Bonnie Chan Photography | blog
Visit my PHOTO WEBSITE! But only if you want to.
“Over the course of 2012, we’re giving 100 disposable cameras to 100 people aged between 1 and 100, inviting each of them to capture one week in their life.”
A while ago, I sent in a submission to a tumblr called The Burning House, which posts people’s responses to the question “If your house was burning, what would you take with you?” The majority of submissions are from people who, like me, take it as an opportunity to lump a bunch of their favorite things into a pile on the floor — which, I will admit, is actually more closely answering the question “If you had to pack for Burning Man, what would you take with you?”
A few people seem to equate “burning house” with “the apocalypse.” (They are probably also the ones who regularly check the batteries in their smoke detectors.)
Fascinatingly, some people would grab things like deodorant and mascara.
And a few parents just get real.
Tonight, my friend Molly and I started a conversation about Making Plans. (Notice the capitalization, which signifies Importance.) I’m a big fan of Plans — making them, that is. I have tons of Google Docs with titles like “Things to do in NYC” and “Writing retreat planning doc.” In fact, I just created two new Google Docs today.
Molly’s and my latest respective Plans will essentially revolve around moving ourselves upward through Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs:
The pyramid above is a generally accepted summary of Abraham Maslow’s theory about which needs must be met for a person to achieve self-actualization, which is essentially the “full personal potential.” In the pyramid representation, the most fundamental needs form the base of the pyramid. Once those basic needs are met, then an individual can begin thinking about meeting the other needs that move him/her towards the top of the pyramid.
I can say that I’ve managed to nail down the basic physiological needs pretty well. Though honestly I’m a bit confused that “sex” is down there right alongside things like “breathing” and “pooping.” How much sex is enough sex to qualify one as meeting basic physiological needs? But digression aside, generally speaking, I take care of my own physiological needs and regulate my own pH levels like a champ.
That generally leaves me squashed into a combination of the other levels of the pyramid, as I imagine is true of most people. And all joking aside, contemplating Maslow’s hierarchy is pretty thought-provoking. Certainly his hierarchy helps me to organize some of my thinking around goal-setting. I work in different ways to move towards self-actualization on a constant basis — in photography and otherwise — but deep, true, authentic creativity is hard to come by when I’m not yet secure in some of the pieces underneath.
This summer, I’m focusing on allowing myself to lean into my friendships a little bit more. That’s the big thing, but there are also Plans to be made around employment, eating habits, homemaking, and health maintenance. For example, I’ve cut a few things out of my diet, mainly cheese and refined sugars, which I’m sure I’ll mention again here in this blog; and I go to a Total Body Conditioning class headed up by a tiny, immaculately muscled Colombian woman who blasts reggaeton while we all buff the floor with our sweat beginning at 6:30am.
Plans are fun.
Any day now…!
(From a photo session with Svea at seven months. As of right now, she is two days from her due date.) (!!!)
A shot from a photo project about my friends’ band, the Solace Trio. Here, Joe and Josh do some recording on a weekend afternoon. Ps- You should definitely check them out playing their song “Stairs” at Tim’s kitchen table.
I’ve been spending some time this past month building up my Instagram grid (if you have Instagram, you can find me @bonnafied). I’m pretty new to Instagram and feel like I’m just now starting to get a handle on what I can do with it. I spent my first month on Instagram just trying to sort out what filter did what. I started sharing some of my Instagram photos on a carefully edited Tumblr, but my Instagram grid itself was a haphazard scramble of photos, half of which I wanted to delete and didn’t bother to. It took me a month to realize that you could take photos using your regular phone camera and then pull those photos into Instagram to edit, rather than taking photos directly through Instagram. Then it took me another little while to realize that Instagram is a photo-sharing network in and of itself, with a whole community of users who take their Instagram sharing and storytelling very seriously — promoting the iPhone as legitimate photographic tool, with its own set of beauties and limitations, just as with any other kind of camera; promoting iPhone photography as its own medium, with all of the filters and apps attendant to an art form that people take time to master.
This is such a photographic journey, discovering and utilizing all of the tools that are available now to instantaneously share, connect, reach out, and communicate with each other.
As I’ve spent more time on my Instagram feed, I’ve learned a bunch about how people are editing their photos, and seen many different kinds of storytelling. Some people use Instagram like Facebook (fitting, too, now that they’re One), sharing snapshots of meals and friends; some have 100,000 followers and every photo is a small photographic masterpiece. There are those whose photos tell an unfolding, daily story of family life spent in fields and backyards; those who document the ways light plays off of the skyscrapers in Manhattan as they walk to or from work every morning.
I’m also seeing the kinds of photos that people are taking on the iPhone 4. My friend Casey (the one who gifted his old iPhone 3 to me) did warn me about the staggering difference in quality between iPhone 3 and iPhone 4 photo resolution. He knew that, as a photographer, I would care about the difference once I realized what the difference was. But it took me a while to realize it; it was a novelty for me simply to take a cell phone photo that didn’t look like I was underwater.
Now that I’m aware of the difference, it’s probably just a matter of time before I upgrade. Yes, I’m thinking about upgrading, two years after the iPhone 4 came out. There’s always a sort of bittersweetness to realizing that I want something better than what I currently have; for a while there, I was practically tucking my iPhone 3 into bed and kissing it goodnight each night… and now my mind is already on to the next shiny thing. But that’s the line that I keep attempting to walk: Do something beautiful with what I have, upgrade when I can, and then keep doing something beautiful.
(Instead of, for example, making a virtue of using low-grade tools, and then making a virtue of refusing to upgrade, and then feeling weirdly resentful and hating my own art and going into a death-spiral and ultimately becoming a nun.)
First dildos, so clearly, now vaginas. The Bay Area chapter of NAPAWF (the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum) is putting on a production of the Asian Pacific American Vagina Monologues on May 17th, and last week they had a fundraising party in Oakland featuring a photo booth that featured a giant hand-sewn plush vagina.
The plush vagina will be auctioned off at the show, BTW. So buy your ticket now if you’d like a chance at a new body pillow.
The photo booth was manned by yours truly, and I gotta say… generally speaking, people tend to be pretty self-conscious in front of a camera, myself included. But make some props available, set up some studio lighting, have a full bar, and BAM! It becomes a tryout for America’s Next Top Model, Playa Playa Edition. Props are amazing. They’re like masks that allow people to give themselves permission to let loose. Then again, when the props are crotch-themed, I guess you can assume that there’ll be some letting loose involved.
You can view the full set of photos here.
My friends Jason and Svea are pregnant. We did a photo session. It was lovely. And then I spent the next few days crying. Neither joy nor sadness, exactly, but everything. This is one of the film outtakes.
This past month was full of opportunities to do photo sessions with friends, which is perhaps the greatest gift for anyone who likes looking through a camera — looking through the viewfinder to find someone you care about on the other side.
In early April, my friend Michele and her fiance Chris drove up from Southern California to do an engagement photo shoot here in the Bay, which is where their relationship first began. I met Michele six years ago at a leadership training in Washington, DC, and last month I finally got to meet Chris. And not only did I get to shoot their engagement photos, I also got to host them in my living room. I showed them how you can lie on the air mattress while you use the remote to inflate and deflate it, which is a game I could play all day long. We also ate like horses. Fun times!
This photo shoot was a truly collaborative effort between Chris and Michele, the wardrobe and styling team of Retrofit Republic, the makeup team of Step Heavvy, and me. The whole episode was a total blast.
Congrats, Chris and Michele, and thanks for the day.
Meet the newest member of my family. This is the Leica M6 film camera that I’m in the process of buying off of my friend Joe, who takes beautiful photos. When Joe told me that he was selling his M6, I asked quite mildly, “Do you know how much you’re going to ask for?”, which ultimately really meant, “Pleez, let it be mine?”
“PLEEZ?”
(Image courtesy Allie Brosh at Hyperbole and a Half, a blog which has nothing to do whatsoever with Leicas or this blog, other than that it’s one of my favorite blogs ever.)
A Leica is like a classic car — a beautiful piece of machinery designed and constructed to perfection, to be handled with some matter-of-factness tinged with reverence. I always assumed that a Leica would be on my wish list for a long, long, long time; given my financial resources, there are many other pieces of photo equipment that I probably need more immediately. But I couldn’t turn my back on the opportunity to buy a used Leica off of a friend who helped me to see myself as a photographer. This isn’t buying a camera off of a stranger. This is like recognizing and buying back a piece of myself.
I’ve been practicing a new thing lately, which is: Buying myself nice things. Last year, J.dub bought me a 16-35L lens for Christmas — another of those things I figured would take me years and years to acquire — and it was a gift that shattered my mind into a billion sparkly little pieces. It helped me to realize that Nice Things certainly have their place right alongside Cheap, Thrifted Things. More recently, he gently but firmly insisted that I accept a pair of boots that I was trying to pretend I didn’t want. And I bought myself a guitar to practice on. And a set of autographed limited edition postcards from Jim Goldberg’s Rich and Poor series.
(And after all that, the IRS is trying to tell me that I owe them money.)
Joe is kindly allowing me to buy the Leica in installments, so I made my first payment to him a few days ago on the 11th, and we agreed to keep on a plan for the 11th of each month. I calculated that I would therefore give him my last payment on August 11th — which, entirely coincidentally, happens to be my birthday. I think this is the best kind of gift I could give to myself.
