Works of art such as this one by Giulio Romano, don’t make me think of that time after the dark ages, don’t make me think of knights or blossoming science.  It makes me think about beauty.  It makes me think about how beauty has changed with the passing years, how it’s different for each person, each continent each era. Especially with the female image.

Back when this guy was big plump and pasty was the thing.  If you were stick skinny you didn’t get the prince or the pretty dresses.  If you were skinny it meant you were some poor working slob because you couldn’t afford enough to eat to put some meat on your bones.  Now we love the skinny and the tan.  Current western society loves defined curves and hints of muscle.  Because if you’re tan it means you have the cash to hop on a plane and fly to Aruba.  But not everyone thinks that’s beautiful.  Which means not everyone thought the lady above was beautiful in her heyday.

Looking at those giant beautiful oil paintings is like being stuck between this time and that one, knowing what it really was like to be on this world then, yet still having your feet planted firmly in the 21st century.  Realizing that beauty then was just as important and glorified as it is now made me stand stick still and just think of all the words and hours behind those paintings.  The women behind that beauty.

When he walked into the room, Jeff Mermelstien exuded an air of nervousness.  He kept his head down and said little as he surveyed the small class and edged his tall body toward the back.  The few things he said were calm and bored sounding as he first opened his mouth to introduce himself and to ask for help setting up.  It was as though he had the distinct impression that we as a class were going to verbally attack him and his art at the first possible opening.  He set up his slides and steeled himself for a blank and humorless hour and a half.  He obviously did not realize the kind of class he was dealing with. Not only did we find his pictures intriguing and occasionally hilarious, which the back row greatly appreciated, he was interesting as well.  The uncomfortably dubbed “street photographer” showed us old pictures, ones from his book Sidewalk and others he remained connected to over the years.  He told back-stories and explained inspirations. As he flipped through slide after slide, his opening statement of “being seduced by color” made more and more sense.  Neon red and old ladies outfits and all the different browns and grays found swimming in his photos clearly showed this passion.
As the slides slid on, his nervousness ebbed away and he began to laugh with us and crack jokes.  He appreciated our side comments and initial reactions.  Then, as the last of his doubts faded away and he remembered that teenagers are people too, he allowed himself to become part of the class for the last few minutes.

As the performance started I was intrigued but nothing glued my eyes to the stage.  There was a lack of coherence, that new age “dance to the music you feel, not what you hear” style throwing me off.
Then the dances and dancers slowly came together, built up a story and took off with it.  When they all started working together with the audience I became enthralled.  I could find the story and I appreciated their movement so much more.  Their limbs were sentences and torsos paragraphs.  Their hands took the music and molded it into life.  I hadn’t been able to concentrate on the dance through the music before hand, yet as the dance came to a crescendo, I found the music through the movement.  As the story took shape the performers brought out benches and stools as props, and used them almost as other dancers.  The objects moved with them, set the stage and accentuated the lighting that set the scene for each story told by each dance.  Both the lighting and the props had distinct purpose, a reason to be onstage, just as each of the dancers did.  That is what made the performance worthwhile.  Each person had a reason to be on stage, to be telling their story, lifting their bodies higher then their voices ever could go and telling a story for whoever was watching.

{slight technical difficulty. just turn your computers 90 degrees}

I like to make pretty things
Involving sharp teeth and butterfly wings
There is a scene of a lovely girl
Blowing balloons around the world
From the picture fantasy sings

Capa’s startling black and white photographs brought out the sympathy that usually resides deep in my being, back by the spine, slick with cynic oil.  I saw the solemn eyes peering between barbed wire and somehow felt chills of recognition down my spine.  Though his pictures were very specifically of Nicaraguan political prisoners, I had seen the look in other people’s eyes.  I had seen it in pictures a friend took while in Peru.  I’d seen it in friends’ eyes and strangers’ eyes and somewhere in my own head.  He found some sort of universal desperate vibe flowing from those inmates’ eyes and froze it for all eternity.   His whole body of work slipped neatly into order as you walked past them in the gallery, each separate photograph telling a story and the whole set portraying an entire people.
It was refreshing to see such a simple photo project done so well.  The prints all had wonderful contrast and let the image be rather then try and exaggerate it in any way.  The images also made you think of what was going on while he took his photos.  Did he ever ask his subjects to move, or to look at the camera?  Were they all candid?  It also just made you curious of the circumstances surrounding the photographs.  What’s going on behind that look in those peoples’ eyes?  His Nicaraguan series made you feel as though you were really seeing the history, not standing apart from it observing, but in the middle, the action swirling around you.

[Attempting to upload slideshow]

The photos presented were taken at three separate locations at three different times.  The ones that were taken first are the prominently orange photos, those littered with utility poles and water towers, were taken on the way back from LBI during an early summer sunset.  I gasped at the colors flooding the car and related to my mother how much I love telephone wires.  In response she fished my camera out of the back and handed it over.  I clicked the last of the sun’s fading rays into the memory card and dubbed the collection of blurred telephone wires “pretty jersey” in tribute to New Jersey’s often discounted and ignored beauty.  The set is full of traffic lights and pick-up trucks, the highlight being a perfectly placed water tower, which was well within my camera’s grasp. 
When I first took these pictures in the beginning of the summer it gave me an amorphous idea.  It started with the simple thought of documenting Jersey’s ignored beauty and then rubbing it in the noses of my out of state friends and then it became more soul searching.  A lonely mini-van, trying to figure out how it is that Jersey can be so amazing yet so deadening at the same time.  I cast my family’s white Windstar as the pensive minivan, a kind of super-auto-hero.  This photo assignment allowed me to come back to this long dormant project, though the Windstar was not my mode of transport.  I took pictures from NJTransit buses and out of the sunroof in my mother’s tiny silver Volvo. I took the project wherever I was driven.
I knew that my project would become quite literally street photography so I knew the issues I would have to deal with.  Taking pictures while in motion is difficult and often frustrating.  If the windows of the vehicle are up, direct specs and fuzziness are expected, and unfortunate reflections often encountered.  Also I can’t ask the bus driver to slow down on the highway.  Sometimes I want a certain sign by a certain car and by the time the camera clicks I have the side of a building in my sights instead.  Things get blurred and trucks always come out of nowhere.  The perfect composition is fleeting so I click-click-click until the guy sitting next to me harrumphs and gives me a dirty look.  Then there are those funny and few beauties between the blurred, a single slide of the movie that I’ve seen over and over again.  That building, river, sign that I see everyday made solid for me in some photo betraying my movement yet slyly un-fictionalizing it by making the object stand still for me.
Then when I took pictures at night, in the rain, things became even more complicated.  I had no set idea for style in this series so I was clicking at will, paying little attention to he light and clicking way at tail lights and traffic lights and diner lights.   I shuffled around the shutter speed some, trying to let in more light so as to get a better shot.  Then, as I looked at the photos I took with the longer exposures, I realized I was playing light tricks, having completely forgotten about how pinpoints of light will streak around during a long exposure photo.  I then proceeded to play around with the shutter speed a lot more and took a lot of curly-cue pictures of car lights.  My accidental re-realization made what was a very frustrating picture experience into a rather delightful one.
The final set of pictures was made up of ones that were taken this November on one of my daily bus rides to and from New York.  I happened upon a beautiful day where the trees were bare and the clouds were shining.  The photos I took were in some ways, great disappointments, because the beauty I had seen, in the incandescent clouds and far off vistas, was impossible to catch with the camera I had from the vehicle I was in.  But when I thought I was going to have to settle, I looked through all those photos and found bizarre beauties within the folds.  I made some accidental images that invoke the strange and wonderful beauty I see as I drive through the Meadowlands each morning and afternoon.  It’s otherworldliness, stuck between wilderness and suburbia.
Each set of photographs stands up on its own accord.  There are multitudes of photos from each shoot and you can literally see my journey through New Jersey with each of the series.  At first I was afraid that mingling them would take away from their strength.  Yet as I picked out my favorites from each set and placed them all together I saw all three bizarre personalities swirl together in a carnival whirlwind that I call home.  Separate each group of photographs is Jersey.  The Jersey that is simplified and mocked.  Together they begin the white Windstar’s journey for him.  Together they begin to explain how Jersey is so inspiring yet so depressing at the same time.