lupe
Back in my junior year of college, I lived in an apartment building known amongst locals as The Barn. It certainly looked like a barn, though I’m quite certain the structure never housed livestock or anything more wild than collegiate types experiencing their first moments of seeming independence. There were two apartments on each of three floors: 1 South, 1 North, 2 South, and so on. Around December 1994, someone poked their head in the door of my apartment, 1 North: might I be interested in selling some of my Russian language textbooks to her roommate? The head in question belonged to Lupe of 3 North, and in that moment a conversation ensued; soon after, friendship. In the summer of 1995, Lupe — and three others — moved into the 2 bedroom apartment I had then relocated to, and we spent that sweltering summer doing everything we could to keep cool.
I set up a makeshift photo studio in one of the bedrooms, and asked Lupe to sit for me; it was one of my first forays into photography proper. The photo above is perhaps my shining moment of that summer, even though the smudginess of the scan might suggest otherwise. I was a newbie at this photography thing, but for Lupe … all of this seemed to come naturally to her (and, though she might disagree, it still does). There’ll be more photos of Lupe to follow, but for now, I’m going to enjoy this one for a bit. It still kind of kills me how nicely it came out, all things — the newbie with the Pentax K-1000, not to mention the 95 degree heat and 97% humidity — considered. Thanks, Lu, for putting up with my photographic aspirations insanity.
what remains.
About three years ago, I was living in a spacious, but a wee bit lonely, apartment in Queens. It was just far out enough that no one ever visited, and going into the city always took a bit of time. So I stayed home a lot, developed a taste for French cider, and worked on a blog that provided me with a platform to discuss my ongoing dislike of what I called, simply, The Quirk. I hadn’t done that much thinking since I finished my phD and left graduate school, and what I lacked in company I had in ideas. Lots of them.
Not all of those ideas were particularly well thought out. I hadn’t been using my film cameras in a while — the Nikon had been broken, and unfixed, for several years — and my little digital point and shoot was suiting me just fine. And it seemed like I had an awful lot of clutter. Why not scale back a bit, live a bit more like an ascetic? Faciliate ideas-mongering by creating a more efficient, minimalist living space?
So I did what now causes me to look back in utter horror: I threw away what I believed were all non-essential photographs and negatives. Yup. The negatives too. To be sure, I kept a lot of my old black and white negatives, which were stored in a special archival portfolio. But anything that had been shot and developed in a one-hour-photo lab — I sorted through the photos and kept only the ones that I had any clear sense of fondness for, throwing away the negatives in the process. Yes, the negatives.
Long story short: for someone who thinks a lot about ruins, and nostalgia for misremembered histories, and how we construct individual, communal, and national narratives from the detritus of all that has happened before — well, my detritus is probably in some landfill on Staten Island. The memories are still here, but without the photos, they seem incomplete, imprecise.
So the photos above: they’re actually fuzzy scans from a contact sheet of photos taken during the first few days of a roadtrip I took in 2000 with my pals A and Rosten. They’re lovely images, if I do say so myself. I have the contact sheet, but the negatives — no idea. I wish the moral of the story could be: Don’t live alone in an apartment off the M train in Queens. Or: French cider makes you crazy! Sadly, I think the takeaway really is just that I’m an idiot.
portraits of the artist.
Next to my bedroom is a little room that my housemate Aaron has been using as his studio for the past little while. There’s a great flood of bright light that comes into my room every morning, but the light that comes into the studio is a bit more muted. The beige walls have something to do with that, no doubt, but what results is a kind of stillness in the space, as if everything within the studio is its own potential painting, a potential still life, clustered outside of the canvas itself.
The top photo was taken a few weeks ago, with the hazy summer morning light fighting its way past the dense thicket of leaves on the huge tree outside our apartment. The photo above was taken last October, with the tree bare and a somewhat harsher, more direct early morning light reaching the paints. There’s still something so quiet about it, though.
Aaron’s moving out soon, and a writer is moving in. She’s also taking over the studio space. I wonder what the light will find in there, come September. Oh, and here’s Aaron, sitting on the front stoop of our brownstone.
world cup saturday.
The World Cup seems like eons ago, no?
These were taken at my local bar during the Spain-Paraguay quarterfinal match. When David Villa scored the winning goal in the 82nd minute, you could hear a wee roar from the combined pro-Spain contingents at both my local and the restaurant next door. It’s moments like that that make you forget how mind-fryingly hot July can be.
many moons ago.
This was taken way back in June 1996, when I still had the Pentax K-1000 that my father gave to me. A few years after this photo was taken, my father gifted me the Nikon that I still use today, and I passed the Pentax down to my brother. The Pentax was stolen one night from my brother’s car — well, along with the car itself. The car mysteriously appeared a week later a few streets away from where it had been parked/stolen. Only the Pentax was missing.
Anyhow, this is Theron. I loved that shirt.
berlin.
[February – March 2009.]
I honestly don’t remember much of what I saw, or was supposed to see, when I travelled to Berlin last year. I stayed with my pals A and June in their flat in Charlottenburg, and while we went to museums and visited monuments and all that, what I remember most is just walking around the city, taking in its everydayness, its livability. Their Berlin was about mid-afternoon dumpling breaks, trips to the out-of-the-way Asian grocery stores, and long, meandering walks with no particular destination in mind. And, on my last night, a hilarious shepherd’s pie dinner party that morphed into a raucous visit to an old dancehall. The next morning, as I sat bleary-eyed at Heathrow, waiting for my connecting flight back to New York, I wondered if it was all a dream.
the big picture(s).
Here we go!
hong-an tran 
