Rally for Darfur

I'll write more about the rally this past Sunday soon--there's just time enough tonight to add a few of the pictures. In the meantime, here's an update on what's happening in the New York Times.

Jonathan Tasini's U.S. Senate Campaign, part 3

One of my pictures of Tasini (the one above, actually) recently appeared on the front page of a weekly newspaper here in NYC. This is actually not the kind of picture that the editor was looking for when he contacted me for possible pix of Tasini to go along with an article on the campaign, but I thought it was one of the strongest images that I had, so I went ahead and included it in my selection of images. It turned out that the paper felt the same way I did, and decided to run it as the main picture in their "Primary Election Special". And I have no doubt that it was a popular issue, since there is nothing more exciting than a primary election. Anyway, the issue came out last week. The article itself is very good, and well worth reading. I'll post a link to it soon.

Oh, yeah. And I guess it kinda goes without saying. Hillary won.

An old picture

I was recently going through some old boxes of photos from back when I was a student at ICP (which, for those who don't know, stands for either the International Center of Photography or the Insane Clown Posse, depending). I remember taking this picture one morning, trying desperately to finish an assignment at the last minute, on the way to school. Rediscovering this picture brought back the memory of seeing it on the contact sheet for the first time. Which happened about 5 minutes before class that afternoon. Subway photography has always been the best form of practice for me--an exercise in photographing strangers at close range in a confined area, without being able to just walk away afterwards, or disappear in the crowd. Two books of NYC subway photography that I highly recommend checking out are:

Walker Evans' classic work,Many are Called
The Subway Pictures by Peter Peter

There are many others as well. I've heard a lot of people say that it's cliche nowadays to photograph people in the subway--but personally for me, there's no difference between that and above-ground street photography. They both have the potential to be cliche or transcendent, depending on the photographer and the moment.

An exhibit in Kosovo

One of my photographs has been included in the 2006 Gjon Mili Prize-International Exhibition in Kosovo. You can see the picture, and find out more about the exhibition, here.