tooting my horn: Best Books 2011!

When I was thinking about starting my first blog, way back in 2005, I asked a few people what they thought about this new form. "Nerdy." "Needy" "Really narcissisistic", were the replies I got.

(Not that I heeded them).

Anyway, I'm going to be a nerdy narcissist and announce, proudly, that we made Amazon's Best Books of 2011 list!

3  students- from Knitting for a Cause section

In my defense,  some of the content in the book is about making the world better and helping others. Here's a free excerpt with knitting pattern (value! added!) on the subject.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

actually I shoot for many non-profits--see some of that work on my Gale Zucker Photography website

collaboration: a beautiful thing

You know what aspect of my new book Craft Activism (Random House/PotterCraft) I might be proudest of? My title. I'm the photographer but I am also co-author.  That's CO-AUTHOR!

The two of us, uncharacteristically on the same coast.

Not that I mind coming in to shoot & illustrate a fully conceived project. I'm fine with being "just the photographer".  But  it is very cool to be co-creator of the whole shebang. Especially with Joan Tapper as the writer.

 

What's a new book without it's own blog? www.craftactivism.com

Stop by there for list of events/booksignings.

• • •• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •   

(If you're  in CT, you can stop by and see me at RJ Julia Oct 11, 7pm. )

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.

northward bonus

This is my favorite place to eat in Montpelier Vermont. It's  tiny and delicious, with cooking as artisanal as food can get.  If a client hadn't taken me here earlier this year, I'd never have found it.  So if you're up that way--don't overlook the little side street storefront.  Thrilled to have a shoot in Montpelier as an excuse to see what''s on their menu. Extra thrilled to do so more than once this month, as I'm back north for a corporate portrait / annual report client.  I  heart location photography.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

see more of my signs, storefronts & Hipstamatic images on my here, there & everywhere portfolio

what it takes

 

An awesome crew to make a woman's mag shoot day with sucky weather in Darien CT turn out  fine.

(L to R: Laren Clark for hair/ makeup, Susan Falzone photo asst, our good sport subject, and stylist April Spicer)

!

and lots of encouraging words....ok 90% are them are "good" and 8 % are "gooooooood!"   (thanks Susan Falzone for grabbing the video)

A porch with a chair or two at the end of the day. Maybe with some wine. Just saying. (later in the week, in Montpelier VT)

and a wonderful client to test stand in for the CEO. Jazz hands, optional.

• • • • • • 

see more location photography, indoor & out, at my website and Dripbooks

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.

• • • • • • • • • • • •

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