Moral Monday July 15, 2013 from rumur on Vimeo. In Brooklyn, where we live, we keep getting overwhelmed with new projects which keeps us from finishing some long term documentaries that need to get done. A couple of weeks ago my wife and I kind of moved our family to North Carolina for the year. That is, we came down for...
For the last 26 years I have lived in New York (19 of those years in Brooklyn). I grew up in North Carolina, and I'm spending the summer here. Yesterday, after the Trayvon Martin verdict, I was lucky enough to have my friend from Brooklyn, Edgar, over for lunch. We know each other from my daughters' school, where his nieces...
I’m a photographer. I go through periods where I shoot a lot and fallow periods where I don’t. I started out shooting film with a cheap Nikon and an even cheaper lens in the mid 80s. Later, in the mid 90's when I was a bit burnt out, I got a cheap point and shoot yashica T4 and shot hundreds of rolls of color...
For years I have had intermittent anxiety dreams about houses upstate that feel so real and connected that in the in between space that one encounters before fully waking they seem to slip from my alternate anxious reality into this one. I had one this morning and I was pulled in to this realm when I wondered out loud why...
Ever since the advent of photography the captured image has played a significant role in both our cultural and social spheres. As the process of image making evolves, so does our relationship to images. We are now at a point in the technological advancement of cameras that it’s almost difficult to make “bad images”. With half the planet walking around...
[caption id="attachment_24281" align="aligncenter" width="1432"] a shot out of the window of 224 Ave B- the building I moved into that was heavily featured in Ken Schles' "Invisible City"[/caption] One of the major rules of filmaking is “show, don’t tell”. We are visual people by nature and when we hear facts they stick on one level, but they don’t affect us as...
I have been on an Instagram bender. In the last week and a half, I have posted about 300 images, and I am happy with pretty much all of them. I got a new phone in September and was introduced to Instagram a couple of days later by Ruddy, another parent at my kids’ school. He happens to be one...
I imagine that I am starting to drive my friends crazy by constantly talking about how profoundly frames shape our thinking. This morning my friend Kevin shared an Onion article that hilariously illustrates ways in which unexamined racism shaped our cultural viewpoint 50 years ago. However, at the same time if one steps around the corner and looks at that...
Last week I wrote several pieces in response to the reaction to Jonah Lehrer's apology speech. I published one, the second that I wrote, on my blog last week. This is the first piece that I wrote. I was told by others that it was too related to our own work to post elsewhere. As such I combined parts of...
This morning before school, I was talking with some other parents about a funeral for an 8 year old 4th grader that’s taking place tonight. He died in a fire last week. I spend a lot of time at the school, and know a lot of kids by sight but not name. I think it’s pheromones, but when kids see...
A year and a half ago, as Occupy Wall Street was just starting to take off after some crazy police brutality, I stood outside of a re-naming ceremony for the New Jersey Nets. A couple of hundred press people had dutifully shown up at this press event to hear the exciting news that the team would now be called...
Last week I heard on BBC radio that the National Health Service in England is instructing doctors to prescribe self-help books. The radio presenter seemed a little aghast at this idea and pressed a doctor by asking something along the lines of, “So you’re saying that you think that people will respond well to a doctor basically telling them that...