one, with 26 of us (out of 900 attendees) being classified as “miscellaneous.” a long while ago i met a CHD researcher who told me that one thing doctors and scientists often miss out on is information on the emotional lives of their patients. given that, i wanted to show how some of the subjects from the book are doing now, as young adults out in the world. they’re dealing with the same things we all have to contend with – school, the future, family, love, fear. and they’re all a whole lot more interesting than listening to me speak!
my recommendation: watch it HERE, full screen, in HD for best results.
ron bloom married sandy, his high school sweetheart, and made his fortune in real estate. in 1988 sandy died after a long battle with cancer. some time later ron met lois, and they married. lois had also lost close family to cancer, and now they’ve both given a substantial philanthropic endowment to cancer research at cedars-sinai medical center. for people in a position to give in such considerable ways, funding research is a wonderful thing. thanks, ron.
i'm an editorial and commercial photographer. i live in pasadena, california (los angeles), the best place ever, where life is good and every once in a while you see someone from caltech ride by on a segway.
