It’s hard to remember, but in 2006 Wikipedia had just said copyrighted photos–like publicity shots and film stills–couldn’t be used.  This was a huge deal and caused a lot of bitterness.  People were angry.  Senior editors walked off.

Times change:  today, no respectable editor would argue for the wanton use of copyrighted images (there are a few ‘certain circumstances’).

Back in the day, I uploaded images to Wikipedia that lacked the basic standards of information.  In 2006, you didn’t need to justify the work’s import nor its origin.  The rules were fast, loose and ever-changing.

A small subgroup of my Creative Commons photos were uploaded in that era.  They may now be deleted.

They are no loss.  In 2006 I was shooting with a Fuji 1.3px point-n-shoot.  But also included were my crappiest-but-favorite uploads from 2002, Cuba and Imitation of Christ.

So here are two Creative Commons 3.0 licensed photos to be deleted from Wikipedia.  These photos are no loss for the encyclopedia.  They are unremarkable and low quality.  But they are personal favorites because of what they symbolize in my photographic and personal development.

I decided to clean them up a little, so I give you the original, and the cleaned-up version I would have uploaded today:

The original above is of Cayo Levisa, a private island where Ernest Hemingway used to fish off  the coast of western Cuba in Pinar del Rio.  There are only 20 bungalows to rent on the entire island.  It’s unspoiled in a way that I know that once the American travel embargo is lifted that it will never be the same.   Unfortunately, this is the best my low-res 2002 digicam took.  Below is my 2010 improvement of it:

This photo below was one of my street shots of the recycle hounds that gather around the Key Food recycling center where they get cash for their deposits.  There are people who make their livings by walking the streets of New York looking for discarded aluminum cans and bottles.  These people usually fall into two categories (based upon my observation over 10 years): Asian immigrants and long-term homeless people who might be better classified as “independent spirits”.  This was my 2006 attempt to capture them:

And here is how I would have uploaded the same shot today:

Corner of 57th and 9th Avenue.  Notice the bird coming out of “Joaquian Phoeniox”‘s brain.

After reading the New York Times article about the new skate park in Queens at Corona Park, I invited my nephews up to try it out.  Verdict: they loved it.  They had scooters, which is bigger in New Jersey than New York (a skateboarding city).  According to the Times, the City is trying to become the international center of the fast-growing sport.  They have been on a construction spree of skate parks (here’s a list).  The Corona Park one, however, was designed with skaterboarders and is judged to be the best for them in the city.  Scooters will still have fun at CP, but the park is really designed for skateboards.

Here are some Creative Commons shots (taken with my cameraphone):

The world-famous Unisphere from the 1964 World’s Fair.

The skate park

Matthew and Richard look on as Joseph jumps the stairs on his scooter.

Queens Theatre.

Exhausted on the subway from a day of scootering.

It was a beautiful day in New York yesterday, perfect late August: 85 degrees and sunny, with a slight sea breeze.

I took Little Man to my favorite park in New York: East River Park.  I love it because is in my neighborhood, and it’s rarely crowded so there are a lot of places Little Man can play and roll around in the grass.  The City has been paying a lot of attention to the waterfront of the New Yorkest of rivers, the East River.  The views of Brooklyn from the new esplanade are incredible, and the Williamsburg Bridge stretches over my end of the park.

I used my much-loathed Samsung Memoir cameraphone, which was able to produce a few good shots.

These are all licensed Creative Commons 3.0 attribution:

Back in the summer of 2006 I set out on a project to create a body of high-resolution photography that allowed the public to use it, even alter it, without my permission.

I initially hosted this project at Wikipedia, because back then very few articles had photographs for a lack of freely-licensed imagery.  I also wholeheartedly supported what they were doing at Wikimedia and still do.   I wanted to contribute.  So I focused on what I considered the most difficult subject to illustrate: biographies.  Photos of famous people.   Not only actors and athletes, but also politicians, poets, presidents, porn stars; nobody was off limits.  Within four years I photographed over 800 people.  Very few release photos of these subjects to the public, and almost never at my resolutions.

My recent CC portraits include the Time 100, the Tribeca Film Festival and Joan Jett.

Any new work I produce–which is sporadic–is hosted at my Creative Commons Flickr Photostream.  Over on Flickr, I compiled a list of my 100 favorite portaits. Click the image below to see the ones that meant the most to me.

I dislike that opponents of the Cordoba House have won in branding it the ‘Ground Zero mosque’ – more evidence that it’s mostly non-New Yorkers, who generally prefer calling it the ‘World Trade Center’.

I ventured out to take some Creative Commons shots of the protesters and supporters of Cordoba House, but there were only a handful of supporters when I arrived at noon.   If people are not against Cordoba House and think it’s fine, they aren’t particularly enthusiastic with support.  That would explain the lackluster support turnout.  I would say there were about 500-1000 people who showed up for the actual protest.

These images may be re-used and cropped – they are licensed Creative Commons 3.0.  Click on the photo to enlarge it.

This was the small crowd of supporters of Cordoba House.

Below are shots of the protesters:

Click here to see more images of the protest at Flickr.

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I received a few e-mails from people wondering why I haven’t been blogging, and there isn’t really a reason.  I’ve been busy with work, I don’t have much to say and I’m in a creative rut.  I don’t enjoy writing about politics because of how absurd the national discourse is right now; it feels a little degrading to write when ‘terror babies‘ and U.N. conspiracies pass for mainstream issues.  If Jack Stuef and Josh Fruhlinger weren’t around, I don’t know how I would make sense of the right wing (Poe’s Law).  I’m in love with Jack Stuef.

Work is busy, though, and the few hours I’m not putting in at the office I am working on a story that’s been in my head for awhile.

I have, however, been keeping my Flickr Creative Commons photostream alive with randomness.  So, to fill the void in my political rants and meaningless observations, I include a few recent uploads.

COLD SPRING NEW YORK WITH SANDY ORDONEZ

If you are an old timer Wikimedian then you will remember the days when the public relations guru Sandra Ordonez was cutting her teeth at the Wikimedia Foundation in St. Petersburg.  Sandy and I have become good friends, and she and her husband José hosted a weekend retreat for various New York artists and intellectuals at their country compound in Cold Spring in the gorgeous Hudson Valley.

The property they rented for the summer has a main house, a four bedroom guest barnhouse, a boat house, and a private pond that you have to traverse by boat to visit the abandoned 19th Century graveyard that contains perhaps 30 graves.  All on their private property.

Above:  The boat house, with the main house in the background.  We were out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by trees, nature and silence (except for our loud laughs and conversation).

Above:  Dave and Sandy in the abandoned 19th Century graveyard across the pond on the property.  There were about 30 graves there of people lost and long forgotten (until we were there).

Above:  Sandy and Maria laughing late into the night by candlelight.

Above:  The Little Man enjoying the flowers in the country air.

See more Cold Springs photos at my Flickr

FIRE ISLAND BIRTHDAY 2010

I was kind of surprised at how “racy” my sister said she found my Fire Island birthday photos.  Actually, both of my sisters found them…<ahem>…racy.  I asked the one why, because there are no shots of anything salacious like people fucking or doing anything other than dancing and having a good time.  She paused for a moment to think about it, and then she laughed and said, “Yeah, I know, but I guess it’s what I don’t see.  The mind fills in the blanks.”

Ha!  I was a saint and just enjoyed hanging out with my friends.  Here are a few more shots:

Michael Lucas, Nonie, Rafael Alencar, David Shankbone and Ernesto Altamirano at the Hotel Belvedere.

Michael and Nonie at the Belvedere.

I don’t know what we were thinking:  Judas carrying crucified Christ.

Michael, Nonie and Ernesto trying to catch fish on the Great South Bay.

See more of my Fire Island Creative Commons photos at Flickr.

LITTLE MAN & THE PIGEON

Finally, below are two shots of Little Man’s unrequited dream captured on film.  His lifelong goal, since he was little (he’s five and a half now) is to catch a pigeon.  He tries often, and never comes close to succeeding.  Then one morning we leave the building for his morning walk and right outside in our alcove is a pigeon with a broken wing.  Helpless, hapless, flopping about.  Little Man was so excited he could barely contain himself.  Alas, I did not let him realize his dream because it was not a fair fight.

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The FBI recently wrote the Wikimedia Foundation to demand they remove the FBI’s insignia.  The WMF and the Internet collectively laughed:

On the blog BoingBoing, Rob Beschizza writes that this is a no-win situation for the FBI.

“The part that’s hard to understand is why the FBI would seek to abuse the law in such petulant fashion,” he writes, “knowing that it will be subject to public ridicule for its actions.”

The magazine Vanity Fair posted the FBI’s seal on its website in a symbol of jest. And, as the blog Geekosystem says, an editor on the site aggregator Reddit jokes that maybe the FBI got Wikipedia confused with WikiLeaks — the site that’s been causing a stir lately over leaked war documents.

Cindy Cohn, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the New York Times, which first reported this story, that she found the whole ordeal to be “silly” and “troubling.” [CNN]

This reminds me of how the Bush Administration sent a similar letter to the satirical news organization The Onion over use of the Presidential Seal.  From the October 25, 2005 New York Times:

The newspaper regularly produces a parody of President Bush’s weekly radio address on its Web site, where it has a picture of President Bush and the official insignia.

“It has come to my attention that The Onion is using the presidential seal on its Web site,” Grant M. Dixton, associate counsel to the president, wrote to The Onion on Sept. 28. (At the time, Mr. Dixton’s office was also helping Mr. Bush find a Supreme Court nominee; days later his boss, Harriet E. Miers, was nominated.)

Citing the United States Code, Mr. Dixton wrote that the seal “is not to be used in connection with commercial ventures or products in any way that suggests presidential support or endorsement.” Exceptions may be made, he noted, but The Onion had never applied for such an exception. [....]

“It is inconceivable that anyone would think that, by using the seal, The Onion intends to ‘convey… sponsorship or approval’ by the president,” wrote Rochelle H. Klaskin, the paper’s lawyer, who went on to note that a headline in the current issue made the point: “Bush to Appoint Someone to Be in Charge of Country.”

It’s hard to understand how these sorts of letters to widely-followed media outlets like Wikipedia and The Onion do anything other than make the agencies targets of ridicule.

Besides, both the FBI insignia and the Presidential seal are widely reproduced all over the Internet.

I photographed for Wikipedia the awesomely huge anti-Proposition 8 demonstration organized by Andy Towle and Michelangelo Signorile back in 2008.  One of my favorite photographs from the protest was this one.

Is gay the new black?  I was approached by Looking Glass Magazine to write an article about that and the  relationship between the ‘black community’ and the ‘gay community’.

I had a lot of complicated thoughts about the topic, and I tried to lay them out simply.  It’s a difficult onion to peel. Below is the press release for the ‘Gonzo Anthropology’ magazine’s summer Black Issue:

_______________________________________

New York (PRWEB) July 9, 2010 — Looking Glass Magazine, since 2007, the quarterly “Gonzo Anthropology” journal launches its Black Issue this summer along with new online features. The new issue provocatively features Blacks vs. Gays: What’s the Real Problem? on the cover. The article, by David Shankbone, takes an objective look into new research and asks what lies at the foundation of America’s “culture-wars.” Also included is an “anthropology of fashion” report detailing the history of the black dandy, an original comic book art and fiction from N. Steven Harris, and a featured exclusive interview with poet Amiri Baraka. (Veteran sound engineer Arya Sundar produced the video, which appears on the website.)

“It’s not an attempt at controversy, we are just doing what we always do,” said editor in chief Michael Merriam. “We are getting to the bottom of something in our culture.”

Merriam is no stranger to controversy. Last year, he crossed swords with HBO’s publicity department over an interview in which Bored to Death writer Jonathan Ames was tied to a chair and interrogated by dominatrix JoYin Shih as a feature for the magazine. HBO refused to allow Looking Glass to print photographs of the event.

Merriam denies that there was any real conflict. “They didn’t want us to use photos, so we didn’t, but we didn’t compromise the text at all. Ames had a great time, Yin had a great time, we ran a terrific interview. That’s all.”

Merriam created Looking Glass in 2007 as a pet-project as he worked on various magazines (he’s a former editor in chief of Time Out Istanbul). Looking Glass spiraled into its print and digital form in 2008 following a New Yorker Talk of the Town profile of Merriam’s work in digital publishing and the launch of a fashion magazine for the iPhone.

Looking Glass Magazine was initially conceived to contain twelve sections. “We wanted to laser in – find ultra-niche counter-cultural content,” says Merriam. Though the traditional model of print magazine publishing is rapidly changing, Merriam contends there are no plans to abandon the print edition. “On the contrary, we are always expanding it. Jay Kristopher Huddy creates an extraordinary visual experience out of it, and the magazine just keeps getting more intense every quarter,” he said. “We are completely devoted to print, and we believe it’s the best way to serve our readers.”

Online, at www.lookingglassmagazine.com, two new sections appear this month: a sports section and a science fiction section. The Playing Field is edited by ESPN’s Eno Sarris, who also writes for FanGraphis, Bloomberg Sports and RotoWorld. “The tagline for this blog is ‘the anthropology of sports,’ and it’s a good way to sum this thing up,” said Sarris about the new blog’s in-depth, brainy, and sophisticated perspective on athletic culture.

The science fiction section, a blog called The Observatory, features new fiction by Blair Kroeber and by award-winning author Nnedi Okorafor, as well as an exclusive interview with Samuel R. Delany. The magazine also will encourage writers to submit stories and pay them SFWA minimum or higher for original fiction.

Publisher Paul Nowak, who is also a video game designer, has his own take on Looking Glass and its journalistic mission. “We think of our readers as users and culture hackers.

Issues of LGM are like cultural strategy guides. It makes sense. Video games use context to heighten the sense of importance around certain objects–that’s what we do for our advertisers.”

The print edition can be purchased throughout the United States at the $4.99 price point, and will be available at San Diego Comic Con. Archives can be viewed at www.lookingglassmagazine.com

On July 9th I turned 36 and I was invited to spend it on Fire Island.  It was an amazing birthday full of new and old friends.  I took Ernesto with me, who is also the model I used to illustrates the body on Wikipedia (for example, his well-formed teeth are used as an illustration of human teeth on over 40 Wikimedia pages).

Here are a few shots of my birthday weekend.  It’s great to be 36!

Nonie reading on the deck with swans.

The amazingly talented Shequida.

Good times: Michael, Nonie, Rafael (w/o head), David and Ernesto at the Belvedere for a party.

Ernie, Shequida and Chris at the Hotel Belvedere.

Ernie and Nonie freaking to “Bad Romance”

Michael, Ernie and Rafael

Click here to check out more Fire Island photos on my Flickr.