Should’ve Could’ve

The more I think about my trip to the JRTC, the more I think about it as a series of opportunities missed.  These opportunities weere sometimes literal (a battalion formation I didn’t shoot ’cause I passed out from exhaustion and travel and heat and not eating) and other stuff I got too apathetic (in the heat) to do (take portraits of soldiers, or take photos of the FOB at night).

That said, on the whole I don’t have any regrets.  These kind of things are what they are.  And, as I was mostly stuck on the FOB while there, I have some interesting/compelling “domestic” photos.

The above pic is the barracks where I slept.  You’re seeing a deceptvely spacious arrangement, though, because mostly the cots were parked about 12″ apart from each other; my cot was in the center of the room (vs. touching the wall) and I could have rolled over and touched the far side of his cot, I was so close.  We never formally introduced ourselves, but that’s sort of how it goes in the Army, and anyway I didn’t want to spook people by taking down names.  What you’re seeing are the cots of the Captain and Sgt. Major of that paricular battalion.  The Sgt. Major snored like a fiend, but this was not as bad as my persistent cough, so no big deal.

This pic is of the dining facility, or DFAC, pronounced “deefack.”  It took me a while to parse what “DFAC” meant but I didn’t want to ask.   The thing of interest here is in the background, though; it’s a large-scale floor map of the “province” where we were staying.  All those little cards you see sticking up are points of reference, and there were photos taped to the floor of the three major towns in the area.  It was very hard to get a good pic of this because it was so large and because I was to close to the ground and not about to stand on a rickety folding chair to get a better shot. 

This, for better or worse, is what Army food generally looks like.  In this case, scrambled eggs.  To be fair, this pic was taken several hours after breakfast was over so the eggs are not at their best, but on the other hand the food in the DFAC was, except for the water/gatorade and hard to mess up things like single-serve Corn Pops and bananas, kind of nasty and greasy and just not appealing at all.  I had “chicken” one night with some other soldiers, and it took a real effort to try to gracefully wolf down the….food? that was on my tray as quickly as the soldiers I was with.  I actually prefer MREs (meals ready to eat, i.e. rations) because in there you get some choices and it’s hard to ruin stuff like vegetable crackers or M&Ms.  And you get stuff like iced tea or mocha mix to put in your water bottle.

Finally, this is another reason I avoided the DFAC at dinner: the long lines and crowding.   You could scoop in early and get stuff or come late and pick stuff over, but going during peak hours gauranteed a wait plus being awkwardly seated among soldiers who are all ignoring you less in a high-school kind of way than in a “it’s not military, so it’s invisible” way which is a little hard to elucidate.  The military is such an insular culture that stuff off the radar (like a fat civilian with a camera) doesn’t even really register, especially with the heat (every day was over 100 degrees) and the stress the soldiers were under.  It took until my third day there for any of the soldiers in the barracks to get curious about who I was  or why I was there.

JRTC fake Iraq part 1

So I am back from Fake Iraq, again.  This experience was a mixed bag; some good experiences, but a lot of frustration and waiting.  It amounted to a lot of miscommunication between the Public Affairs Office, the visiting Public Affairs Office, and me,  and all in all I have no regrets. 

It was also frustrating from a photo persepctive ’cause I usually work in series and conceptual bodies of work but what I mostly came away with were great single images.  Which is SOP for photojournalists but which is a new, odd thing for me.

The one “series” I produced was of an empty, isolated town not yet being used for training.  There’s no text on the street signs, and the buildings are all shut, and the place is desolate and the streets are literally covered in horseshit: there are wild horses in the area.  So here are a few pics from that series, and I’ll have some stories and some single images later.

Also the “actually going to Iraq” thing may be back on so if you have $6k sitting around, get in touch.

Tedium, violence, and strepthroat

So I’m leaving tomorrow to go to the other Fake Iraq, the JRTC in Louisiana, so of course I get strepthroat so that I can be hot, awkward and in pain all at once.  Yay, but also, you know, whatever.

I am excited about going, though.  Just now I’ve been looking through military- and JRTC-related clips on YouTube and they seem mostly to consist of one of three things: 1) explosions; 2) wrestling; and 3) dancing.   This jibes with what I understand being in the military must be like: long stretches of skull-crushing boredom punctuated by moments of violence and chaos.  Not fun. 

But here’s a sort of standout clip, short and to the point:

So Friggin’ Awesome

Sluglike

Things have been dormant lately ’cause I’m going through a sort of paradepressive period of hypersomnia, sleeping peacefully upwards of 12 hours a day.  So I’m not getting a lot done.  Still having trouble at work (unrelated to sleep), still scratching my head over the future, but these things are not world-ending.

Also right now I’m trying to really learn Photoshop so I’m editing a lot of pictures but not taking many.  That’ll change when I go to fake Iraq later this month but for now it’s the dog days of summer etc. etc.

In the meantime, check this place out for a daily dose of awesomeness.

repetition part two

Still messing around with grids and repetition.  No time for theory now but here are some tries.  First up, flowers:

And some detail shots:

And then a loose grid of cuise park shots at different sizes, plus my mattress:

and a detail:

Also, comments are open again but now moderated so let’s see if this works or not.

Swedish Vampire Milwaukee

So I’m so enamored of Let the Right One In I’ve been going out at night to try to replicate the beautiful cinematography with my cheap digital camera.  Results are mixed:

Repetition (part 1)

Because it’s so easy to take tons of picture with my digital camera plus for personal reasons, I’ve been thinking a lot about repetition.  Or it’s less of a “thinking-about” than “immersion in” w/ listening to a lot of early Steve Reich and krautrock and looking at folks from Warhol to Liam Gillick.

The theoretical part of this post will come later when I have more time, but for now here’s an example of what I mean when I say it’s become easy to take a lot of pictures of something and repeat them, in this case in modernist grid/Warhol style.  Actual size 4 x 3 feet.

Okay

Someone out there has way too much free time.  Comments disabled.

Comments mostly disabled

Not sure why I’m getting spam-harrassed ’cause only 5 people even read this blog but because of that the commenting is going to be a lot tougher around here.  Just so’s you know.