Have relocated to the West Coast and am looking to work on some personal projects while I get my commercial work up and running. Anyone in the San Diego area interested in being a subject for my scars project (no self scarification, there has to be a story) please send me a message. Also working on black and white nudes and maternity shots.

Just got tired of that last journal entry sitting there.

If you live in the United states, and you are an artist producing original works. You should know that as of yesterday, you are well and truly on your way to being fucked. Not fucked as in taken out to dinner and seduced and then having passionate sex with someone you find attractive, but fucked as in you dropped the soap in the shower in a bad prison movie.

You see, your representatives in the senate have decided that the protections afforded to artists under the current Copyright act are too restrictive. Apparently, they have been convinced that copyright law should be loosened so that "Orphaned Works" can be used without consequence. The scenario that the proponents of this legislation (see [link]) like to bandy about is this: imagine you were to find at a yard sale a diary written by someone hiding in an attic in Holland during the Nazi occupation (yeah, the Diary of Anne Frank). According to "them", the way copyright law works now, you would not be able to use that to teach people about the evils of the holocaust.

This is bald faced crap. Current copyright law and legal precedents allow for the use of copyrighted material for fair use. This principle has been defined by courts over the past 30 or so years and is a recognized and understood concept. Thus this is a scenario that does not require any further legislation in order to make it happen.

What this bill does has nothing to do with educational uses. It lowers the bar for usage to making a "good faith" effort to find the copyright holder. Thus a porn producer or an extreme right wing nazi group can now use your work to promote their ideas if they make a "good faith" effort to find you and ask for your permission. Not only that, but once you find the person using your art, you then have to sue them to get them to stop using it. BUT WAIT! THERE"S MORE!! Once you sue them, and you prove that their good faith effort was not really in good faith, you are entitled only to "reasonable" compensation. You read that correctly, there are no longer punitive damages (currently up to $150,000) and you are no longer entitled to recoup any legal fees that you may have had to pay.

It is telling that the main backers of the bill are the major MPAA, Google, Corbis, and Getty. The MPAA members want to be able to use images and artwork in their movies, Google wants to be able to incorporate images into its mapping applications, and the stock image companies, well, to quote Rodney Dangerfield from Back to School "... those guys aren't the Boy Scouts...". Lined up in opposition are the textile designers, photographers, and illustrators.

Time to go to find your senator ([link]) or representative ([link]) and write them a little note explaining how this will impact their constituents.

Just enjoying having more and more of my old work scanned. Nothing more than that.

I took a class in college called Visual Literacy. The professor was this crazy Russian who took the train down from NYC twice a week to sit in a dark room with about 120 snot nosed, arrogant college kids and look at slides to try to figure out what a given piece of art meant. In the end he got in huge amounts of trouble because he gave us the proverbial one question final exam: "What is art?" My smart ass answer at the time was that art is an advertising scam designed to allow people with a small amount of talent to charge large amounts of money for crap that hangs on walls. I got a B+ in the class and was told I would have gotten an A if I hadn't missed so many classes.

20 years down the road, I still think that "Art" has become a marketing term. I would far rather be called a craftsman than an artist. The term artist has been usurped by dilettantes and housewives to excuse a life of absurd protest or distracted ennui. I remember hearing someone quoted as having said that "Art is pain." I imagine that was someone like Michaelangelo who probably had one hell of a crick in his neck after doing the fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I doubt sincerely that he would have been terribly impressed by Serano's crucifix in a jar of urine.

At this point I sound like I hate art. Not so. I am forcefully annoyed by people who are far more interested in being artists than in creating quality work. Now, maybe it's just me, but I honestly believe that there are 3 parts to the craft of photography:

• Planning the image - knowing what you are going to shoot. If you just happen to be standing there when something happens and you take a picture, you're a journalist or documentarian. If you leave the house and make a plan, even if it's as ephemeral as "I am going to take some pictures today." you're on your way. The more you shoot the more likely that your ideas will get refined as in "You know, I took pictures of that tree yesterday and it was a cool tree but I think I can do better. I'm going back and spending the day with that tree."
• Executing the image - using every tool available to you to achieve the results you want. Ask a photographer if they have every piece of equipment they need and if they say "yes" then they are full of crap. Even if they can't point to a specific piece of equipment there's a good chance the answer will be "You know what would be cool ..." followed by a description of some fantastic contraption that does something totally impossible. BUt it's not all about having crap, once you have the crap you had better be able to use it to some effect. Unless you're a doctor or a lawyer. Real photographers LOVE doctors and lawyers because they buy Hasselblads and then realize that Hasselblads are ill suited to taking pictures of the wife and kids and then flood the market with cheap used Hasselblad gear.
• This brings us to the point of this entry: EDIT!!! Motherfucker... if the point is to create a great image, wouldn't you weed out the shyte images before you dump them on DA? Recently, I have been scanning my back catalog of work on film and while the scanner is plugging away turning my old jobs into digital files I can then stick in a database of client work, I have taken to perusing the most recent files uploaded to DA. And it's not just the jackasses who upload 30 really bad pictures of their own genitalia (note that is not a male or female thing, both sexes are healthily represented around here).

So that is my request of my fellow DA citizens. Please pick one or two pictures of your penis/labia that really reflect the quality of your work. If you're unhappy with your results, analyze them and revisit the subject matter. It's not like it's going anywhere though if you keep playing with it you may go blind.