I arrived at ground zero and began trying to think of an angle. The challenge was finding something different to shoot that all the other hundreds of camera holders wouldn’t get. Thats when I realized, that there are hundreds of other camera holders. I thought back to my education and remembered that I was taught to shoot what I see. I decided to photograph the photographers, to document the documenters, if you will.

I think that its a beautiful thing to live in an age where human life is captured from anybody with a SLR to a point and shoot. It does make getting a new shot more challenging and it is a bit heart wrenching when I notice a lot of dials pointed to ‘A’ when I spent so long learning ‘M’.  When it comes to an event like 9/11 though, I do think it was overall a great thing everyone was taking all these shots of their own, because everyone has a story of their own from that day 9 years ago. Everyone has a reason why they were drawn to this event.

I was overall surprised with the reactions I got from people as I went up to them and asked them simply if I could take their photograph. A lot of people said no, but plenty said yes. It was a lot of no’s from those with the point and shoots and basic SLR’s, what surprised me was the yes’s from professionals. I felt this give-and-take feeling professionals put off, like they realized they constantly took others photographs, it was fair to let someone take theirs. I think this was a great lesson.

I enjoyed my experience. A few of the folks I met I ended up having really great conversations with after I took my shot. We talked about everything from the masses of cameras, to 9/11/01 and what we were doing that morning, to our views on the new islamic community center, to our opinions on the conspiracy theories involving the attack.

This was a terrible event in American history, it was great to see that so many people made the effort to come record and embrace the memorial.

Thank you to all the 40 photographers who allowed me to point a camera at them Saturday morning.

Here are a few of the folks I recorded…

Alex Rodriguez
Freelance Photographer

Officer-who requested to stay anonymous
Hobbyist Photographer

Yoko Ando
“just-for-fun” photographer

Migul
Hobbyist Photographer

Carl Glassman
Editor and Co-publisher of the Tribeca Trib

Jason Florio
Professional Photographer
www.floriophoto.com

Bernadette Difuntoruim
Beginning Hobbyist Photographer

Alexandria BenOthman
Documentary Photographer

Annaelle Margerotte
Amateur Photographer

Eric Ford-holevinski
“Aspiring-Advanced Amateur” Photographer
www.EricFordH.com

Sheila Phalon
Professional Photographer

She creates this babies as her own self-expression on becoming a mother herself and the pressure young women of this age feel to become one. As the title of her baby series is called “These are the babies I choose to create”. She also creates gift bags, miniature canvas pieces, headbands and more. I photographed a handful of her headbands as well.

Bianca Marcia herself is not only a good friend of mine, but an artistic inspiration of mine. She has a unique and  beautiful mind, and is not only great and physical arts but an impressive and clever performance artist. I would recommend looking into her more. (for the record, if you like some of the pieces shown, she is in the process of setting up an etsy account.)

To complete the project I printed each piece as a 4×6 and hung them up in the Gerber House Gallery. I put a classic “$X” garage sale sticker on each and during the duration of the show had an ongoing sale. The concept was almost like window-shopping-online-in-an-art-gallery. Participants would pick off the wall an item that they were interested in then bring it to me to get the product and purchase.

The whole thing went well overall. I ended up selling about half of my things, donating about a quarter of them and keeping the last quarter of them. There were over 2000 images/items all together, to shoot this series I had to treat it like a full time job. I plan on keeping up with this series for as long as I can. I see it as holding onto material objects is really nothing more than holding onto a memory or idea. I can to the same thing with the images, and take up a lot less space.

I was wearing this flannel the night derrick and I went to the drive in fall of 2007, I had been begging him to go with me for months.

These are my most comfortable pair of jeans (not including my light blue classic levi’s). I wore these jeans when I photographed Gorilla Zoe at blueprint lounge, a big black guy with gold teeth spanked me that night, which was extremely awkward.

I bought theses earrings like 5 years ago for like 50 cents. I never wore them once before taking this photo. I always liked them a lot though.

I used to wear this head wrap like it was my job.

I had this since I was a kid. There is a button on the back that when you press is plays a annoying kids song. and your supposed to brush your teeth for as long as the song goes. The hole on top of the bunny’s back is where you put your toothbrush when your done.  This thing was really cool.

the back of my flyer…the flyer I was forced to put together in a matter of 5 minutes and still hold a sliver of bitterness about. :)

Here is one of the rooms of the gallery where my collection was displayed.

To see all the images, click on one below and then you will see thumbnails below that you can click on and one by one go through the entire set, there are 84 all together.

The concept is great, we used real students who came up with words to describe themselves. I think the fact that they are real students, from all 4 of our campuses, is a key factor. Also I have had people ask if we made the words up for them, and I’m happy to say that no, these were words they used to “define” themselves.  Our graphic designer, Matt Finkhousen,  did an awesome job putting the piece together.