Peter Levitan & Co.
The New Business of Advertising
Every Wednesday (sort of), I am putting up a couple of photos from my history.
These are iPhone shots from a random walk through my town, San Miguel de Allende. Not sure why these kids were sitting up in a flatbed truck. But, seeing them helped me to feel closer to heaven.
A funny thing happens when you run a blog. You find out that you have to feed it as if it was a pet. No food, no life. In the blog’s case, no content (copy, videos, photographs), no Google love.
Google love is my primary business development tool. Most of my ad agency clients tell me that they found me on Google (usually on page one for a related search.) So, in honor of my need to feed the Google beast and the fact that my weekly round-up newsletter will go out tomorrow and… the fact that I have not written a new blog post this week (too busy with client work – a very lame excuse), I am starting a new series called My Wednesday Photograph to ensure that I have at least one post per week. By the way, that’s me on the left in the mining town Minerale de Pozos.
I’ll get into my photography in greater detail in the future. But, as a fast start… I started shooting when I was a teen in New York. Got my BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Ran Levitan & Feinstein Photography in SF for 4 years and then moved to New York where I decidedIi did not want to shoot commercial work. I then started my advertising career. That said, I’ve been shooting for myself since then. For gear heads… I shoot a Widelux, a 1960’s wide angle film camera made famous by Jeff Bridges, and Fuji’s X-T1 and X100T.
I moved to Mexico last July. You can read about the move here. In the past few weeks, I’ve been going out in the streets of San Miguel de Allende and nearby small towns with two assistants and a large white background to photograph Mexicans. One of my goals is to show Americans how wonderful these folks are in a time when many Mexican are demonized by xenophobic Americans. So, here you go with the portrait on the left and two Apache dancers I shot last week in San Miguel Viejo – a town of 336.
More to come.
Do you know Martin’s work? You should. From LensCulture:
I accept that all photography is voyeuristic and exploitative, and obviously I live with my own guilt and conscience.
— Martin Parr
Martin Parr deliberately directs his camera at the unspectacular, the commonplace, the normal, at things that at first glance do not seem worthy of being captured in a photograph. His dissecting gaze reveals in an honest and unflattering way the excesses of our contemporary society.
This is a Widelux camera. It is a rather unique 35mm swing lens film camera and as I have discovered over the years, it is loved by Jeff Bridges and, yes you guessed it, me.
As Wikipedia says: “The Widelux is a fully mechanical swing-lens panoramic camera first developed in Japan in 1948, with both 35mm (the F6, F7 and F8 models) and medium-format (1500) models available. The WIDELUX cameras manage this trick because of a 26mm lens pivoting on an axis.”
The New York Times article, “The Dude Abides On The Other Side Of The Lens”, just highlighted some of Jeff’s film set work and his thoughts about this strange tool. He is also one of the few Widelux information resources on the web. Here he is on the camera and how he deals with its delights…
The Widelux is a fickle mistress; its viewfinder isn’t accurate, and there’s no manual focus, so it has an arbitrariness to it, a capricious quality. I like that. It’s something I aspire to in all my work — a lack of preciousness that makes things more human and honest, a willingness to receive what’s there in the moment and to let go of the result. Getting out of the way seems to be one of the main tasks for me as an artist.
Here are a couple of shots from a series I did on very tight Japan retail – click them. You can see more of my Widelux photographs from Cambodia and beyond on my photography website.
