Gabriel Orozco Quotes

March 24, 2018

"Looking through the camera doesn't intensify experience. It just frames the object. It's much more intense without the camera. For me photography is like a shoebox. You put things in a box when you want to keep them, to think about them. Photography is more than a window for me; photography is more like a space that tries to capture situations. It's notational. I use the camera like drawing."

"A photograph might or might not become a work of art. In a way, it's irrelevant because I think photography is a necessity for documentation ... for memory. First it's a necessity. Then, some of these photographs might generate enough thinking and contemplation to be exposed for consideration. But I don't take photographs thinking that they are going to be art. I take photographs thinking that I need to keep the moment, because I need to look at it afterwards."

from Art: 21, Volume 2

Trump Piñata

March 22, 2018

I saw this Donald Trump piñata at Dulceria Clarissa last week and it immediately inspired a new obsession and possible project.

Found Photos from an Eviction

March 19, 2018

I found this eviction yesterday on 23rd Street, just before the rain started, and managed to salvage a few photographs.

Rose City, North Little Rock

March 11, 2018

Greater Rose of Sharon

March 06, 2018

View the full archive of Little Rock churches and places of worship at wherelittlerockworships.tumblr.com.

Unsolved

February 27, 2018

It is hard to stand alone on a dark corner where you know a homicide has taken place. I parked the car next to an abandoned house and dragged my tripod and camera out. I set up on the corner, beneath a street light. I had been to the site earlier in the day, when it was light, and a man who lived a few houses away came out to ask what I was doing. I explained that I am photographing the sites of the unsolved homicides from 2017, taken as near the time of the crime as possible, and asked if he remembered the night of Jan. 8, when Mashon Jackson was shot near here, the first homicide of the year. He pointed me further down the block, to the intersection of 33rd and MLK.

Which is why I found myself standing on the corner at night, watching cars pull up to the intersection, pause to stare at the man with a camera, and then pull away while I struggled to hold my shutter open for the two-plus minutes needed for the exposure. I stayed there a good 10 minutes, making five different exposures, none of which I managed to hold long enough for a good image.

Of the 55* homicides committed in Little Rock in 2017, 27 of them remain unsolved, according to the latest data from the Little Rock Police Department. And Mashon Jackson's is not the only one in this immediate neighborhood. I drove a few blocks over to 3300 Wolfe Street, where, on Feb. 12, 2017, Troy Langston was found around 11 p.m. in the driver's seat of a Ford Taurus that was parked in the yard.

* This number comes from the official list of homicides obtain through a FOIA request. Some of these crimes have either been ruled justified or, in the case of two, may appear in the 2018 stats since the victim was shot in late 2017 but didn't die until early 2018.

Unsolved: Troy Langston (3300 Wolfe Street)

Liquor Boxes

February 22, 2018

I made the block just to pick up this box. Something about the colors – the icy blue and electric orange – caught my eye, and I needed to have it. Good advertising and design, I guess. But then I started wondering why I had never seen it before, which sent me down a road of considering the different liquor boxes one is likely to find in different neighborhoods around the city and what it might look like to document that.