Family are subjects...

Well, this is my father in-law and his brother. I thought it would be good for me to photograph them. I tried to capture the fact that they are brothers. I'm not sure if the "putting their heads close toghether" thing quite worked. I saw a similar image of two twins that worked in a similar manner, but that image was very different. I think I like the other one better. Would be cool if there was a similar one of them as kids. Could make a great diptych.

I'm almost home......

I used to ride my bike under this bridge, pretty much every day on the way home. I kind of like this solitary light against the twilight of the evening sky.

Happy Together

I took a bunch of photos of my wife and I at home. I tried to abstract away
our environment a little, but still leave a little there. These were a little
bit of work. I used a big Arri and a couple smaller tungsten lights which were
diffused through a 4x8 ft scrim. I was hoping to perhaps take portraits of friends
like this, but would probably have to leave the 4x8 ft scrim behind and bring a strobe or two.

More on development

San Francisco reminds me of those arcade games these days, where you pick up candy and small toys with a little crane. These are some more snaps of China Basin. I'm not sure I'm inspired with this phenomena enough to perhaps get out black and white film and do some big prints. Maybe...

Avedon at Stanford

Well, we went to the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford, and saw the Avedon exhibit of his wonderful portraits of the West. In addition, to the Avedon photos, there was a room devoted to contemporary Bay Area Art. There was a very lifelike statue of a man in the room, in fact so lifelike, I was hesitant to stare, for fear it could actually be a gallery worker. The piece reminded me of Ron Mueck's stuff, which I've only seen on TV and the web. It was strange, on the other end of the room, there was a man sitting in a chair, playing with his digital camera. Perhaps working on a slide show. He was apparantly flipping back and forth between images of the sky. He was real, but he could very well be a work of art. I took a quick photo, which I've attached. It was the only one I took today.

Now, getting back to Avedon. I stopped at the book store on the way out, and started to read a book which documented the process behind Avedon's portraits of the west. It was titled, "Avedon at Work: In the American West". There are few books of this sort, which talk of an artist's process in detail. In fact, the author makes the point, that the camera is not often turned on a photographer while he works. The author also reveals much about Avedon's personality, and how he interacts with potential and actual subjects. Anyways, hopefully it'll help me pursue some of my ideas involving the photography of real people.

No picture today...

Its funny, when I had a job, wandering around the city without a real purpose, trying to put a rectangle around things was fun. It didn't seem strange. Then, when I was doing it as a photographer, not a part time photographer, I would sometimes feel strange. I felt like I was goofing off, not really working. Furthermore, I often had a hard time finding something interesting to photograph. A good friend of mine, Jason, once said, I shouldn't feel strange when I'm out looking but not taking photos. Both are part of the process, and now my job. So, I guess thats the purpose of this blog entry. No photo. Enjoy.

SF vs LA

I think these two photos are very representative of what is SF and what is LA, at least to me. One I feel is very dramatic, moody, perhaps contemplative, and of course cloudy/foggy. The other image glows in saturated beautiful color.

Will Work for Options......

As I might have already mentioned, I once had a career in hi-tech. My parents were hard working Polish immigrants. They worked hard their whole adult life to send me to college, so I could experience a better life via a good career. However, my career never really went the way I would have liked. I felt as though I was always respected, a good engineer. But, it seems I was always in a rut, doing the same old thing. After a while, I pretty much lost interest in computer science, and no longer got excited about going to work. In fact, most of our working population doesn't get excited about running out the door, and heading off to work. They do it to pay the mortgage, make that car payment, send the kids to pre-school, and save a little for retirement. Pretty soon retirement is here, and they're too tired to enjoy it. They were often lured by stock options, bonuses, and rewarded themselves with that new SUV, that big screen TV, etc.. They're sentenced to life of "success". A couple years ago, I took this photo, as my comment on this topic. One mistake I made was I hung it up in my office. Bruce, the CEO of our company, a really nice guy, saw it one day. I brought it home. If you happen to read this, I'm sorry Bruce, I didn't mean any disrespect.

My mug is always available......

Well, since I used to have a day job, I had little time to take photos except on the
way to work or the way home. At night, well it was dark, and I was home. Last year I got a small studio space, and tried to refine my lighting skills. My own mug was always available. I thought about doing a photo series on Surveillance, and this is a photo from that experiment. I might turn this one into a fake add for a private detective agency or something like that. After all, I don't have any magazine covers or add campaigns yet, so one thing I'd like to do is makeup my own fake ones. Hopefully, some one might look at mine and say, "Hey, we'd like him to shoot our cover.". I made an advertising gallery on my site, with a handful of images to get started: adverti$e, $ell, adverti$e, $ell.... Need to get going on the fake covers idea.

Lamp posts, power lines, and the sky

Well, I like looking at the sky, the clouds, power lines, lamp posts, etc.....
I think my interest in taking photos of whats above me started when I was thumbing through a book by Nobuyoshi Araki, a book of photos of power lines, if I remember correctly. He's a photographer that often leaves me a little uncomfortable, as if I shouldn't really be interested in his images. After all, he's known to be a fetish photographer of sorts, who's documented the underground "sex scene" in Japan, and much more. I once saw an exhibit of his in Tokyo where he portrayed middle aged house wives juxtaposed with images of decaying urban objects such as old pipes. It was powerful, yet uncomfortable to view. In some way, the images seemed cruel to the subjects. Anyways, these are a couple of my photos. I kind of liked the bad scan with scratches and dust so I thought I'd share it. It kind of has a "creepy" twilight zonish feel to it.

Tourist Portraits

Last April I went to a photo festival in Palm Springs. I took a workshop from Veronique Vial, a well known fashion, celebrity, advertising, etc. photographer. She told us how she started out. She gave herself an assignment. It was to photograph people in their apartments before they were ready to go out, preferably people that were well known. She was lucky enough to get access to some celebrities in the process. The result was a couple books: Men Before 10 and Women Before 10. Since, San Francisco is such a tourist town, I thought it would be a great idea to photograph tourists in their hotel rooms. Veronique's photos were very raw, and shot on black and white film. I was hoping to have mine be more like portraits, perhaps lit, but hopefully capture some of the human elements when people are relaxing after a long day of, well, being tourists. Perhaps, there could be an element of what Martin Parr captured when he photographed the British as they vacationed in Brighton, England. Check out his site: Martin Parr. Anyways, I got my friends to allow me to photograph them when they went on a weekend to wine country. This is the one photo I liked. It was fun. I need to do about 100 more to get a book, which might start getting me noticed, getting people to hire me, and well, maybe get me famous. So, if you are staying in a hotel/motel in Northern CA, email me: marek@marekjulian.com, so I can take your photo (please, please, please)!

Urban Green and Development

Over the past few months I've photographed alot urban green/parks, and also much of the development going on in San Francisco. Guess these photos show both.....

The Everyday

Last year I went to Portland Or, or maybe it was two years ago. I rented a bike and rode around the east side. I was amazed at how much I felt I could learn from just photographing the exterior of peoples homes and their yards. A couple weeks ago, I tried to reproduce something similar by riding my bike from downtown San Jose to where my wife's parents live. Basically, I rode down Monterey Expressway (I think thats what its called). This kind of stuff makes me think of William Eggleston's work. His show at SF Moma was amazing. I watched a documentary about him too. It seemed like he often wandered around aimlesly trying to put a rectangle around his surroundings, producing great images in the process. Anyways, here are a couple photos from that bike ride. Hope to do more.

I wish I was 16 years old again.....

I kind of got a kick out of this. I was riding Cal Train to meet my wife at her parents house in San Jose. I was in the bike car (you can bring your bike on cal train and then be able to easily get to where you really need to go), and noticed this high heel shoe stuck on the window sill. Its nothing special as a photo, but I can just imagine some teenagers sitting around, having some innocent fun. Perhaps they're riding the train with no real purpose. Come to think of it, perhaps I should rethink the last few sentences since I'm now a parent. Anyways, I still got a kick of the shoe on the window sill.

Beach Portraits

A couple years ago I took a really great class in color photography at SFAI. The teacher was a guy named Tim Sullivan (Tim Sullivan Art). Well, about this time, I rented this movie entitled "Five Obstructions" which is a film about Lars Von Trier challenging Jorgen Leth (a dutch film legend) to remake his classic 12 minute short several times under different constraints. The short was entitled "The Perfect Human". As a result of seeing this film I created some photos which the instructors girlfriend commented had a color palette similar to Reneke Dijstra's (Reneke Dijkstra). You can see these photos on my site here: Just a Cog in tghe Machine). I had to investigate her work. She create these amazing portraits of teenagers on the beach in various parts of the world. Anyways, I loved the low camera angle of her beach portraits and thought I'd emulate her work a little bit. These are some of those photos.

Lets go to the beach

I love the beach. Its peaceful, the air is clean, you always look better with at least a little bit of a tan, its a great place to ponder, or have a good time. For a period of time last year, I spent alot of time on Ocean Beach and Baker beach just to take photos. Also, drove down to Pacifica and Santa Cruz a few times. Need to do more of that. Here are some of those photos. For some reason I felt a need to really mess with the colors. Originally, they were shot on slide film, where the blues were too blue, and the browns too brown.

Textures

A couple weeks ago Stephanie and I went to the Fraenkel Gallery in downtown San Francisco. It happened to be a weekday afternoon, a perfect time to go. You should too. There are plenty of other great galleries in 49 Geary. Anyways, Fraenkel pretty much exclusively exhibits photographic arts. When we were there that day I noticed what appeared to be an amazing painting. A vivid golden experiment in texture. As I approached closer, I was astounded to learn it was indeed a photo, a photo of a motel room wall. It was by Richard Misrach, a well known California photographer. The other really, really memorable pieces by Misrach I also encountered at the Fraenkel. They were these amazing aerial shots of a crowded beach, full of living, vivid color. The other day we were walking in our neighborhood and I took some photos of walls. I kind of like this one. I guess I should take more. Perhaps try lighting some of them. Feels like I'm simply copying, but its a great excuse to take a photo of something mundane on the surface which could turn into a beautiful surprise.

The Art of Walking

Well its the oldest form of transportation known to man. 2 or 3 years ago I took a bunch of photographs off people walking set against these blank walls which were the facades to buildings under renovation in downtown San Francisco. Actually, they were primarily against one wall which seemed to be there for ever, and might still be. There's a gallery on my site full of these photos: hey, where these people goin?. I guess I got interested in this silly idea since it was kind of an outdoor natural light studio. I'd pretend I'd be photographing the building, and then lower my camera, and snap, usually without looking through the viewfinder. Most were blank and white. I probably have enough prints for a show. Never, really felt they were worthy of approaching a gallery with. I'd love to hear what you think. Here are a couple color ones. The first I think is kind of humorous, the lost tourists, if you will. The second is recent, and deviates from the earlier ones. I recently found that the buildings around certain intersections, allow what is essentially a spot light on the pedestrians below at certain periods in the afternoon. I was kind of tired of the people walking thing, but perhaps this creates a new spin. Someone once told me, if you have an idea, work on it to the extreme. Guess there might be some truth to that. If I should stop, let me know.

New Friends

Well, sometimes its hard to find people willing to be photographed, that is, folks with a pulse and all. Luckily, I've found these cute guys. Actually, their Lucy's (my daughter's) friends. I spent a few hours photographing them today. Plan to do a little more tomorrow.

Hello again....

Well, its more than a month since my last post. Not much of a blog I guess..... Its great being a dad, but feel a little bit of pressure as I'm not quit where I'd like to be as a photographer.... Haven't gotten hired for any really big commercial shoots, but then again, noone knows who the heck I am. I've been pretty much in portfolio building mode ever since quiting my job last July. I really love taking photos of people, and I like real photos of real people. I spent alot of time this past fall hanging out in spots in our city that I thought might make nice settings for a photo. No fancy equipment, just some black and white film. Lots of fun, but in a strange way I felt like I wasn't working. I felt as though I was goofing off. Wandering around, searching for a a photo. This probably wasn't a recipe for making a living as a photographer. I'd love to hear about your journeys as photographers, especially as you were trying to figure it all out......