former apartment

in light of recent circumstances i've been looking through the mess that is my digital file system, culling snapshots here and there for a portfolio. this is from the vault, when i first moved to los angeles, and when i still believed in using film but had nowhere to print it.

en foco

diptych of the photos that occur when setting up my camera, 2010

another window

nighttime story

morning light (two studies)

my time

lately i've been photographing concerts for the label for which i work (and for which i start full time in june! yay me!). it's an incredible amount of fun; however, during these shows the art sk00ler in me is also tempted to point the camera elsewhere. these are some outtakes that i enjoy.

generic announcements

got back from coachella monday morning. haven't slept for more than 4 hours a night in almost a week, need some time to process the absolute physical, mental, and emotional intensity of the experience. my thesis animation will be playing in a film festival this weekend, and my photographs of mexico city will also be exhibited this weekend at a gallery show about urbanism and graffiti art. yay for life and art.

while digging up my photos of mexico city, i found an old self-portrait that i had really loved but never dared to show in crit. our situationist punk rock printmaking professor at the time was telling us about an artist who drew into the reverse side of fashion photos so that "wounds" would appear in the front, and i carved the e.e. cumming phrase 'to eat flowers, and not to be afraid' into this one. salvaje!

thursday morning exercise

"One should take care when fighting monsters, to not become a monster in the process."
-F. Nietszche

in that same spirit, one should take care when putting on clothing, to not become a clothing monster in the process.

but you can try

animal

this weekend

i listened to cat power and took some pictures in my room






and it rained on sunset boulevard

me, myself, and ikea candles

my car was towed this morning for being parked in front of a fire hydrant. i am successful at many things, but life is not one of them. head too caught up with dreaming. i rode the bus to the towing yard and aside from the unpleasant fine at the end of the bus ride, the day was pleasant. being warm and being in transit spaces are two things that make me feel alive and happy. i began reading cormac mccarthy's the road on the bus. a manifesto for a post-apocalyptic, post-beat-generation type of wandering.



i keep on wasting my stash of polaroid film on patches of light in my room. studies for a something something? i think i may want to make my next animation in the summer. in the meantime, i found a darkroom facility and my boss is showing me how to screenprint (ANARCHIST TSHIRTS HERE WE COME!). this week is a big drawing week - aren't they all? overall, i think i'm doing ok.

spent my saturday

dancing stupidly to the vaselines (frances mckee i love thee) and rediscovering how time is quiet. the day almost forgot it was halloween.

some thoughts on the ocean

palette of a cloudy day

it's rarely cloudy here. so much so, that the sight of overcast, gray like the particles of smog that make their way into your daily layer of sunscreen, becomes a pleasant surprise. the air is crisper. no longer blinded by the sun, the birds gather on telephone poles outside your apartment.

death by camera

the heat was unbearable. i was walking out onto my third floor balcony, gingerly peering to see if the pool had emptied so i could take my midday dip, when i saw him. six foot four, bleached blonde boiling lobster of a man sprawled out beside the pool. he wasn't dead, but he wasn't aware either, thanks to the earbuds planted in his ear. i crept back into my apartment and grabbed my polaroid. the camera clicked loudly, and i ran back before he could raise his head and see me, clutching the piece of developing film, victorious.

my fake plastic love

i started my second gig at the retoucher's today. clicking through the post-production process for a magazine photograph is frightening and perversely fascinating all at once. retouching seems to operate upon the assumption that we are all innately sexually oriented towards smooth, lustrous, and high-contrast surfaces. but if that were the case, wouldn't i want to fuck the shit out of this frank gehry building? wait, do i?

do you love me, now that i can dance?

i had this grand plan while cleaning out my studio to leave all of my unwanted prints in a box outside for anyone to claim as wall art, collage material, etc etc. and then i realized that to road to graduating with a photo degree is lined with embarrassment. there are some photographs, especially those hailing from your first few rolls of film, that should never be seen. recurrent themes include: ex-boyfriends, your feet, shadows, and "feminist concepts". at the same time, there are a lot of incipient ideas which, i think, i regret not pursuing further in my haste to achieve some sort of photographic literacy. i'll probably spend the next few months mulling over these.

self portrait of the artist on the eve of her 21st birthday

let's be honest. the negatives are shit because the vintage lightmeter i was using gave me a reading two stops too low. i printed them on a 3 filter, which strikes me as a cardinal sin in the church of ansel adams (side note: i thought about changing my facebook religious views to 'the zone system', but realized no one would find that funny). but it's not like these are photographs that i can reshoot, and they will still remain valuable to me because of their moment in time. just goes to show the beautiful images that i have produced in the past are not by accident, but by a deliberate and arduous process that typically goes shoot-catastrophe-reevaluate-reshoot. but what if we instilled an ethic of photographic process that can't be subject to this form of reiteration? that too has to answer to contingency? would roland barthes roll over in his grave?

d.f. in a nutshell

took this with my holga at the the insurgentes bus stop in d.f., whose recessed concrete plaza doubles as a skate park and marketplace. it contains a few of my favorite things: couples, blue skies, and the color orange