"sometimes i look at my work and how people read it, and it has no relationship to what i might have experienced in taking the picture or what i might get from it. there's no absolute truth in what a portrait can convey. the way i view photography is closer to poetry than to documentary. it's one thing to portray something and to give an inventory of facts, and another to use those facts to your own ends, to achieve something that filmmaker werner herzog defines as an ecstatic truth, an experiential truth.."

/ excerpt from an interview with pieter hugo from artist profiles magazine

/ from three questions, a collaboration with z. keneally 2010

/ synecdoche new york (2008) written/directed by charlie kaufman

i write in order to comprehend not to express myself

i don't grasp anything i'm not ashamed to admit it

sharing this is not knowing with a maple leaf

so i turn with questions to words wiser than myself

to things that will endure long after us

i wait to gain wisdom from chance

i expect sense from silence

perhaps something suddenly will happen

and pulse with hidden truth

like the spirit of the flame in the oil lamp

under which we bowed our heads

when we were very young

and grandma crossed the bread with a knife

and we believed in everything

so now i yearn for nothing as much

as for that faith

/ the lamp, from silences by anna kamienska, 1979

/ in the summer of 2008 i went across america

this is a photograph i took of the grand canyon

part with emperor/ part with father will always be favorites.

'come,

see real flowers

of this painful world'

/ basho

'standing on the bare ground, - my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, - all mean egotism vanishes. i become a transparent eye-ball; i am nothing; i see all; the currents of the universal being circulate through me; i am part or particle of god.'

/ ralph waldo emerson, nature chapter 1, 1836

/ screenshot, july 4 stratford ct

/ beautiful by any definition

/ stratford ct april 2010

JULY!

/ me, taken by zk in brooklyn ny june 2010

"heartrending, each termination;

god-shaken, each beginning.

at the dawn of smoke,

pungent as creation,

the long chaos rises over these trees.

for we opened our eyes in eden,

with the taste of fruit on our lips."

/ excerpt from 'have you eaten of the tree?' by paul hoover

/ my parents, april 2010 webster ny

on the way to my grandparents house

/ to love endlessly, october 2009 brooklyn ny

Suspending disbelief » Honolulu Weekly

my very dear friend, mitchell kuga, is a brilliant writer currently working for honolulu weekly. check out this beautifully written cover story he did for them recently.

z + i saw luca guadagnino's 'i am love' starring tilda swinton this friday in ny. the movie was shot absolutely beautifully and tilda was great but the story line could have been a bit better. we both walked home barefoot through brooklyn because our shoes were killing us.

um... at halfway through this may be the most beautiful sound ever.

/ updated iconoclast

/ sam bassett, sacred geometry

/ the seventh seal, ingmar bergman 1957

this guy's a genius. i'm currently reading 'four screenplays of ingmar bergman' and i sat mesmerized as i read his introduction where he discusses filmmaking. its incredibly moving and rings very true to my own sense of why i love photography so much.

/ photographs from the mermaid parade, june 19 coney island

i feel my maternal instincts creeping in more & more these days

'building my work, i built my self.'

/ valery

/ photograph by gisli z. grade 5 from reykjavik iceland, thecameraproject.com

currently working to expand the camera project!

/ went home to rochester w/ z this past weekend to visit family

its nice now to have suburbs as a relaxing escape and not an everyday constant.

webster, ny june 2010

"i dreamed that we were together in some old-fashioned room. i read at the table. on the other side, j. lay on a wide bed, also reading in his favorite position. through a window directly across from him, the light of the rising sun fell on his body. i buttoned up some kind of white bathrobe and ran to kiss him.

-- i greet you with the rising sun! i called out. we never speak like that in life.

in dreams artificial, literary formulas sometimes turn up.

it seems that the dead always appear in our dreams just before we wake. in this way they remain somehow half real.

in my dreams his body is always phosphorescent blue."

/ excerpt from the journal of poet anna kamienska

/ delicate as love

old/new photographs to suit the dew-coated grey morning

stasis in darkness.
then the substanceless blue
pour of tor and distances.

god's lioness,
how one we grow,
pivot of heels and knees!--The furrow

splits and passes, sister to
the brown arc
of the neck I cannot catch,

nigger-eye
berries cast dark
hooks----

black sweet blood mouthfuls,
shadows.
something else

hauls me through air----
thighs, hair;
flakes from my heels.

white
godiva, I unpeel----
dead hands, dead stringencies.

and now I
foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
the child's cry

melts in the wall.
and I
am the arrow,

the dew that flies,
suicidal, at one with the drive
into the red

eye, the cauldron of morning.

/ ariel by sylvia plath

/new iconoclast

meeker ave flea market, brooklyn 29 may

/anything you could ever need

brooklyn ny, 29 may 2010

"I devoted my interest to the church’s mysterious world of low arches, thick walls, the smell of eternity, the colored sunlight quivering above the strangest vegetation of medieval paintings and carved figures on ceilings and walls. There was everything that one’s imagination could desire — angels, saints, dragons, prophets, devils, humans."

/ an excerpt from laterna magica, the autobiography of ingmar bergman