Greenpoint, Brooklyn – Host, Kramer O’Neill
Emily Weinstein and Jared Iorio
Emily Weinstein
Kramer hosted a New Year’s Eve party. Drinks, Apples to Apples, a few photos, a New Year.
Tag: bryan formhals
Photos From New Year’s Eve
Posted by – March 6, 2010
Chapter One: Minneapolis, MN – Sunday, January 5, 2003
Posted by – February 9, 2010
Los Angeles, Calif. – 2006-2007
Minneapolis, MN – Sunday, January 5, 2003
“Yet the writer exists even before the man, paradoxically. The man would never have become what he did unless there was in him the creative germ. He lives the life which he will record in words. He dreams his life before he lives it; he dreams it order to live it.”
- Henry Miller
I think that I’m going to paste my favorite quotes all over my apartment.
The act of writing is more than mere words on a page, its the process of inner evolution, the shedding away of old selves, the birth of new individuals, with the final destination, a return to the original soul.
—
I view him much like one would view a Zen master, he’s a teacher, a fellow traveler. He doesn’t stand above. He stands side by side with me.
PREVIOUSLY
Chapter One: Friday, January 3, 2003
Chapter One: Thursday, January 2, 2003
A Photograph Living in No Man’s Land
Posted by – February 6, 2010
Los Angeles, Calif. – 2007-2008
As painful as it is, I’m always going through my archives and re-evaluating photographs. The vast majority need to be deleted, but for whatever reason I can’t always do it. Then there are those few photographs that stare at you without answers. They don’t fit into any of your schemes. They are flies, gnats, annoyances. What to do? as Blake Andrews might ask. I’m not one to allow organisms to live in limbo, so I normally end up re-examining the puzzle. If the photograph asks a question, then certainly it must fit somewhere. And sometimes when it does fit, it changes you’re ideas. This is why this particular photograph is causing problems for me. It exists in a place and time that I can’t easily categorize, which makes it of particular interest to me. Right now, I’m tossing this outlier with a bunch of other misfits, but I’m not sure it will get along with them.
New BW Project Teaser
Posted by – January 25, 2010
©Bryan Formhals
Sometime a few years ago I read that Trent Parke used Delta 100 and pushed the shit out of it. Reading this meant I had to have the film, even though I had no dark room skills to speak off. At the time I was shooting Trix, Delta 3200 and Neopan 1600, and had no idea what I was doing, but it didn’t matter really because I was just burning through film making photographs.
I bought this Delta 100 and thought I’d try to be Trent Parke, but after about one roll I decided I wasn’t going to push the shit out of the film and had no intention of learning the dark room at my age. Exposing for 100 speed film even in the nice California light was too much for me. I needed fast film, so the Delta went into the fridge and followed me around for a few years.
As the summer of 2009 came to a close I was running out of film and tired of shooting 35mm color. I’d spent a good time wandering around shooting 120 color and found a groove that made sense to me. But I’m rarely satisfied doing one thing at a time, and I had grown to love shooting with the Contax T2. I needed something else. I’ve always dreaded winter (why I moved to California in the first place), so I looked in the fridge and saw these seven rolls of Delta 100 staring at me and figured, why the hell not. I loaded up the Contax and a vague idea for a project.
It didn’t start well. I took some night strolls and flashed random shit, but never really what I wanted to photograph, or what tone I was going for. I shot two rolls, got them developed, then scanned them. Two or three photographs caught my attention. They fueled my initial idea, so I went out again, at night wandering around. It was still a struggle, but I was determined to keep shooting. I knew that feeling nothing was something. This was the inspiration. Fight. Move forward. Make photographs, something will happen.
As with all ideas, the initial stages are the most difficult, but eventually you fight through them and through scanning and editing you start to see patterns, ideas emerging. This is the exciting part for me. Once I have images to work with I can go back into the field and refine the ideas. I feel this is something that’s been trilled into my mind by watching Hin Chua over the years. Repetition, persistence, hustle, and above else, photographing even when you don’t feel like it.
I burned through those initial rolls and ended up buying more. Now the project is a passion. The last couple of weeks every time I leave the apartment I can barely believe what I’m seeing. I just dropped off four rolls at the lab. I don’t remember what is on them, well kind of, in that magical way of photography. There will banality, misfires, missed opportunities, but I know there will money shots and building blocks. Whenever you think photography has abandoned you, it taps you on the shoulder and reminds you why you do it.
New Year, New Project
Posted by – January 3, 2010
Over the last few months I’ve went back and put all my medium format work into one project pile. After doing some processing and editing, I started to get an idea of what I wanted to do with the work. At this point, I’m reluctant to try to articulate where I’m going with words. Instead I just want to keep shooting and compiling work. I’d like to let this project breath a bit more and not confine with words or overly cumbersome concepts (not that I’ve ever been overly conceptual.) I’ll keep this going on a separate track as Brooklyn Jukebox, both of which I plan on working on over the course of the year. Probably starting again in the spring. I’ve put a few rolls of black and white through the Contax this fall and winter for another idea. It’s too cold to think about color, and black and white is always fun, if not completely baffling.