Just finished launching Luceo’s brand new website and, before I get too off-track, I want to share the important links:

1. The Site:  http://luceoimages.com

2. The Blogs: http://luceoimages.com/blog

3. My Blog Filter: http://luceoimages.com/blog/matt-slaby

4. A Virtual Tour of the New Site: http://luceoimages.com/2009/11/welcome-to-our-new-site

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.

-MS

Had one of the more interesting and challenging assignments that took up the better part of last week.  The piece was to focus on Najibullah Zazi, the alleged Afghan-born terror plotter with deep roots in both Colorado and New York.  More specifically, the photographs needed to focus on the Colorado places significant to the plot.  The challenge of the assignment was one of finding pictures to illustrate the mundane, bedroom community where he resided before his arrest.  Complicating the assignment was the fact that the subject of the article had already been extradited, precluding most of the obvious images.

It doesn’t take a Susan Sontag to figure out that there are certain things that photographers gravitate towards and certain things that they don’t.  Aurora, Colorado is not one of them.  And the part of it that Zazi lived in, even less so.  Whitebread, tract housing perched on the shore of the great plains, Aurora is little more than houses stacked on houses stacked on strip malls, with a sprinkling of apartments.  Zazi himself lived in one of the newest parts of the city (technically Centennial, Colorado) in a gated apartment complex just a stone’s throw from one of the area’s newest commercial experiments, a gigantic outdoor mall with a town square-styled epicenter, surrounded by boutique stores, restaurants, a cinema, and all the warehouse-sized stores that the developer could fit onto the land.  To the south, a golf course.  East, a reservoir catering to suburban recreation.  And, of course, the great, flat plains.

Not exactly the kind of seedy, dark, underworld you’d expect Bin Laden’s protégés to be hanging in.  Even after the alleged purchase of the hair-care supplies needed to build the bomb, Zazi is reported to have checked himself into Homestead Studio Suites, a nondescript chain of pleasantly colored and landscaped extended-stay kitchenettes.  You know, the kind of place a visiting manager would stay while he set up a new office branch.  Boring.  Safe.  Beige.

So the assignment took me on a short tour of suburbia, dodging security guards hired to protect the hotel’s image, trying to figure out how to make a picture of a gated apartment with management not too keen on the negative press brought by the scandal.  All this capped off with the warehouse that sold the chemicals and a smattering of reportage from the land of the nondescript.

In the end, I found a nice group of apartment residents to host me for the 80’s/Madonna-themed 40th Birthday party of resident Jennifer Williams.  After all, it’s not trespassing if you are a guest.  For all the hassle of getting turned down by the apartment managers, a little bit of patience and a little bit of luck put me in touch with something that really showcased how normal Zazi’s host community is.  A few more days of traipsing through the four wheel trails cut onto the plains (just out of reach of Aurora’s eastward expansion), a visit to the reservoir, and some properly timed appearances at the Beauty Supply Warehouse, and the essay on all things mundane was ready to go.

Originally slated for a several page spread, the Afghanistan War bumped the layout to something a bit shorter.  Still, the folks at Time are among some of the most talented and supportive in the business.  I’m proud of what ran and happy to see some of the additional work that popped up in the Time.com edit of the photographs.

The article is available here.  Time’s online essay can be viewed here.

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(Click the image to view this video on Lo Scalzo’s Vimeo page)

If you’re a literature critic, you have so many tools to work with.  All the different paradigms you can put a text through, all the different tools that a writer uses to fix their points to a sentence.  Tone, rhythm, diction, word choice, structure, metaphor, analogy, dialogue, denotation, connotation, imagery, personification, allusion, metonymy, meter –the list is bottomless.  These subtle devices impact meaning and allow the writer a sense of sophistication and nuance that is so important to how they present their message.

Sometimes, if you look at too much of the daily pulp, it’s hard to believe that this same level of sophistication is possible in the visual sense.  At its worst, story gets mistaken for a children’s book, taking on the rote structure used to relay information to eight year-olds: beginning, middle, end, climax, resolution.  The photographs follow the same, clunky pattern: wide, medium, tight, rinse, repeat.  And, perhaps, someone chops the layers out of a photo to make a headshot, turning the photographer’s crafted statement into a rough, ham-fisted mallet.  ”It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… ” becomes ‘they were alright times.’

The thing that I appreciate most about Jim Lo Scalzo’s recent work is that it doesn’t succumb to formula, delivering emotive nuance with the directness that the photograph is most suited for.  His multimedia pieces capture sentiment, bringing the viewer into his frames and playing on the less-obtuse sense of place evoked by his subjects.  Needless to say, I’m a huge fan.  If you’re headed out to catch the new G.I. Joe movie, don’t bother looking.  But if you want to see the best of what our craft has to offer, check out Lo Scalzo’s Vimeo page here: http://www.vimeo.com/5653709

This project started by accident when friend and fellow photographer Michael Rubenstein loaned me a Polaroid back for a Holga camera in 2007.  Ten frames later I was sold.  The Polaroid brings two photographic methods that are seemingly at odds with each other together into one format.  You get the immediacy of digital with the tangible, ’share-ability’ of film.  A few days after borrowing Rubenstein’s back, I returned to Colorado and bought my first ten dollar Land Camera, a relatively obsolete Polaroid with limited control and a cost-prohibitive cap on how much film I could actually shoot.  Now priced at over a dollar a frame, the format forces a judicious approach to making frames, something that the bottomless 32 gig digital cards seem to undermine.  Listen to the clicks on the tape of any news conference and you will, no doubt, hear photographers pushing the limits of 24 frames-per-second, a method of shooting so rapid and oblivious as to make the process closer to shooting a movie than a still frame.

Since 2007, the camera has gone with me almost everywhere I’ve been, from my next door neighbor’s living room after his open-heart surgery to Obama’s inauguration.  Until earlier this year, I’d been looking at all these different events as isolated series of images; recently, it’s become obvious that there is a bigger tale of Americana at hand in the thread that winds through all of the photographs.  NPR’s Claire O’Neill recently helped me put together an edit of this work-in-progress that gets at this.  I’m very happy with her final edit and even happier that she’s taken the time to share it on NPR’s blog, The Picture Show.  Please have a look for yourself and feel free to revisit my website in the coming weeks.  I’m working on a comprehensive edit of this work that will bring all the Polaroid galleries into one, bigger grouping of pictures.

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

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I recently photographed people and places impacted by the closure of New Frontier Bank in Greeley, Colo. The bank was forced into receivership after what the FDIC describes as “unsafe or unsound banking practices and violations of law and regulations.”   Many eastern Colorado farms and business were impacted by the closing of the bank and are now unable to transfer their loans to other institutions. The fallout threatens commercial and agricultural businesses that have historically relied on the bank for short-term credit.  The essay appears in the June 16th issue of the Journal and a nice edit of the work also appears on the Photo Journal blog.

The story turned out to be a little more nuanced than fat cat bankers getting ahead of themselves.  There aren’t clear villains and victims, rather a sense of loss that is common to both sides of the cashbox.  The bank was rooted in a very humble beginning during which the founder, Larry Seastrom (pictured above), sold ten dollar shares to friends and neighbors in order to raise capital.  New Frontier  purchased a doublewide trailer as its first place of business and, over more than a decade, it grew into a much more formidable building.   The business began to shape its image around its involvement and commitment to the local community.  The short version of the bank’s fall is somewhat of a perfect storm of overextended lending, undercapitalized business, and a sharp decline in the price of milk that wreaked havoc on many of the bank’s large agricultural loans.  Many of the businesses who received money the bank are now having difficulty refinancing their loans through other institutions.  They face the possibility of losing their collateral later this year when the FDIC packages and sells off New Frontier’s loans.

The assignment came as a welcome challenge and a bit of a crash course in getting my head around the nuance of the relationship between the abstract banking world and the real-life fallout experienced by New Frontier’s customers.  This is the second piece that I’ve worked on with Wall Street Journal writer Stephanie Simon and a real treat to work with a writer able to tackle the complexities of the story.

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