The Idol auditions for season 11 came through Portland this past weekend and I found myself out at the Rose Garden surrounded by 7000-odd hopefuls and their supporters at 5 o’clock in the morning. The assignment was to document the event while looking for interesting characters but in so doing I was once again made to marvel at how polished the AI machine really is up close.

It reminded me of a shoot at the same venue exactly two years ago when I was invited behind the scenes to photograph the preparations and dress rehearsals for the first stop of the Idols’ live tour. Put them together and I’ve effectively been given a bookended glimpse of the process by which celebrity is created.

There is something contradictory in pop culture coverage. It is at once over-exposed and under-analyzed. While celebrities are undeniably a rich commodity in the mediasphere, celebrity is less so.  For a number of reasons (not least of which the need to separate themselves from their evil twins, the paparazzi) serious photojournalists can be forgiven for preferring other subject matter. Indeed, celebrities can’t help but look bubblegum beside matters of life and death.

At the same time, the pervasiveness of celebrity intimates a certain substance or consequence that gets ignored because of this. In a happy coincidence, I happened to watch Adrian Grenier’s documentary “Teenage Paparazzo” this same weekend. I did not expect the many thoughtful approaches he makes on the subject of fame. My favourite of these had to do with a concept called para-social relations. I gather it’s complicated but in a nutshell describes the unidirectional relationship between someone on screen and an audience member. It explains that sense of familiarity we feel toward these people we have never actually met and why some of us are so personally concerned with their lives.

Another illuminating idea from the movie is the suggestion that we use celebrities as a way to discuss our values. Like archetypes, they become representations of the issues we are collectively wrestling with. Their stories, real or fictional, are worked into our societal narrative and the meaning is further hammered out during our debates of them.

Idol, perhaps more successfully than anyone, seems to have harnessed these principles of para-social interaction and archetype. Watching from the sideline the other day before auditions, you’d see producers already circulating, looking for interesting stories amidst the throng. Having also been backstage at the other end of the process, I was struck there by how the narratives of the performers had been finessed such that they became representations of some larger group of people. Really, it could be seen as a new sort of pantheism; by boiling a contestant’s story down to elemental parts, they effectively create a patron idol of, say, the working class or of single mothers or of the disabled or of Christians. Keeping these stories vague allows a vast audience to see itself reflected on the screen, filling in the gaps with traits the individuals therein identify with. The real work then is keeping the particulars under wraps and accentuating the broad strokes. This would certainly justify the army of publicists.

I’ve known photogs who take a camera everywhere with them and I’ve known others who don’t shoot a frame unless it stands a chance of being published.  As a student years ago, there always seemed to be something tragic about the latter camp. After all, the whole reason I was training to become a pro shooter was to make money off of what I did all the time anyway. If you only took pictures for work, doesn’t that mean you don’t really enjoy doing it for its own sake? Well, over the years I’ve realized that it’s more complicated than a simple matter of enjoyment and my reading of motivation seems to back this up.

First of all, it would appear that our brains are rarely as good as we think they are at figuring out why we’re doing things. We often attribute causation after-the-fact. So, while there is no denying that someone who takes pictures for the sheer joy of it (the amateur, if you will) is motivated by something intrinsic, things get cloudy when money, notoriety and competition come into it. Those three things are extrinsic motivations for doing something and psychologists have noticed in experiments that extrinsic motivators sometimes overshadow intrinsic ones in our after-the-fact attributions of why we do what we do. Take this experiment, for example: kids who liked to draw were randomly separated into three groups. One group was left alone to do their thing. The next one was rewarded with prizes every time they did a drawing. The third group was praised from time to time but otherwise given nothing. The result? Kids who were regularly rewarded with prizes stopped drawing when the researchers stopped giving them out and the other two just kept on drawing.

The assumption underlying all of this is that the kids who got prizes began to think that they were drawing for the prizes rather than the intrinsic enjoyment that seemed to have motivated them up until that point.

So the other day I picked up my camera during some down time and went for a walk with the express purpose of shooting something I would never publish. I met these guys who were driving a restored steam engine back and forth in a machine shop’s back lot and stuck around for a while. It was fun. I shall have to start doing this again, if only to remind myself that I like to take pictures for the sake of taking pictures.

In the latest issue of Reed Magazine, they gave me a half-page spot for a story on this student group called Uncommons at Reed College here in Portland. They’ve got this recurrent event wherein they serve a multi-course meal in a residence apartment to diners who’ve been chosen by lottery from an online sign-up list. The food looked tasty and all but the real excitement was happening in the little kitchen, separated from the customers by a hanging sheet. Clearly, the meal, although carefully prepared, was incidental to the amusement these guys have when they get together. The writer was there to take in the dining experience but I was left to roam. As a result, I’ve got hundreds of what turned out to be superfluous images of Uncommons in action that don’t necessarily fit the story – or should I say, they augment it – and certainly wouldn’t fit on half a page. So I’ll post them here.

The setting itself also lends itself to pictures. Weird stuff is piled here and there and the lighting is often irregular. Again, everything is temporary, very little has been deliberately positioned.

Then there’s the nervousness, the anticipation. Everyone deals with it differently but whether they’re the knuckle-down-and-focus type or the jittery-bounce-off-the-wall sort, they are undeniably photogenic.

These next ones were shot for The Oregonian some time ago at a Body Vox rehearsal. In this case I was able to show up an hour early and grab some shots of the dancers getting ready. They then allowed me to wander around on-stage while while they practiced. A very cool place to be.

Hey, speaking of high school football, if you’ll permit the tangent, I am forever astounded at the attention it merits down here in the USA.  My own high school didn’t even have a team so you must imagine my wonder at the resources that go into athletics at American schools. Dedicated coaching staffs, training facilities, STADIUMS!  Spectacle! I’m never sure exactly what to make of it. Way off topic now (and probably weird) but the cheerleading – where else are teenage girls meant to be thrown high into the air in order to flash their underwear at a crowd of sports fans?

Anyway, boots and football one day, the next it was a dinner party. Freelancing – at its best – is like pulling the handle on a slot machine every time you answer the phone. At its worst, it’s staring at that phone wondering when it’s going to ring again. Either way, it’s addictive and spoils me for most other jobs.

I was sent out last week to shoot a portrait of Caitlin and Lewis, two of the four founders of an artist studio called 12128 that they have constructed on a fishing boat. This was one of those shoots when everything was ideal; great visuals, open-minded subjects with lots of time, perfect time of day. On top of that, the vessel itself turned out to be a bit of a playground with ladders, cranes, stairs, nooks, crannies and machinery everywhere. It was an embarrassment of opportunities and I have to say, like the proverbial kid in the candy store, one of the hardest things about a situation like this is, perversely, the potential for variety itself. It’s hard to pick where to start and once you do, it’s hard to stay focused enough to properly work through – there’s already five other angles and set-ups nagging at you’re peripheral vision. Parameters can sometimes be of tremendous assistance.

I came back a couple mornings later (Fridays were said to be one of the busiest) with my camera and audio recorder and set about hanging out. The idea was to produce a multimedia piece encapsulating 24 hours at the Radiocab shop. There’s something timeless about this place – in more than one sense of the word as I was to learn at around 3 o’clock in the morning – and so many little stories and routines to observe. There’s also something about it that makes you feel like you’re in every cab shop, everywhere: characters coming in off of long shifts, gas jockeys putting down lit cigarettes to pump fuel, the subdued murmur of the dispatch room.

It got me to thinking how I ought to start a whole series on work….

Anyway, I’m still editing the interviews but here’s a peek at some of the imagery I pulled together.

Speaking of ambivalence, I happened to read an article the other day – think it was in Wired – about the way the Internet has become a bastion for unabashed self-promotion. It pointed out how decorum in other settings prevents us from openly boasting while a URL is all the license one needs to trumpet recent accomplishments. Even though I do not intend to use Elevator Thinking to do this, I couldn’t help feeling that there would be something presumptuous about my posting things that I’ve been doing or thinking. Then again, I’m so consistently remarkable a specimen, soooo….

Today it struck me, though; I’ve got a lot of pictures that never get to see the light of day, either because they wind up on the cutting room floor after editors take their pick or because they were shot beyond the periphery of a given assignment. Even more interesting to me is the potential this blog may have as a motivating apparatus. I take pictures for publication. While I usually have a side-project on the go with the vague notion of getting it published down the road, I will now have a more material (if virtual) place to put them to work, thus (hopefully) spurring me on to shoot more and better. If I pick up some valuable input from my peers along the way, all the better.

Worse comes to worse, this thing will get me thinking more explicitly about what I’m doing. For you, the hypothetical reader, I shall endeavor to engage your fancy with compelling imagery and a bit of opinion. I shall also endeavor to be less wincingly self-conscious. Let’s see how it goes. To ease me into this project, here are some summertime images loosely related by the fact that people are framed in the center.

Thanks for stopping by.