While working in my archive, I felt like these two images went well together. So, I did a quick diptych in Adobe Lightroom.

On the left, 5,000 revelers take to San Diego’s Mission Bay during Floatopia. On the right, a fundraising dinner at a home on Country Club Drive in La Jolla.

Both Will and I are in grad school (he’s at Ohio’s visual communications program, while I’m at a all over the place journalism program at CUNY) and are swamped and are failing at posting. But for good reason readers! Look at my first audio slideshow. I spent hours messing with the audio, selecting photos, and then timing everything.
I used soundslides instead of Final Cut, just to test out new software. The interface was actually fun and mostly headache free. And even though you have to host the project yourself (opposed to uploading it to Vimeo, as a Final Cut project would allow you to do), they made a great little tool to help embed projects.

My beat for school is Lower Manhattan. I picked this a few weeks before Occupy Wall Street started. Initially, I thought I’d be writing about “the yuppies” but the protest changed everything. A roommate and my next door neighbor were very passionate and down at the site of the protest regularly, often staying the night. I found out after a brief chat with my neighbor that he was the oldest overnight protester. Naturally, I asked if I could talk to him about his experiences.

Turn on the captions for a little more info here and there. Or, to see it bigger go to my website.

San Diego-based photographer Tim Mantoani has finally put his years-long photographic project, Behind Photographs: Archiving Photographic Legends, into book form.

I asked Mantoani about the project a year ago this week, and it’s great to see that he didn’t run out of the gigantic, expensive Polaroid film he uses.

In my Q&A, I suggested that the project would be great to throw on Kickstarter.com. A year later, he’s used Kickstarter to raise almost $13,000 — with 17 days to go! Ergo, for planting the seed of that idea, I think I’m due a chunk of that change. Almost certainly. Maybe.

I love photos of photographers. I can’t wait till our library gets a copy!

I looked through the nearly 5,000 photos I took that are published on the site. There were some surprises (I took a photo of Calvin Trillin, a writer I now adore but at time had to ask him to spell his name for me; A photo of a roommate before we were roommmates or even friends). There were plenty of photos I don’t recall taking, or even the event where it was taken.

Here are some of my favorites, from oldest to newest. There are some photos I like for aesthetics sake, some photos I like for a memento of nights that didn’t feel like I was working, photos I like because of the people in them. PMC, it was real. Thank you.

From the very first event I shot. John Bartlett before his runway show, New York Fashion Week 2009.

Don King and TI at Inauguration weekend in DC.

Grace Jones. Another one I didn’t know at the time. I should have known it was big deal with the model’s expression in the background.

Topshop opening. Stayed up the night before, catching some zzz’s in the bathtub before running over to hang off the side of the building to get a shot of the line.

I have never seen such a reaction at a red carpet before. People went WILD for Dolly.

Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish and Nomika Zion. I read about Dr. Izzeldin in a New York Times article about losing his three daughters in Gaza when he was treating patients in Israel. Such an honor to meet him.

Waris Ahuwalia.

Venerable U Agga Nyana, Venerable U Pylnar Zawta, Venerable U Gawsita. Screening at HBO about the Burmese monk uprising. Sat with a co-worker and Albert Maysles.

Audience spill out after New York Photo Festival.

I love what a good sport Ross is being about the obvious fanboy.

This was a strange night.

I shot this entire event on manual focus without realizing it. Fortunately, this photo came out great.

Tory Burch at the First Fashion Night Out.

Dick Waggoner from Texas!

Another strange night. This time at Fendi.

I’ve kept up taking photos and tweeting up a storm about the #OccupyWallStreet protest down in the Financial District for class in my graduate journalism program. The protests have been going on since September 17th and as far as I can tell this sustained overnight occupation is first of its kind in Lower Manhattan.

The good folks (hiii Bokeen and Miz Chartreuse) of Consumption Junction got in touch and interviewed me for their show about the protests to get a reporters take on it. Check out the podcast.

I slept here for six months.

I’m going to miss the wallpaper in my old room. Who knows how long it had been since that yellowed pattern was banished from the rest of the house. Thirty years? Fifty? It covers one wall — the only wall — in an awkward space coming off a short dead-end hallway in the middle of the house I lived in for most of a year. Beaten back to this refuge, the wallpaper disappears behind two massive heating units. In front of it, someone crafted a creaky wooden platform. Foam pads cover it like sedimentary layers. This was my bed.

My roommate pointed out more than once how much “artist-cred” I got by living in a closet. But it didn’t feel small. It had all sorts of hidden space that made it easy — nooks and crannies on the exposed wall beams to store things, room for large boxes underneath the platform. And a short hallway served as my office and doubled the size of my living quarters. I could edit for hours without any true sense of time or weather. It felt a lot like living in the analog darkroom I used as a student. I did relish in giving the brief tour to guests. I would lie down on my bed to prove I could fit.

Almost two months ago, I left San Diego. The morning I moved out, I stopped halfway through pulling my shirts off the rack to photograph my room while it still looked occupied. My green dress shirt hung exposed. It was my go-to shirt for high society assignments. Those gigs amounted to rent — closet money. It wasn’t my nicest shirt, but it was dark enough to not bring attention to myself while I photographed. And I could wear it straight out of the dryer without the wrinkles being unbearable. I don’t own an iron.

Unlike the metaphorical closet, mine was liberating. Living there let me keep doing what I love in one of California’s most expensive neighborhoods. But it is a chapter I don’t plan to revisit. And I think the day I moved in was the day I resolved to bring my craft to a level where my frugality was more of a hobby and less of a necessity. Hence my move to Ohio, land of plenty, where roughly the same rent affords me a room with a window. Granted, I’m swimming less, but I’m taking plenty of photos.

There was a protest in Lower Manhattan this afternoon, against Wall Street and capitalism in general. As Wall Street falls in my beat for my journalism program (more on that later, promise) I biked down with my camera and notepad.
The organizers were expecting 20,000 but hoping for 90,000. The police expected 5,000. From what I saw the police were much closer in their guess. The protest is suppose to be in the Arab Spring tradition, with an extended occupation and protest. I’m going back Monday morning to see if that actually transpires.

This is a quick and dirty edit for expedients sake.

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama wait backstage before being introduced at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington, D.C., April 30, 2011. Press Lead Advance Brandon Lepow and Trip Director Marvin Nicholson, right, stand with the President and First Lady. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

Why doesn’t the White House press office release more photos?

Take the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, for example. In the photo immediately preceding that sequence, Obama is a tuxedoed man-about-town. In the next, he is schooling National Security Advisor Tom Donilon. One more photo and Bin Laden is dead. The White House Flickr photostream makes President Obama look like James Bond.

President Barack Obama makes a point during one in a series of meetings in the Situation Room of the White House discussing the mission against Osama bin Laden, May 1, 2011. National Security Advisor Tom Donilon is pictured at right. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

If we saw more images from within the White House that day, would that photo from the situation room still be the defining image of the mission that killed Osama Bin Laden? Would a real journalist take the same photo?

In an excellent piece on NY Times’ Lens Blog recently, Stephen Crowley calls the White House press office “nervous, distrustful and risk-averse” and cautions new organizations to maintain a distinction between photojournalism and carefully controlled visuals.

“The media will not survive without investing in journalism. And democracy cannot function properly if we settle for the scripted performance — or if we grow unable to distinguish the scripted from the real.”

He also mentions the sentiment of his colleague, photographer Ken Jarecke, that the public is entitled to each and every photo frame out of White House photographer Pete Souza’s camera.

That is not likely to happen any time soon, but what if instead of 7 photos a day (that was the number released from May 1, the day Bin Laden was killed), we got 70? Is that too much to ask for? Granted, security is an issue. But is that why more photos aren’t seen?

Editing is a powerful tool for narrative, and naturally the White House doesn’t want to cede that power. The more images it shows, the more the public has the ability to curate their own experience of our government at its highest level.

When Souza accepted the gig as White House photographer in early 2009, he wanted to make clear what his role within the administration would be.

“My discussions with the transition team were mostly about making sure the function of the White House photography office would be to visually document the presidency for the sake of history. That was important to me and to them.”

In practice, however, the public receives a carefully controlled selection of images on a daily basis. Inevitably, the photos released are chosen for their immediate impact (usually countered by sharp analysis on BagNewsNotes.com) in the news cycle, and not their historical value. In this way, White House photography is going beyond preserving history by steering the collective memory toward the icons of its choosing.

Maybe years from now, or hopefully sooner, the White House will release a wealth of photos for a larger picture of the presidency. This is the only way  we can examine deeper and richer narratives outside of the single, immediate and self-serving one cultivated by the White House press office.

The Observer loves to call me when I’m about to teach at 3rd Ward. When I last shot for them, I got to rush out of class to go shoot. This time, however, I had to shoot in the Upper Eastside (Manhattan) and then teach in Bushwick (Brooklyn) 30 minutes later. For non-New Yorkers, let me explain – that doesn’t sound remotely conceivable.

But I made it work. I biked furiously through the commuters trying to get home, up and over a bridge and tore through pothole-ridden streets in Brooklyn and made it in 29 minutes. My legs felt incredibly weird the next day. Possibly because the 2nd half of this shoot took place before 8 A.M. the next morning, for which I decided to also bike.

The story is about CUNY board member Jeffrey Weisenfeld who blocked playwright Tony Kushner from getting a honorary degree because of his views on Israel. The subsequent citywide backlash and outrage caught CUNY unaware and propelled this story to dizzying (local) heights. This was particularly of interest as I’m going to be at CUNY in the fall. Also because of my interest in the Israel-Palestinian conflict and its repercussions in the states. It’s pretty fascinating when a Jewish playwright can be blocked by a Jewish board member over his “extremist” views on Israel, which really top out at protesting the settlement policy in the Palestinian territories.

Weisenfeld, however, said to a New York Times reporter that the Palestinians were “People who worship death for their children are not human.” So there’s that. The decision was uninamously reversed at an emergency meeting.

Here are some shots that I’m CERTAIN that the Observer would have run, if there had just been the space.