* the camera roll *

once in a while i’ll watch this scene and just giggle like a little girl.  the single best one-camera steadicam scene ever shot in the history of filmmaking.  3 minutes, from the car keys to henny youngman, with everything in between.  hundreds of extras, all timed to hit their marks perfectly.  just thinking about the coordination involved in producing this scene makes me dizzy.

enjoy!

these thoughts from stephen mayes kinda sums up a lot of how i feel about my former photo life:

http://www.jenshaas.com/blog/2009/05/26/world-press-photo-470214-pictures-later/

i would always ask myself this question back when i was a photojournalist:  ”was i shooting for the general public?  or was i shooting for photo judges?”  and to be honest, it was sometimes tough to admit the truth to myself.

i guess we all sometimes get caught up in the buzz of peer recognition and glory.  as photographer/artists, we’re naturally an egotistical bunch.  perhaps the approval we seek trail back to when we were schoolkids trying to please our moms with our fingerpaintings.  so now all grown up, we seek affirmation from our peers thru contests, grants, magazine covers.

i remember this one moment back when i was shooting conflict photography, when i was sent to pakistan to cover the brouhaha the weeks right after 9/11.  i was part of a scrum of journos sent to a refugee camp near the town of quetta right on the border of afghanistan.  afghan families were fleeing the fighting in and around kandahar, and after days and nights of nomadic wandering through the desert, would find themselves huddled inside 6×9-foot white tents with the letters “UNHCR” scrawled on the side.  the desert wind would cut thru these tents, scattering fine sand particles everywhere.  hungry babies crying, dirt in your eyes, all your earthly belongings piled into the back of an old repurposed soviet-era truck…

so imagine, if you will, you’re one of these said afghan refugees sitting inside your new 6×9 white tent of a home.  all of a sudden a gaggle of foreign journalists come tumbling out of an air-conditioned bus, making a beeline straight to you, and start snapping away as if you were the beckhams, tripping over themselves, inches away from your face with their overused 16-35mm dummy-wides.  but even worse, there doing that to your womenfolk, your kids, your mother.

i remember standing back, watching this scene play itself out.  there was the big international award-winning photog shooting for time mag, the big international pulitzer-prize winning photog for The Newspaper of Record, the big international wire photographer with her war scarf.  all of them just piled on top of this shocked afghan family.

this scene sure was a recipe for a nod in the world press book.  maybe POYi.

and i had this realization…  was this really it?  ever since i was in photoj school, i had dreamt of shooting international war coverage alongside my idols.  and here it was, that moment.  but it was thoroughly unsatisfying, if not downright troubling.

yeah, i know, there’s pressures from the editor, from your competition, to get THE picture.  there’s reputations to live up to.  and if you’re a freelancer, future assignments depend on what you deliver now, not to mention the numerous new clients to be had if you were to win an award or two.  a picture in a photo annual equals money in the bank.

funny thing that was mentioned in that stephen mayes piece about photog copying each other stylistically and content-wise.  i guess it can be translated to the broader field of photography-at-large.  so much fashion involved in photograph — the fashion of the ring flash, the fashion of the so-called “dave hill effect”, the fashion of the POYi winners circa 1999, the fashion of the hand-of-god toning (1970s and 2000s), the fashion of the tilt-shift…

so cliquey, this photography thing.

i think tears for fears is one of the most underrated bands from the 80s.  them and siouxsie and the banshees.  here’s “pale shelter” from their first album.

enjoy.

so i was watching newshour a few days back, and they had this segment on this freelancers union.  here’s their site: –> HERE

pretty useful, given that so many of us are becoming freelancers.  hell, seems like 1/3 of the entire population in san francisco is either a freelancer or “consultant.”  how else do you explain the army of people sitting on their asses in coffee shops and parks during the middle of the day on weekdays.  and they’re not bums either, because no bum i know can afford macbook pro laptops.  or if they are bums, they’ve got a pretty good panhandling racket.

but this freelancers union mostly cut us deals on inexpensive health care.  not shabby, mind you, because we all need our vicodin.  but i don’t expect them to negotiate my day rates or help with my estimates.  

digging deeper into the union’s website, seems like they’re really only active in NYC.  i bet they’re all in brooklyn.

ok, it’s 1:00 am, and i can’t get to sleep.  so i’m sitting here with my laptop, and rambo: first blood part II is on cable.  i haven’t seen this flick in, ooh, about two decades.  really makes me miss the reagan era.  back then, a magazine day rate was probably really worth something.

watching the flick, i noticed this actor:

he’s british actor/director/playwright steven berkoff.  at left as general orlov in octopussy, at right as victor maitland in beverly hills cop.  in rambo he was stallone’s nemesis lieutenant colonel podovsky of the soviet army.  

as a teenager in the 80s, his face is not unfamiliar to me.  i mostly remember him from beverly hills cop, because i frigging loved that movie when it came out.  i forgot that he was also a bond villain.  

he’s definitely a google candidate, filed under “what ever happened to…”  victor maitland was such a great bad guy.  why he didn’t reprise his role in any of the 17 lethal weapons is beyond me.  i fault the casting director for that one.

fishing thru his wikipedia bio, turns out he’s still quite prolific — mostly in the respectable london theatre scene.  no doubt he took his 80s villain money and ran back to the london east end.  

** OOH OOH!!!   he just got blown up by rambo via a head-to-head helicopter game of chicken and an rpg in the face… **

his wikipedia bio lists his birth name as leslie steven berks.  now, “leslie berks” or “steven berks” is a perfectly fine name for an actor.  but i wonder what the thought process was behind his metamorphosis into “steven berkoff”?  

i mean, it’s not a bad name.  ”berkoff” hints at a pan-euro heritage, somewhat similar to that confusingly euro-ish accent christiane amanpour has (not quite british, not quite anything specific, just “european”).  no doubt “berkoff” does something similar for the former mr. berks.  i’m sure cultural ambiguity makes for lots of varied acting gigs.

so mr. berkoff’s name change gets me thinking about branding and why people change their names to something more commercially acceptable to their industries.  seems that lots of people do that.  ralph lauren was born ralph lifshitz, but there was no way the upper east side set was going to pay top dollar for waspy haberdashery from a semite.  

photogs do that too.  lots of em.  and many seem to go by one name.  i know a photog in chicago named dimitre.  hell, some photogs just double up their first name (horst p. horst).  there’s also a local sf photog who goes by anon, although i think it’s actually a two-photog operation.  pretty efficient to compress two full names into one word.  

maybe i should change my name.  john lee is a stupidly common name.  take one of the most common male first names in the english-speaking world, and jam it next to the absolutely most common last name in asia.  there were four john lees in my high school graduating class.   i was once mistaken for a john lee who headed a local korean street gang (i’m not korean, btw).

just try googling “john lee” and see what you come up with.  luckily, i usually come up around #3 or #4, and i’m usually above john lee hooker.  

but the problem happens when you google “john lee photographer”.  some farm high school senior portrait/wedding photog from rural iowa comes up.  he’s figured out how to work the google crawlers to his advantage.  luckily, he seems to only get these benefits when one adds “photographer” beside his name.  otherwise i usually come up before him.  

i’ve had a couple of issues pop up so far because of this google mixup.  i’ve had an offended nyc photo editor sternly proclaim to my former agent that they didn’t think it was funny that he was introducing high school senior portrait photographers to them, only for the editor to realize a few minutes later that she had googled the iowa john lee instead of me.  mistake cleared up, and i got the gig.  but how often does that happen and i don’t know about it?

at last count, there were at least 4 john lees working as photogs in north america.  bad news.  

even worse, a few years ago there was some random beijing-based chinese photog who decided to pick a western name.   any dumb name, just something that he probably thought would be easy for westerners to remember.  he picked john lee.  dick.  to make matters worse, the newspaper i was working at happened to run one of his photos 4 columns across the front page.

so this gets me thinking that i should probably contemplate an appropriately witty pan-asian pacific rim byline.  maybe i should go by my chinese name.  or maybe i should think up a company name?  anybody got any suggestions?

i recently shot a portrait of this sf interior designer whose company is called “mr. wonderful.”  what a goddamn brilliant name.

“honey, i think i want to get back into modeling…”

file under BAD DECISIONS IN LIFE…

interesting topic in today’s talk of the nation about the growing percentage of freelancers in the workforce:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100249858#mce_temp_url#

it’s about how as this shitty economy forces so many people out of traditional 9-5 jobs, many of them are starting to go freelance, hustling multiple smaller “gigs” to compensate for that single 40-hour a week job they lost.  

tina brown (of vanity fair and the new yorker fame) is one of neil conan’s guests for this one.  seems interesting that she’s the one talking about this topic, given her background as magazine boss.  she and her various staffs over the years have no doubt hired many a freelancers.  in this interview, she compares hiring freelancers to dating, fooling around with a bunch of potential suitors before deciding on the ones that get to stay for breakfast  (of course, she didn’t say it exactly this way).  

good analogy.  i’ve no doubt gone thru several failed “dates” in my newish freelance career so far.  but some invite me back into their beds now and then, so maybe i’m not that horrible.

which reminds me of this question i occasionally get from photo students and beginners:  ”what it takes to survive as a freelancer?”  yeah, i usually give them the typical canned response of “not giving up” and “just doing your best work”, blah blah blah…

but what i’m really thinking is, “get married to someone with a good-paying job and health insurance.”

***AMENDMENT***

feb 17:  i got some heat from the ole missus about that last line above.  she didn’t take too fondly to that message, which gave the impression that i married her only for her paycheck.

well, let me clarify to all three of you reading this blog (missus included) that i did not marry her for her paycheck and benefits.  in fact, if you saw the shithole we lived in when i first went freelance, you would completely understand (we’ve subsequently moved to a better place, btw).

it’s just interesting, though, how much easier it can be for a newbie freelancer to find his/her path when they have a spouse supporting them.  see, if i had to go it 100% my own way when i started, i would have had to take every single piece of shit gig that i could drum up in order to pay for the roof over my fat head.  i would not have been able to take photographic risks and calculated decisions on what NOT to shoot if the ole missus wasn’t there for me.  i would have been so mired in shooting absolute crap, that i would have had no time or energy to devote to the type of shooting that i was really aiming for.

so i’m gonna end this amendment before it sounds too much like an academy award acceptance speech.  but there is definitely some truth to cliche of oscar speeches, where they thank their loving spouses who held it all together at their jobs while their deadbeat husbands/wives went off and made “art”.