Wanderlust

Since my cameras are out of commission for a bit, I’ve been going through a bunch of recent work, editing and looking for things I missed the first time around. A friend of mine recently asked me to do a headshot of her and I came across some outtakes I really liked from the shoot.

At the paper, we’ve been doing a lot of interviews of local candidates for the upcoming election. It’s usually about an hour long Q & A session that we videotape and put on our site. I’ve had the pleasure of covering the 10th district race, one of the most contentious in the state. After our interview with democratic hopeful Dan Seals, I managed to get a candid of him. Hopefully I’ll have the same luck with his rival for the position, incumbent republican Mark Kirk, during our shoot tomorrow…

I just finished recovering from the 3-day Camp Video Journalism workshop [and pulling my hair out watching the debates] with Robb Montgomery at the Chicago Sun-Times. It was the most “official” training I’ve had in video, minus my video installation classes at Columbia and the self training I’ve done at the paper. Basically, besides shooting, it was heads down, non-stop-eyes-bugging-out video immersion. And it was pretty fun.

The first day was pretty basic, shooting b-roll and editing. Day two was spent with tv and print journalist Carol Marin who had some great advice about interviewing:

#1: Shut up and listen.
#2: Get out of the way of your interviews.
#3: Ask leading questions.
#4: An interview is a conversation, not a Q & A.

We also heard from video journalist Mark Scheffler who added about 10 more names I need to research, NYU Film grad Aaron Cahan and Northwest Herald videographer Danielle Guerra. If you haven’t seen her video Jeff’s Last Delivery yet, you should stop reading this and check it out. It is an amazing piece and I was glad to see such a variety of work shown in class.

Once we got down to actually shooting, I headed for the south loop in search of a story. Luckily enough, I stumbled across Chicago’s own Cecil Locke, owner of Touch and Go chess, a 30 ft. table of chess and checkers boards south of the Art Institute of Chicago. Locke was quite a character and I had a great time working with him. And here’s the piece I did for the class:

Find more videos like this on Camp Video Journalism

Any feedback is more than welcome. I think my video excitement has returned so hopefully you’ll be seeing some more of these soon…

So as many other colleagues and friends have already done, I too have now added the title “wedding photographer” to my little bag of photo tricks. I have to say I was fighting it for a long time but being still a “rookie” in the newspaper industry with more doom reports (just google ‘newspaper layoffs’ and you’ll see what I mean) every day, I knew something was in order. So I reluctantly left my press pass at home last month and headed downtown.

And the amazing thing was, it was ridiculously fun. It was like picking up a camera for the first time and taking hundreds of photos just because you can. It was pretty amazing. So once my pj snobbery subsided a bit, I did some research and found the WPJA, an amazing site of wedding photojournalism work. No cheesy portraits by the fountain. No “can you tilt your head a little to the left”. Just amazing pictures. And I breathed a sigh of relief. Even if I don’t make it out of this decade with a press pass, at least I’ll still be able to fund the things I love to do with some good, old fashioned wedding work. And I won’t have to get a desk job to do it.

One of the special features we have been doing at the paper is choosing a town to cover a “Day in the Life” in. It’s pretty much an assignment photographer’s dream day since you can shoot however you want and not have to worry about upsetting your editor or making sure you get a shot of so-and-so.  This time around was Libertyville, a northern suburb of Chicago and our last one for the year. Here are my favorites from the day:

I know I have been the worst blogger known to man. I’ve got no excuses. So in an effort to make up for lost time and lack of material, I intend to bombard you with copious amounts of photographs with the intention of actually blogging more often. Here goes.

Thanks for looking.

a.

On my last day in Mexico, my roommate, comrade and partner in mischief Ana Manzano and I headed to the pre-Hispanic city of Teotihuacan to see the pyramids. We had a fantastic bus ride due to our drivers insatiable love of 80’s/90’s pop ballads and we sung our way in and out of the city.

The ruins are a stunning sight, even at a distance, and we walked along the Street of the Dead towards the massive Sun pyramid. [Apparently I was having a "minimalist day", so I apologize in advance if the negative space gets overwhelming.]

After an extraordinarily long and hot trek, we made it to the base of the Sun pyramid. As we looked at it looming above us, Ana joked, “I’m not trying to do the second one [pyramid].” Glancing over at the moon pyramid which looked about another mile away, and then looking at the massive structure next to me, I just laughed in agreement.

As we neared the top, massive rain drops started to fall and Ana looked back at me wildly grinning. Tourists pulled out their umbrellas and ponchos, but having neither, I just let myself get drenched and took in the view.

After the pyramids, we did a bit of wandering and found a little side street lined with shops, restaurants and endless picture possibilities.

We decided on a little cantina and instantly fell in love. While sipping Manzana Lift [an apple flavored soda], I suddenly heard, “Béseme, Béseme mucho”, in my ear and I turned to find two charming men with guitars singing their hearts out.

After finishing our enchiladas, Ana ran over to talk to the women who ran the place and found out that three generations of women were all cooking together. They taught her how to make tortillas and shared some stories.

Back in Chicago, I’m still processing the trip and everything that has happened. My only coherent thought at the moment is that I need to figure out a way to get back to D.F. as soon as possible.

a.

After Juan Luiz had disappeared, I had a day to kill at the workshop to photograph whatever I wanted. I had been in contact with numerous NGO’s and decided to photograph the Monólogos de la Maquila performance at Teatro Coyoacán in Mexico City’s Colonia Coyoacán. Los Monólogos de la Maquila is a play and collaboration with the theatre group Costureras de Sueños and the Mexican Society for the Rights of Women. The performance is meant to bring awareness to the injustices experienced by women maquila workers [assembly line workers] by acting out the lives of the women who work in an area of large denim factories also known around town as El Rey de la Mezclilla [which directly translates to "The King of Blue Jeans"]. The women who work in the factories suffer physical abuse and rape and are exposed to harmful working conditions and have little to no rights. Clothing made in these maquiladoras are usually tagged as “made in the US” or “made in Italy”.

Hopefully these photos give you some idea of how intense the performance was. Even though my Spanish is mas o menos, I nearly burst into tears at the end of it.

I followed them backstage and found out that one of the women actors is from one of the maquila towns and offered me some contacts there to do some work with them. Needless to say, I plan to head back to Mexico City, spend some time working with these women and try to illuminate the issue and do their story justice [photographically speaking].

They also have a blog which you should check out. And if you don’t speak Spanish, I highly recommend using my favorite online free translator because it is definitely worth the read.

a.

Mexico City is one of the most visually rich places I have ever been to. While I was riding the bus, I seriously had to stop myself from motor driving [holding the shutter on my camera down continuously] as I watched the most amazing images pass by the bus windows. Here are some of my favorites:

The past several days have been nothing short of complete chaos. After all of my story ideas fell through, I woke up at 6 a.m. on Tuesday and headed downtown to the Zocalo [central plaza] in search of a story. After two hours of wandering around and finding nothing, I headed toward the Metro feeling a bit defeated. As I was walking, I came across this vision and knew that I had stumbled upon something great.

He introduced himself as Juan Luiz, a homeless street vendor and began to tell me the stories of his life.

Juan Luiz is 29 years old and has been living on the streets for 14 years. He is an aries and enjoys reading his daily horoscope outside the Juarez Metro stop. “My hobby is to read. I like to take the things I have read and practice them in my life.”

Juan makes flowers out of cloth, tape and straws and sells them in certain parts of the street. He used to sell them in one of the main plazas but the police thought it made a bad impression for tourists, so they have been kicking the vendors out.

On the third day, I hopped on the Metro to meet him at a video arcade and he was nowhere to be found. I searched all of his local haunts: the mall where he sleeps, the shops where he buys cloth for the flowers he makes, the stand where he gets his daily newspaper to read his horoscope and see what his lucky number is for the day. No one had seen him. I cannot tell you how many scenarios of what happened to him have run through my head. Every time I see a glimpse of red, I pause, in hopes of finding Juan Luiz and knowing whether or not he is alright. I can’t help but wonder if he made it to the library to read Carlos Castaneda’s Teachings of Don Juan or the beauty school where he gets free hair cuts. If he is laughing like he was when the evangelical, crazed street woman yelled, “Do you have Jesus Christ in your heart?!” or if he is listening to one of his favorite musicians, Rod Stewart, in a music shop.

At two of the panel discussions, many of the photographers discussed the toll this life takes on your emotions. Flashes of all that you have seen through your lens. I just keep imagining the image of him sitting on the street corner when he read me a father’s day passage with tears in his eyes. All I can hope is that my time spent with Juan Luiz made some positive impact on his life.

a.

I’m sitting on the porch outside of my room at the hostel eating the most amazing sandwich from a street vendor and drinking orange soda out of a glass bottle. Any vegetarianism that was still in me has quickly faded away and I’m trying to process everything that has happened since my last post.

Spent much of yesterday wandering around the Mercado [market]. Every turn I made brought more visions of sunglasses, fruit, animals, spoons. Any and everything. The market stretched for what seemed like miles and every turn I made brought an entirely new section into view, each one unique and interesting. I wish I could show all of the photos but I’m short on time right now.

After all that, we had our opening party at AAVI, the school that is hosting us. It was a pretty intense experience to walk into a room and see Stanley Greene, Stephanie Sinclair and Andrea Bruce all in the first few minutes. In typical photographer fashion, there was loads of beer and I proceeded to introduce myself to a roomful of over 100 strangers. It felt almost like a speed dating night that went a little something like this:

Hey, I’m Allison.
Where are you from?
Why are you here?
What class are you in?
What do you love besides pictures?
And on to the next student…

I didn’t really realize how humorous this was until someone that I had already met came up to me and instead of saying his name I just said “Hey, Boston!”. Instead of a list of names, all I had was a world map with marked locations: Australia, San Fran, Malaysia, Brooklyn, Brazil, Hawaii. I then became ‘Chicago’.

I was really frustrated with some problems with my fixer and working on stories, so when the workshop was over I headed home for some much needed sleep.

This morning we listened to our keynote speaker Ron Haviv. Sitting on the floor sipping my 7-11 coffee, he just kept saying everything I had been thinking before I went on this trip and I felt completely revived.

“This is a life, not a job…One day you wake up and realize that this has become your world…In the end, this is not about us. It is about the other…It is a serious responsibility…The essence of what we do should be our motivating factor…We have the ability to give a voice to the voiceless…”

I really needed to hear those words, to be surrounded by others who believe in them, validate this bizarre existence.

After that we broke up into our first class. I was really nervous about showing my work but I had a really good critique and some positive feedback on my images. Phew! We discussed our story ideas and after talking to Renee and Scott, I feel as motivated as ever to run out and capture the moments I believe in. And that is exactly what I’m off to do.

a.