Lou

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

It took only half a year to fully execute all the pieces that went into my senior thesis show at the Cooper Union in 2007, but documenting those pieces had become a personal project in and of itself. The exhibition was called Male Places, and I can hardly bear to study any of the drawings for more than several seconds. But, I still wanted to present the drawings in a permanent space of their own. In the end I think it’s difficult to part with such a significant amount of time and hard work put into a project such as this one.

I bought the domain in late 2008 and started building out the website. But it wasn’t until the end of 2009, when Rich and I made the decision to invest in our own set of photographic equipment, that it became feasible to photograph the entire collection on my own.

The weaker qualities of these drawings, at least from a photographer’s perspective, are the same qualities that I had originally liked so much about them. They are incredibly faint and abundant in subtle detail, making them almost impossible to photograph. To add to the headache, these drawings were at inconvenient sizes—the smallest drawings are just an inch too wide for the bed of a scanner—and the largest drawings are massive. The best solution I could come up with in the end was to shoot them at close distance with a macro lens, which meant that I got crisp detail and no distortion. But this meant hours in front of the computer stitching together images in Photoshop. Painful! If I had known of a better solution, I would definitely have pursued it. And, having been through this laborious process, I may take this part of the experience into consideration when I made work again.

All that aside, now that the work is done, I invite you to come take a look: maleplaces.com.