“In street photography quality can come out of quantity. ... The photographer should not be enslaved to the camera. The camera is the photographer’s tool.”
—Daido Moriyama

2019-now:
Manhattan and lately Brooklyn

Channeling:
de Chirico, Hopper, Saul Leiter, W Eugene Smith, Daido Moriyama

Pre-Pandemic:
At the intersection of design, commerce, art, sex and politics

Backstage, retail, event
Soundtrack: various

Post-Pandemic:
Transforms in the Crush of Tectonic Changes

Collaborator: María Schön
Channeling: John Chamberlain
Soundtrack: the sound of the Universe

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
—WB Yeates

Paleo AI from the beginnings of text-to-image

DOLLY: Dall-E 2
Fierce: Adobe Firefly
Unstable: Stability AI

Channeling:
Alberto Mielgo, Frank Miller, Hajime Sorayama, Yoji Shinkawa, Jamie Hewlett, Batman, Harley Quinn

Soundtrack: Bullet the Blue Sky (U2)

In strategic places at pivotal times [list here]

Through the AI powered eyes of painters [list here] and photographers [list here]

It’s all there in color and black-and-white:
the new and the old; the familiar and the unexpected; buildings, streets, skylines, shadows, billboards, water towers, reflections, lampposts, fire escapes; the urban jungle; Gotham; the soaring ambition and countless dreams…

distracted by disjointed fragments of strange future dreams, Asian girls form Kraków, pieces of starships glowing greenish blue in forcefields, silence pierced by squalls of inaudible waves, then a droning hum, dark matter unseen, surround in a primordial sludge whatever is left of you, like on flickering fragments of Dawson City celluloid strips,[*] faces scowl, bejeweled belly dancers from Salome’s dream of St John, helmets, masks, ruined cities on the edge of time, rays of light iris like stars on the black sky, a smoking cigarette, an impossibly twisted arm, she’s sitting on the edge of what is left of the roof ledge at night—how long, how long can this go on

Venice, the medieval superpower that shaped Europe and much of the contemporary world. Where, appropriately, Jakob Fugger, the richest man who ever lived, had learned as a young man the newly invented double-entry accounting before he went on to build an empire and make Emperors and Popes. One of the rare exalted places in the world. With its history, uniqueness, beauty, mystique, culture and art—and in this time of acceleration and convergence of everything, pandemic, climate change, the fourth turning, the technological, economic, political, social, cultural revolution—will Venice continue to capture the human imagination? Inspire and shape the world in some way? Will it remain a nexus of sorts in our consciousness? Or will it, like Atlantis, slowly sink into the waters of the Adriatic Sea and become a legend?

joe strand’s fascination, dedication, steadfastness, unique point of view, pushing of the edge artistically, visually, technologically, fearlessness, energy, tirelessness, self-confidence, intuitiveness, curiosity and youthfulness all go into this “stuff.” of which memories and dreams are made. cars, planes, trains, boats, babes and the whole mad world. at this turn of the century, who knows what beast is slouching where?

here we show some of the cars. one hopes this is but a beginning of sorts…

pd, october 2006