Amari's World

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Sat, 20 Apr 2013 10:00:32 -0400

;)

I’ve recently begun work on the largest scale photography...

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 18:49:25 -0500

I’ve recently begun work on the largest scale photography project I’ll do in high school. For my studio art course, students create an idea to serve as their ‘concentration’ - a 12 piece portfolio with a cohesive theme that’s submitted to the College Board at the end of the year for evaluation. Ideas for concentrations must revolve around subject matter, as opposed to technical aspects of artwork. In my class, people have chosen to pursue ideas ranging from album covers to biological illustrations and just about everything in between. I have decided on the theme of urban landscapes for my project.

I’m using this assignment to explore New York City - for me, it’s the place that’s so close yet so far away. As I’ve stared at the city from the window of my Latin classroom for the past three years, I’ve often wondered how many kids in the world have a similar view. Indeed, I’ve spent virtually my whole life in the orbit of the greatest city on the planet - a short 30 minute bus ride away (assuming it’s not rush hour) - and yet I know I haven’t dedicated nearly enough time to exploring it. These are a few shots from my first captures of my urban landscapes project from Brooklyn and Manhattan. I’ll have more to show once the weather warms up and I can spend more time in Queens and the Bronx.

They’re all done with my Holga in Medium Format.

Well, I’m back. If you’re a senior like me, these past few weeks...

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 13:56:00 -0500

Holga 120mm Film

Digital

Digital

Well, I’m back.

If you’re a senior like me, these past few weeks have been tough. For me they culminated in a week of college-application writing with a healthy serving of influenza on the side. But now applications are in and I’d like to think that a new chapter begins. I will write a full-length post about my reflections on the college-search/application process in the coming months. I also now have an on-going statistical study on college-admissions that I’ve been doing with some friends that I’ll release with that post. But now it’s time for more content. Here are photos from some recent projects that I never posted for one reason or another.

Rapping 2 U - Das Racist One of my favorite DR tracks.

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 19:34:11 -0500

Rapping 2 U - Das Racist

One of my favorite DR tracks.

Heems - Wild Water Kingdom

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 01:04:00 -0500

From the mysterious, talented, and now surprisingly prolific Das Racist empire comes Himanshu’s latest installment, Wild Water Kingdom. If you’ve listened to his earlier mixtape, Nehru Jackets, or any other Das Racist projects, Wild Water Kingdom won’t seem terribly innovative. Here we have the return of Heems’ hypnotic monotone, complemented by familiarly exotic samples that cover a wide range of cultures. We enjoy some quirky features, ranging from some lesser-known members of Heems’ own Greedhead label to the likes of Childish Gambino, who unfortunately appears on one of the weaker late tracks.

This mixtape is funny and catchy, but praising it for these features alone wouldn’t do it justice. As is the case with most Das Racist projects, Wild Water Kingdom hovers safely above inanity whilst still retaining Heems’ signature sense of humor. Heems, Kool A.D., and Dap continue to cultivate this quixotic formula, and yet again they bring us a successful mixtape.

My favorite tracks: ‘Third Thing’, ‘Wild Water Kingdom’, ‘Let It Go’, ‘Running Thru The Jungle’, ‘Medium Green Eyes.’

Beautifully made video that really captures the scale and...

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 01:47:52 -0400

Beautifully made video that really captures the scale and grandeur of the Essex County Hospital Center.

Exploring the Essex County Hospital Center

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 01:45:00 -0400

A few weeks ago a friend and I spent a few hours exploring the Essex County Hospital Center in Cedar Grove New Jersey.

Before I begin, I should say that I’m now aware it is highly illegal to trespass on the land (we didn’t know that when we were there), but I figure that tons of people have been in there and written about it so what harm can one more account do?

The Essex County Hospital Center, also known for a time as the Overbrook Insane Asylum, treated and housed psychiatric patients from the surrounding area from 1896 until it finally closed in 2007. After it closed, the sprawling 90-acre campus rapidly fell into decay, and today it looks like it’s been abandoned for decades. The place certainly has the kind of history you’d imagine an abandoned asylum would; I’ve done some research in the New York Times archives and found several interesting articles that I’ll link below. One particularly scary and tragic event happened during the winter of 1917, when the boilers of the facility broke and 24 patients froze to death in their rooms. There are accounts of patients’ escapes and havoc in the surrounding area, malpractice inside the hospital, and the whole gambit of abusive treatments that were once considered state of the art in treating mental disorders.

Armed with a couple cameras, my friend and I got in through one of the many smashed windows and began a two-hour exploration of the facility. What began as an honest photo project quickly became an exploration of buildings 1 through 3. Quite frankly, we were awestruck. I cannot stress just how big this campus is. It once held thousands of patients and there are literally thousands of rooms. In 2 hours, we were barely able to scratch the surface of 1 floor of the complex that makes up buildings 1-3 – the main hospital center. We didn’t get to the 2 upper floors, the basement, or the subterranean tunnels (which are supposedly haunted by the ghosts of the patients).

Hallway after hallway stretches as far as the eye can see. Huge mess halls, game rooms, offices, bathrooms, and patient wards sprawl over many acres. What strikes you immediately is how decrepit the place is for having been abandoned just 5 years ago. Ceilings everywhere are collapsing, sinister looking funguses and mosses creep up the walls, windows are smashed, and filing cabinets and desks are destroyed. The place has been thoroughly pillaged by teenagers probably bearing baseball bats and spray paint cans; macabre graffiti (just text, not art) now competes with faded paintings of rustic landscapes as the decoration for this once grand asylum.

What strikes you immediately is how much is left behind. It honestly looks as though one day the people just packed up and vanished. Computers, printers, desks, paintings, pianos, furniture, board games, and even soda cans are all left where they must have been 5 years ago. Signs on the walls urge nurses to “Respect the patients’ behavior. Understand that it is due to his or her illness. Maintain the patients’ dignity, privacy, and well-being.” Handwritten notes reminding nurses about meetings and patients are strewn across the floors of offices and file closets. Adventurers have ransacked nearly all filing cabinets and desks in search of the Holy Grail: patient files. We found none, but it makes me shudder to think about what some of the first explorers in this facility must have found. Everything was left behind.

My friend and I didn’t have time to explore the most notorious building of the Essex County Hospital Center – building 11. Not only is there a morgue in the basement with the metallic cabinets that hold bodies like the ones in CSI, it is said that most severely ill patients were housed there. Extra precautions have been taken to secure the building; first story windows are barred, and all doors are bolted shut. Ghosts of all the criminally insane patients that once lived in building 11 supposedly haunt the grounds to this day.

I’m going to post some links to interesting articles about the Overbrook Asylum. I don’t want to encourage anybody to do anything illegal, but I should give some warnings that my friend and I couldn’t find anywhere online. If you do chose to break the law and go the Overbrook, bring masks – there is asbestos everywhere and we could smell it even after we tied t-shirts around our faces. Also, don’t go alone, and don’t go at night – there could be squatters living there (we didn’t see anybody, but there was one ward that looked like it had been lived in recently). Above all, respect the place. It’s really sad to see such an amazing historical site being neglected and abused by teenagers who think it’s cool to smash pianos and write racial slurs on the walls. Oh, and look out for ghosts. We didn’t hear/see any signs of paranormal activity, but you never know!

Oh and P.S., we did find something cool, but you’ll have to ask me in person if you want to hear about that.

Wikipedia -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_County_Hospital_Center

Interesting Stories -

http://naturalplane.blogspot.com/2010/09/infamous-overbrook-asylum-essex-county.html

1917 Freezing Incident -

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9804E7DD1E3BE03ABC4951DFB467838C609EDE

Lobotomies -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0aNILW6ILk

Wheeler Antabanez’s account, probably the most famous explorer of Overbrook -

http://www.luckycigarette.com/sanatorium_memories/sdon/index.html

Playing around with some negative space ideas in studio art...

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 22:12:58 -0400

Playing around with some negative space ideas in studio art class. Things are getting real creepy.

Childish Gambino's 'Royalty'

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 23:05:37 -0400

After earning success as a writer for ’30 Rock’ and as an actor in the show ‘Community,’ Donald Glover emerged into the volatile Hip-Hop genre as Childish Gambino with the studio album ‘Camp’ in late 2011. The album enjoyed great notoriety, peaking at 11^th on the US Billboard 200 soon after its release. Despite its great commercial success, however, Camp was met with a fierce wave of criticism that painted Gambino as a “Nerdcore MC” or a “singer for a mall-punk band.” Comedy and rap, some assert, are incompatible, and Childish Gambino supposedly represents the worst of both worlds.

With the release of ‘Royalty’ in July, fans and haters alike had a chance for a better look at the protean figure that is Donald Glover/Childish Gambino. The collective verdict is this; CG hasn’t given us anything particularly fresh or groundbreaking in his new tape, but Royalty offers us a rotary of flavorful tracks to be savored as we anticipate his next move.

The contemplative, harmonious, animated, and clever sides of Gambino all return on Royalty with a vengeance. The powerful storytelling, and entertainingly large ego signatured on Camp have made a comeback as well. CG is a gifted multi-talent, and he represents a rare triple threat of lyricism, beat-craft, and zeal in his music.

What stands out most about Royalty, however, is the impressive list of features that accompanies nearly every track. Childish flexes his Hip-Hop muscles with the likes of Steve Lover, Ghostface Killah, RZA, Bun B, Schoolboy Q, Danny Brown and several others. He shows us the more alternative side that was imbued in Camp with Beck, Danielle Haim, and Kilo Kish. One even witnesses a splash of R&B in Josh Osho and comedy in Tina Fey (Yes, she raps a verse in ‘Real Estate’). For an artist with a single 7-month-old Studio Album, CG has amassed an impressive coalition of supports from a wide range of genres. The strongest technical feat of ‘Royalty’ is how well Childish meshes with this diverse group, a testament to both his flexibility and wit.

Despite its powerful alternative feature in Beck, the mixtape feels very Rap oriented, especially compared to Camp. The Rap is great, but it overpowers the rest of the tracks. It’s in this lack of balance, one could argue, that Royalty’s greatest weakness emerges. Fans of Camp will ask, where has the variety gone? Perhaps in the struggle to earn respect in the unforgiving world of Hip-Hop, Childish may have partially lost sight of his multi-genre identity. No matter how many Hip-Hop legends he features on his tracks, CG will never represent the polarized Rap idol that he seems to be aspiring to: His genius lies elsewhere.

This great Mixtape will easily be remembered as one of the best of 2012. There’s something for everyone here, and Childish Gambino deserves tremendous respect for releasing it as a free online download. Nevertheless, one can only hope that going forward, Childish Gambino will once again harness the creative versatility that makes his music powerful and his character unique.

"Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst."

Sat, 01 Sep 2012 01:37:00 -0400

“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.”

- Henry Cartier

First two shot in 35mm, second two shot in Medium Format.

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 00:03:00 -0400

First two shot in 35mm, second two shot in Medium Format.

The End of Summer

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 00:01:00 -0400

Here is an artist statement that I delivered as a presentation at the end of my photography class at the International Center of Photography in New York earlier this month. Despite having been plagued by the dreaded crusade of college-searching during the past few months, I’ve had a great summer and I hope you have too.

“I dream’d in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth, I dream’d that was the new city of Friends, Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love, it led the rest, It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city, And in all their looks and words.”

-Walt Whitman

I’ve been asked to describe my earliest memory of summertime; it goes something like this. It’s dusk on a June evening in the late 1990’s. Pink and red hues glow behind a splendid empire of clouds in the sky. The sun’s reach is rapidly receding over the rooftops and chimneys of my old neighborhood and the sky assumes a deep blue. There I am, about four or five years old, sitting alone on the swing set, drawing in the sweet smells of blooming trees and sizzling barbeque meats, thinking, perhaps brooding, about something very serious to my young mind.

Our assignment in this class was to interpret the “summer landscape” through our photographs. After quite a bit of time searching for some sweeping theme, some grandiose conclusion, that brings together all of my photos and meshes them with heartwarming tales of youth, I can safely say that none exist. Now that all is said and done, though, I begin to see some abstract unity among my pictures.

At the risk of sounding terribly existential, I submit to you that summer is a fantasy, best depicted by pleasant memories and dreamy suburban idylls. My pictures are surreal, idealistic, and even absurd. Whether it be in the man with a rat in his mouth or the kid with a gorilla mask in a playground after dark, I hope to project these qualities onto the summer itself.

Quite literally, I spend about nine months of the year yearning for the summertime, cajoling myself with visions of beaches, girls, and sun, only to end up spending half of the time sleeping, and the other half dreading the prospect of September, from which, I’ve found, there really is no escape.

I propose that the idea of summer is far more savory than the season itself. I will always love the summertime, but it will never live up to my expectations born on frigid winter nights. I hope that my pictures will convey summer as a dream, an idyll - strange, beautiful, and perhaps even impossible.

Above are some of my pictures shot in 35mm film – some have already been included in my shots from Five Pointz (see below) and some were never scanned to a computer. I’ll be adding more as soon as I get back to school to scan them.

Silk Pilow - Childish Gambino. From his new mixtape...

Sun, 19 Aug 2012 19:51:14 -0400

Silk Pilow - Childish Gambino. From his new mixtape Royalty… audible gold.

More film from NYC. Pictures and an artist statement from my...

Sun, 19 Aug 2012 19:34:41 -0400

More film from NYC.

Pictures and an artist statement from my summer photo class coming soon, just have to find a way to scan the negatives.

These are some shots from 5Pointz Aerosol Arts Center, Inc., an...

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 00:49:00 -0400

These are some shots from 5Pointz Aerosol Arts Center, Inc., an outdoor graffiti museum in Long Island City, Queens. Its 200,000 square feet of artwork is known as the “graffiti Mecca” of the world. I don’t know much about the current masters of aerosol art, or their predecessors for that matter, but apparently this museum showcases pieces by nearly all of the greats. People tend to associate Graffiti with gang insignias and visceral fears of hooliganry, but the artwork at 5Pointz falls under neither of these categories (perhaps it’s incorrect to call it “Graffiti” - the word implies something illegal). Aerosol art, when done tastefully, can be strikingly beautiful. Some even believe it has the power to change neighborhoods and revitalize communities, and I’ll let the first episode from the documentary ‘Here Comes the Neighborhood’ (posted below) speak for itself. 5Pointz gets its name from the symbolic coming together of the 5 boroughs of NYC. It’s a work in progress, and while I was there a few artists were gracious enough to let me photograph them. I loved 5Pointz and would definitely return. I’d recommend it to anybody willing to take the 10 minute subway ride from Downtown Manhattan.

Episode 1 of ‘Here Comes the Neighborhood.’

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 00:29:11 -0400

Episode 1 of ‘Here Comes the Neighborhood.’

Photo

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 23:55:38 -0400

Unedited picture from my Holga.

Childish Gambino - Summerstage

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 14:55:00 -0400

In June I had a rather spontaneous opportunity to go see Childish Gambino live at Central Park’s Summerstage when a good friend of mine offered me an extra ticket just a few hours before the show. A group of friends and I made the familiarly unpleasant trudge through New York in the sticky heat of summertime, encountering a powerful rainstorm upon our arrival at the venue (in t-shirts). But for enduring the rain, heat, and a lengthy warm-up and wait, we got to see a fantastic show. If you’ve read any other concert descriptions on this blog, you’ve probably noticed that I say that lightly quite often, but down to my every fiber, Childish Gambino gave the single most well-coordinated, well thought out, funny, versatile, hyped-out performance that I’ve seen in a long time.

As usual, I went into the show with limited exposure to the artist. I knew some of his hits and videos, maybe even owned one of his albums, but had never given it a thorough listen. For those who don’t know, Childish Gambino, perhaps better known as Donald Glover, rose to fame for his work on Derrick Comedy, Community, and as a writer for 30 Rock. 28 years old, he represents the quintessential multi-talent as an actor, writer, comedian, and most recently, musician. He got the name ‘Childish Gambino’ from a Wu-Tang Name Generator (http://www.mess.be/inickgenwuname.php/) - procurement almost as arbitrary as his decision to start rapping, “… it was an extension of what I was already doing. I was making beats so much, it was actually a nice way to unwind, and I wanted to have somebody rap over these, and I’m like: OK, I’ll do it. That was pretty much it.” He was signed to Glassnote in late 2011 and has been touring rigorously in the past few months.

I’ve always felt like the greatest concerts I’ve seen were more than simple musical shows. Great performers like Odd Future, Wu-Tang Clan, People Under the Stairs and several others have some extra element that makes their acts great. Seeing Donald Glover’s show was like seeing a rap concert, a rock concert, a stand-up act, and a movie, all in one. There are many multi-talented people out there, but it’s rare to see someone who can incorporate all of their skills into a show like this one. He went into song after song seamlessly, from rapping to singing to dancing. His movement on stage and his facial expressions were histrionic, funny and yet so genuine and serious; it was clear that we were watching a true actor as well as a musician. Every detail of the show, from the seamless transitions to the coordination of his band (which included violins, pianos, guitars, drums, and more) to the lyrics and videos on the projector screen behind him indicated careful planning and creative thinking, which I have no doubt was the work of Childish himself.

It’s rare to see such a hyped-out show, and rarer still when the performer is wearing a plain white t-shirt and blue jeans. I think it’s that casualness intertwined with intensity that forms the relationship between Donald Glover and Childish Gambino. Grappling between the two identities, and bringing together all of his talents - this is his true genius. When that plays out on stage, you get something wonderful.

A great interview with Donald Glover/Childish Gambino - shows...

Sat, 30 Jun 2012 02:05:00 -0400

A great interview with Donald Glover/Childish Gambino - shows many sides of him. Watch this, listen to his album Camp, and you start to get an idea of who he is.

Fun with toy soldiers.

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 01:58:46 -0400

Fun with toy soldiers.