Tuesday, April 17, 2007

NY Exhibition, NMAI, Retro Cameras & Travel Photography


Here I am cabbing it in to New York. I love showing work at the American Indian Community House Gallery there. They do community service for Native Americans in one of the largest urban Indian centers in the country. It was cool walking around New York with my cousin and old buddy Jesse Cooday late at night. As we walked down a busy side street, he casually motioned to where Jimmy Pepper used to play while he lived in NY, and reminded me that Broadway was originally a path that the original Indigenous people had made in ancient times.


Sarah Sense curated the show and she did a great job. I am always very appreciative of people in the arts who enable artists to make a living, so Thank you Sarah. My lecture at the National Museum of the American Indian went well. It was cool to walk inside the museum and be greeted by some of my photographs from an old project years ago from the book Spirit Capture. It was like a homecoming.


I brought my little Contax G2 film camera with me to shoot along the way. It feels retro to be shooting film, but like I tell my Digital Photography students, film is definitely not dead, especially with the impeccably sharp 45mm Planar T* lens. One can shoot with film, scan it and get a higher resolution than most digital cameras and with a better dynamic range of tonal values with more detail and nuances in the image. It is a bit more work, but you do get a better image. I have also been traveling with a miniature Lieca C-Lux camera that shoots 6MP images. What is so cool about it is that it is so compact and has a 28- 102 lens, which is wider than usual. I think I've shot well over 20,000 images with it since October, which qualifies it for my recent favorite camera.


 


 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Larry, Larry, Larry...

NYC should have been a Team Evergreen trip. Jeez. You are *the* Larry McNeil. You need an entourage.

Congratulations on your many recent exhibits.

And I dig the Van Morrison videos. Good work.

Take care.

-melissa b.

Larry McNeil said...

You wouldn't believe this, but on another recent trip my bags came off the carousel first again. I guess baggage handlers like me or something. Maybe my suitcase eminates good vibes...

Don't you think its about time to plan another Team Evergreen trip? I hear that the Indigenous Artists in Peru do some pretty cool stuff.

I hope your semester is going well,

Larry