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| Want to change what you became when you grew up? | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Jul 27 2005, 07:21 AM (277 Views) | |
| Amanda | Jul 27 2005, 07:21 AM Post #1 |
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Senior Carp
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It's not so much this guys "Art" that was interesting to me as that he shifted gears completely at 38 from corporate lawyer to artist (depends on what you mean by "artist" in some ways, but who's counting? grumbling, grumble from representationally trained Art person) Changing paths, chasing dreams... My father changed his career around that age. Three little kids, a large heavily mortgaged house in the suburbs, a great job (at least remuneratively). But he hated it. Quit to become a free-lance artist. And he succeeded (very much so - a rarity, I know). No one at his workplace could believe he hadn't been fired. but no... In this respect, at least, he set a great example. He always said, he couldn't believe he was paid as much as he was to do what he loved. That he would have done it for free! ALso, spoke often of his pity for those who lived for the weekend and retirement. I realize not everyone can be so fortunate for many reasons. Still, some of you kids out there are around that age - or older. Ever wished you'd set your sites on something different? Need a push in that direction? http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/24/arts/des....html?th&emc=th |
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[size=5] We should tolerate eccentricity in others, almost to the point of lunacy, provided no one else is harmed.[/size] "Daily Telegraph", London July 27 2005 | |
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| Jolly | Jul 27 2005, 07:24 AM Post #2 |
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Geaux Tigers!
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I know a lawyer who walked away from it at 40, and opened his own catering business. Also, a very good friend of mine now only practices part-time, as he has pretty much shifted his focus to raising and training gun dogs. I think there are a lot of these stories. I think a lot of attorneys are very unhappy with their jobs.... |
| The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.- George Soros | |
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| FrankM | Jul 27 2005, 08:04 AM Post #3 |
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Senior Carp
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Here’s my take on it. Not really advice, just observations. I certainly believe in learning from the past. But I also accept that, if I were to put myself back in the situations and circumstances that constituted the branch points for my life’s path, I would likely have chosen the same route. As a result, I’m pretty well content wherever I might find myself at any time. In other words, I truly never regret the past and try to make the best of my present situation. I think I could have been happy in a wide variety of careers because I trust myself to find the special challenges of that career. But I think someone is born with that kind of attitude so I’m really just being true to my nature. Neurobiologists have found strong evidence to confirm what most of us already know, namely that people are born with set-points for happiness, some being blessed with set-points higher than others. In other words, one’s general happiness is less determined by your actual life path and more by your genetics. The corollary here is once again to be true to yourself. That is, in choosing whether to give a new career a shot regardless of the time in your life, go less with your head and more with your heart. |
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| ivorythumper | Jul 27 2005, 08:14 AM Post #4 |
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I am so adjective that I verb nouns!
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Not me. I love what I do, and can hardly believe that I can do what I love and get well paid for it! I have no interest in retirement -- I'll do it until I drop dead. |
| The dogma lives loudly within me. | |
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| CHAS | Jul 27 2005, 01:02 PM Post #5 |
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Middle Aged Carp
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At 30 I quit the practice of law, went into farming. Preferred the outdoors and working the market. At 46 sold off farm equipment, kept land, and moved to the mountains where I drive a bus. The farm is leased to a good farmer. I grin a lot. |
| "You want to be Nice, or you want to be Effective? Make the law or be subject to it?"-Roy Cohn | |
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| Fizzygirl | Jul 27 2005, 02:00 PM Post #6 |
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Fulla-Carp
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Amanda, I'd like to read the article, but it says I have to log in to the New York Times. Since I don't read the times, could you paste the article here? Or email it to me? Thanks!!
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Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose. ~ Garrison Keillor My latest videos. | |
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| Amanda | Jul 27 2005, 02:16 PM Post #7 |
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Senior Carp
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Sure, fizzygirl. Sorry. I had decided that long pastes were dissuading people from posts owing to the scrolling. Especially when they might be more interested in the merely associated topic here. (Plug: it's easy to register with the NYTimes. I have a Google acount I use just when I want to keep my email address anonymous!) Glancing at this again (and you are BTW, missing the side show of his work - here are two), I see that he had barely been surviving before as a lawyer owing to all his photography and equipment. Also - interestingly - he resigned from the Bar when he changed careers, so as not to be tempted to fall back on his legal training! A lot of ethics involved here. Especially because of disrespecting the companies. ![]() ![]() hot-linked I fear. I'll delete them in a couple of days. July 24, 2005 A Great Big Beautiful Pile of Junk By PHILIP GEFTER Tucker, Ga. CHRIS JORDAN stood on a ladder, gazing down at 3,000 or so used cellphones in a pile on the warehouse floor. His 8 x 10 view camera was perched even higher, on a tripod 12 feet above them. He had spent the morning figuring out how to include every one of the phones in a single photograph, eventually sweeping them into a neat, trapezoidal-shaped mound, the shorter side closer to the camera, or what would be the bottom of the picture frame. Mr. Jordan had flown from Seattle, where he lives, to photograph at CollectiveGood, an electronics recycling center in the Atlanta suburbs. "I want to give a concrete sense of our consumption, with the real quantities," Mr. Jordan said, from his perch on the ladder. Of course, for one image to represent the actual number of annually discarded cellphones - 130 million, according to CollectiveGood - he would have to reproduce the picture he was now getting ready to take about 43,000 times, creating a panorama that would stretch 61 miles if the photos were laid side by side. The millions of consumers who buy new cellphones each year give no thought to the ones they are discarding, Mr. Jordan suggested. "If they're only thinking about the environmental consequences of their own actions," he said, "they have to change their lifestyles." Mr. Jordan has certainly changed his. In 2002, at 38, he abandoned a 10-year career as a corporate lawyer. The job had merely been supporting his photography habit: for a long time, he didn't even have a car, and had spent his money on photography equipment, sheet film and processing. When he finally left his job, he went to the trouble of resigning from the bar, intentionally dismantling the safety net that his legal experience would provide should photography not be an adequate livelihood. "As a lawyer, I represented industry," he said. "I felt I could no longer reconcile representing some of the companies, based on what they were doing." Mr. Jordan's free fall from law to photography is about to pay off. He is currently preparing for an exhibition of his series of photographs of industrial refuse - his first solo show in New York, in September, at the Yossi Milo Gallery in Chelsea. Most of his subjects - huge piles of crushed cars, mounds of discarded cellphones, bales of recycled cans and mountains of sawdust - were photographed as he found them at industrial sites. Now, at a cellphone warehouse, he was beginning for the first time to rearrange the objects into a swirling pattern based on drawings he had been making throughout the day, adding an interpretive layer to his formal documentary approach. He wasn't sure if the experiment would yield a successful visual metaphor; it might be too obvious or corny. The shape signified to him the enormity of a galaxy of electronic refuse and also the idea of a whirlpool, as if the cellphones were swirling down a drain. "Walk on them," he said playfully, urging an observer to follow him as he stepped on the pile. Cellphones crunched under his feet as if he were treading on plastic cockroaches. By Mr. Jordan's standards, the cellphone recycling center here is a highly controlled and thus luxurious situation in which to photograph: the proprietors are hospitable, the interior environment is air-conditioned and well lighted, and the subject matter is malleable. In contrast, most of the photographs in his series were taken at active industrial sites, where a photographer and his tripod can seem particularly vulnerable. His image of crushed cars was made at a metal recycling plant in Tacoma, Wash., after he saw a barge float by with cars piled several stories high on their way to the shredder. He drove to the building and obtained permission to photograph there in exchange for pictures to be used on the plant's Web site or in its annual report. He signed a release and was escorted through a menacing industrial maze in which huge cranes hoisted crushed cars above him, and dump trucks unloaded them all around him. He returned to Tacoma five times to get the picture he wanted. Most facilities, though, were not so accommodating. "Container Yard No. 1, Seattle 2003," was shot at the Port of Seattle. He had seen the containers from an overpass, and when he drove up to ask if he could photograph on the site, he was given a long list of reasons why he couldn't: homeland security issues, OSHA regulations, accident liability considerations. So he returned to shoot the containers on a Sunday when the yard was empty. "It was unbelievably scary and stressful to be there with my 8 x 10 camera," Mr. Jordan said, adding that the picture of containers was among the first in the series, and one of the few to address the infrastructure of mass production, as opposed to the resulting detritus. Another early image is called "Recycling Yard No. 1, Seattle 2003," a print 50 inches wide, which he hung on the wall of his studio. Visitors would approach the picture, stare, and say, "Look, Altoids." Also identifiable are Campbell's Soup cans, Slim-Fast containers, Libby's pumpkin pie mix, Hunt's tomato sauce, Rosarita refried beans: a kind of "Where's Waldo?" of consumer refuse. As Mr. Jordan crawled around on the mound of cellphones, he heard a distinct ring beneath him. Seth Heine, the founder of CollectiveGood, later said that it's not uncommon for people to throw out cellphones that are still active. Then he offered another statistic: If all the cellphones thrown out annually were recycled, they would yield 202,000 ounces of gold (worth about $84.8 million), and keep 65,000 tons of toxic materials- battery components and elements like cadmium - from landfills and incinerators. The process of making the picture of cellphones at CollectiveGood was more laborious than Mr. Jordan would have liked. The old-fashioned 8 x 10 view camera requires individual film holders; each sheet of film has to be slipped into the holder in total darkness, with the emulsion side set to face the lens. On his first night at the Red Roof Inn, he turned his hotel room into a darkroom, hanging sheets and blankets over the windows, placing towels under the door to block the light from the hallway, and taping a magazine over the light switch itself, which glowed like a night light. "I hate the technical aspect of photography," Mr. Jordan said. "I don't want to stop to think methodically and make calculations, like adjusting the light meter, setting the f-stop, the exposure, remembering to close the lens, seating the film holder properly. I crave to be able to photograph the way a painter paints - in a loose, expressive way. With the view camera, I have to stop and think like an accountant." Still, when the images are as large as some in his forthcoming show- one picture of small electronic wires called diodes is eight feet long - every step is crucial, from exposure to development to scanning to printing. To make sure that his images are scanned for optimal size, color fidelity and accuracy of detail, he spent six months researching film-scanning operators. The resulting precision of detail gives Mr. Jordan's large-format photographs a truer-than-life clarity. "What I aspire to is to have the viewer look directly at the subject, as if they're looking through a window at the real thing," he said. Mr. Jordan said he had been greatly influenced by Andreas Gursky, whose eye-zapping images depict, among other things, our commodity-patterned world. Even the enormous scale of Mr. Gursky's prints is meant to reflect the globalization of capitalist sprawl. "Gursky's work proved to me that representational photographic art can be cutting-edge relevant, as well as complex and beautiful," Mr. Jordan said. But he added that Mr. Gursky took "the point of view of detached observer, which I started with in my consumerism work and am finding myself no longer comfortable with." Instead, Mr. Jordan is an openly passionate advocate - or maybe a protester. While he is aiming for visually resolved images as an artist, the point is to heighten awareness about our collective environmental disregard. But art and advocacy can be at odds, the goals of one often canceling out the other. "My goal," he said, "is to try to face the complexity of the issue and honor it." Mr. Jordan needed one more day at CollectiveGood to get just the exposures he wanted of the cellphones. Once back in Seattle, he sent an e-mail message describing the moment when, after all the planning, the traveling, the setting up of his equipment and the arranging of the cellphones, he felt "something like joy and recognition and excitement, plus some instant anxiety," because he had to get it on film safely or it would be lost forever. He did get it on film, had the film scanned, and spent several days working in Photoshop to blend two different exposures into the single panoramic swirl, "Cellphone No. 2, Atlanta 2005," 7.5 feet long, above. The image shifts between documentary evidence (real cellphones in mass quantity) and metaphor: a vortex evoking the endless flow of consumer detritus. |
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[size=5] We should tolerate eccentricity in others, almost to the point of lunacy, provided no one else is harmed.[/size] "Daily Telegraph", London July 27 2005 | |
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| Amanda | Jul 27 2005, 02:18 PM Post #8 |
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Senior Carp
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Way to go, CHAS!!!
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[size=5] We should tolerate eccentricity in others, almost to the point of lunacy, provided no one else is harmed.[/size] "Daily Telegraph", London July 27 2005 | |
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| Fizzygirl | Jul 27 2005, 04:13 PM Post #9 |
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Fulla-Carp
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Thanks so much Amanda, I appreciate it. Fascinating article and very interesting photography as well.
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Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose. ~ Garrison Keillor My latest videos. | |
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| NAK-1.0 | Jul 28 2005, 09:24 AM Post #10 |
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Senior Carp
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EDIT: Never mind. Stupid question. |
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