11 april 2009: heather loop

09 april 2009 jack z.

i love the unabashed insanity of children. that fun insanity that's really just a lack of inhibition that gets regrettably, eventually replaced by the true adult insanity that is obsession with what others think of us and our actions.

jack belongs to the zinsser dynasty. they are friends. talented, awesome people. those qualities are not dependent on each other, rather two separate and incredible things about them that i love. i am a jill of all trades for them, doing this and that ranging, from assistant teaching to plant watering to art photographing to dressing up like a gypsy and conducting candlelit rooftop tarot readings for giggling but strikingly career-focused eleven-year olds.

when it was little brother jack's turn, he looked into my eyes with all of the grave seriousness such a subject deserved and asked, "will i make it to the major leagues?".

i shot jack in the same school hallway where i shot his father, john, 2 months earlier. see that session by clicking here: ah, may as well make it a two-fer, since i didn't include the actual scan with typed print...

as usual, these are so much lovelier when you click on them to enlarge...

08 april 2009 maria (+diana)

07 april 2009: petersen

petersen playing the drums is as much, if not more, of a visual experience as it is an audio experience.

p.s. if you don't click on the photo to see it enlarged, you're not really seeing it...

monday, 06 april 2009: ann scobie

be a dear and click on the image to enlarge!

ah. when i see this image i wring my hands. i wring my hands because this picture was taken the last time i saw ann and that's too long ago and there is no reason. even when we didn't see each other often, we still sent birthday cards. but even that has trickled off and i just wring my hands at the way life sometimes drifts people apart.

i met ann fourteen years ago on a catering job in philadelphia. we'd been bused down there like cattle and stood in line with water pitchers in a sweltering tent, waiting to pour drinks for rich people. ann turned what would be a miserable situation into a standup routine, keeping all of us laughing and smiling. she continued to salvage many tough work situations, leaving bananas and sweet notes on my desk at the us open when she knew i was pulling all-nighters, sharing support hose secrets with me--always reminding me to take care of myself rather than get too swallowed up in the heartless corporate work machine that tried to chew us up and spit out zombies.

ann went on to become a very successful voice over artist, pictured here, through the glass window of her in-home recording booth.

people bristle over the apparent saccharinity of this scene. i wring my hands over that too, as this moment was a fleeting one, a wave hello to her boyfriend, who had just walked in the door and passed behind me.

yet even that misconception is okay. perhaps the saccharinity works. what a strange world we live in, ann, the voice of the martha stewart show and the oxygen network. that soothing or authoritative voice that transitions you from show to commercial, commercial to show, coming out of a 10 square foot soundproofed box within an apartment on the upper west side of manhattan.

they say a picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes, perhaps the wrong ones come through. photographers are generally terrible at editing their own images because they become too emotionally attached to each one. this is very true about me. i stubbornly chose this one for the series. think what you will.

05 april 2009: kevin lips

click on image to enlarge
one of my favorite portraits

saturday, 04 april 2009 t-bone

click on image to enlarge

sometimes there are so many words that there are actually none good enough to choose. therefore the margins remained blank. i think this was tbone's first show as 'hellbent hooker'. for a first show, the divey greenpoint bar was packed full. fresh from cuba, jade and i were still fuzzy, starry eyed and drinking cubalibres. hellbent hooker went on to thrill the crowd and possibly horrify the queens museum of art with their opener to 'those about to die salute you'

HELLBENT HOOKER - Long Black Train from Ben Chace on Vimeo.

03 april 2009: allison

my obligitory reminder: click on the photo to see it bigger. these are scanned prints that i ran through my old typewriter. viewing the text larger is rewarding!

for those of you just tuning in: i started posting this series of photographs to my blog in 2009, while i was still shooting it. the idea was to photograph a different person every day. this project spanned three months of lugging my big camera with me everywhere i went and obsessing over who would be my next subject. i intended it to function primarily as an exercise in constant shooting, in breaking down my personal taboo of asking people to be photographed, and for exploring spontaneous portraiture. I also hoped it would function, secondarily, as a self-portrait. As I've lagged sometimes months between sharing them here, suddenly, two years has elapsed. this time provides the distance to see that secondary function emerge at the forefront. when i flip through this series i see a time capsule.

i shot this portrait, along with a slew of others to come, at a bar in williamsburg called iona. i spent a lot of time there over the course of a couple of weeks, meeting jade's friends and waiting out an awkward relationship transition at home. i didn't know allison at all. i knew her so little that i invented the words to type on her photo. i had no idea she'd become my neighbor, that's she'd sell me girl scout cookies and offer to deliver them in improvised uniform, that we would cook together and vent our troubles at my kitchen table.

to see more of this series, click here.

01 april 2009: miss sarah brown

there are certain moments when you are struck by love. especially when you are just falling into said deep feeling, these moments are poignant realizations of admiration. usually they stem from small gestures that signify something greater, something important to you. maybe it's something you've knowingly searched for. maybe it's something you never knew you wanted until that moment. whatever the trigger, for me, these moments slow the pace of the world and heighten all senses.

behold, a moment at freddy's back room, roughly two years ago. this place no longer exists, having been demolished to make way for luxury condos or shopping centers or some such nonsense that none of us really have the funds to support.

sarah brown used to host a reading series there, monthly. it was possibly the best activity in all of new york (this statement biased by my own interests of course). rather than read from well written books or highly praised poetry, the readers would read from the ratty pages of their own teenage diaries. requirement: what you read must be so horrifyingly embarrassing as to make you physically cringe. hence, the title of the event. CRINGE. i cannot express in words what hilarious fun this was to watch. The comedy came from empathy, from having been there. and oh, was i there. i have 4 boxes full of faux paint-splattered, hello kitty, puffy rainbows, rhinestone-studded, behind lock-(albeit pickable by bobby pin) and-tiny-keyed tomes of cringe-worthy words to attest to this. and finally, i had something to do with them.

over the course of roughly a year, i laughed so hard i found it necessary to smack my fist on the table. on a few occasions i downed a pint of grapefruit vodka and soda to fuel the courage to stand behind the mic and cringe myself, reading ridiculous histrionics over ex-gay boyfriends and jaw-droppingly heinous 'poetry' about affairs with chefs. really bad bad stuff. but getting behind that mic and hearing others slapping the table and roaring with laughter easily constituted a year's worth of therapy. we've all been there, and we can all laugh about it together.

when sarah compiled entries from readers from freddy's into a book (Cringe: Teenage Diaries, Journals and Abandoned Rock Operas) she included a few of my 'gems' in the body of the book and a whole lot of anonymous excerpts and miscellaneous scrawlings and samples collaged into the interim pages. dreams about george michael written on garfield stationary. reports of rick springfield on hello kitty red and white. hearing that these entries had been selected for publication was at once exciting and horrifying, but having experienced the joy of laughing at myself in public (really cathartic!), i decided not to fret.

there was, unfortunately, a wet towel dampening the experience of cringe in my life, and it came in the form of a boyfriend who shall remain nameless, who was less than thrilled with my 'exhibitionist' activities. sharing these entries in public advertised the fact that in my 30+ years, i had actually shared love and lust with someone prior to him. the horror. he refused my invitations to join me even on nights i wasn't reading to see how fun and harmless it all was. he picked huge fights with me upon my return from cringe nights and gave me the silent treatment for days. he refused to accompany me to the publication party of the book and not surprisingly, awaited my return from said really fun and awesome event where i met so many great people and felt so proud to be a part of, with a fight. cringe became a bittersweet night, and so, i started to go in secret, just to avoid the fights, ridiculously sneaking around as though i was having an illicit affair or sleeping with prostitutes.

clearly this was not the man for me.

so let's return from my bitter rant (sorry!), to the moment you see pictured above. i've just fallen head over heels in love with jade townsend. freddy's backroom is so packed for cringe that we sit on the floor behind the readers, holding hands. as sarah introduces the next reader, i look at jade. he is laughing. he is there with me. and i'm so much in love.

31 march 2009

it's been a while since i've posted any of these images from my '98 pictures of 98 people' series. since i'm so busy/uninspired over here, seems like a good time to continuing sharing them.

30 marzo: twins

on cubana air from havana to nassau.

29 marzo: che

remember to click on the photo for detail...
last night in cuba...

28 marzo 2009: la esquina caliente

27 marzo 2009: policia especializada

approaching strangers to request permission to photograph them? difficult. cops? even harder. cop in communist country? even harder. such is the power of lust...

24 marzo, wednesday: oliver jeffers

one year since cuba creeps up. one year since jade creeps up. and i'm just posting these now. return to cuba? ojala!

el 23 de marzo: la casa de juana

22 de marzo: sunday

21 marzo: sunday. jade. mi vida

i hesitate before i post this because i want to write a long post about how i fell in love. but time does not allow. so i move forward. another day, i promise.

20 marzo 20009: saturday--the only surfer in guanabo, cuba

i feel like i've posted this before. because it was my protype--the first of the series that i printed and experimented with the typing. apologies if i'm being redundant, but anyway, this is where it falls in the timeline of the project. i love this one.

19 marzo 2009: rez

still with the sting of a midnight jellyfish on our backs,
we spend the stormy day on a cuban beach