Detail - Slipcase and Top of Book. Click on photo above to see the whole story.
The folks over at Legion Paper, the parent company of Moab, took a liking to my hand-made portfolio and featured it on the Moab Facebook Fan page. Made with Ballistics cloth, Rayon and Japanese hand made fabric, the portfolio pages were printed on Moab Lasal Matte 235.
And, as nice as the detail photos look, the inside of the book is much prettier, it has my photography in it.
Fifty years ago, Calvin Communications, a leading corporate industrial film producer of the 40s and 50s, created this short film as a spoof of their own corporate work. Using their regular actors, Calvin (whose clients included DuPont, Goodyear, General Mills and Westinghouse), would regularly produce parodies that were shown at company get togethers.
This film from the Prelinger Archives opens with a commentary that says, it is a groundbreaking replacement for the high cost of original, creative thinking. Some things never change.
(References here were from Wikipedia – yeah,yeah, I know, not the best references! – and Steve Hoffman Music Forums)
Double, double toil and trouble; Fire, burn and caldron bubble.
A Chinese lady came up to me in the Union Square market last Monday morning, pointed down and asked, in broken English, how much? I don’t have a clue what gave her the idea I worked at this particular kiosk at the market, but it gave me pause to look down at a group of pumpkins with long, wild stems, as if they had been torn off the vine instead of cut. No prices.
Now, I wanted to know, too. How much? They were two bucks apiece. I took the three most interesting stems (almost more important than the pumpkins themselves) and bagged them so the stems didn’t break on the way back to the studio. Then, I stopped and told the lady how much they were, but she looked at me in a funny kind of way – I don’t think she understood me or, maybe she’d already gotten over her pumpkin jones.
Vicki says these pumpkins remind her of Shakespeare’s witches in Macbeth.
A dark Cave. In the middle, a Caldron boiling. Thunder. (Shakespeare)
Happy Halloween. (Not Shakespeare )
Sweeping Leaves, Mustard Greens
Now that I’m moving onto this dark thing…
Black backgrounds are so completely different to shoot on. The black just wraps itself around the subject matter. Where white is wholesome, clean, crisp and elegant, and never loses my subject, black is erotic, deep, surrounding and foreboding (but not in a creepy kind of way), and can swallow my subject like a black hole.
Recently a friend asked if I was tired of shooting vegetables and the market. No, not really. It’s challenging to find the interesting and unusual in the familiar; it’s not always easy. And what I find fascinating is, there is a front and a back to these studio subjects that I am sure is not intentional, but purely by coincidence. The most involvement I have on set is getting the produce to stand up. With very few exceptions (like Green Market in the Studio #4), I don’t style. If a stem is broken or a leaf torn or eaten by a passing insect, I don’t retouch it. It’s about real food, just as I bought it. The only difference is, I shoot it before I eat it.
If you like arugula, broccoli rabe and bitter greens, you’ll love this very simple recipe for wilted mustard greens.
Wilted Mustard Greens
1 bunch of mustard greens (about a pound or a 2″ circumference of stalks when tied with a rubber band – that’s about what I had)
2 cloves of garlic pushed through a press
3 or 4 tablespoons of dashi (at about 1:5 dashi to water) or vegetable or chicken broth
1 tablespoon of olive oil
1 tablespoon of sesame oil
Okay, here’s how: Tear off the leaves from the stems and thick veins (and discard those guys) and wash and dry them as you would lettuce. In a large frying pan or sauté pan heat up the olive oil on a medium/high heat and add the garlic and brown (about a minute). Add the dashi or broth to the pan and add the greens, tossing gently for about a minute or so (not much more, or you find it’s cooked down to nothing). Remove from the burner, drizzle on the sesame oil, add salt and pepper to taste and toss. Put it on a nice plate and eat. Serves 2 to 4, depending upon how much you love your greens.
And don’t forget to share.
Grilled Steak on Stakes
Addendum – October 27, 2009 – Calumet Photo selected this image as a Photo of the Week. Nice start.
I built a patio over the summer with Vicki. With the help of Tim and a neighborhood kid, we moved the six thousand pounds of sand, gravel and pavers by hand that had been dropped on the front sidewalk by the delivery guys, to the garden about 50 feet away. Over the next 4 weeks the two of us tilled, excavated, leveled, filled the hole with gravel and sand and laid stones until we had a lovely, small patio in the middle of our (Vicki’s really) garden. No war stories. No injuries. A perfect execution by a couple of DIYers.
What’s this got to do with the photo?
It’s the nails, or stakes as they call ‘em, that were used to hold the stones in place. They’re huge. They’re more than twelve inches long and a quarter inch thick with a rough, galvanized finish on them and every time I drove a stake into the ground, they grew more beautiful and interesting. When we completed the project, I went out and purchased a dozen of the stakes and they sat in a red bucket on the floor of the hallway for weeks until the idea came: steaks on stakes. I yanked apart the palettes the pavers came on and let the large, four inch, wood blocks sit in the weather for a month. Now I had the stakes, the wood for a fire and an idea. The idea progressed along, during the move and while making phone calls and sending mailers, until it came to fruition last Thursday, when it all ended up in front of the camera. It came together quickly; it’s what happens when my neurotransmitters slam those molecules into their receptor sites and then I spend a few nights sleeping on the idea. My axons and dendrites get all excited, and then with a steak from Pedro the butcher (with the patience of a saint) at Los Paisanos around the corner, it all began.
Wood. Stakes. Steak. Fire. Boy, that was fun.
I have so much of my new work on white, it’s time to start a black series. This is number one.
3:24PM, 9/25/2009 - Outcast Bean
As always, there are many ways to skin a cat (bad metaphor – I have two cats), or should I say capture a bean.
If there is any one piece of advice I can give about shooting in the studio, it’s don’t quit when you think you’ve got the shot. Hey, it’s digital. It’s not like you’re going to run out of film or rack up a huge lab bill. You’ve already done that by buying a nice digital camera. First, I cover the preliminary set with a point and shoot camera, then shoot until the set has been covered top to bottom, upside down and backwards. It’s quick, it’s easy and there are hidden ideas floating around that get overlooked when burdened with a tripod and tethered to my iMac capture workstation. Then I hook up the big guns and get down to business.
This anthropomorphic alternate to Greenmarket in the Studio #4 was influenced by another photographer’s bean image I have seen in an on line portfolio, but can’t remember who or where. That photo was a group of bean tips simply plated in geometric formation. Well done and quite beautiful, that image has stayed with me, but not the photographer’s name (sorry! Maybe you’ll read this and set the record straight).
Anyway, enough with the beans. What else is out there to shoot?
3:04PM, 09/25/2009 - 3 Beans in a Bowl
Finally, my first Union Square produce photo shot in the new studio.
I was waiting to get settled before capturing these images of wax beans (crappy name, but that’s what the sign said), also known as yellow, heirloom or golden beans, and almost missed my chance. Except for the folks with the big ORGANIC banner, none of the vendors had them. Wax beans (yellow green beans as far as I’m concerned) have these really gorgeous yellow to green transitions at the tips. When I started to play around with the curved ones it looked like steam coming up from the bowl, so I went with it. Maybe this will make it to the portfolio.
Who said legumes can’t be sexy…?
10:35AM, 8/31/2009 Assorted Mini Peppers at Union Square Market, NYC
Done. I’ve moved in to the new studio. Six trips in Vicki’s Suburu Legacy station wagon with Vicki at the wheel. Without my girlfriend as driver and watchdog, not only would I still be moving, I’d probably have been to the tow pound on 12th Avenue as part of the deal. After all, who was going to stay with the car to keep it from being towed? Vicki. And who was going to keep an eye on the equipment while loading and unloading? Vicki. Who forgot to ask Vicki if she could help with the move?
Me.
Duh. Thank you, Vicki.
I’ve already started unpacking and managed to shoot two jobs over the weekend as well: one for Lincoln Center, and one for AJ, my friends, James and Andrea’s Jazz/Soul band.
Feels like I’m off to a good start.
Second place (it’s good to be number 2, we try harder) 2012 Hasselblad Masters Finalist D.A.Wagner is a Brooklyn boy who took up photography after finding his father’s old twin lens reflex roll film camera in the attic. After a stint at the Fashion Institute of Technology he jumped into assisting for a few notable still life and fashion photographers and then, being an impatient sort, launched his own career. He’s shot everything from big budget, large scale video productions to special effects imagery and everything in between. For the moment, he has returned to his roots, eschewing the old David Wagner for D.A. and shooting still life and editorial projects that keep him closer to home. Brooklyn, that is. He changed his mind. He’s now working out of a 10,000 square foot studio just outside the Lincoln Tunnel and thinks big projects are just way too much fun to pass up.
It may have been Bauhaus architect Mies van der Rohe who said, “Less is more.” But it took D.A.Wagner to do more with even less.
If you’re curious about the old David, click here to see the somewhat secret archive page:
