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Category: photo-essay

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Stranded

An Everyman moment for the modern world, from Amy Stein’s Stranded.
Every once in a while an artist comes up with an idea that’s so universal I wish I’d thought of it. Amy Stein photographs people stuck at the side of the road.
Stein’s artist statement demonstrates the disconnect between what we say we’re investigating and what we actually create. Her essay is full of pap about “the despondence of the American psyche as certainty collapsed and faith eroded during the second term of the Bush administration.” But get past that, and the idea is simple and affecting.
From Amy Stein’s Stranded.
Most of her pictures are of cars and people, but the mobile home brought a smile of recognition. Our first house was pre-fabricated, built by kids at Orleans-Niagara BOCES. We bought it at auction and it was the biggest purchase we’d ever made, by far. Imagine our distress when we learned that it had been pulled over for a traffic violation and would spend the night parked next to a gravel pit. I didn’t sleep that night, visualizing thousands of stones in unseen punk hands aiming for all those uninsured new windows we had just paid for.
From Amy Stein’s Stranded.
Every breakdown has its backstory. Yes, it’s an isolating experience, but it is always personal, never political. We are late, we are in trouble, we are too broke to go buy oil, or we need that car to last six more months until we finish graduate school. Despite her rhetoric to the contrary, that’s the reality behind Stein’s pictures.
One scenario familiar to northeasterners is missing: the winter storm that lands our car in a ditch. A Google map, here, explains why: Stein, who is based in LA, never made it up here where the winds blow cold. Stein is intentionally artless and unheroic , but stripping away the conventions of earlier photography doesn’t actually move us; quite the opposite, in fact. Her empty emotional space is a pause waiting for an idea. Someone else should move in and fill it.

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The perils of open source publishing

I think this is the best photo I took in the entire photo essay, but you be the judge.
See the whole photo-essay HERE.
A few months ago, Carolyn Mrazek asked me what my obsession was with East Avenue Wegmans’ construction project. “It’s a work of art,” I replied, “as important as anything I’ve painted. And, besides, the construction workers are cute.”
Wegmansis a phenom in Rochester, something that isn’t necessary fathomable if you don’t live here. This is its hometown, it’s a family-owned company, and it’s been on Fortune’s annual “100 Best Companies to Work For” list since the list was started. But beyond that, it’s a first-hand, constant experience in the lives of Rochesterians. To “go to Wegmans” is a universal act we all participate in and understand, even if it isn’t our first choice of grocery stores.
Gone forever… an improvement or a loss?
This was a private-enterprise project; we see so few of them in New York these days. Over time, I realized that the contractors were consummate professionals. Their workflow was a joy to watch, and they were fanatically neat. (I wish I’d taken photographs of the times I saw their workers sweeping up after themselves.)  Read the comments by my friends comparing this to the public-works projects in their neighborhoods. It will give you pause.
Living a mile from the East Avenue store, I’ve long been in the habit of walking to it daily to shop. This photo essay started as a casual, personal project—I took photos and posted them on Facebook for the amusement of my friends.  Over time, it hardened into a specific project with a documentary goal.
Moving the pharmacy to its temporary location. I shot this with my cell phone,
through my windshield, on my way home from Maine.
Oddly enough, I don’t have any photos of the first buildings to be torn down for the project: the M&T bank branch and a parking garage behind it. I remember messaging my friend Ron that it was cool and he should photograph it; I remember commenting to my husband at one point that it looked like Christo was in town (when the bank was wrapped in plastic for asbestos abatement), but I don’t have a single photo of it. A pity, because that bank never looked better than as a skeleton.
Certain ground rules applied: I couldn’t make my husband late for work; I couldn’t trespass on Wegmans’ property. This project obviously lacks a studied artfulness, because that was never my goal. But it makes up in breadth for that, since I took photos five days a week for the better part of two years.
Probably asbestos abatement but who really knows?
Of the thousands of shots I took, I saved fewer than 300. I travel quite a bit, so there were periods when I took no photos. And there were periods when they seemed to be doing nothing much, and I didn’t feel like taking pictures. But overall, this is as complete a record as you could want.
Imagine my surprise to find that many of my earliest pictures are missing from my Facebook album. Either I lost them because I wasn’t thinking in terms of a photo essay, or they’ve been deleted. There’s never been any guarantee from Facebook that it would provide a ‘safe’ repository for art, and of course there’s no such guarantee from Google, either. But here we are in the Brave New World of open source art: I can’t be bothered to print and show these photos in a traditional gallery, or publish them in a book. So I will use social media to disseminate them and see what happens.
One of my earliest photos, and a favorite. Nature will never be totally suppressed.
The process of moving these pictures to Google created problems I never anticipated. Because the photos were shot with three different pocket cameras and two cell phones over two years, Google couldn’t reconstruct a date order that matched the original. I had to meticulously reconstruct it, using the original FB album as a guide. (Anyone who thinks the life of an artist is glamorous should spend three days assembling a folio on a laptop; I may never walk again.)
I meticulously copied the captions and comments from the individual photos, but of course can’t copy all the comments made elsewhere—and on Facebook, as with blogs, comments happen in weird places. I also added photos back into the original photo essay. The Facebook album was a day-by-day experience, and I think of this as more of an exhaustive memoir.
Maybe I wouldn’t have been so obsessed if
they hadn’t constantly messed with my sidewalks.
There is actually a small amount of work left to be done on the store since I said, “It is finished.” Just as I didn’t document tearing down the M&T branch building, I’m ignoring the finishing touches on the wine bar. To me it is enough that it is open and I can shop there again.
A note about their new logo—it is the third one I can recall. The original one on the old store was designed by Janice Corea, RIT graduate and graphic designer. I always loved it, and I think devotees of mid-century modern will appreciate it in coming years. But the new one is equally lovely. Graphic design is by its nature fashionable and fleeting. Just imagine someone looking at these photos of the Grand Opening in 40 years—will it all seem quaint to them?
Wegmans is a phenom in Rochester.

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