a book(let)

© kjm

For your consideration, a booklet and print.

This is something new for me, inspired by similar projects by online galleries and other photographers and unique to the wide reach and accessibility of blogs. I think the diminutive term "booklet" fits my offering well - both in the size of the piece and the spirit in which the pictures were created - these are small observations. (Besides, I feel kind of old when I hear myself say "zine.")

The thirty-eight color and b/w pictures are mostly singular images that I made and posted here on the blog, and not work from my larger projects (Camp Home, Early Places, or Fast Food).

Edition: 150 pairs available (54 remaining). Title: 38. Saddle stitched, 6x6". Print title: Cemetery Flowers, Fish Creek, Wisconsin. Digital c-print on Fuji crystal archive matte paper, 7x5.5".

Price: $27.00 (plus shipping)

classified

North Milwaukee Avenue Location, #1 © kjm

Wanted: Help in finding locations of abandoned fast food restaurants.
What: Only the big chains. No Brat Barns, Sub Shanties or Tofu Huts, please.
Where: Anywhere in the U.S. considered! I'm willing to travel if the location can be combined with an assignment or a visit with nearby friends (I'm likely heading to Washington state for a ripe Taco Bell and a recently shuttered Burger King).
Who: Midwestern photographer who should spend a bit more time taking pictures and a bit less time writing his blo
Why: If you tip me off to a location that I end up photographing, I'll send you a copy of my soon-to-be-released booklet of personal photos (although your time is surely worth more).

[The Burger King, above, (graffiti on the windows and yet still one light on inside!) was spotted in Chicago by photographer Michelle Nolan.]

stack

My nightstand is lousy with new photo books. In the stack, to be devoured in no particular order (but listed here clockwise from top):

[Manzanar] Architecture Double by Andrew Freeman
The catalog for FOTO: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945 (photo by Lotte Jacobi)
Allison V. Smith's second zine, An Issue With Lomos
The Castle & The Kingdom by Mikael Kennedy
Driftless: Photographs From Iowa by Danny Wilcox Frazier
The Polaroids by André Kertész
The catalog for the Archive Fever (photo by Fazal Sheikh)
Dog Days, Bogotá by Alec Soth

Note to self: Schedule time to curl up.

renovation

© kjm

I've been thinking a great deal about my website lately. Without buying too much into corporate-speak, I've started to view the site as my storefront. That's not to say I don't have some actual bricks and mortar that I pay a mortgage on, but the website is my one-stop shop for anyone looking to work with me. Luckily, the lights are always on, hopefully it's easy and fun to browse, and feels a bit like me. This blog is more like a peek in the back storage room, or maybe my thoughts on the daily commute to the day job.

Anyway, I've got new space.
www.kevinmiyazaki.com

within reach: 6:34 pm

bedroom window at dusk sunday © kjm

The days are getting longer.

don't miss it: listen

© david turnley

On the radio today: A really nice interview on The Story about this picture of the photographer Peter Turnley. And a piece about Robert Capa on On The Media.

early places: the rules

Four Square Court, Lincoln Playground, 2007 © kjm

I've been working like an e-dog for the past days - editing old assignments, searching for files and scanning film for possible inclusion on the new website (to be unveiled any day now!). This is an Early Places picture I scanned today showing the painted line of a Four Square court on my elementary school playground.

I remember that when you advanced to the A square in the game, you were able to call your own set of rules. I'm sure nowdays kids yell something slick, like, "Texas Hold 'Em!," but in my day, the default set of rules (unless you were a young dictator) were "Jenny Noble's Rules." Jenny Noble wasn't a student at our school - but likely some Four Square prodigy from days gone by - and for all we knew, she was married with kids by then. But whether she knew it or not, she still called the shots on a small corner of the playground.

wind

349225 © kjm

I'm sticking with the 'someone else wrote this' theme.

I live next door to a hardware store, and the wind brings small bits of garbage from their dumpters to my property. Among these things, (besides lots of small Doritos bags, for some reason), are occasional small handwritten lists. I find them interesting, because they're such a big part of the hardware store experience - and have decided to start photographing them in detail.

thaw

summer camp birding list © kjm

Today, on a drive at dusk from Madison to Milwaukee, I saw two, nearly perfect v-shaped flocks of Canada Geese.

They were flying north.

he is sam

© kjm

I spent two days in Philadelphia catching up with friends Andrea and Colin and their charmer of a son, Sam. Lots of changes and potential and new beginnings in their lives right now, so it was a nice time to visit. And trust me when I say that Sam is every bit as cute and happy as the picture above suggests.

as seen: light

© kjm

A few of the Whitney Biennial installations were held at the Park Avenue Armory, an amazing Upper East Side building constructed in the 1870's. I dare say the building, with details like the hanging lamp above, was more compelling than the art.

as seen: street

Wet Plastic Bag + Metal Door © kjm

don't miss it: in the city

© kjm

In NYC for a few days as Marilu does studio visits and takes in the latest Whitney Biennial. Some highlights:

At MOMA, geek that I am, my first stop was a show called 50 Years of Helvetica. It was very small, though, just a corner of one of the design galleries. In Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today, there were all kinds of good things. John Baldessari's photograph called Common Memory Colors, a beautiful Jennifer Bartlett, David Batchelor's Found Monochromes of London, and Jim Lambie's vinyl tape floor (iPhone self portrait, above.) I've always loved On Kawara's date paintings, but never had the chance to see the corresponding color chart journal, so that was a treat. The link above for the show is a nice online exhibit, where you can see everything I've just mentioned.

The Archive Fever show at ICP had beautiful photographs from Afghanistan by Fazal Sheikh. I'm not sure what I think of Sherrie Levine's straight appropriation of Walker Evans photos, but I'll need to read more about her in the catalog.

In Chelsea, Bruce Yonemoto's pictures at Alexander Gray - portraits of Asian American men dressed in Civil War uniforms; Marcel Dzama at David Zwirner - drawings, along with journal pages of sketches, sculptural dioramas, and even a scratchy film.

Lastly, Thomas Holten's show, The Lams of Ludlow Street at Sasha Wolf. The most memorable photo in the show (the third in the online gallery link) could tell the whole story on its own.

Whew. OK, today, it's on to the Whitney...

i love this photo, #18

Oil Self Portrait (2), 2007 © sonja thomsen

I love this photo by the photographer Sonja Thomsen. Sonja has been photographing ever-changing water surfaces for some time, and more recently began photographing oil. Of the oil pictures that include her own reflection, she notes that "photographing oil has been a challenge as it is essentially a black mirror. I decided to stop fighting my reflection and work with it. I have been interested in how the form mirrors the oil and how the shadow allows a look into the oil rather than the reflection of the sky."

within reach: unbleached

Coffee Filter © kjm

great leap backwards

© stretch

It's a Leap Year day today, and the anniversary of a legendary swansong performance by the band, The Rawls. The year was 2000, and they had what it took: guts, fierce determination, and most importantly, a quality ink jet printer. The band got some good press on the strength of their debut, Fictitious, but in the end - dropped by their label, Wink Wink, and unpopular with most audiences - they faded to black. The final (some would argue their first) performance, the band's Last Waltz as it were, was at The Comet, a sleepy Cincinnati bar best known for raucous Kiwanis Club meetings. If you were there that night, and were one of the lucky ones to get a copy of Fictitious, hang onto it - I've seen signed copies on eBay going for small fortunes.

back of the fridge

Lunar Surface or Mold on Vegetarian Chili - You Be The Judge © kjm

above and below

© kjm

A while ago, trying to figure out if there were pictures to be made while waiting to catch planes, I started shooting detail photos of bad airport carpet beneath my feet. I'm not quite sure in what manner I'd present these pictures - maybe in some kind of quilt-like pattern, or morphed together to create a travelogue pattern. The bad carpet is much easier to find in the U.S., as the European airports seem to have lots of granite or tile. In the Mexico City airport, the carpet was quite gorgeous, as were the walls and ceilings, all round porthole-style shapes (above, reflected in a pane of glass), allowing beautiful light into the space.

as seen: nine

Nine Bugs In (About) Nine Minutes © kjm

It's been a good few days here in Mexico City - shooting food of all types, from street vendor tacos to high end restaurant fare. Not too many personal pictures made, though, so I spent a few minutes shooting on the street in the Zona Rosa neighborhood this morning.

comida rápida

Paseo de La Reforma Location © kjm

I'm in Mexico City this week, shooting a food and travel story for a European magazine, Saisonkuche. While walking to the metro this morning, I came across an abandoned Kentucky Fried Chicken. Ironically, it's the first KFC I've shot for my series, but I'm not sure if this qualifies for inclusion, since it's abroad. On the authentic Mexican fast food side, I had a delicious, hot shrimp empanada today, with avacado, onions and salsa - for breakfast, no less.

don't miss it: their take

© brown cannon III

Deb Pang Davis and Mike Davis have started a new blog of photographer interviews called Raw Take. Between the two of them, they're connected to some of the best photographers working, so this promises to be a good site to bookmark. One of the nice things about an archive-type site (like The Photographs Not Taken) is that it's easy to revisit when time permits.

I shot a story in France for Deb when she was at Virtuoso Life, and she writes the blog Coco Ink. When I was in Portland this past fall, I had the chance to meet up with the two for a quick coffee.

The first interview posted is with Brown Cannon III. I'm particularly excited, since Cannon has been a mainstay in my Rock Stars bookmarks folder for quite a while. I'm not as interested in his fine art water images, but his editorial travel work is among the best there is, and it always inspires me.

within reach: morning

© kjm

The days are starting to get noticeably longer.

happy...

© kjm

valentines day.

his and hers

Highway 66 Location, #1 and #2 © kjm

Marilu and I traveled to Winslow, Arizona on Saturday, where we resisted the urge to photograph each other standing on a corner, and spent the night at the La Posada hotel. It's a charming old railroad hotel, designed by the architect Mary Colter, and recently refurbished. On the way to the hotel, though, we had two great finds - one for her and one for me. For her (being from a family of geologists), a big hole in the ground - in the form of a 4,000 ft. wide meteor crater. And for me, a nearly equally dramatic closed-down Burger King (this one was fantastic!) on the outskirts of town.

don't miss it: why walk?

© margarita cabrera

Marilu's Car Culture show opened this weekend, one of the last she curated for SMoCA before leaving for her new job. The show is fantastic, of course, with photography by Robert Frank and photos from Amy Stein's Stranded series, as well this life-size soft sculpture of a Hummer (so very Phoenix) by Margarita Cabrera.

within reach: white

© kjm

We had 17 inches of snow in 24 hours yesterday - a real spectacle, and enough to even make Wisconsinites a bit nervous. What looks like grade school theatrical snow, above, is actually morning snow piling up on my front window ledge. Aside from venturing out to shovel (4 times), I watched from a warm, dry seat at my desk most of the day.

local

Richard, Jason, Courtney, Juliet, Colin and Rory © kjm

After a month of travel, I've enjoyed settling in back home and working on several local projects. I've been designing a small booklet of personal work, which will be available, along with a print, on the blog soon (stay tuned). And I've been photographing participants in the Milwaukee Artist Resource Network's mentor program (a few, above) for an upcoming catalog. I'm a fan of the program, and am also lucky to be the mentor to Mel Trittin of Cigarettes and Purity fame.

within reach: lemony

decaying lemon © kjm

When I started photographing around my house and studio, it was an exercise to look closer at my immediate surroundings and to try to see the new - as opposed to the old and familiar, which is what I look for in the Early Places pictures. The growing subset series of details of mold and neglect will now be called, In Defense of Bad Housekeeping. The rule: Just be my sloppy self and see what appears under the swipe of a white glove (if I had a white glove). Unfortunately or fortunately, there's lots of material to work with.

i love this photo, #17

© michael nye

I love this photo by the photographer Michael Nye. It comes from his project, Fine Line, a series "voices, stories and portraits" that addresses mental illness through large format black and white photographs and audio interviews. In the exhibit of the work, Nye presented 55 portraits, accompanied by their own audio player, allowing viewers to listen to a 4-6 minute recording of each subject's voice. Nye's projects are humanistic, and he appropriately travels his them widely. Two of his other projects are Children of Children and About Hunger.

as seen: west wingish

© kjm

The Ramada Inn I'm staying at tonight in southwestern Wisconsin apparently used to be called The White House. There's a small dome, and Presidential portraits adorn the lobby. George HW Bush is perched above the coffeemaker, and here's Bill Clinton, looking young, but a bit dejected that I've decided to vote for Obama.