David Alan Harvey Workshop, entry 12: Times Square, p1: Elvis gets angry but Naked Cowgirl seems OK with it; professional posers demand to be paid (warning: explicit content)

Towards the end of my Times Square shoot, I looked down the street and saw Elvis walking toward me, in the form of an impersonator. He was plugged in, rockin' and jivin' to whatever he was listening to - Elvis, I presume.

As I had started out trying to shoot an essay on Mormon Missionaries, then, when that failed, turned to street preachers and then, after I failed to find any, turned to Times Square - I decided to look at the life on Times Square kind of in the vein of it representing its own sort of secular religion, where people go to find the blessings of happiness and signs of their own self-worth, connection to the universe and even recognition from above  - even if only in a most fleeting way.

Just about anything that I would see could be construed to qualify, but certainly Elvis more than most. The real Elvis lived hard and fast, all right, but was none-the-less possessed of deep inner faith. What a gospel singer he was! Can anyone listen to his rendition of How Great Thou Art and not feel some kind of connection to the eternal divine, be they Christian, as Elvis was, or something else?

There, hanging from him, was the cross that stood for the Christianity that Elvis believed in.

Surely, if he chose and dared to carry such a symbol of the love of Christ, then this impersonator must be a kind man - as the real Elvis was known to be.

The Elvis impersonator quickly spotted me. As unlikely as it seemed to me, he seemed startled to discover that I was pointing a camera at him.

He was not happy. In fact, Elvis Impersonator was angry. He suddenly came marching straight at me, an intimidating look upon his face.

Closer he came, fast, angry - too close to allow the lens that I had on my camera to focus upon him.

Closer yet - trying his damndest to frighten and intimidate me.

Then, he was right in my face, one lens of his sunglasses practically ramming my lens. Just after I shot this image, I could not help it - I started to laugh. He stepped aside, and stormed off. Christ said, "Judge not that ye be not judged," so I am reluctant to the judge the man, but on the surface, despite the cross that he carried, it would appear that he did not have the love of Christ in him.

That's ok - he was just an impersonator, anyway.

Here is another impersonator - of the Tin Man, from the Wizard of Oz. He has good peripheral vision. After I took this picture and lowered my camera, he immediately turned toward me and demanded that I pay him.

There is a profession of impersonators here on Times Square. They make their living by posing with tourists while their friends or loved ones take pictures of them together. To pay them for posing with your family or friends is one thing - but they have no more right to demand payment from passersby who snap their image and do not pose with them than does anyone else. If everyone demanded the same, and all photographers yielded, street photography would die.

That must be why Elvis was angry, too - I had photographed him, but had not paid him. I didn't pay the Tin Man either.

Same with Tickle Me Elmo. Somehow, those big eyes caught me as snapped this picture of him posing with a man who I presume did pay him for the honor. Elmo then demanded payment from me. I did not comply. He shouted angry words at me as I walked down the street away from him.

The thing is, Elmo, Elvis and Tin Man, when you make a spectacle of yourself in the most densely-crowded piece of out-in-the-public real estate in America, where everyone has a camera and people are wildly shooting everything they see, as they have every right to do, people are going to photograph you and you can't make them all pay.

Just stick to demanding payment from those who pose with you, and let it go at that. Don't make these beloved, delightful, sweet, characters that you have chosen to impersonate look like mean, greedy... well, you know.

Here is an actual example of how the impersonator payment business model works. This woman calls herself the Naked Cowgirl, although, thank goodness, she is not totally naked, nor is she a cowgirl. I've known cowgirls, and she is not one of them. I'll bet she's never sat on a horse and chased after a cow, nor competed in a barrel race in the rodeo or rode a bull.

Those are the kind of things cowgirls do.

So she is an impersonator, too.

Still, she is close enough to naked that I did what David always does on Burn when one of the essays that he runs includes a picture of someone who is even close to naked - he puts in the "explicit content" warning. He says he does it to protect himself. There is nothing pictured here that will not be seen by every innocent eye that walks through Times Square when this lady is out on the street, hard at work. Still, David has posted the warning for less than this, , so I figure I had better, too 

Anyway, here is the Naked Cowgirl, collecting money from some men whose eyes she caught. They have now paid for the privilege of posing for pictures with her.

The lady in green does not appear to be impressed.

She poses, as the men photograph their friend with her. Afterward, I went in to the bank in the background to get some money so that I could buy a pretzel. There were some ladies in there who were also getting cash from the ATM. They were talking about the Naked Cowgirl. They were totally grossed out and disgusted.

The more famous Naked Cowboy was no nowhere to be seen. From what I googled, he sued the Naked Cowgirl for infringing upon his trademark. That was two or three years ago. He must not have won. Or maybe they reached a settlement. I suppose with a little more Google research, I could find out.

Maybe one of you readers who have more time than I do will research the answer for me.

The shoot is over. She knows I have taken pictures that include her, but she does not ask for payment. She is okay with it. She knows she is a public spectacle and people are going to photograph her. Through their photographs, her fame will grow. For reasons that I cannot understand, even more men - and some women, too, I am certain - will want to come and pay her for the honor of posing with her.

So there you go: Times Square, New York City, New York, USA, Planet Earth.

I found this lady posing with an impersonator of a man who has been one of my favorite actors since I saw the film, Pulp Fiction. This impersonator does not ask for money from anyone.

This impersonator simply doesn't care, or have any feelings or thoughts about it one way or another.

It is now late Friday night, January 20, and I have begun to tell the story of the things I saw as I roamed about Times Square, hoping to pull myself off Humiliation Road and come up with a presentable essay for the Loft Workshop show.

I will finish my Times Square adventure tomorrow, Saturday, January 21, in a series of action entries that I will begin to post shortly after I get up - which might not be all that early, and will continue until I go to bed tomorrow night.

On Sunday, I will move to the final day of the workshop and the evening presentation and will show the slideshow titled, At Home With David Alan Harvey. This includes the essays shot by all the Loft Workshop students. Again, I will save the images from my own slide show until then. None of them will appear in this blog until then. What you see here and will see in the posts tomorrow are and will be outtakes, 

After that I will do a followup and that will be it. This series will be done.

David Alan Harvey Loft Workshop, entry 11: it is time to stop and go to bed, so here is one token image from Times Square

In the end, for reasons that I will explain later, I would have one hour to edit my Times Square take and pull the selects together to take to the final critique that would determine what the final images for the evening slide show would be.

As I had only one hour, I did it in an hour and took a decent selection of images to the final critique - still worried that I would not have enough that would make the final cut. Now, however, I have no such time restriction. I can take five hours, ten hours, 20 if I feel like it. So it is much more difficult to edit them down and make a selection.

Only now have I finally found the time to sit down and look at every image that I shot in Times Square. I have spent the last several hours going back and forth through my take and I am not even close to being ready to make a selection to post here.

I want to go to bed, so I am going to post just this one image for now. I selected it for one reason - simply because this is the final image of my Times Square take. I reached it just a little bit ago and so decided to post it and stop for the night.

It is not one of the images I that I brought to the workshop or that went into my piece of the class slideshow. I will not post any of my images that went into the slideshow in what will probably be a multiple-part Times Square series to follow over the next day or so. At the end, when my coverage of the workshop is all done, I will present my part of the slideshow, but I don't want any of the images to appear in this blog until I do.

Also, David was very strict with us about narrowing everything down to only our very best work. I will not be so strict with the images I present here - in part because in many cases I do not know what the best image is, and also I want to show the process that I went through to get to where I wound up.

Friday will be a busy day for me. Among other things, I must go to Anchorage to pick Margie up and bring her home. I do not know how I will find any significant time for this blog, but I will try. Plus, all the images of my initial edit are in my head and they will be playing in my mind even as I go to Anchorage and take care of all these other things. So maybe I can get the Times Square posts all done before I go to bed Friday night. I hope so. The Loft Workshop was a great experience, one that will be with me for the rest of my life, but still it is time to get it all blogged and to move on to other things.

David Alan Harvey Workshop, entry 10: As I head out to shoot my last-gasp attempt to get off Humilation Road I walk through the Hassidic neighborhood of The Loft

David had asked me what I planned to do on this, the final shooting day. I told him that I was going to hit various places where I thought I might find some street preachers, from Columbus Circle to Ground Zero, and see what I could come up with.

No, he said, given the time left and the fact that I had come up with none the previous evening, I should just drop that idea. Sometimes, he said, despite our best efforts, we just run into stone walls, and that is what had happened to me so far, both with my Mormon missionaries and my street preachers.

"Go shoot the hell out of Times Square," he suggested. "You will never see anything like that in Wasilla."

"Okay," I agreed. 

"Put your whole heart into it," David said, "just like you did with your dad."

Obviously, this is not Times Square, nor is the previous frame. The building that houses the loft sits in the largely Hassidic neighborhood of Williamsburg. During my previous walks through the neighborhood, I had spotted some beautiful potential pictures of people, including some wonderful images of parents with children. At home, I would have just shot, before the moment was lost.

Not knowing Hassidic sensibilities, I had stopped each time to ask if they would wind and each time they had smiled politely, thanked me, and said, "no." David then told me that in principle they had no qualms about being photographed, but they had sometimes been ridiculed in the past and so were hesitant, but nothing bad would come of it if I saw a picture and just shot it.

As I walked toward the subway station to do what would be my second Times Square shoot of the day and my final of the workshop, I contemplated this dilemma.

I needed something in my personal record to say that I had been in a workshop that took place in a Hassidic neighborhood. So, as I walked back to the subway, without ever breaking stride, without ever raising my camera from my waist to my eye, I applied my quick draw skills and shot these three Hassidic neighborhood scenes.

I felt a little guilty, but I had to do it - just to put something in the record. Edite Haberman was heavily engaged in the process of shooting an essay on the Hassidic that would go much deeper.

At the train station, I found Zun Lee, catching some sun rays as he waited for the train. We would board together as we set out to do our final round of shooting.

Now I must take a break for several hours to complete some other tasks, but when I get back, I will take you out onto Times Square as I make my last-gasp effort to pull myself off of Humiliation Road. I will then stick with this Loft Series until it is done - no more breaks to update the near-present.

I hope you will stick with me.

I had almost forgot to mention - as you can see, my camera had come back from whatever moisture problem had beset it - not totally. Everynow and then, a frame or two would still go bad. Mostly, it was working okay.

I take a break from the Loft to take Margie to town and to eat at Abby's

Yesterday, I had to drive Margie to Anchorage so she could babysit the boys. Thanks to the Martin Luther King holiday, I was able to keep her for an extra day this week. She had to be there no later than 9:30 AM, so we were headed out of Wasilla by 8:30 AM.

Crews were busy cleaning snow from the roads.

We followed the waning moon toward Anchorage.

I found Kalib and Lynx studying each other as Al Sharpton pontificated in the background.

I lingered through much of the day to nap and take care of some things, then I began the drive out of Anchorage. I stopped for gas with one mile to go before empty.

A moose ran alongside the freeway.

This cop had pulled someone over. Now he was getting out of his car to go talk to the driver. Maybe he was going to write a ticket. I don't know. Perhaps he just wanted someone to talk to. Perhaps he wanted to make a bet on who would win the Super Bowl this year.

Maybe he wrote the driver a ticket, or gave the driver a warning and said, "don't do that again!"

Whatever "that" was.

Speeding, I would suspect.

But I don't know.

Things are not always as they appear.

Whatever it was, the driver probably did not think it was fair. "Unmarked car!" the driver probaby muttered to the driver. "Is this what I pay my taxes for, so cops can prowl around in unmarked cars and ticket people who would not even have been speeding if the cop had been in a marked car? Unfair! Unfair!"

I'm pretty sure that's what the driver muttered to the driver.

Come dinner time, I could find nothing handy to eat. So I went to Abby's, where I discovered that I, the camera man, was on camera. And see that aloe vera plant in the window? What I did not know when I took this picture is that it was gift for Margie and me, from Arlene Warrior.

When we visited her just before Christmas to pick up the atikluks, we admired her aloe vera plants. And now she had given us one.

This morning, I did not want to cook oatmeal and Caleb was watching TV, which was OK, because I had planned to go to breakfast at Abby's anyway. Here is Shelly, reflected in the window, just before she cooked an omelette for me.

Abby was not there.

I took a walk. This dog came and barked at me. I don't know this dog. I don't know why he would bark at me. I am good to all dogs.

A C-130 Hercules flew over.

When I went to the post office to check my mail and get Visa photos taken for my upcoming trip to India, I found a bill from my doctor for the visit that I had made in early November when I was diagnosed with shingles. I decided that I had better go pay it right away before I forgot again and while I still had some money left.

Along the way, I got to photograph two school buses at once.

It was a terribly exciting day here in Wasilla.

So exciting I damn near had a heart attack.

The doctor's office is just ahead. 

Now that I have updated the near-present a bit, I will return to working on my David Alan Harvey Loft series. 

David Alan Harvey Workshop, entry 9: Riding down Humiliation Road with nothing to show for myself, I watched as some superb essays came together; a few drops of rain fell upon my camera

My last Loft Workshop post began with a picture of Zun Lee with his arms wrapped around Tracie Williams, who was painfully frustrated at how her take of the Occupy Wall Street movement at Zucotti Park had gone so far. She was not happy with her presentation, either. David had passed over her protest candid shots, zeroed in on some strong portraits of protesters that she had made using detached flash and had then suggested that she concentrate the remainder of her shoot on doing more such portraits.

She had done just that. Now, when her images were projected onto the screen, we beheld multiple powerful images, including one of a young protestor with his t-shirt pulled up and self-inflicted scars on his chest that just made us all gasp and go, "wow!"

 

When Carolyn Beller put up her images, we also gasped, "wow!" - particularly at the image at the lower left, partially masked by her hand.

I'm afraid that I basically did not take pictures during these workshop sessions, except to raise my camera a couple of times just to put something from the morning on my own personal record, so I do not have pictures of any of my other fellow workshoppers as they made their presentations:

Andy Kropa - who had added a stunning, magical picture from Zucotti Park that has now become one of the iconic - perhaps THE ICONIC - images from the protest there...

Isabella Eseverri - with some sexy dance shots in her essay that would become known as, "Latina."

Mark Bennington - with his atmospherically dark, dreamy, tastefully sexy shots of young woman, all of whom hid secrets behind their lovely and mysterious faces.

Sarah Baker - She had transformed her image of the black barbershop from color into black and white and was creating something warm and homey, yet also powerful, including a "wow" image that also makes you laugh.

Edite Haberman - art. How else can I describe Edite's work? She is an artist. A non-practicing Jew, she had immersed herself in the local Hassidic community and was producing... art; penetrating images of beauty. No one could do what she was doing in just five days - four if you really think about it - but she was doing it.

Jen Klewitz - I have to use that word, "sexy" again, plus - moody, atmospheric, dreamy, romantic - all on the Tango, a dance which is all of those things. Wow! Wow! Wow!

Milli Apelgren - She had produced an exceptional action skateboard image, but it would not be part of her essay. That would all be devoted to some of New York's coolest people. Again, "Wow."

And Zun Lee - Again, Wow! Wow! Wow! He was finding the black father that he had missed growing up.

Yet, there were two photographers who had no "wow" shots projected that day - in fact, neither had any shots projected at all.

One was Uwe Schober of Germany. He had disappeared from the workshops a couple of days before, not long after receiving a pretty blunt critique from David. We were all worried about him, but the word was that he had come in, done his one-on-one meeting with David and that everything was good with him and he was out shooting his essay, also focused on the Occupy Wall Street Movement and those gathered in Zucotti Park. He was said to be producing some excellent material and we would see it tomorrow.

That left only me. I had nothing - not one image to show - not today, not tomorrow. My computer was still at the Apple Store. I had taken on two essays. The first, the one dealing with my own life through Mormon missionaries, had come to a dead end. The excursion that I had taken the day before to get the second essay going had failed to produce a single image, because I had failed to find a single street or subway preacher.

I felt a bit humiliated, sitting there as everybody showed their great work while I put forth nothing. I did not want to be humiliated at the show the next night, but humiliation was the direction that I was headed toward.

Somehow, the presentation and visit of Danny Wilcox Frazier passed by without me ever taking a single photo. I guess I was so mesmerized by Frazier's black and white essay, Driftless: Photographs From Iowa, I forgot to shoot.

In this magnificent essay, Frazier made me realize some of the stretches that I must yet make if I am ever to shoot an essay on Wasilla that plumbs the depths I hope to reach. So far, I have just been splashing on the edges of that essay - but it is there, waiting for me to do it.

How do I push myself to the depths and lengths that Frazier did of his home state?

It feels impossible.

But it isn't.

Somehow...

but how...

No... it can be done. I can do it.

And here is Carolyn, the human tripod, shooting a portrait of Zun.

I had needed to get to the Apple Store to pick up my computer. Another guest was coming. David warned me not to miss her. I got on the train, picked up the computer from the Apple Store, then shot a few pictures and got just a few drops of rain on my Canon 5D Mark II. This worried me, because when it comes to moisture, the 5D Mark II is absolutely the worst camera I have ever owned - it is probably the worst ever made.

I do not state this lightly - THE WORST. But otherwise, a wonderful camera - in many ways, the best that I have ever owned.

A few drops of rain can be all it takes to shut it down - or even send it to the repair shop.

This is the guest David wanted us all to be there for - Mary Anne Golon, the former picture editor of Time Magazine who now works as an independent photo editor and professional media consultant. Her connections in the world of photojournalism are both broad and deep. Were we to become connected to her, David emphasized, that alone would make our own connections broad and deep - although it would be up to us to make something of those connections.

I did take a few pictures of Golon - and was horrified to see that the raindrops had indeed put my camera out of action. The images were streaked with lines and sprays of color, blue and green in this case, but sometimes red, sometimes purple, sometimes yellow - sometimes all these sprays in one image.

So far, essay wise, the week that been a total failure. And now this.

What the hell?

Humiliation road - I continued my fast charge down it.