Posts Tagged: Brisbane Graphic Arts Museum
The psilocybin skateboard
He said
he was bored
and, the day being hot and slow,
I understood that.
And he said
he was on mushrooms
and, being a recovering alcoholic,
I smiled quietly at that.
(Photographed in Brisbane, California in September, 2020. See my other work here.)
And, lo, there was a bird
And, lo, there was a bird
outside the picture window
of the living room
where my father-in-law died.
It was a day of peace
and happiness.
I was entertaining a friend
with dinner in the living room,
and the bird was
just being its bird self.
It had nothing to do
with what happened
to my father-in-law
in that living room,
but being there
made me think of him
and whether in some way
he was in the bird
and looking in
on the home of the life
he left behind.
(Photographed in Brisbane, California in September, 2020. See my other work here.)
My week of shooting, 28 April 2019
Codename: McDonald’s Hamburger Eyes
Because I live about two miles south of the San Francisco city and county line, my photographic work continues to evolve and to benefit from the rich cultural, religious, and ethnic diversity of this area. It also benefits from living with two loveably-insane cats…
- This week I got a big boost professionally from Hamburger Eyes, a highly-regarded Los Angeles photo magazine that has just published some of my cat photographs in its latest issue. The photos are from my ongoing “Kitty Noir” photo series about my cats Kuroneko and Mikadzuki, which you can see here.
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Thursday I stopped into a Daly City McDonald’s for a snack, and congratulated myself for deciding at the last second to walk inside instead using the drive-thru…
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As I left that McDonald’s, this woman asked me for a light and some change. I gave her both, and felt a kind of peace and comfort while standing in front of her. Visually she reminded me of CCH Pounder.
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On Friday “Avengers: Endgame” opened nationwide at a theater near you, but I’m sure you knew that. Huge American movies like this follow us everywhere. They watch us as much as we watch them. This photo is also on Flickr.
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Saturday in Brisbane I encountered a Sikh and his family. And I think once you’ve photographed a suburban Sikh dad who’s wearing coordinated shades of pink, you’ve reached some kind of visual pinnacle. He is also on Flickr.
That’s it for now. Until next time see my other work here and here.
Remember: people and the world are more beautiful, odd, and interesting than you think, you just have to stop and look long enough to notice.
My week of shooting, 03 March 2019
a.k.a. ‘My WEAK of shooting’…
In terms of photographing people, my week was frustrating. I felt like my reflexes and timing were off, my heart wasn’t completely into this work I love so dearly, and that my Nikon D90 is plotting against me in service to the vast global machine intelligence planning to overthrow its human masters. I’m hoping this is merely a very short phase I’m going through. I missed a lot of photos that would have been far better than the images below because I was too slow or too indifferent.
Anyway, here’s what I have for you this week…
- On Monday in San Francisco I had breakfast at the WORST fucking diner in the world. At the Silver Crest Donut Shop it cost me almost $19 for a bottled Coke, cheeseburger, and fries. The fries tasted of stale motor oil and the burger tasted of mammals not native to our planet. It is a sad place I will never revisit…
- On Tuesday while my wife played with our cat Kuro-chan I photographed the scene from an unexpected angle. I photograph our cats constantly. See more of them here and here.
- On Thursday I photographed this animated fellow and his dog at my local Grocery Outlet. He was very nice, the dog was friendly and cute…
- A fellow Brisbane resident, who wears that propeller beanie everywhere he goes. He says it’s his trademark, and as a fashion statement I think he pulls it off quite nicely…
And that’s it for this week. Until next seek see my other work here and here.
Remember: people and the world are more beautiful, odd, and interesting than you think, you just have to stop and look long enough to notice.
My week of shooting, 24 February 2019
Codename: Pink Tuba Fire…
Welcome to the first installment of a new weekly feature here on Brisbane Graphic Arts Museum. It’s an ongoing showcase of photographs from my growing body of photojournalism and street photography work, featuring what I think are the best and/or most interesting photos I shot during a given week. I hope you enjoy my work, or get some value from it, and will come back here each week to see how I’ve been seeing our world.
Here we go…
- On Tuesday I unintentionally unnerved this adorable little girl who was walking past my house with her grandmother…
- On Wednesday there was this kid in a shopping cart at a Japanese supermarket in San Mateo where my wife and I were getting some groceries…
- On Thursday Brisbane’s only public house, the Brisbane Inn, caught fire on the top floor and burned for a while. See more photographs of the incident here.
- On Saturday I encountered this fuzzy pink kid at the public unveiling of a raccoon statue in a small park here in Brisbane. You can also see this photo in this collection…
- Also on Saturday, I came across tuba player rehearsing in a shopping center parking with his banda group for a gig they were playing later in the evening…
And that’s it for this week. Until next seek see my other work here and here.
Remember: people and the world are more beautiful, odd, and interesting than you think, you just have to stop and look long enough to notice.
Be the moon…
Nocturnes,
nighttime,
short lives,
long crime,
the moon is the vampire
because the sun is afraid of the dark.
Be the moon.
(Brisbane, California 2018. See my other work here and here.)
Supergirl on the Fourth of July did not fly away
Superheroes have childhoods too, you know…
You can be anything in America, and anything can be you. To even put the costume on you have to believe somewhere in even the smallest part of your little girl’s heart that you can some day be a woman who can fly. I like to think this child’s mother gently held her daughter’s hand to keep her from flying too early, before she was ready to see our sloppy, maniacal, perilous world from above.
Because we all in our hearts once believed we could fly, until something in life changed and our quest for human flight died. I hope that never happens to this little one, and that one day she knows how lucky and privileged I was to meet Supergirl in a supermarket parking lot…
(Grocery Outlet, San Francisco, California 2018. See my other work here and here.)
Goodnight, America…
…I leave you with this.
You don’t have the right to look away…
(Brannan Street @ 5th Street, San Francisco, California 2018. See my other work here and here.)
Prelude to summer’s cauldron…
“It would shock you too…”
“…the things we used to do on grass.”
(Brisbane, California 2018. See my other work here and here. XTC rules.)
Mother days
Yeah, I know, Mother’s Day is quasi-holiday that is way too commercialized. But that doesn’t mean we can’t legitimately set aside one day per year to honor our mums for bringing us into this world and then doing their best not to fuck everything up after that. Motherhood is hard work, a lifetime of it. It’s 24/7 for at least 18 years but really it’s from the day you’re born until the day one of you dies. And for the rest of their life whoever remains has to do whatever it takes to keep from falling completely apart emotionally.
It’s vicious, it’s cruel, it’s love, and it’s life itself. If asked I bet most mothers would say they wouldn’t trade one good, great, bad, or horrible second of raising their children for anything. I hope that includes your mom.
To celebrate this day of Eggs Benedict, mimosas, and fresh-cut flowers I present a small gallery of photographs I’ve taken in the past few years of moms and their kids. I hope you enjoy it, and see the beauty and edginess in these people who share a human bond like no other…
Brisbane, California, July 2015
Kagurazaka, Tokyo, Japan, November 2015
Sierra Point Yacht Club, Brisbane, California, September 2016
Clarion Alley, San Francisco, March 2017
Nijiya Market, Japantown, San Francisco, July 2017
(Photographed in Tokyo, Japan, and Brisbane and San Francisco, California. See my other work here and here.)