I don't know what happened to Antonio Bay tonight. Something came out of the fog and tried to destroy us. In one moment, it vanished. But if this has been anything but a nightmare, and if we don't wake up to find ourselves safe in our beds, it could come again. To the ships at sea who can hear my voice, look across the water, into the darkness. Look for the fog. —John Carpenter's The Fog I've had two careers in my life: teacher...
Barely Socially Acceptable, Fairly Odd Parents-Present, Professional Auteurism / 21.08.2014
I Talk to Strangers in Elevators
I talk to strangers in elevators. But not just to any stranger. I pick and choose, depending on the elevator, the mix of people, and, of course, if I have anything to say. Our time together is short and there must be some connection to our shared experience riding up or down. Not quite an elevator pitch, but a close relative. Timing is everything. It might be Monday morning. No eager beavers on Monday morning. "Thank God it's Friday," I might say. I'm often the warm up act for the week. And, if I'm lucky, I'll get a chuckle. Out of...
Wally Shawn photographed for Time magazine. This has got to be the worst photograph of Wallace Shawn I have ever seen. What were the editors of Time magazine thinking when they decided to use Peter Hapak's image for their summer reading feature in last week's edition? What? You don't know who Wally Shawn is? I know Wally and this is NOT him. Well, I actually don't know Wally personally, but I once saw him at a phone booth on the street next to the Whitney Museum, which is the same thing. You do remember The Princess Bride, don't you (he played...
News Outta My Control, Professional Auteurism / 25.06.2010
The Real Reason AT&T Has Exclusive Rights to the iPhone
A recently discovered magazine ad fuels speculation that Steve Jobs can time travel. This morning, in an old dusty box hidden in the corner of my attic I unearthed some old magazines. I can't remember why I kept them. But thumbing through their pages I came across this 1960s ad for Western Electric's Picturephone ® and something in the shadows caught my eye. Steve Jobs knew Marty McFly. But more importantly, proof positive why AT&T, the descendant of Western Electric, is the exclusive carrier for the iPhone. [ iPhone, AT&T, Steve Jobs, Western Electric, Apple ] ...
Child's Play, Fairly Odd Parents-Present, Professional Auteurism / 24.04.2010
On Talking to Strangers
Never say a commonplace thing. Jack Kerouac My name is Jeff Gates and I talk to strangers. More on that later. We don't want our children to be fearful of public engagements. But we want them to be able to understand the risks. Illustration from an ad for online security software. With one bona fide teenager and a proto soon-to-be teen in the house privacy has been a hot family topic. Well, only their parents seem to think it's an important issue. The girls seem totally nonplussed. And that's our point of contention. My wife and I are trying to teach our children...
Professional Auteurism / 14.03.2010
Clearing the Path for Sisyphus: How Social Media is Changing Our Jobs and Our Working Relationships
This is the second in a series of essays on the effects of social media on organizations. The first, Confessions of a Long Tail Visionary, looked at how social media is changing our jobs. This piece continues the exploration by looking at how these changes in information delivery are changing our relationships with our co-workers.
Introduction
Social media is changing the inner workings of our museums. Like many other organizations, our hierarchical structure has historically disseminated information from our experts to our visitors. The envisioned twenty-first century model, however, is more level. Instead of a one-way presentation, our on-line visitors are often interested in having a conversation with our curators and content providers. And many of us are joining our traditional experts in representing our institutions in these conversations. In response, we in new media have been looking for ways to engage our public by designing and using applications that encourage dialogue; however, in order to succeed all of us will need to approach our jobs and our relationships with our co-workers in different ways.
While the early hope of many technorati was that the Web would dramatically change the inner workings of our cultural institutions, new media's role began as a support for more conventional projects - exhibitions, outreach, and our collections - with their Web-based counterparts. But as new Web 2.0 tools developed and we saw the possibilities for a greater engagement, we often felt like Sisyphus. We heard concerns these new initiatives would take too much time or they would take away from our institution's core tasks. And just when we thought we had made inroads, the boulder would come crashing down: one step forward, two steps back. Our work was to function within our traditional organizational structure. Yet these first steps were just a prelude to real change.
Social media is now challenging the traditional flow of information throughout our institutions and out into the world. Researchers, educators, new media specialists, and exhibition designers are asking to join marketing and public affairs departments in conveying the mission of our museums to our visitors. Blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, just to name a few social applications, allow for and encourage multiple institutional voices.
But how is this transformation really taking place? Are there methodologies that encourage this shift? And how can we negotiate with our peers a greater role in content creation and dialogue? How can we challenge existing paradigms, yet maintain the support of our coworkers?
News Outta My Control, Professional Auteurism / 03.01.2010
Avatar:a Reflection of Human Nature
When Will Homo Sapiens Stop Making Movies Like Avatar
Glenn Beck as our species savior? Annalee Newitz recently posed this question: "When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like 'Avatar'?" And she followed it up with some interesting ideas on race and film making in America. While I would agree that Avatar and District 9 are Hollywood's metaphors for racial relations, by limiting her piece to just race she missed a larger issue: the broad scope and brutal reality of human nature reflected in these films. Avatar is James Cameron's epic about the Na'vi of the moon Pandora. Humans are so interested in obtaining the element Unobtainium (talk about transparent...
Artistic Tendencies, News Outta My Control, Professional Auteurism / 25.04.2009
On Creating a New Stock Photo
Commentary at the New York Stock Exchange On a trip last week to New York for a series of meetings I suddenly discovered the New York Stock Exchange was located directly on the path between my hotel and meeting site. This "discovery" was hard to miss with a huge American flag draped across the front of the building and tourists holding up their cameras for a similar photo op (even at this early morning hour). My time in Washington has trained me to look for initial signs of heightened security camouflaged as benign architectural flourishes. Bronze-colored "stones" subtly blocked would-be terrorists' attempts...
Artistic Tendencies, Idiosyncratic Celebrations, Professional Auteurism / 08.02.2009
Anatomy of a Photograph
Details from some of my Inaugural portraits
As I began to look at the photographs I shot during the Inauguration I realized how many portraits of people I had taken that day: from soldiers and police who were doing traffic control (and other more subtle national security tasks) to the many different citizens who came to celebrate and sell their souvenirs. As I said initially, this was a very different Inauguration than the last two I attended. Few protesters, it was more celebratory than either of the last two Bush events.
Over the years I have spent a lot of time thinking about the best camera to take on these urban photo safaris. In 2001 I dusted off my Pentax 6x7 to shoot medium format "real" film at Bush's first Inaugural. This had been my go-to camera during the 1990s. Medium format gave me great detail for large prints and I loved the quality. But that January 20th I realized this would be the last time I would ever used this camera --too few shots per roll and, weighing in at almost four pounds, it was heavy as hell. This was not well-suited for the type of urban documentary photography I was interested in and my back was no longer willing to carry it around. It became a burden to take pictures. I needed to make an adjustment just as digital cameras were coming into their own.
In 2005 I brought my first digicam, the tiny Pentax Optio S5. Oooh, it was light and its featherweight brought the fun back for me. But the measly optical zoom (3X) didn't allow me to get close to some of the action at Bush's second Inauguration. So I began looking for something closer to my dream combo: a lightweight camera with a massive zoom. The winner was the Panasonic TZ3 (and now its successor the TZ5). It was a bit heavier than my S5 but not by much and it had a 10X optical zoom (the longest zoom on the lightest camera around). It didn't have processional settings like the Nikon P5000 or the Canon G9 so I wouldn't have the most control over the images I took but I figured I could do what I needed in post-production using Photoshop.
So this year it was me and my TZ3 welcoming our new President on the National Mall. When you're taking impromptu street portraits you don't have a lot of time to contemplate your camera settings. You point and you shoot. I asked people if I could take their photograph. Sometimes I'd just be able to get one shot off before my subject moved on. That's street photography: Henri Cartier-Bresson's decisive moment. I was in a maelstrom of people moving in all directions. Getting someone to stand still for a minute wasn't easy.
As I looked at my images on the computer later that evening I started to form opinions about what I had taken. Going in without a strict notion of what I wanted to take (how could I, not knowing what to expect), I relied on my internal photographic senses on the street. However, now I had the time to make decisions about the final images. And I realized that some would require a shallow depth-of-field to separate the subjects of my photos from their background. Unlike my formative photographic years when I could do that by as I was taking the photography using a wide aperture, I was going to have to recreate this via Photoshop. And to do it right was going to entail a multi-stepped process.
Beauty has always been a product of the social attitudes of the time. During the Renaissance voluptuous Rafaelesque women were the standard aspiration while in the 1960s, and certainly today, thin --even an emaciated look-- is often what people admire. While waiting for the subway after work yesterday I found a new back-lighted dental ad at my usual standing spot. Quick! Who does this man look like? Is it a coincidence this model reminds me of Barack Obama? His election was more than the total electoral votes he garnered --some even calling it a post-racial social revolution. Oh, our propensity to...