Tim Soter… blog.

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.