about time

in which I talk about me talking about myself. So meta. So narcissist. Be warned.
It is astounding how one can miss the forest for the trees. Especially on one's own website. For years, there's been no live link on my home page.

Somewhere along the way I lost sight of that fact that,  you know, the most important function of the website is for people to contact me for work. All the while fiddling with little details within the portfolios. This is why working for yourself can be such a humbling experience, you can not blame the Media Relations department or the head of Communications for this kind of stupidity.

As of today, I am live linked to my email and to my Flovors.me page, which takes you to me all over the intertubes. Go ahead, look & click.

 ps. Here's my new book, out Sept 27. I'd like to own it even if I didn't spend a year working on it. Pre-order now, in stores Tuesday, book signings and talks coming soon. I'll list them here next week.

tearsheet

     In one of those weird synchronicities  some call coincidence, I photographed Ran Vann, a refugee from Pol Pot's Cambodia, on Holocaust Remembrance Day in May, for Miller-McCune.  The violent lime green of early spring in Connecticut was stark contrast to Ran. She's delicate; a sad petite woman living in a small basement apartment. She speaks of the ghosts who live with her.  Her loneliness is a presence in the room.

     While we talked and I tried to figure out where to make her portrait, I couldn't put aside memories of the Holocaust survivors I knew growing up. In my suburb in western upstate New York, everyone working at the bakery had tattoos from Hitler on their forearms. Each July my grandmother visited from Brooklyn with her 3rd husband, Harry. He'd had a horrific childhood in the concentration camps of Europe, surviving as a teen by feigning death in a mass grave while camp guards shot down into his pile of bodies, as the liberators approached.  Harry felt it his personal responsibility to retell this, in a chilling heavily accented narrative,  once every summer.  I'd spend his visit avoiding eye contact but knowing at some point he'd corner me, and I'd hear it again. Bearing witness, I guess, but I was too young to get the importance to him.

a wall in Ran Vann's apartment

With all that in my upbringing, it bothers me that while Pol Pot was destroying Cambodian culture and lives, I was oblivious. Roughly 2 million people died, and many more, like Ran Vann, are suffering in the shadow of his reign, still. It was in the newspapers but I was busy being a teenager not noticing the details, hearing about Kampuchea but not understanding that a genocide was going on. Didn't really get it until the movie The Killing Fields came out. (It's worth a watch, still, if you haven't seen it).

There's not much we can do about history but try not to repeat the parts that went horribly wrong, and to acknowledge the needs of the Ran Vann's and their ghosts, in our midst. That's what the Miller McCune article does. (You can read it, from the link.)

 So very glad and honored to have had the opportunity to meet her.

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You can see more of my portraits of people with stories to tell on my website and over at my Dripbook.

editing when you're very happy

is actually harder than when things are just plain old good. Because, it is SO hard to edit out the ones you don't like as much when you  remember how much fun you had with the subjects, and are very very pleased with the whole take.*

These are some fresh portraits for a private girl's school, from a location photo shoot of some students,  teachers and trustees. And to say I overshot is...um..yeah. Gotta go. Several hundred images to narrow down and a very patient designer waiting.

* for those of you also waiting patiently for the Rhinebeck Project, this is precisely the problem, minus the designer drumming his fingers with a deadline. (And, more volume.)

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see what I've edited into my portfolio at Gale Zucker Photography &  more from this shoot over on Dripbook

clearing your vision

Why is it so hard to see our own vision?

Last week I had the honor of judging for the Rhode island State Council on the Arts Photography Fellowships in Providence. Me? Invited to be judgemental ?

I was psyched, but wondered how I'd know which portfolios to select in, and which out.

Turns out it was manifest. A portfolio with a consistent vision, and  a commitment plus passion for the subject was obvious. As opposed to those with a grouping of strong images, with good technique; a portfolio anyone would respond to as "really nice work".

Even more damning: the weak photo(s) in a strong portfolio, images the photographer threw in ... why? to fill out the fully allowed 10 ? because they weren't sure?  How quickly the weak ones brought down the excellent work in the same portfolio, no matter how we judges tried to put it aside mentally, or talk it through.

Did I learn something there? oh yeah. But it's not a new challenge for me. Or, I guess, for any of us in this world:

He who knows others is wise;
He who know himself is enlightened.

Lao-tzu, The Way of Lao-tzu Chinese philosopher (604 BC - 531 BC) 

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The two RISCA fellows we selected won't be announced & awarded till the end of the month so I'm not blabbing, I still only know the work, not the names of those we judged.  We narrowed it down to six, then three, then debated for a long time for the final two.  It was not easy but it was very, very, cool.

want to see if I've attained any self knowledge from this ? click on over  Gale Zucker Photography

pecha kucha night New Haven

Above is the first  of  20 slides  I'll be showing at Pecha Kucha  Night New Haven, Thursday April 27th at 7:30 pm.  Curious?  Come by.

Each presenter shows twenty slides for twenty seconds each, while talking about their passion, in a night of multi-topic show & tell.

In my case, the subject is  "In Search of Craft Activists" , telling the story of the book I photographed last year, visiting crafters, makers, artists and DIYers all over the country.

As for the book itself, it's (fingers crossed, knock on wood) in its very final design review before we send it off to press, for publication by Random House/PotterCraft in late September.

(Immodestly speaking, it's looking pretty fabulous. I can't wait to have the whole thing to show in the fall).

see more of my work at GALE ZUCKER PHOTOGRAPHY

take me out to an upgrade

When I get a call from a university alumni magazine, I  never know what I might be photographing.  Celebrities, brilliant scientists, explorers, authors, could be any kind of subject. Unlike consumer mags these days, I often see images run full page, in spreads and as photo essays. How much do I love these clients? Much.

That's how I found myself photographing a Vintage Fantasy Baseball League game in bucolic Sandy Hook, CT. The shoot was fun, the subjects passionate about their slightly eccentric hobby,  the editor and designer are happy. 

Custom replica 1860's baseball gear for the game

My MVP wasn't on the field though. It's my upgrade to a faster newer computer and Aperture 3.0. Mostly the Aperture 3.0 I forgot that image processing didn't have to be a teeth grinding, computer-freezing annoyance.  Suddenly working on images is fun again. When I got finished processing the big TIFFs for the magazine, I changed the files to look all faded and vintagey, as you see here. For funs. Because I felt like it. It's not that I'm using their presets for vintage (although I think they have one, it's just not that look I wanted).  But I have more speed and the new adjustment and filtering tools in Aperture. Home run. Score! And, lots of other sports metaphors.