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October 2011 One of my short stories was a finalist in the Cincinnati Review's 2011 Robert and Adele Schiff Prose Prize.
September 2011 Photographs from my Tokyo Crossing Series will appear in the fall issue of The Adirondack Review. I was also named a finalist in their 2010 photography contest.
August 2011 My novel, The Hashimoto Complex, received an honorable mention in Starcherone Books' 2011-12 Innovative Fiction Contest..
July 2011 One of my short stories was short-listed in the 2011 Faulkner-Wisdom Short Story Contest.
June 2011 The Heart Is a Lonely Drummer, one of my long stories, was named a finalist in the 2010 Long Story Contest.
April 2011 The Hashimoto Complex is a finalist for Black Lawrence Press's Big Moose Prize. • One of my stories was a finalist in Third Coast Magazine's 2011 Fiction Contest. Writer Brad Watson judged.
March 2011 One of my short-short stories will appear in SpringGun Journal this spring.
January 2011 One of my short stories is a finalist in Third Coast's 2011 Fiction Contest. Novelist Brad Watson will pick the winner next month.
August 2010 On August 15th, my novel The Hashimoto Complex was named a finalist in the Santa Fe Writers Project 2010 Literary Awards. • Pocket Smut has just published my twisted, perverse short short story called Please Don't Eat the Sausage.
July 2010 One of my long short stories, The Heart Is A Lonely Drummer is a finalist for Ropewalk Press's Thomas A. Wilhelmus Fiction Chapbook Prize. The press is a University of Southern Indiana imprint. Its website is here.
May 2010 One of my recent short stories, Protection has been "honorably mentioned" for the 2010 E.M. Koeppel Short Fiction Award.
March 2010 A selection from my Suburban Geometries series is entered in Leica's Oskar Barnack Prize competition
February 2010 I've donated a triptych to art auction benefit for the victims of Haiti's devasting earthquake which takes place on Wednesday, 2/10 at 7pm.
December 2009 At 7pm on Sunday, December 13th, I will give a reading at one of NYC's only leather biker cafes, Motorcycle Federation. Organized by Madeleine Beckman, the reading will also feature Roberta Bernstein, Jean Monahan, and Nicole Sprinkle. More details later.
November 2009 I will have a couple of stories published in the Brooklyn Writers Space first anthology, The Reader. The launch party is on Thursday, November 5th at 7pm at BookCourt, 163 Court Street, in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.
October 2009 The Hashimoto Complex won 2nd Runner-Up in the 2009 William Faulkner–William Wisdom Novel Competition. • I will be attending an artist residency at Atlantic Center for the Arts with Antonya Nelson.• Photos of my friend LuLu LoLo's 14th Street Newspaper Boy performance appeared in Domus Web. • My short-short South of the Border is favorably noted in The Review Review.
July 2009 A photograph from my collaboration with LuLu LoLo, Pierrot 2.0, was included in an Italian mail art exposition here.
May 2009 My short story Back Trouble is a semi-finalist (top 27 out of 654) in Nimrod's Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction. • Photos from my Suburban Geometries series are published on Polar Inertia's Spring 2009 (#34) issue at the end of May.
April 2009 4/8: Max's cousin Elena Takeuchi was born at 5:24pm Tokyo Time! • My long story The Heart Is a Lonely Drummer is a finalist (top 30 out of 900) in Summer Literary Seminars-2009 Unified Fiction and Poetry Contest judged by Lynne Tillman. • A photo from my Visual Haiku series was published in Shots's Spring 2009 issue (#103).
February 2009 My short short story South of the Border was awarded 3rd Place in the Sonora Review's Third Annual Short Short Contest. The judge was Aimee Bender.
January 2009 My short story Second Act is a finalist won Honorable Mention in Cutthroat Journal's 2008 Rick DeMarinis Short Story Competition. The story will be published in February.
November 2008 Brooklyn Writers Space Reading at Union Hall, Sunday, 11/9, 5-7pm. BWS.
September 2008 Final LMCC Reading at U.S. Custom House, Thursday, 9/18, 6-8pm. RSVP is mandatory because of security. RSVP at LMCC's site here. Map of Bowling Green here.
August 2008 Our Baby Boy Is Due! 8/15 is the due date of our unnamed boy. HE'S HERE! Max Miles Takeuchi was born on Friday, 8-22-8 at 3:33pm! See tons of pix here.
April 2008 Excerpt from Tokyo Crossing appears in Redivider. Readings at LMCC Open Studios 4/26 at 92Y Tribeca, 4/27 at 200 Hudson St. Studios.
March 2008 Short story Please Don't Eat the Sausage appears in WordRiot. Awarded a 2008 Fellowship from the Urban Artist Initiative/New York City. March 28 & 29: LMCC Workspace Open Hours.
February 2008—2/11 Reading at the Telephone Bar. 2/25 Reading at Union Hall with Brooklyn Writers Space writers Amy Sohn and Alex Tilney.
October 2007—Awarded 1st Place Lucie Award (Abstract Nature Fine Art Category) from the International Photography Awards 2007.
August 2007—Awarded 9-month residency at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
July 10, 2007—Short story Please Don't Eat the Sausage read by British actor Alex Woodhall at the Liar's League Sex & Death reading series, London.
October 2006—Artist in Residence at Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, FL.
Why I Never Had Enough Guts to Be a War Photographer
Alvaro Ybarra Zavala, 2008
Twenty years ago when I was living in Tokyo and shooting more photojournalistic work, I still harbored a romantic desire to be a war photographer. To jump on a plane and document the horrors of Desert Storm, Sub-Saharan Africa, East Timor, the Middle-East. Robert Capa, James Nachtway, Don McCullin, Eddie Adams, and especially Philip Jones Griffiths were heroes of mine. I believed that documenting man’s inhumanity to man was not only noble, but necessary and would change the world for the better. I still believe that, in theory, but not in my gut anymore.
My only real confrontation with violence occurred in Tokyo when I was photographing a feature story about a fringe left-wing group who was opposed to the Emperor system. One late afternoon, as I photographed them protesting with bullhorns and banners near the pedestrian crossing bridges at Meiji Shrine in Harajuku, a bunch of burly, yakuza-looking guys in cheesy polyester suits arrived and started yelling. The threats soon escalated to kicks and punches. I continued to shoot away, totally ill-prepared, my only film left being Kodachrome 64 which was no good in the dusky light. As a gaijin, I was kind of invisible to the bullies who were now swinging bats. They attacked Reservoir Dogs-style, kicking and punching and smacking one of the protestors against the curb rail. Then one of them started shouted at me about taking pictures. In truth, I’d only snapped a half-dozen frames, partly because of the weak light, but mostly because I was not only scared, I just couldn’t frame the violence without feeling nausea and rage and impotence. My overwhelming urge was not to photograph, but to protect my subjects. When the police finally arrived 15 minutes later (the ties between the far-right and the police are pretty strong), I was nearly in tears. The sidewalk was splattered with blood and a few of the protestors were crumpled on the asphalt waiting for ambulances. That was the moment I realized I didn’t have the guts for war photography. I was a chicken and a partisan. After that I became an armchair war photographer.
After the recent deaths in Libya of two amazing young photographers, Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington (both residents of Brooklyn), there has been much discussion on the risks and worth of documenting brutality and war. The Guardian ran a story and gallery about war photographers shaken to the core. Warning: it’s a sobering read and might be a bit graphic for some.
Tripod Setup
I recently upgraded (reverted?) from a ballhead to 3-way pan-tilt head. Above is the hardware I use to photograph artwork. Manfrotto’s 410 head with micro-adjustable 3-axis adjustment. On top of the head is Chris Hejnar’s elegant, custom arca-swiss adapter with clamp for the 410/405. And on top of that are some Really Right Stuff rails, clamps, and their pano adapter mounted vertically. All this hardware allows me to reposition the camera in small increments without having to touch the tripod’s legs--very convenient if you’re shooting a lot of work of similar sizes and you want to maximize the usable pixels of your capture.
The Best Street Photographer You Never Heard Of
Her name was Vivian Maier and she was born in 1926 and died in 2009. Her father was Austrian, her mother French. She was born in New York, grew up in France, and returned to the U.S. when she was 25. Most of her working life was spent as a nanny in Chicago, where apparently she spent much of her free time walking the streets and photographing square compositions with her Rolleiflex. Her life’s work, 100,000 negatives, was won at auction by a real estate agent, John Maloof, who paid $400 for the mysterious boxes. Below are a selection of her work, all of it scanned by Maloof who has only catalogued a small amount of the total archive and has near total control of her photographic legacy. It is fascinating to look at all of this work and not be swayed by comparisons with other street photography greats: Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Lisette Model, Harry Callahan, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand. When a life’s work remains hidden, it doesn’t get a chance to dialogue with the culture and it’s hard to ascertain such chicken and egg issues as was she an imitator or a trend setter. Had she seen Callahan’s formalist work featuring Chicago’s light and shadows? Had she seen Helen Levitt’s photographs of kids in NYC? Whatever further research may reveal, what is undoubtable is that she had a great eye and cool sense of formalist aesthetics, and without a doubt, we’ve never seen such a treasure trove of fantastic street work of any city outside of New York. Interestingly, like Garry Winogrand, she died leaving hundreds (perhaps thousands) of rolls of undeveloped film. It will be very interesting to see what unfolds in the coming years. She left behind almost exclusively negatives—very few vintage prints—so all editorial decisions will be made for her. The first large scale exhibition of her work opened yesterday at the Chicago Cultural Center and a documentary film, Finding Vivian Maier, is set to be released in 2012. To read more about Vivian Maier, go to Maloof’s VM blog here and view a fairly candid interview with him here. Also check out this in-depth Chicago Magazine piece, as well as here and this TV story on the whole discovery. And as always in such a big find, there’s a bit of controversy on who “discovered” her and who controls what, here. Meanwhile, enjoy the fantastic photographs.
Kodachrome R.I.P. 1935-2010
Kodachrome was my first color film love. Great name, great colors, great longevity. 2009 was the year Kodak ceased manufacturing it and yesterday the last Kodachrome lab in the world--in Kansas--processed its last roll. Before Ektachrome and high-resolution color negative emulsions became the preferred choice of photographers, Kodachrome was the king of color. Much of the groundbreaking images in the history of color photography were shot on Kodachrome, but none are perhaps as well known as Steve McCurry’s Afghan Girl, seen above. NYT has 2 stories on this here and here.
Another Digital Manipulation Controversy
Through the Strand's Window
Recent Published Work
Manhattan Panorama from LIC
Homage to Nadar Project
Flats Fixed
Panorama of Castle Rock State Park (near Boulder Creek)
Beach Panoramas
After the Rain, Santa Maria
Trees in Fields, Guadalupe
Rancho Guadalupe Dunes Park
The Kiss that Ends the War
Bush in Tears
Contact Sheet: A Photo a Day
Painting in the Window
Holiday Lights, Bokeh Style
Feels Like the Seventies
Empire Fulton Ferry Park Panorama
ISO Urban Landscaper (Jay Street, Downtown Brooklyn)
Sensor Noise
A Couple More Fall Colors
Brooklyn Borough Hall, Dusk
Necchi Sewing Machine Ad (Chelsea)
The Manipulator Manipulates McCain
Photos of Photos
Another Pierrot Test
Pierrot Redux
Buddha Project
In Praise of Redheads
Chelsea Hot Summer Afternoon
Paris Pix Online
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire: Chalk Project
Seagulls at Battery Park
The Beauty of Reststops
1st Big Snow!
Custom House Outside Details
Santa Maria, Oso Flaco, Morro Bay
Propaganda Photos: Which Came First—Chicken or Egg?
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