Ok, it’s really not that hard to grock.

it’s interesting to see what other people like. i’ve submitted many photographs to file magazine for publication and never heard back. yesterday i was online looking through their work and noticed that they decided to publish one of mine. what strikes me is that of all the photographs that i’ve submitted, the one the published is my least favorite. i mean i like it and all, but i like the other much more.

anyway, if you’ve never read through file magazine, make it a point to do so. in a world where we are constantly overloaded with bad photography on sites like flickr, they do a great job finding quality work.

here’s my photograph.
here’s the magazine.

i’ve been a fan of the writer christopher isherwood ever since i first saw cabaret performed … actually even before that, i helped my friend bob prepare for a dinner theater performance of the show (he was great, herr shultz was great and the rest of the cast was just ok.) when i finally saw alan cumming perform the role of the mc on nyc’s studio 54 stage, i was really blown away.

when i read his autobiographical work, my guru and his disciple, i found yet another reason to be impressed with his work. in this book, isherwood talked about his spirtual development alongside his guru swami prabhavananda in los angeles, starting in the 1940s. what impressed me most about this book was the way that isherwood was about to talk about his struggles between a desire to lead a dedicated spiritual life and also to explore the the new freedom that gay men were experiencing in la at the time. there were points in the book where he would spends days meditating and chanting at the ashram, and then head out and have anonymous sex on the beach. he didn’t seem to look down on himself for any of this in the book, he merely explored it all as part of his spiritual development. he also wrote a lot about pressure from his agent and the literary world to write more along the lines of cabaret, but how he felt drawn to translate sanskrit texts into english and to write about the life of ramakrishna.

besides his beautiful writing, it’s the honestly of the book that impressed me the most. that even back in the 50s, he was able to talk about his sexuality and how he struggled with finding a spiritual path that he could follow at the same time.

the following five collages combine isherwood’s translations of the yoga sutras with photographs that i shot in india. i think i’ll do at least five more before the series is done, but in the meantime i would love comments on these. you can click each image to view a larger version on flickr or see them here on my main site.

back when i lived in san francisco, i had this tendency to go months without ever leaving the city. i seem to do the same thing living in bangkok, which is likely bad for my mental and physical health. so about a week ago, i went up to kao yai national park with sherry, her parents and two other friends. the park is somewhere between 1.5 and 4 hours from bangkok (depending on traffic) but manages to have unbelievably clean air, pretty mountains, cool weather and this rather unsettling quiet. we only went for two days which was probably too short, the first day up there i felt like i was wondering what i was missing back in the city. most of the time when i’m in bangkok, i just sit around naked in my apartment and read a book or play with my computer but somehow i had this fear of missing something. day two i started to settle into things and i’m sure that if i go back for a week or a month, that i’ll totally get into a routine of lounging, walking slowly and leaving my cell phone turned off.

these photographs were shot with my holga and that same agfa rsx ii film that i have been getting such great colors through cross-processing. i’ll post some digital and panoramic photographs soon.

i shot these photographs with pank at an abandoned building near nana bts … well it looked abandoned at first but when we started to explore we realized there were some security

guards who seemed much happier to let us in once i gave them 100B. the film is agfa rsx ii which i cross-processed and the camera is the holga of course. you can see the full set here on flickr.