Gangbangers With Pit Bulls?

I just returned home from a very lovely and positive celebration with family and friends and then made the mistake of reading the New Yorker's review of Pieter Hugo's show at Yossi Milo. I quickly soured on humanity and the young year's promise of a more perfect world. The magazine that is typically a bastion of progressive values referred to Pieter's subjects as "merely exotic versions of U.S. gangbangers with pit bulls." Seriously? If that isn't straight up racism it's as close as you can get this side of a locker room at the Augusta Country Club.

Wishing You a Hopeful and Happy New Year!

© Amy Stein

My Pro-Taco Agenda

© Patrick Romero

Staying true to the lessons I learned during Miami, I spent my holiday week in Sunset Beach enjoying the company of my husband and in-laws instead of focusing on photography. I did not go to a single museum or gallery, I left the Blackberry behind and I shot only one roll of film over the entire seven days. This was a remarkable achievement for someone who has been eating, breathing and drinking photography for the last four years.

While it was not top of mind, I did make the time to meet two photography friends. While we were in Santa Barbara we went to La Super Rica for tacos with Liz Kuball and talked for a good two hours or so about everything under the sun. Liz lives in paradise and I couldn't be more jealous of her ready access to so much beauty and so much tasty wine.

Patrick Romero was nice enough to drive down from Los Angeles to meet me at Taco Surf in Sunset Beach. Patrick has a life outside of photography as a camera operator for television, but has had more time of late to focus on photography because of the writer's strike. He shared some of his new work with me as we mowed down the salsa.

Those two meetings aside, I really enjoyed my brief time away from my career and my camera. I am not a big fan of New Year resolutions, but in 2008 I definitely want to continue to make time for things in my life that have nothing to do with my chosen profession. Oh, I would also like to eat more tacos.

The Most Disturbing Thing I Have Ever Seen

Sleeping Rat Baby © Anne Geddes

I am back in New York after seven sun-soaked days lazing around the beaches of Orange County. I am mildly resentful, but ultimately happy to be back home. The OC is all about excess. Shiny expensive cars, big hillside mansions, Botoxed and pulled faces and everyone wearing Ugg boots for one more season. Over the course of a week the gross parts become part of the perverted whole and it's hard to be moved to comment by any single excessive fragment. But, amid this ocean of excess one thing managed to rise above and hover like a grotesque surfeit island of beautifully useless swill. I speak of the Anne Geddes flagship store.

After a day spent at Disneyland (don't ask) waiting in mind-numbingly long lines to ride their latest cross-promotional brand experience, I was not to be easily aroused by marketing clutter. But, as we walked through the chilly streets of Downtown Disney I saw the Geddes store in the distance and I became transfixed by the sheer totality and audacity of her vision. Inside the store were the typical cringe-inducing photos of her Doctor Moreau-like flower and animal babies, but that was just the beginning of the Geddes merchandise empire. There were baby clothes, hats, t-shirts, maternity kits, books, and most disturbing of all, a series of plushy dolls that resembled the hybrid monsters in her photos. These dolls were all around you, eyes closed and sleeping. Or were they dead? After a few moments I began to imagine that the local Union Carbide plant had sprung a leak and these babies lay peacefully departed, the casualties of a terrible industrial accident.

Then it hit me like a store full of dead plushies; Anne Geddes is a genius and my new inspiration for pimping dry every last bit of my art to maximize exposure and profits. Now, when I close my eyes I don't just see my work hanging on gallery and museum walls, I see my own flagship store hawking the Amy Stein logoed line of hats, t-shirts, golf tees and mouse pads. I see a line of plushy deers and coyotes playfully chewing away at plushy garbage. And, I see a touring ice-show featuring a bear and a little girl tensely skating to "The Final Countdown" around a chain-linked enclosed swimming pool. The sky and my own sense of decency are my only limits.

Thanks, Anne!

Oscar Peterson RIP

Going Back to Cali

Los Angeles (Blue Mustang). © Adam Bartos

I am heading west tomorrow for my annual holiday break from all things New York with my wonderful in-laws, John and Sue, at their fabulously beachy home in Sunset Beach, CA. You really can't top Christmas at the beach. I will be spending most of my time relaxing, but I have my radar out for "can't miss" art and music shows in the OC or Los Angeles. Let me know if you are in the know.

Met Scores Big With Arbus Archive

Woman with a Veil on Fifth Avenue, N.Y.C. © Diane Arbus

Today's NYT reports that the estate of Diane Arbus has gifted her massive personal and professional archive to the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

Now the photographer’s estate has presented this intimate chronicle of Arbus’s life — her complete archives — to the Met as a gift, along with hundreds of early and unique photographs; negatives and contract prints of 7,500 rolls of film; and hundreds of glassine print sleeves that she personally annotated before her death by suicide in 1971.

This is a huge coup for the Met whose contemporary photography offerings have been minimal to date. Congrats to Jeff Rosenheim, curator of the Met’s department of photographs (and my MFA thesis adviser), on this great gift.