morocco photos.

By popular demand, here are a few highlights from last semester's photographs.

This is the Grand Mosque in Casablanca. Second only to Mecca.

A Moroccan wedding.

View from the pier on the Rabat beach.

A typical street in Media ar-Rabat.

A gratuitous artsy shot from inside the underground prison in Fes.

shit.

iran.

This post is mostly just because the Times had this really cool image in the paper today.

everybody loves cool postcards.

I'm obseeeessed with these. The old French travel agency ones are more orientalist than when Bill O'Reilly and Bernard Lewis will meet in hell. There are a bunch more from Air France that I've seen which are totally unbelievable, but I can't find good images online.

And these US State ones are pretty amazing too. They kind of just remind me of better times. They construct this really fucked-up, illusional "real America" feeling.

You wonder how many people went on safari after they saw these.

8 av local

Lately I've been thinking a lot about what I could do capture what it's like to be on the nyc subway. There's just as much going on down there as there is above ground. Probably a lot of that has to do with the people in ny itself, the subway being this sort-of great equalizer. You know, no matter who you are or where you're from, you've gotta stand there and absorb other people's sweat, clinging on to whatever you can find in order to avoid being catapulted into your neighbor's crotch.

Portraits have been done a million times on the subway, and have never really done much for me. Walker Evans did some great ones but took a different route with them; he never really captured the diversity and constant flow of people and energy. And some of the faces were too real-looking, so much that it distracts from the fact that you're on a subway. The gift that a photographer gets on a train is all the banal snapshots and moments and interactions that are in a constantly changing state but make up the entire environment.

So I guess I wanted to do something without faces, then, and see what I could still come up with. I could still comment on a lot of things with other parts of the body. Clothes, skin color, bags, shoes, sitting position, and length on the train, you know the little things, would probably do a better job of capturing my ideas without a face sort of spoiling the importance of all those other elements.

Basically I sat in the same seat from the start of the line to the finish, and took a snapshot of the floor in front of me at every stop. The C has about 50 stops, but it's never a very crowded train and I was riding at an off-hour.

Next we'll try the F and see what we can come up with.