Every year, there's this big motorcycle ride that rumbles through Linden. I think it's a POW/MIA charity thing. It's a pretty amazing site to see all these motorcycles of all shapes and sizes ridden by people of all shapes and sizes. This past year as I was coming home from a bike ride (a non motored kind), I noticed that people were starting to line up on the sides of the street and cops and barriers were also showing up. So I grabbed some cameras and headed out to see the bikes. This is one of the shots I made that day. I like to think this guy is thinking "What are you lookin' at?"
Linden, NJ.
Summer 2008.
It's pretty easy for me to say that Joe Strummer was a hero of mine. I'm not alone in making such a statement. He and the music he created had a profound impact on a great many lives. Mine being one of them. Shorty after he passed, the owner of the Niagara Bar had a mural put on the side of the bar in tribute to Joe. I've made photos of this mural on more than one occasion. If I'm walking by and have a camera, there's a good chance I'll snap another shot of this fine tribute.
The first time I made a photo of the mural was not too soon after it went up. It was early one snowy morning, I was wandering around NYC after a night out, killing time until the first train back to New Jersey. I ended up in the area and made my way to 7th and A. The first light of day was trying to force it's way through the lingering clouds. I took out my trusty Canon AE-1 and made that shot.
A few year later I was wandering by one night with a polaroid camera.
More recently, I was in the area shortly after flipping the lens in my Brownie Hawkeye Flash and made this shot.
The mural became a backdrop when Chris Salewicz dropped by the Niagara to do reading from his book "Redepmtion Song."
This last shot is of Chris with the great photographer Bob Gruen.
Here's the video of Joe's cover of the song "Redemption Song" which shows the painting of the mural.
A guy I worked with recently gave me a couple of cameras. One was an old Kodak Instamatic and the other was a newer Pentax. The Instamatic is beautiful and came with some flash bulbs and the box. Now I've just gotta search around for some film. As for the Pentax, it's one of those full auto everything with zoom options type of cameras. Nice for snap shots I guess. Not really anything that I would want to use on a regular basis. So I grabbed a screwdriver and started to dismantle the camera in order to turn it into a pinhole camera. It's been an amazing process. This camera had so much electric wiring and circuit boards stuffed into it. It's been really interesting seeing how the camera worked.
It's also interesting just how many tiny little screws were olding this thing together.
Check out that interesting shutter shape.
And look at all those little gears! It's all part of the film advance system. Which also proved to be the first big hurdle for me. Since this camera was auto everything, including the film advance, I had to figure out a way to manually advance the film once it's officially a pinhole. It took some drilling, cutting, and grinding but I think I came up with something that will work. I've got a lot of work to do on this project yet, but it's coming along nicely. And of course I'll post updates as they happen.
I'm an old punk rocker who picked up a camera many years ago so that I could fill up the pages of the fanzine that I was doing at the time. And even though the fanzine is long gone, I still love exploring the world of film photography. I work almost exclusively with film and often times with vintage/antique cameras. I do this because I love it.
Enjoy.
