Tim Soter … blog.

I’m back from a beautiful trip to Seattle!  It’s my second visit there, every time I go it’s 80F or warmer and cloudless blue skies.  I bring good luck.  This was the second stop on a three city campaign shooting the Ford Fiesta for Taow Marketing.

Below is a self portrait perhaps bested by my friend Christine’s documentation of the action.  I don’t like to admit defeat to an iPhone but it’s post-modernly funnier.  Funny always wins.

I’m currently in Seattle for a week on assignment and just wanted to offer a placeholder, a coupling that I’ve always liked, taken rather spontaneously at a Halloween party ten years ago.

I have no idea who this is.

I just got back from shooting the first of a three city Ford Fiesta campaign, the first city being Portland, OR.  A really fun shoot that completely suits me - creative reportage in interesting environments - my absolute favorite.  The good folks at Taow Marketing I swear are like family.

I am completely in love with that city, realistically perhaps the only city I’d leave NYC for.  Below are two spoils from the trip - one, an out of print Duane Michals book, purchased at the legendary Powell’s bookstore for only $8.  Powell’s mixes in their used  with the new books, so it’s a large bookstore that still maintains that sense of the possibilities of discovering something rare or unusual on the shelves.  Two, a bacon maple bar from Voodoo donuts, pretty intense and rich - I had to eat it over the course of a day.

Look for a promo of all of this work by the end of the summer.

I met Dennis Hopper back in 1994, the first year I lived in New York City which was a really wonderfully naive time.  I spent almost every weekend with headphones on listening to mixtapes I had made as soundtracks for my walks around lower Manhattan, which was about all I could afford.  One Saturday while cruising (non-sexual sense) SoHo I saw Mr. Hopper on the street and asked I could take a quick portrait of him.  He accepted politely, I shot it and he left, entering in a high priced boutique behind me.  I sat on the wide metal steps waiting for the polaroid to fully develop which it did, just as Dennis was leaving the store.

“Hey Dennis, would you mind signing this since you’re still here?”

“No, No… (taking polaroid and pen) …oh, who’s that?  Where was she?  Wow…” he said, leering at the passerby in the photo.  The he noticed the pattern in the image and asked about it.

“Oh I’ve been experimenting with polaroids.  I take nail polish and paint dots on the rollers in the camera and when the film goes through, the pressure against the raised dots makes this pattern.”

“Oh, wow oooh… can I show this to my wife?”  He took it and walked a few feet away and proceeded to tell her verbatim and somewhat excitedly what the process was. “The kid over there he takes nail polish… “

In hindsight that’s a connection I should have been more assertive in maintaining but I was just jazzed to have such a good New York City day.

BELOW is a more experimental pattern (more nail polish, thicker and more randomly applied.)  I think this pattern was my favorite both for the color that emerged from hitting the bumps as well as that kind of insect like pattern right down the middle.  Please forward this to the Creative Director of Polaroid to see if I could get a free case of film.  Is Ms. Gaga checking her corporate emails?

I have posted photos taken in my neighborhood recently and received a few more on a roll I got back yesterday.  There is a small voice in my head however, leftover from the days of grandiose misconceptions that says that my fascination is trivial.  That this project, and I have to acknowledge that it is a project because I’ve shot enough local photographs -  is small.  As I’ve matured as a photographer and as a person however, I’ve gradually accepted subtlety.  I think we’re all initially attracted to shock and awe but discover the understated as time goes on.  It’s also interesting to compare these neighborhood photos to the one below (FROM THE ARCHIVE) which was taken eight or nine years ago, with a Mamiya 7 in Atlantic City.  The comparison really reflects my evolution in mood, self-awareness, and relaxed attitude in exploring what I am interested in finding visually.  The photo of the reading glasses (not the best scan) is a dark image; I’ve still retained a similar sense of humor (though not as black) but I remember my influences were the same that most emerging photographers had at the time.  It was a post-Eggleston, medium format snapshot influence with many young photographers looking for irony and sometimes trying to find the joke at someone else’s expense.  I’m not on some moral high ground, it’s just that it quickly turned into a game of “find the Trans Am with weeds growing around it” or “real American with a Budwiser can in hand” popularized by imitators of photography printed in Vice magazine.  There was little exploration and many photographers unknowingly fell into a knee-jerk pattern of looking for imagery that already existed in their minds.  The style was really very narrow, but easy to see why it was enticing.

The work that I’m doing now is brighter, more consistent not only as a series of ideas, but to my personality.  I accept what I like to see and create; it’s truly the only way to make original work and hopefully there are some other people that connect with it on a similar level.  Even the camera I use is not so “serious” and I intentionally chose it because of it’s stripped down nature, which enables me to make a more primal connection with it as a tool designed to express what I see.

So the idea here is the acceptance of subtlety through personal growth.  It  took me fifteen years to understand while Lee Friedlander published such editions as ‘Flowers and Trees’ which I initially viewed as dry, stiff and dull.  As I write this John Lydon (Sex Pistols, PIL) is being interviewed on East Village Radio and has unironically offered “… over the years, I’ve developed a real love for nature,” revealing how cuddly he became with gorillas on a recent safari.  Sincerity is the new punk.

Last year I had an assignment for Billboard, shooting a reportage’ story involving fifteen EMI songwriters collaborating in a studios, literally writing the next big radio/internet hits.  Totally fun being a fly on that wall, even the phrases that they wrote in my presence got stuck in my head.  Things like, “You’re freaking me ow-out, you’re freaking me ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-out… “  A kind, barefooted German-Dane handed me his business card politely, on it were some of the hits he had written… Beyonce “If I Were a Boy,” Fergie “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” entire seasons of Hannah Montana… I couldn’t wait to hear something I had been present at the origin of, blaring out of slow rolling cars all summer long.  Simply so I could say I was there.  I was there at the genesis of THAT.

Cut to last month when Dylan from EMI asked if I would do a group portrait of the Urban Songwriters Conference.  Some of the same guys would be there and more, all shopping their diddies for the “next Ke$ha” who might need just the right ballad to complete her album.  I was warned that time was tight; ten minutes, one hundred writers, one shot that couldn’t look like a class portrait, all even heights and perfect rows.  Well it all came together well; I had some time a few days in advance to the ballroom and really sketch out the gist of it, setting up some unequal risers and getting that piano in there.  Plus I had some good assistants the day of and a bullhorn. I am now trying to figure out a way to use a bullhorn on all my shoots, even single portraits.  Or buildings.  It’s simply so much funnier.  Everyone was great and we actually all had a really fun time given the fact that it was first thing in the morning for a bunch of night owls.

Click on any of the below frames to see a short timelapse video of the whole thing.

Though for some reason I only used the bullhorn off camera.

I do really enjoy my Italian neighborhood here in Brooklyn; I could shoot for weeks within a five block radius.  I’m sure fellow photographer James Mahon is missing the local hospitaliano just a bit (though he found an absolutely beautiful house.)

ABOVE: As protected as your house can get apparently.

I shot a story that is running in the April issue of Maxim, on the newsstand now.   The editors of the magazine were given dance lessons by Cheryl Burke (above) from Dancing With the Stars; the whole thing was exactly as fun as it sounds. Wait, actually you can SEE how fun it was through the magic of video. Thanks to photo editor Stacey Pittman and all of the now expert salsa dancing editors. Special shout out goes to production director Amy Fritch, who made it to the final Dance Off. (DISLCAIMER:  Amy and I went to school together and she has seen me at the height of my adolescent art school arrogance… which has luckily eroded away from years of humbling work in the field.)