The site was announced as live at noon EST, though we took the liberty to have a private launch at 11:11 on 11/11. You know, for good luck. Our revamped destination features a dynamic new group blog with individual filters for each photographer. The moral of the story is that if you like what you see here, you’ll really love the stuff on the group blog. This blog will continue to exist, though no further posts will be added. From here on out my updates will be on the new site. Hope you’ll join our conversation.
Luceo will be presenting for the latest Open-i Webinar tomorrow morning at 15:00 GMT (that’s eleven, for you east coasters). The webinar will last one hour and will be in conjunction with Nophoto, Drik, and Wéyo. More information about the webinar is available on facebook here or anyone wishing to just log in and join the conversation can do so here.
Been so busy with other work lately that I’ve found myself with quite a backlog of material to share from recent weeks. The easiest pieces to check off are the bits that have been published, including this shoot of a young Colorado girl who is one of tens of thousands of immigrant-children who stand to be positively impacted by the passage of the federal DREAM Act this fall. The Act comes before both chambers of Congress and essentially affords children of ‘good moral character’ who have been in the United States for more than five years and who have graduated from an American high school a path towards permanent residency. Their residency hinges on completion of either college education or military service.
For immigrants with the academic credentials to attend college, the DREAM Act affords them the opportunity for in-state tuition as well as federal student loans (two things currently unavailable under federal law). The biggest tragedy of the status quo is that an estimated 65,000 immigrant-students graduate high school each year and are unable to attend college. In a twist of unintended consequences, these intelligent, assimilated young men and women remain in the United States as part of a hidden underclass of English-speaking, Americanized, undocumented immigrants.
The thing that is particularly challenging about the Act is how contentious this issue is. Of all proposed immigration legislation, this is a no-brainer. As opponents to immigration reform are keen to remind us, many undocumented immigrants have made the journey to the United States of their own volition, knowingly broaching the laws of the United States in doing so; their children, however, have not. The Act, in its essence, gives a no-fault waiver to children who had no say in how they entered the United States and offers society the ability to harness the talent and enthusiasm that would otherwise go wasted.
The Act was also part of the focus of Luceo’s recent group project, Still Hoping, available here: www.stillhoping.com
I’m writing this as I’m about to step outside to do my gardening. Which is turning into an interesting Holga project, slides of all the plants I’ve been growing in my yard over the past few years. The thing about all this technology that kills me is that you gotta draw a line between your real life and reporting on your real life. This stuff makes for an interesting lens on our lives but, all things said and done, I’m doing my best to keep it balanced.
Anyhow, with the caveat that I take my garden more seriously than I take Twitter and Facebook, I present everyone with links to my personal pages as well as Luceo’s. And if my own pages go unattended for too long, rest easy knowing that I’m ass-deep in bindweed. This stuff is horrible. Really. Non-native rhizome that puts down 20′ roots, has seeds that are viable for decades, can live without sun for up to four years, doesn’t respond to herbicides, and can put out hundreds of seeds per plant in any given flowering cycle. Here’s the score at halftime –> Facebook: 0; Bindweed: 1
Luceo’s own Tim Lytvinenko has been a creative force in recent days, turning out a couple of fun, little stop motion shorts. He’s on a cross-country trip right now, due in my home-city of Denver any day now, as he makes his way from Raleigh to San Francisco with his partner at Well Done Media. Anyhow, the shorts are fun and it’d be criminal not to share.
Did a portrait series of the Luceo folks on the last night of our meeting. More Polaroids with a little experimental twist tossed in. Photographing photographers is a little stressful –ok, a lot stressful. Took a few quiet minutes with Kevin German to play around with some test frames and get my head on straight before calling everyone out, one at a time. After 50 frames, a pep talk from German, and a couple hours, I felt like I came away with something I could be proud of.
Kendrick did a fun series of Polaroid 600s in 2007 and just posted it to her blog, here. There’s still something incredibly appealing about these old analogues. With any luck, Fuji will keep this stuff in production for the foreseeable future. I’m not really ready to stop shooting it just yet.
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Dan Celvi just passed this note to me re. Polaroid’s future. Apparently it’s old news to everyone except me. Still, more than glad to see this:
“I dunno if you saw this article or not, but in case you didn’t, I figured I’d send you the link. Basically, some guy somehow managed to spur a few million from random investors to help them keep the Polaroid line alive for no other reason to keep it going.
Always serious business at our meetings. We’ve been busy enough to bump our annual meet two a twice-a-year schedule and took advantage of the days following the Look3 festival to lock ourselves into a hotel suite and hash out the next six months of affairs. A bigger write-up and more comprehensive edit of our photographs is up on the Luceo blog, here.
