Grant Ernhart photography

This is my dad and today is his birthday! I am one of the lucky people who can say that as a child and even as a teenager my parents and I really had a very little amount of animosity. I remember my parents as very supportive and encouraging people in my life. As I would come home and declare at various stages in my life that I was going to be a biathlete, then a Rolfer and then a photographer my parents did not even once shut me down. They were inquistive about these things and I felt that they trusted my judgement and my knowledge of who I was and what I valued. This trust and ever present love are probably two of the biggest factors that have helped me become the happy confident adult I am most days. So thank you Dad and Mom(even though it is just Dad’s birthday today). Thanks for being great!

And if anyone besides my parents actually reads my blog and if you were lucky enough to have parents that were even half as loving, involved and supportive as mine are,  then call them up today and thank them.

And Dad, I hope you have a great day, I’ll call you later.

The other day I was trying to get a print sent off for an up-coming show. That simple task turned into a really long ordeal but ultimately I finished the job. As I was paying the employee who had been helping me for the last 40 minutes or so said, “Hey you want a quik-pick? It is up to $95 million.” So just on a whim I said yeah why not.  I picked up my lucky ticket last Friday afternoon and have not been able to bring myself to see if I am the newest California millionaire yet. 

It has just been pretty satisfying to see that little ticket lying there on my desk and thinking about all the possibilities that it holds. I have been having a lot of fun deciding how I would spend my millions. I know that I would seriously reconsider going back to work rubbing other people’s backs(not that I even dislike my job… but I mean come on), I would give my girlfriend her trip around the world, pay off the school loans that my friends and I racked up while becoming educated about all things photographic, fund a few people’s projects, allow my parents to retire etc. etc. etc.

I am going to enjoy one more day of imaginative philanthropy. Checking my ticket will have to wait until tomorrow, because today I am off… to work.

I met Thomas Macker while in Chesterhill, Ohio during my residency with Harold Arts. Thomas was great because he seemed to be up for pretty much anything, including driving around the windy roads near the farm and enjoying the summer night while looking for interesting things to photograph. It was interesting to go out with him because whenever we saw anyone near the road he would stop and go out to ask them if he could make their picture without hesitation. Meanwhile I sat in the car having mixed feelings, partly I wished I was the one who went out to ask to make their picture and partly I really felt that I was not interested in them at all. While I did take quite a few pictures of my fellow residents at Harold it was still difficult for me to ask complete strangers and somehow whenever I tried I was turned down. I guess I feel like I probably approach portraits like I do landscapes, which means I have some sort of feeling about the scene or situation that creates in me a desire to photograph and perhaps with people I just take too long to decide whether I want to take a picture or not. So, it was interesting to go out with Thomas and see his sort of unrelenting approach to portraiture, where nearly everyone he came across was a potential sitter.  Anyhow, Thomas is a great guy and really down to earth. I had a fantastic time talking with him on the front porch about girlfriends, photography and life in general. I see on his website that a lot of the work he made during the residency is in the project called With God, All Things are Possible go and have a look and also check out his series on Gardeners and Housekeepers.

I will have a photograph in the Texas Photographic Society’s 17th National Competition. Lisa Sutcliffe, a photography curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acted as juror for this large call for entries. The show will open on September 4 at the Dougherty Art Center in Austin, Texas after which it will move to the Center for Contemporary Art in Abilene, Texas. I am happy to report that my good friend Ryan J. Kellman also had a photograph from his recent work in Albania accepeted into the show as well. For a complete list of accepted works and artists names click here.

The San Francisco gallery Marx & Zavattero has an interesting exhibition up right now. The exhibition Let Us Now Praise San Francisco was co-curated by Robert Mailer Anderson, the show throws together new photography by Sean McFarland, Gregory Halpern and Whitney Hubbs and new works of fiction by local SF writers Victor Martinez, Peter Plate and Michelle Tea. 

According to the gallery’s press-release:

The groundbreaking book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men – written by James Agee with photographs by Walker Evans – told the story of poor white sharecropper families in the Depression-era American South, and provides inspiration for this exhibit’s premise. The prose and photographs, completed and shot in late May and early June 2008, aim to chronicle an extremely timely and distinct artistic view of San Francisco ranging from its gloomy urban underbelly to its quiet, startling beauty. This atypical exhibition, merging contemporary urban literature and photography in a gallery setting, promises to provide images and stories, both real and imagined, of a San Francisco stripped bare and awkward in all its tragic and sublime contradictions.

I think it is a novel idea, and the combination of the photography and snippets of the short stories together on the gallery wall creates a lingering effect. If you have time, go and check it out it will remain up until August 18th.