January 27 - Shoot w/ Alee Jakimowicz

The Philosophy: While we still glorify the period, modern America has moved on from the culture of the cowboy and the American West. Just like Zeus and Apollo, characters like Billy the Kid have become immortals in the realm of American mythology. Recent films, like 3:10 to Yuma, No Country for Old Men, and There Will be Blood only accentuate how remote that era now is from reality. Also, our fascination with these immortal characters is really a way for us to deal with our own mortality.

 

            I was gathering my bag to go down to St. Marks church when it came to me that it had been almost a year since I photographed Jimmy Webb, the flamboyant owner and manager of the clothing store Trash and Vaudeville, and I had yet to give him a copy of his portrait, despite having come down to St. Marks multiple times. I mention this because I really believe that the photographs I took of Jimmy Web were a really important point in my career as a photographer. Before it, I knew I wanted to be a photographer, but I was never really sure of myself in terms of where I wanted to go with my art. I’m almost certain that without those photos, I might be doing a very different senior project today.

            I arrived on St. Marks place at around 3:00, knowing Alee wouldn’t arrive for a half an hour or so. I love walking around the street; sure, it’s possible the street is now somewhat more gentrified than it was before, but it’s still a hip place. The new stores, which some say are destroying the culture of the three-block stretch, are still part of the hip underground. And if you ask me, a little bit of commercialization is a small price to pay for the PinkBerry that’s opening there. The first thing I did was to go to Trash and Vaudeville to drop off the picture. As a token of his good will, Jimmy took me down to where they keep the t-shirts advertising the store, telling the extremely pierced sales clerk to give me shirt free of charge. He had already made this offer when I had first come to see him, but I decided I could get one for Nina. The clerk and I spent a good ten minutes looking for a shirt the right size. I finally settled on a small, after having to explain three times that a white boys medium was not equivalent to an adult XS and would shrink even more.

After that, I hung around the Bamn! Automat until Alee finally called me. We walked over to St. Mark’s Church, in the wrong direction at first, negotiating our first challenge, where could we change into our costumes? (In exchange for posing for my photos, I foolishly agreed to pose in my pajamas in the middle of the graveyard.) We decided to “try on” an item at Urban Outfitters, and in the process change into our costumes. It was the first time I had ever taken off my pants to try on a shirt.

Once we had changed we went over to the back of the church to shoot. I posed first, and though I was in public in 37° weather, I somehow felt impervious to both the cold and awkward glances of people passing by. Just when I thought I was beginning to freeze, Alee finished up. This time the photo shoot was slightly less automatic, because the now bitter cold was causing my hands to freeze on the metal camera. But what was even more jarring was that every once and a while, I’d notice the people staring at the two teenagers in the graveyard, one with a cowboy hat and the other with a camera that looks like it was made when they still called them “talkies.” I hadn’t reacted when I was posing, because I had nothing to say. But this was my project. I wanted to run to the gate and scream, “I’m not an idiotic teen! It’s about the death of American mythology and its use to mask the inevitability of our perdition! You’re the idiots!” But I kept my cool, because I know that at the end of the project, these photos will have to speak for themselves.