Photographer Eric Robinson set up his view camera and portable darkroom on 1oth and Folsom to take wet plate photographs at the Dore / Up Your Alley street fair in San Francisco. 19th century processes meet 21st century subject matter. He is in California working on a project that he began in Illinois. Click here for more on Eric. More later. [photoevent: July 25th, 2010]
Category Archives: GAY GAZE: Visual Culture, Photos, Art, Comics, Film, Objects, etc…
Eric Robinson shoots wet plate Photography at Dore / Up Your Alley Fair
Posted in Art and Artists, Leather, Photography, San Francisco
Tagged Ambrotypes, Dore Alley, Leather, Photography, San Francisco, Up Your Alley, Wet Plate
Sights seen at Scene Site: Dore / Up Your Alley San Francisco Street Fair
Lots to look at as always at this year’s Dore/Up Your Alley Street Fair. Boys and men from the sublime to the ridiculous, Leathermen from the Old, New and Avant Guards, Uniform Buffs, Rubber Fetishists, Sadists and masochists, subs and Doms, Bondage Freaks, Dragsters, Masters, slaves, Merchants and Peddlers, Porn Stars, Activists in droves, a smattering of Tourists, and an assortment of more exotic permutations of perversion including furries, superheroes, cartoon characters and other kinks apparently generated in front of the television on some Saturday morning long ago. Photoevent: July 25th, 2010.
Posted in Drag, Leather, San Francisco
Tagged Dore Alley, San Francisco, SOMA, Up Your Alley Fair
Street Art seen at Dore / Up Your Alley Fair
New street Art seen during Dore weekend in San Francisco. South of Market. SOMA. Photo-event July 25th, 2010.
19th c. Technology 21st c. Subject Matter: Artisanal Photographer Eric Robinson to shoot SF Leather
Eric Robinson takes the techniques of photography back to its roots. He works in wet plate collodion processes, producing one of a kind plates on glass. Using a traditional view camera, he cuts an anachronistic figure while exposing the plates. No shutter, he lifts a sliding door on the camera to expose the plate and counts. One, two, three…twenty-nine, thirty seconds or more. A portraitist, his subjects experience a taste of the early sitter’s experience. It is important to stay still. The help of devices may be sought. Portraiture at its best is a collaborative process, an agreement between the photographer and the model. What began in the midwest as a series of portraits by a graduate student of his professor and his partner has become the focus of a cross-country road-trip to document a lifestyle, a subculture, and the extended family of a friend and rogue scholar. On the road somewhere in Nevada as of this posting, Eric should be arriving in San Francisco sometime late Friday, in time for many of the festivities associated with the Dore (Up Your) Alley street fair. Read more about Eric at the HomoGenii site. The photos in the slide show below were taken during a shoot in April, 2010 in Carbondale, Illinois, where the photographer is taking an MFA in Mass Communication and Media Arts at Southern Illinois University. His undergraduate degree is in Chemistry.
Posted in Art and Artists, DIY and Maker Culture, Leather, Photography, San Francisco, Southern Illinois
Tagged Art, Dore Alley, Eric Robinson, Leather, Photography, Wet Plate
Sights seen at Mendocino’s Rattlesnake Creek, Hole-in-the-Wall swim Site.
Warm weather lured us up U.S. 101 to the Hole-in-the-Wall swim site on Mendocino’s Rattlesnake Creek. Right off the highway, down a neatly hidden, meandering trail, it hides in plain sight. If you didn’t know it was there, you wouldn’t know it was there. We took the half-naked otter handyman of Timbers (not to be confused with the half-naked muscle-bear handyman of Sunfair) and his monkey-man hobby photographer boyfriend. Down the trail to the water and the picturesque rock formations that give the place its name: the cool hole already hosted a half dozen hippies, a few cute naked nature boys, a woman-and-kid or two and some dogs. [photoevent: 9 July 2010]
San Francisco Street Art Seen
San Francisco Street Art Seen on June 26th, 2010 in the South of Market (SOMA) neighborhood.
Surveillance at Kansas Kum & Go
The proprietors of convenience stores are not the only ones interested in pointing cameras at their customers. A quick stop for gas, snacks and corn-fed, slushie-finished boy-shooting on the way out west. May, 2010.
Don’t Ask: Camping Soldiers are all a Gaga in Afghanistan
Taking a break from the horrors of war, these US soldiers camp it up to Lady Gaga’s hit Telephone. They don’t ask and don’t tell. But they do keep camping and dancing the swiveling hips. Thanks to Joe Jervis of Joe My God for this bit of strange fabulosity.
Posted in Afghanistan, Music, Video
Bacha Bazi – The “dancing boys” of Afghanistan
Private dancer: The practice of bacha bazi ('boy for play') is growing in Afghanistan. Photograph: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
The PBS documentary series Frontline has produced an investigative piece on the ancient Afghan practice of Bacha Bazi, translated as “boy play.” Afghan journalist Najibullah Quraishi reports in The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan. Watch the full 53 minute program on-line at PBS. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad also reported on the apparently growing phenomena in September of last year in the UK’s Guardian.
The Gay Highwaymen 