NY PHOTO FESTIVAL - the experience!

I went with my newly printed magazines every day of the festival.

Imagine yourself dragging a handcart with the second issue of your magazine. You look like a cross between Johnny Thunders, Patti Smith, Bob Dylan — you know, just imagine you don't look pretty. Anyway, you have all these copies of your magazine that you know you have to make some sort of an impression with. You just have to.

I doubt that you and a handcart with a cardboard box bungeed to it are what you'd be advised to use if you want to make an impression with your magazines. You have to give up the cool. 

So I gave up the cool and got real and just walked the streets and stood outside the talks and walked the fuck up to strangers and gave the magazines away.

I met Martha Cooper — so unassuming and gracious, I met Eugene Richards, again, unassuming and gracious. Lauren Greenfield, Andrew Hetherington, Daniel Power, Frank Evers... everyone so devoted to one thing, photography.

William A. Ewing mentioned me - or at least what I was doing - in a talk he gave. (I didn't hear that, two separate people who were there at the talk told me when they happened upon me. But it was about the American spirit or something) He mentioned to me how smart I was, once when I was standing outside of a talk at the festival — he told me to hand out my magazines to people as they came out of the talk. If I had memoirs, this experience would be in there, no doubt.

btw - It was really profound watching Daniel Power's brave humility in the face of the publishing world's awful turn away from photography books and the powerHouse move to go into custom publishing. It's kindof sickening that photography book can be on a bookstore shelf for only 90 days, that is nothing. I love powerHouse books, I love their vision of photography, and New York City. That was the overwhelming feeling in the Festival for me, how crappy this anti-book thing is. I was proud to be trying to make a printed magazine work. Fuck that shit. A world without books and magazines? That's just wrong. We are moving in the wrong direction with that. 

I wanted my magazine everywhere I was able to put it. Every day I spent taking my magazines around was an adventure in being completely out of my comfort zone! Just the raw experience of interacting with others in such a mind-blowing manner — look, it's like being both a beggar and a salesman — and it was wild.

I gave away approximately 400 magazines to so many different people - it is the most incredible event I have ever been to, full of such vibrant visionaries.