Assignment – Possible Helmet Law

It’s bad timing, looking for parents with bike-riding kids during school hours. Only kids 3-5 years old are going to be out riding. We walked across the park and finally spotted one. No helmet, riding a trike with mom, grandma, and the family dog, Brody. Mom was willing to talk after some initial hesitation. The kid was practically posing on her bike, in pink sunglasses with Brody in the background. It was a great shot. We finished and they walked on, us going in the same direction. I thought, We should walk a different direction. But we didn’t. Sure enough, a minute later mom turned around and said she doesn’t want us to use her quotes or the photos. “I don’t want to be part of a negative story,” she said. But it wasn’t a negative story. We were just putting her opinion out there. There was no talking her back into it.

We found another mom, her daughter riding a scooter. When we started talking, her daughter yelled, “Mom! You’re wasting our time!”

Another day at the office…

.:.

Finished Gypsy Boy: My Life in the Secret World of the Romany Gypsies. A troubling book, Mikey Walsh takes you into the Roma culture. Troubling from the abuse his father dealt out to everyone in the family.

Now I want to know more about Irish Travellers…

Link: Irish Traveller family charged with keeping grown men as slaves in England:

The Irish Times reports that the men were recruited off the street or at homeless centres, and promised $70 a day. It is alleged that they never received the money, were blocked from leaving and were forced to work from 4am to 11pm six days a week, sometimes without food, while some were beaten.

Oldham claimed that at weekends, the men went door to door to find new customers and were ‘threatened if they failed to win business or tried to flee’.

Oldham also told the court that one man, now in his 40s, had been with the family since he was 14. He refused to stay at a rescue centre after the raid by police last September, and later returned to the caravan site.

Link: Unwelcome Exposure – TIME:

The Irish Travelers of North Augusta, S.C., stopped their pickups in the middle of the road last week to commiserate over the “outing” of Madelyne Gorman Toogood. The woman caught thrashing her 4-year-old on a surveillance video in Indiana is also, as it turns out, an Irish Traveler. And though they don’t know her, they know what her arrest means: 15 minutes of grueling fame for a community that thrives on secrecy.

See what I mean?

Redesigned the site, lots more content coming, and personality. Everything but The Click.

Daybook will now be in the daytime.

.:.

The important thing to do when you get laid off from a journalism job is to legally change your name. That way no one will be able to uncover your prior job history as a journo and blacklist you from their company. But I was having a really hard time figuring out what my new name will be (when the day comes). Until the other night…

DonkeyStar GalactiKong

.:.

Starting to wonder about all the big-tent projects I’ve spearheaded over the past few years. Questions I heard from friends involved are stuck in my mind. After we did a juried photo exhibition that was really cool and almost successful, a lot of the group was done. We limped through the second exhibition and collapsed. Gumby said to me something like, “Why are we doing all this work for other people? Why not do it for ourselves, with our own photography?”

It was a great question. The reward I saw coming from Salt City 50 would only have come if we kept going and became something like concert promoters, having photographers come to us hoping to be part of our next showcase. But we quit.

Gumby’s probably right. It’s not like concert promoters are seen as cool (even when they are). The promoters don’t get the attention, the artists do. There were other mistakes in the project that I wish we had avoided, like when we didn’t show the work of a couple photographers who put down serious money in entry fees. We should have balanced the integrity of the project with the goodwill that it needed to grow.

Stay focused…

After the last everyone-is-invited big-tent Utah PJ event, I couldn’t get over the strains in the room, the tension between different camps. Most of it was under the surface and you wouldn’t have picked up on it. But I did. And another friend who was there acknowledged the difficulty of getting photojournalists together, telling me, “Everybody secretly hates each other.”

Us photojournalists, we’re like comedians: bitter and brilliant and broken.

So yeah. Maybe it’s time to leave the era of the big-tent invite everyone events behind and be more selective. As the photojournalism world shrinks, the sense of community is fading. Freelancers in the small Utah market are so competitive now that I’ve seen people turn their backs on other photographers (literally) and complain about anyone who isn’t there to defend themselves.

Luckily the staff photographers seem to be somewhat immune to the toxicity. After all, we’re not a threat to each other or the freelancers. As long as we’re employed, that is…

Stay focused…

Why can’t we all relax? I should draw up a chart of the various factions in the community. I’d like to think that I’m on pretty good terms with everyone. Sure, I like some more than others. There are close friends and people I only smile and say hello to… I certainly wish everyone success and enjoy the talents of every photographer in the state. I think I know their strengths and weaknesses.

Stop rambling…

The point is that I’ve spent three years trying to build a community out of compounds that don’t and won’t stick together. And to what end? What is the goal of all this? I honestly don’t know what any possible payoff would be.

And don’t take this like some kind of Utah PJ suicide note, but I’ve actually been (irrationally) thinking about shutting down the Utah PJ website. Every time the thought comes to mind people start posting again. It’s a whole different crowd and I’m left wishing that everyone would fit in the big tent. But again, why? Yugoslavia failed.

What’s funny about this rant is that my next project is another big-tent thing. But I’ve learned one thing. This time, no photojournalists.

.:.

I’m taking a break from Google+ for a while. I don’t understand how I can have 6,000 or so followers combined with a nearly complete silence on my posts. Hardly any comments. Hopefully they’ll announce some changes to it at Google I/O at the end of June. I want it to work.

.:.

the Clunk has been restarted after two years. Clunk posts will be in my Twitter feed as well, though not on this site.