I took my camera (Leica MP TYP 240) to West Hollywood this month to photograph Pride on my own. Pride is a special time of year for me, although like many LGBTQIA+ people I’ve had conflicting feelings about it over the years. The partying, the substances, the corporate sponsorships, the rainbow-washing–all of these seem to take away from the original message of the original Pride marches. It took me a long time to understand Pride as both a party and a protest. Pride is both rage and joy. Pride is over-the-top because Pride is about saying “I am not ashamed, and I’m here.”
And, like many, I’d rather use this celebration as a creative opportunity and to act the documentarian. Here are some of my shots. I hadn’t done street photography style shooting in a long time, so it felt a little bit like getting back on a bike again.
I’ve been pretty much consumed with The LA County Fair, basically my biggest client of the year, especially in terms of scale. After photographing the first two full days of the Fair, I was reminded once again just how exhausting it is. And the number of photos I have to process from each day at work is daunting. Thankfully, I’m pretty adept at editing and processing large batches of shots.
It’s not all work. I decided to also attend the Fair as a guest with some friends and family. I couldn’t resist a Dole Whip.
It took me several days to recover from these shoot days. Having worked events for several years now, I basically can keep going and going. I have to make myself stop. I did manage to get out and do my favorite hobby of visiting thrift stores in my area. That’s just about as exciting as my week got. The way things are going, it’ll be a few more weeks or months before I’m able to show some of the work I’ve done for the Fair.
Took the opportunity to escape to the desert house out on the Colorado River for a few days. It’s already hot enough in Parker, Arizona, to feel like summer. I wanted to relax a bit before the actual summer activities of the area begin–mainly boating, beaching, and day-drinking in the scorching hot sun. The area becomes a family vacationers and swimsuit-clad party animals looking to get tanked. I like to escape to the quiet.
We’ve been a part of this little desert community now since the early 1990s, when my grandparents bought what eventually would become their post-retirement home. When I was a kid, it felt like we were being dragged out there. The weather on the weekends we’d go out there would be unbelievably hot and my grandparents wouldn’t allow me and my siblings to watch TV. We were, of course, instantly bored and saved only by the prospect of going down to the water to go swimming. As an adult, I appreciate the little family house we have here much much more. It is both a refuge and a gathering place for raucous family gatherings.
My mini-cation was short-lived, as I had to book it home to start my month-long engagement with the LA County Fair. This is my second time with the Fair, though I’ve done many events with the Pomona Fairplex since. It’s one of my favorite events of the year, and I feel privileged to be one of three photographers on staff for the month. The fairgrounds covers whopping 487 acres, making it the largest county fair in the nation. What I remember the most is feeling like this was an endless visual feast, quite literally sensory overload. I grew up going to this Fair, and somehow I still wasn’t prepared for the amount of stimulation. Thankfully, we started out with a Fair food preview day to ease into the experience.
Once the food preview was over, we headed into the first Fair weekend. What’s amazing is that this massive event is created and organized by a rather small office of staff. And of course, there’s a practical army of food and shopping vendors, sanitation staff, volunteers, security, artists, and many, many, more. I can’t show much of what I’m photographing here out of respect to my contract. After clocking in about 17,000 steps on my first day back, I am reminded that for some reason I really enjoy working these gigantic events.
As the busier season of my year continues, I’m starting to see the longterm effects of my chosen path. How my days off are more like days “off.” Meaning, I don’t have a pressing engagements to get to, but I have just as much correspondence to take care of. Emails, invoicing, thinking about this ongoing blog that basically nobody reads… I keep writing these posts for reasons I’ve elaborated on before. The Meta-owned app has now introduced an AI search feature that I find annoying and seems to further sink the user experience of a once exciting creative community. If I want to post my photography anywhere, it’ll be over on Foto app (still in beta testing.) Keeping my own space on the internet, not dependent on algorithms has become more and more important.
Do what you love and you’ll never stop doing admin a day in your life.
I found out that my photos from an event were being used in press with the wrong photo credit. That kind of thing is so distressing, but we as photographers have almost no recourse. I reached out to the sites but there’s not much I can do about it at this point. This kind of thing can really affect my business. But, as with most things in business, I have to take most of the responsibility. It just means I’ll have to be more direct about photo credit moving forward.
I’m gearing myself up for one of my favorite clients of the year. Starting this week, I’m back with the LA County Fair as one of three official photographers. Even though I grew up going to this Fair, last year was my first as their photographer and it was all things exciting and overwhelming. The event itself is the biggest I’ve ever shot in terms of scale. It’s about the size of a small city, and it truly is an endless visual feast. Sensory overload. This year, I’m working on a more focused approach. I’ll be trying to capture more classic images, stuff you’d see emblazoned on a billboard, with a strong central focus that still captures the essence of “Fair.”
For research, I’ve been looking through a photo book called Life 75 Years: The Very Best of LIFE. It’s a huge coffee table book I’m lucky to own. As I was flipping through, I found myself almost bowled over. No one takes photos like this anymore. And rarely do we see photos in print like this anymore. The word “iconic” is so terribly overused online, but these photos truly are iconic in that so many of them became emblematic of their time. We’ve sort of lost that in the digital world of endless scroll. Yet, I also realized that the aspect ratio of LIFE is similar to the smartphone screen, only much larger.
I might make more effort to direct traffic to this blog, seeing as I enjoy making this more of a weekly update of my goings-on now.
I found out that some of the work I did for the Consulate of the Kingdom of the Netherlands was featured in a Dutch newspaper. Hidde, a friend and colleague, sent me a photo of the paper. I also found the article online, if you speak Dutch and want to get past the paywall.
A friend of mine invited me to a Dodger game. I took my Nikon F3 loaded with Kodak 400 T-Max. I took a few shots. Haven’t developed the roll yet. This started me carrying a smaller 35mm camera with me to more places, something photographers talk about all the time but I sometimes find a little burdensome. Carrying a camera around the grocery store, to the gas station, the post office…it seems a little odd. Then again, the great street photographers carried cameras and film with them always. They’d either roam the streets all day, or shoot in any spare moment they had.
More and more, I wonder about street photography. My stepdad had introduced me to the idea years ago, and we even attended one of the first exhibits of the work of Vivian Maier in Los Angeles. It seems like over the last six or seven years, especially on platforms like YouTube, street photography became more about content creation than actually decent photos. Content churner-outers are more emboldened to stick cameras in strangers’ faces, the idea of consent goes out the window fairly easily. The mystique of street photography lies in photography books. The now-forgotten names of the faces in the works of Vivian Maier, Elliot Erwitt, Robert Frank, and Diane Arbus, they peer out at us from another time. It’s easy to forget that they may not have consented to having their photo taken, while these were also eras when cameras weren’t so ubiquitous. No one was making content from street photography, because street photography didn’t pay. I’m not so sure it pays now since it doesn’t seem to be for anyone now, but for generations to come.
I’m in a swirl of photo editing from my steady stream of clients this month. I’ve been really happy with how much of the work has turned out, especially some of these shots from the Pasadena Playhouse annual gala. It was almost rained out, save for a set of elaborate clear catering tents. I put a prime lens on my DSLR and took advantage of the shimmer all around me from the raindrops falling on the enclosure.
This has been one of the busier weeks of the year for me. Event photography is my main business and it tends to be seasonal, so now is when many spring gatherings and galas tend to be underway. Starting out there was the California State Thespian Festival, an annual gathering of high school theatre students from across the state. There are competitions in acting, singing, dance, and technical theatre. There are dozens of workshops, performances, and leadership opportunities within the California State Thespians.
This was a favorite festival of mine back in high school. In fact, my theatre teacher has since retired but is still highly involved in the Educational Theatre Association, which helps theatre educators continue to provide good programs to their students. She is one of the several familiar faces I got to see there. I saw many more friends and colleagues who were teaching workshops during day two of the festival.
Anyone who knows me knows that my background is in theatre. All my artistic endeavors seem to start there. And I can’t emphasize enough just how important arts education–particularly theatre arts education–is for young people. This isn’t just a chance for kids to express excess energy. This is hands-on learning skills that apply across all career fields, including those elusive “soft” skills that are so hard to teach (empathy, listening, being present, etc.). A particular bonus is all the technical skills learned in the theatre arts. It truly is a head start in a rapidly changing world.
There was that little eclipse thing. There wasn’t much excitement here in SoCal. I noted the little crescent moon shadows in during peak eclipse time, then watched the live coverage on TV. I agree with many others that there is something nice about thousands of people coming to view such a major event.
The rest of this week has been essentially a marathon of photo days. (I resist the term “shoot” more and more as I continue working in this profession.) I could say more, but out of respect for my clients, I try to keep quiet until I’m done editing photos and delivering them. There are so, so many to edit and process. Thankfully, I’m pretty fast in that department.
This has been such a change of pace from the first few months of the year when all is essentially dead. When I seriously begin to doubt my choices while the days are still short and spring still seems far away. It’s definitely a good reminder of the seasonality of life. Right now is more of a harvesting season, as I see the fruits of several years’ work of planting seeds, nurturing relationships, developing best practices, and following through. Come summer, the harvest will slow and I’ll have to embrace a new season.
Zion National Park, once the ancestral home of the southern Paiute, as well as the Ute and Navajo, and once known also as Mukuntuweap.
I hadn’t been back since I was a kid. In fact, I found a display in the park noting the last time I was here, 1995 when I was trapped with my family in the Zion Lodge due to a landslide. I nearly jumped when they mentioned said landslide on the shuttle ride in.
The Court of the Patriarchs at dawn
You can’t help but be inspired by this place. I feel like a poor man’s Ansel Adams. No photos do these incredible cliffs justice.
The crowds were a bit much. I got an earlier start, parking early enough to catch the very first shuttle into the park to see the famous Court of the Patriarchs at dawn. I got in a few of the simpler hikes, ate at the Lodge, then left the park midday back to the airstream camp I’m staying in.
I loved the various natural hanging gardens along the Riverside Walk.
I know why everyone—the indigenous folks, the Mormons, the Methodists who named three towers here after three biblical patriarchs—sees this place as a temple of sorts. The un-scalable cliffs humble you almost instantly.
The famous Zion arch, about 900 feet long.
I actually spent two full days in and around Zion. I also worked on some video, so I’m working on a way to share that as well.
I have shared less and less of my personal photography work on social media lately. My client work has taken off this year, but I’ve found myself hesitant to share anything outside the scope of what I do for my clients.
I know I’m not the only one who feels that the large social media platforms have changed so much, enough to feel that they no longer have the users’ best interests in mind. I won’t lie and say that Instagram, Tumblr, Flickr didn’t help improve as a visual artist. Sharing my work there helped me build confidence, take risks, find a voice. I also bought into what happened there, too. The people going from artists to “brands” to “influencers.” The photos in exchange for “free” watches. The purchased followers (never did that) and the mad dash to hack your way to a large following.
Things got lost in that process. I’ve studied visual art my entire life, and learned to see the world around me as creative inspiration. That started to become the cliche—doing it for the ‘gram. As in constantly seeking the most visually stimulating thing to post.
I’m trying to remember what it is like to simply make photos as visual meditations again. Pictures of nothingness and that don’t serve an outright agenda. Work that documents. Work that is my own mix of influences that follow me everywhere: Salvador Dali, Vivian Maier, Leonardo Da Vinci, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and lots of musical theatre.
Social media isn’t all bad, but it’s also not that great either. Instagram in particular was built of the work of photographers, then became saturated by media and Meta’s attempt to appropriate ever other app out there. I’m sticking around with a few selfies, and some updates on various projects. I still believe in building a long-haul audience, in having a space like this to post quality content. It’s extra work, but I’m keeping this site exactly for that.
While I’m not far away from an old, creepy mansion, much of my small town on the outskirts of LA County goes all out for Halloween. This is a fairly recent development, and for the first time I took the Leica M240 out to capture some of the ongoing decorations. I’d kinda love it if my town became known as Halloween Town.
Last week, I was able to catch one of the last tours of Phillips Mansion for the year. The mansion is one of two remnants leftover of Spadra, a real wild west town located a few miles from where I was born in Pomona, CA. The other remnant of the town is the very old Spadra Cemetery, which is closed to the public. The mansion was built by Louis Phillips in 1875, then one of the wealthiest men in Los Angeles County. I’m not very familiar with second empire style houses, but I’ve always been drawn to Spadra and the rich (but lost) history of the small town that go left behind in time after the building of a railroad stop in neighboring Pomona.
Phillips Mansion sometime in the late 19th Century
The mansion has that classic “haunted house” feel, and has actually been used as a location for a few horror films. The last time anyone had actually lived there was around 1960, when the rooms were rented out as apartments. It suffered bad damage from several earthquakes.
The creepy vibes we real, and since I love old things, I was drawn to every corner of the house–except for the attic. A few people went all the way up into the attic and came down a little creeped out. The interior is quite run down, not at all the lush interior that it had once been. The Pomona Historical Society runs this property and has been doing work to restore it as much as possible.
Onsite of the Phillips Mansion property is also the Currier House, another old mansion that was moved to the property from the City of Industry about 20 years ago. The Currier House is in much need of repair, but exudes character throughout each of the rooms we were allowed to see. Each had unique custom wood floor designs, and some beautiful antique tile work on the fireplaces.
Self reflection from inside the Currier House.Some of the wood paneling inside the rooms of the Currier House.
The Pomona Historical Society is doing excellent work maintaining and restoring this property, as well as educating local people on the rich history of the area, going all the way back beyond the Missions of California to the indigenous Tongva people who were here originally. Please take a look at their website on Phillips Mansion to learn accurate information on these.
