Mamiyaroid 58

2023 Update, looking toward the future in 2024

Feb 21, 2024

Hello, friends in 2024. The last time I sent a newsletter was January 2022!

2023 was busy photography wise. In October I was a photographer in residence for Worthless Studios’ ongoing Free Film: NYC project. I spent the month working out of an Airstream trailer outfitted with a working darkroom. Each participant spends a month in a different NYC neighborhood and I chose the one where I teach, Sunset Park, and we had a wonderful partnership with Green-Wood Cemetery. The Airstream was parked at the 25th Street entrance, near the Gothic arch, where Monk parakeets roost.

Me on the right, with a photo walk participant, in front of the Airstream after our walk through Sunset Park. Image credit to Asya Stepnova, another participant, and new friend!

Lomography wrote up the next month’s artist in residence, but also ran a photo of me and my students outside the trailer.

Besides honing my darkroom printing skills anytime I was off work running my library, I led photowalks, talked to photographers new and old, and led workshops with my high school students and local middle school kids. I also began a long term project called Portraits & Secrets. The gist is I invite pairs— couples, siblings, friends, etc.—to be photographed on Fuji FP3000b peel apart film using my Polaroid passport camera. The camera can take two images on the same frame so I took photos of each pair on the same frame. Afterward, they wrote down a secret their partner didn’t know and deposited it in a Taiwanese mailbox. I am keeping these secrets anonymous. I haven’t even looked at them yet! Like I said, I’m not looking to break up any marriages, but eventually I hope to publish the photos and secrets, in random order.

If you’d like to participate, send me an email to schedule a date!

After my residency I gave a photo talk for Monique Islam-Salas of bk.photo.talk at a wonderful community center in Bushwick. Here is a link to my slideshow.

Since those hectic months I’ve been concentrating more on writing and toward that end, I published a new short story, “Fever to Tell” at Epoch. It is the Spring 2024 featured fiction! Epoch also used one of my photos for the cover of the Spring 2023 issue.

And another photo of mine is the cover for Barrelhouse 24. I sent a bunch of potential photos and I’m pleased with the photo they chose.

I’m happy I’ve been able to merge my writing and photography worlds so seamlessly.

I hope to make this newsletter a monthly publication going forward. In order to keep my promise, at least for March, I plan to send a newsletter about photographing Super Sunday in Manhattan Chinatown. This is the day all the Lion Dance Troupes march through the streets and bestow blessings on shops and people.

In addition to my monthly newsletter, I will be making contributions to In the Absence Of, an eclectic newsletter of good writing and multi-media explorations. I plan to write up my time photographing the 2024 New Year’s Day Polar Bear Swim in Coney Island.

The last big photography news I have is I am co-teaching a photography class 3 periods a week. I created a brand new curriculum based on my experience running my school’s photography club, with the aim to introduce students to all the fun of photography through viewing photos, photo books, researching photographers, and most importantly, hands on projects. Toward that aim, I have been experimenting with pinhole cameras so that our students can make their own pinhole cameras, expose a sheet of photo paper, and develop the image in the darkroom.

I made two pinhole cameras using a no. 13 beading needle to make a hole in a piece of soda can. Later I sanded the hole clean so there weren’t any jagged edges. The first camera I made using an old Impossible Project Lab body that I had broken some years ago. I removed the guts, used gaffer’s tape to attach the pinhole and used this site to figure out my aperture. Since this body is broken, in order to process the Polaroid film I used, I had to remove the cartridge in my windowless bathroom “darkroom” and put it inside a Polaroid back I use with my Mamiya RZ67 to get the film to eject and process by squeezing through the rollers, getting all that chemical goo across the frame, creating the chemical reaction needed for an image.

For my other pinhole camera I spray painted the inside of a box with matte black paint and added a pinhole to the front.

Here are the cameras and results: