All Screenshots

Since I started this blog a lot of people have been e-mailing me saying "When are you going to show us a new form of documentary photography, one that treats the internet as a landscape and the screenshot as a camera with which you document your travels through cyberspace and ultimately capture something about each of us and the culture we live in?" Well, the wait is finally over. Today I'm here to usher in an entirely new way of seeing and thinking. You can throw away your cameras and you can draw over the lens of your cell phone's camera with a Sharpee - these are devices of the past. The screenshot is the only camera you'll need. Consider this post the first All-Screenshot Photography exhibition.

All of these photographs were collected online and have not been altered in any way. Just like a photo from the top of Mount Everest, you could feasibly see all of these sights yourself. But after this exhibition, you won't have to.































Copies of my book "Shift+Command+4 and Other Ways to Take Memorable Screenshots" are available for sale in the lobby.

A Riveting LA Story

Sorry for the breaks - this is the only way to let you see the whole conversation in this blog window and still have it be a readable size. Disregard them - this is one continuous tale.

Drinking and Driving and Running Red Lights

1. A Return on the Pickup Day

On every commercial job I've worked there is usually a day for picking up rental furniture and other props, and a day afterwards for returning those things. Usually two people do this in a 4-ton truck, one to drive and the other to back the truck in to tight parking spaces. The recent Honda job I worked was no exception. I was at my boss's house, getting the list of the rentals we needed to pick up. The guy I'd be driving with was named Rob. Rob said to my boss "While we're in North Hollywood, we should probably return the car from that other job, right?" My boss agreed that we should.

"Okay," Rob said to me. "One of us will return the car and then get picked up by the other one in the truck. Do you want to drive the truck or the police car?"

"The police car," I said.

Before we took off I tried to get the lights and sirens to work, but either they were disabled or there was some kind of code to stop people who have no business turning on the sirens of a rented police car from turning on the sirens of a rented police car. Whatever the case, on his camera Rob has a picture of me behind the wheel, pretending to look like a stern cop. There's actually a story behind why I don't have that picture, but it can't be posted on the blog, so you'll have to e-mail me if you want to hear it.


I followed the truck to the highway. He went through a yellow light. In my own car, I would have stopped. But I didn't know where we were going. "Screw it," I thought. "I'm in a police car." The light turned red as I went through the intersection.

To understand the sweet release of driving a police car on Los Angeles highways, you have to understand Los Angeles drivers. While you or I might perceive the "self" as the combination of mind and body, the Los Angeleno perceives the self as the combination of mind, body, and car. I experienced this form of consciousness one day when I was walking, and was curious about what was behind me, and instead of turning around, I looked up and to the right, where a rear view mirror would be if I was in a car.

Because of this condition, Los Angeles highways, or "freeways," are the locker rooms of the city, the place that residents express their hopes, dreams, and deep inner rage. They tailgate with their brights on, even if there's an open lane to the left, because they shouldn't have to merge left, you should get out of their way and merge right. But this is tough, because when a Los Angeles driver sees someone about to merge into their lane, it is customary to speed up and close the window into which that person would merge. Allowing another car to merge into your lane is viewed as a sign of weakness.

EXCEPT if that other car is a police car. The LAPD's proud tradition of overreacting, especially when it comes to highway situations, has led to an corollary to the LA be-an-asshole-on-the-highway doctrine, which is back the hell away from cops. Initially I drove extremely cautiously, this being someone else's rental car, but shortly into the trip, I noticed something that I've termed a "Pocket of Freedom." Regardless of the speed of traffic, I could go as fast or as slow as I wanted, and the amount of space between me and the other cars would not change. Even without the sirens, we made the trip from Santa Monica to North Hollywood in record time.

In North Hollywood, I drove past a real police car. I'd wondered about this. My car had a sign taped in the back window that said "Motion Picture Vehicle," but from all other angles was indistinguishable from a real police car. I'm not sure what police procedure says about a person in jeans and a t-shirt driving one of their vehicles, but this officer waved. It could be that he didn't notice my lack of uniform, or that given our distance from the cinema vehicle rental lot, he'd seen a lot of inappropriate driver-to-vehicle relationships. Or maybe this person wasn't a cop at all, but a costumed actor on his way to a shoot who forgot to tape up his Motion Picture Vehicle sign. Whatever the case, I waved back at him, and through this exchange we acknowledged the unspoken power we each felt in our respective black-and-whites.

2. A Pickup on the Return Day

I was helping Rob pack the 4-ton when I got a call from my boss.

"What are you doing?" he said.
"Packing the truck."
"I need you to pick me up at the Standard Hotel in Hollywood."
"Okay..."
"I'm on my way there now, so leave in 5 minutes and we should get there at the same time."


I left Rob to make the returns on his own, and drove to Hollywood. Surprisingly there was a metered spot directly in front of the hotel. As I was parallel parking, my boss pulled up to the hotel's valet, in a bright red vintage-looking Cadillac convertible. He got out and gave the keys to the valet. "Keep it near the front," he said. "Someone is gonna pick it up in a minute." And then, to me, "Come on, let's have a drink by the pool."


I got a Fat Tire, my boss got a Pomegranate Mojito. "I stayed in the Standard once," he said. "The rooms are tiny."

"What was the Cadillac for?" I said.
"Music video. Same as the police car."
"Oh," I said, realizing I forgot to ask about that.
Halfway through our drinks, an Art PA from the music video came to pick up the Cadillac.

"This Mojito's the business," my boss said.
"Really? It's good?"
"Yeah. Sip?" He slid me the Mojito.
"Sure. Fat Tire?"
"Sure."
We traded sips.

We left the Standard. Getting into my Honda Fit, my boss said, "Ouch. Sucks to go from a Cadillac convertible to this!"


On the way home I went through a yellow light. My boss said "I was wondering when you were finally gonna go through one of those. I mean, Jesus! It's Los Angeles!" I put on my signal, and we got on the highway.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like...

A good portion of my day is spent talking on ichat with Henry Ferreira (see Tuesdays with Henry), and I feel we've come to know each other's online personalities fairly well. So when Henry left his ichat account open on a public computer in RISD's Printmaking building and a deeply angry sophomore named Maria started talking to me through his account, it didn't take long to realize that this was not my friend. But for some reason I talked to her for a long time anyway. I'm posting some excerpts from our chat, so that researchers can analyze the unfocused angst of a modern American art school student, and together brainstorm ways to quell that anger, or at least direct it toward something that needs a good name calling!

(Notes: 1. You may have to click some of the chats to open them in a new window and make them easy to read. There's no good way I've found to stop blogger from compressing images. Blogger is lucky that I didn't know about Tumblr when I started this thing. 2. Henry was also logged in to facebook, which is how Maria found out the rest of the information such as the fact that my girlfriend's name is Emily.)

Seagulls

I just got done working on a Honda commercial. The commercial was Japanese, for a car that’s only available in Japan. Most of the crew was Japanese as well, including the director and producers, and a translator accompanied them for when they had to talk to the crewmembers who didn’t speak Japanese.

Since this was a car commercial, most of the shots were of the car driving through various neighborhoods. The only real “set” was an RV that followed the Honda, outfitted to look like a hip trendy mobile radio station, which I guess was supposed to be the spirit that this new Honda embodied.

Anyway, on the first day the shot was of the RV and the new Honda in a parking lot. We needed to paint over the white parking lines with gray paint, and then lay down our own parking lines with white tape, because the spaces had to sit at a slightly different angle than the real parking lines. That took about two hours, and after that, our work was done. We’d prepared the RV the night before. Most of us stood around either tidying up our truck, or grabbing some food from the Craft Services table. But at some point the Producers had told my boss, the Production Designer, that there might be too many people in the art department. He was seeing a lot of standing around. So for the afternoon, we got busy, cleaning the RV that we had cleaned the day before.

My boss handed me a spray and told me to use it on the wheels. When I was on number three out of six, he walked by me and said “Not the tires! The wheels!” He came by and told me to start over on the wheels, and then handed me a different product to use on the tires. After about five hours of cleaning the van, production wrapped for the day.

The next day we had one less person in the Art Department. And today the set wasn’t a parking lot, it was a driveway and a back yard. We were responsible for even less today, this time just a surfboard and two bikes sitting in the back yard. We looked for things to do. I drove forty minutes to return a single chair that we had rented. I came back to set and there was still nothing needed. We put another coat of wax on the van.

Then we packed up and moved to the next location, which was a beach in Marina del Rey. The shot was the Honda at the beach, the driver getting out and looking at the ocean, and a seagull flying by overhead. With only the Honda in the shot, we weren’t responsible for anything.

Until the translator came over to my boss, and said “What methods do you have for attracting seagulls?”

Apparently when the crew scouted the location, there had been hundreds of seagulls on the beach, but now there were none. “I’ll get right on it,” said my boss.

Two of our people got on the bikes that we had used in the last shot, and rode up and down the boardwalk with bags of potato chips. The plan was to find some seagulls and use the potato chips to lure them towards the car. The rest of us stood on the beach with bread and potato chips and other snacks we’d taken from the Craft Service table. Whenever a seagull would fly by overhead, we would all throw food into the air, and in the direction of the car, trying to catch his attention. There were four of us at first, but then the Production Assistants, who also had nothing to do, caught on, and soon there were about ten people at various points on the beach, throwing confetti-like showers of crumbled bread into the air whenever a gull flew past.

The people not throwing food became runners, going back and forth between the Craft Service table and the people on the beach, resupplying the throwers whenever they ran out. At some point the Art Director figured out that cheese was the best because of its shape – it could be tossed into the air like a frisbee, thus reaching a higher altitude, closer to the seagulls.

I noticed one of the Producers talking to the translator, who ran over to us. “There are too many people,” he said. “You will scare away the seagulls.” So the rest of us backed off the beach, and only the Art Director was left, throwing pieces of cheese into the air by himself. I jogged over to Craft Services for more cheese.

“You mind if I borrow some more of this?” I asked, picking up a stack.
“Sure,” said the Craft Services person. “But it will never work. Seagulls don’t eat cheese.”

When I came back, a seagull was hovering in the air about fifty feet above the beach. He started making slow circles towards the ground. Everyone struggled to contain their excitement. The Art Director threw cheese with increased fervor, to make sure that the seagull saw and understood. The Director said something to the camera person, the Producer said something to the actor, everybody scrambled to get the camera ready to shoot, and the seagull got startled and flew away.

I went to the Art Director with more cheese. The translator jogged out and met us. “You can stop now,” he said. “They are giving up on that shot.”

I took the cheese back to Craft Services, and joined the rest of the Art Department in tidying up our truck. But a few minutes later I heard a caw, and looked over to see that not one but two seagulls had landed on the beach near the car, and were eating some of the food that had fallen to the ground. And while I was looking, a third landed, and then a fourth. I looked down the beach. Hundreds of seagulls were flying in, directly towards the set. More and more landed, eating all of the food we’d thrown at them earlier.

“Well, now they can definitely get that shot,” I said to the Art Director.
“They’re not going to, though,” he said. “They’ve moved on already.”

So as the sun was setting on the beach and the Producers and Director and Camera Crew were hurrying to finish before it got dark, we all stood around, eating food and drinking coffee from Craft Services, and more seagulls landed on the beach, and at one point the crew had to turn the camera slightly, to keep all the seagulls out of the shot. Like the rest of us, the seagulls were no longer needed.