Art Daze

There was an art opening this past Saturday night for a group photo exhibition, "Attachments," at The Hole Gallery on Bowery in the East Village. It features a wide selection of new work by Andrew Kuo, Asger Carlsen, Jason Nocito, Jessica Eaton, Jim Mangan, Kate Steciw, Peter Sutherland, Sandy Kim and Tim Barber. Sometimes the work is so captivating it puts you in a trance.

Art Party

I went downtown to a small party/cocktail sort of thing last night. There was wine and cheese and it featured the work of the artist Spencer Tunick. Moby was there for a while and here he is talking to Spencer. The works on the table in front of them are 8" x 10" color photos of various installations around the world.

Love NYC Style

After you live in the New York City for a while, you come to realize that nearly anything goes here. So if you are planning a NYC destination wedding (assuming you have to get married), you might as well make the very most of it. Thus, it's totally a-OK if that involves taking your wedding photographs during a mid-week rush hour in Midtown.

When you and your spouse-to-be come to New York to get married you're definitely going to get those precious photographs of the two of you that you'll cherish for a lifetime. You only have to make sure you do it just right.

For best results, I recommend that you pick the absolute busiest time of the day. A few minutes after 5pm is ideal for the perfect light and catching hundreds of thousands of people headed out of work in the concrete jungle. Also make sure you take your photographs smack in the middle of Midtown right next to one of the most photographed landmark art sculptures in the city as well. You'll also want to commandeer a super busy bus stop, push everyone out of the way and work around the tourists and elderly gentlemen waiting for the Uptown local. No one will mind one bit. Of course, you should try to ignore the extremely smelly homeless man who's been using the bench as his see-through bedroom. Also don't worry if there are multiple bags of trash strewn carelessly about the sidewalk. You'll probably want to photoshop these out of your photos, but I think all this adds to the realism of the location.

I didn't intend to be a wedding photographer, but I think I got the shot.

Sunday Photo Overload

The Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) had their annual photography show at the Park Avenue Armory last weekend. It's the longest running international show of fine art photography.

My friend Spencer called me at around 11am on Sunday morning and asked me if I wanted to head over there and check it out. I was still in bed when he called and had to get up anyway so I'm glad he called. I was sort of sleeping late, but I wasn't sleeping until noon. Actually, I woke up really early (7:35am), but I was still so tired that I went back to bed and was just waking up when he called.

Spencer has an upcoming exhibition of his work in Mexico and wanted to look at some different framing techniques. He's shipping all his work down there (his prints are fairly large) and he wanted to figure out the best way to frame and mount his photos for this exhibition.

If you like photography, it was a really great show with so many photographs crammed into the space. I was surprised by the vast numbers of people there admiring (and buying) the work. Jeremy Irons was there too. I took a rather blurry picture of him. He's wearing glasses and boots and you can see him standing in the background of the group of people (he's the tall one) engaged in an animated conversation presumably about photography. It looked like he just came from riding horses in Central Park. I thought he was so great as Claus von Bulow in "Reversal of Fortune." He's playing the legendary photographer Alfred Stieglitz in an upcoming TV movie about Georgia O'Keeffe. If you look closely at the picture (and if you give him a mustache), he looks just like Stieglitz.