Chris Bickford

I recently had the privilege of participating in David Harvey’s “At Home With David Alan Harvey” workshop in New York City. For 8 days, David and his staff opened up his Williamsburg loft to 12 aspiring photographers to get a firsthand experience of the New York photographic world. Each of us worked on an individual project and participated in daily critiques, as well as impromptu studio visits from photo editors, National Geographic staff, book publishers, and representatives from David’s photo agency, Magnum. Classes were held in the studio of NatGeo photographer Robert Clark, across the hall from David’s loft. It was a rare opportunity, made all the rarer by the fact that he probably won’t continue giving workshops in his home.

The exposure and instruction were first-rate; David pushed each of us to explore themes, dig deeper, get closer, trim the fat, let go of the “almost” pictures, forget about the shots we missed, and build a body of work that had style and impact. He pulled no punches, and at times it was hard being in the room when he was bearing down on a fellow photographer who wasn’t “getting it”…but in the end, every single one of us came away with work that was on a higher level than what we came in with.

I’m posting here the results of my workshop project, which was a somewhat lyrical exploration of the New York night, focusing on the hip Lower East Side. From a visual standpoint, I was attracted to all the colors of artifical night light: neon, blue stage lights, red -gelled interiors, halogen street lights. From a thematic viewpoint, I was looking to capture what I saw to be the prevailing mood of the nightlife on the Lower East Side: a world of people searching for something, sometimes finding fleeting hints of it, but generally lost in the darkness of a place that is ultimately apathetic to whether or not their band makes it, or whether they find love, or how cool they look. The Lower East Side is one of the great bastions of the “Tragically Hip”, and to me there is some poignant irony about it all; so many people who yearn to be different, to rise above, to express themselves as artists, to escape the conformity of their upbringing…and all of them drowning in a sea of sameness: tattoos, pork pie hats, rock bands, wallets on chains, cigarettes outside the bar…I don’t think I really scratched the surface of that theme in my piece, but it was there with me the whole time. There were moments when I saw it all in a more positive light, when I thought of this great teeming world of art and music and young people out doing their thing, hooking up and breaking up and living out the dramas that are the stuff of rock and roll songs…but mostly it struck me as a sad. lonely kind of scene, with a retro-upon-retro style that no longer seemed to have much substance to it…kind of a Foucault’s paradise of endlessly circular self-references…

David’s advice to me upon review of my portfolio was to get looser and edgier, to develop a stronger “personal style”. On one level I feel I succeeded, but the quandary now is how to really “own” the changes I’ve made in my style, and what further changes to make to come into a style that takes the best of the old old stuff, the best of the new stuff, and puts me on the path of “authorship”.

For me, shooting in New York was a challenge. I lived in the Big Apple for three years and there was no love lost when I moved away. Like an old girlfriend said to me, “New York is like a bad lover”–you give and you give and for the most part she is totally indifferent, except for every now and then she throws you some shred of love and approval, which makes you hungry for more, so you stick around waiting, hoping…And then there’s the overcrowding, the absence of nature, the noise, the smell, and the overwhelming presence of anxiety, frustration, and alienation. Being there puts me in a “Taxi Driver” state of mind, which is not a state of mind I really like to be in.

At the same time, I really do love playing with night light…So I guess the real question is where to take this thing from here. I’m thinking maybe I could take pieces of this idea south, to small towns and regional music scenes, where I might find a little more soul, a little more humanity. I think maybe I’d like to add a stronger element of “Americana” to it. Maybe make it a piece about the “American” night…Or hell, maybe I’ll just suck it up and head back to the LES for another dose of postmodern blues, New York style…

Anyway, here are the ten photos that made it to the final slideshow, followed by the outtakes:

And some of the better outtakes:

I’ve recently put together a book of a performance by London’s Rambert Dance Company in Montepulciano, Italy that I shot this summer. The performance was part of Montepulciano’s summer arts festival, and ran for two nights in Piazza Grande, which holds the distinction of being the highest piazza in Tuscany. Unfortunately for the dancers, that means the nights can get quite chilly, even in summer. The company put on two flawless shows however, and we all had a fine time hanging out in the café afterwards.

The bulk of these shots are seconds apart, and come from a single piece, out of about six or so that were performed that night. As I was shooting a live performance in a public square, it was a little tricky moving around, trying to find the right angle, trying to get close enough for a good shot, without being obtrusive or annoying to the paying spectators. In the end, I think I fired off the motor drive a little too much during this piece, and my newfound Italian photographer friends ribbed me about being a machine-gunner, but I did get some cool shots…

The Rambert Dance Company is one of England’s most prestigious and preeminent modern dance groups. It was founded in 1926, and currently has 22 dancers. The Montepulciano show was a showcase of works in progress, and the dancers, as they put it, were “on holiday” there, dancing for free in order to try out some new work and enjoy a few days in a Tuscan hill town. They were, in addition to being spectacular dancers, a great bunch of people, and I hope to run into them again.

This piece has got me thinking about taking things in a certain direction. Something about what happens in performance, when individual personalities lose themselves to the dance and become beings of pure movement…Something like that…

The end of summer here is always bittersweet. There is a sense of relief, that the tourists have gone and that the traffic has slowed and that soon the suffocating heat will subside and we will still have two months of beautiful weather and warm water…but every year it hits us all with a bit of a shock. People get a little depressed, maybe even a little ill. After all the craziness of summer, it’s hard to slow down and contemplate the coming off-season. Some people will move away, or leave for the season. Some relationships will end, and new ones will begin. And we’ll all be making less money. But soon enough the momentum of autumn kicks in, the hurricanes start pumping surf and there are weddings, wine festivals, and Halloween parties look forward to. The sky gets crisp and colorful, the hoodies and Ugg boots come out, the oysters get cheap and plentiful, and we all remember why we live here.

Anyway, here are a few recent photos…

Of all the cities of the world, perhaps none is so ingrained in the collective imagination as Paris. There is something about the place that we all feel and understand, even before we set foot in its quartiers. Maybe we all read the same picture books, or saw the same movies when we were children; maybe it’s those iconic images from Renoir, Monet, and Doisneau that grace the walls of college girls’ dorm rooms around the world. Maybe it was from reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Henry Miller…whatever the cause, Paris is a place that has already filled our minds before we ever even arrive, and a place that we all seem to want to hold on to after we leave. “We’ll always have Paris,” “wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you”…how many artists and writers have expressed this notion,that those who have visited and loved the City of Light carry a piece of her wherever they go?

So Chris Whitehurst turned 40 last week. As befitting for the unofficial “mayor” of the Land of Lost Children, we had a big party, involving several boats and a lot of seafood and beer. Originally Whitey wanted a parade down Lindberg Street, but somehow the event morphed into a boat procession from Jon Beckner’s house to Greentail’s Restaurant on the Currituck side of the sound. At the Beckners’, we presented him with his birthday present–a Fender Deluxe Telecaster, which Gary Rader had bought with a pool of funds from the crew (Gary’s ulterior motive was to get his old blonde Tele back, which Whitey has been using for the past two years). Chris was also given a top hat and scepter, which he proudly sported the entire evening. The party ended up at Chili Pepper’s, where Whitey got up with his new guitar and tore it up with Formula.

Happy Birthday, my man…