Bicycle of my future, somehow. A version, at least. Wrote a post about bicycling over at CV.

Carl Heldmann talks with Lou Manfredini

Here’s the follow-up to my photo post about going with my dad to do a taping of HouseSmarts TV to talk about his book Be Your Own House Contractor. House Smarts has updated their website with the segment from my dad’s interview and it’s totally neat!

This won’t come as a surprise to some readers, but Greg & I just started a foodblog about our eating habits and research and health in general, because aside from photography and websites, respectively, those topics are what we spend a lot of time researching and talking about. I came up with the name The Casual Vegan, because it describes what we are in a few words. In more than a few words, we eat a whole-foods, plant-based diet and generally do not eat meat or dairy, but we are not strict vegans. We’re terribly passionate about things like whole grains and the error of a daily diet of meat and dairy, and rather than having to explain this extemporaneously in social situations and annoy friends endlessly, it’s nice to have a website that we can point to and say, Uhh, just go there and read our articles. So, uh, go there and read our articles.

My neighborhood, aka Jackowo, according to Wikipedia. I’ve never heard my Polish-speaking friend, who also lives here, mention it having a different name. This is a neighborhood in Chicago that even long-time Chicago residents have never heard of, so I tell everyone that I live in the adjacent neighborhood.

I saw the Aaron Siskind exhibition today at the Smart Museum, and I was underwhelmed. But I enjoyed the museum itself, especially seeing a big Rothko they have there, and spent a moment vibrating with the purple and red canvas. And walking around the campus of the University of Chicago and through Washington Park from the Green Line was very pleasant on a brisk, but relatively mild day (still sporting the long johns under the jeans until next week).

I came home to receive this Granta in the mail that I ordered two days ago, and with any luck, I’ll spend a good amount of time reading it over the next few days. Granta is my favorite literary journal, and this issue promises a few pieces written around photographs of the writers’ fathers. They usually have nice photo essays, and it’s also the magazine where I first encountered the writing of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, for which I thank the editors!

Also, this weekend brings the visit of one Emily Porter for holiday festivities, as she has many friends here in Chicago. So, perhaps I’ll partake in a little unusually-timed spirits tomorrow for the opportunity to chat with my lovely and talented internet friend! Maybe she’ll let us geek out on Star Trek talk for a few minutes, because along with being a wildly successful photographer, Emily is also a fellow Star Trek fan. I find it slightly amusing that in my effort to finish watching the Voyager series sequentially (I was at first unwilling, but find the later seasons to be more appealing), coincidence had me watching a really corny episode tonight in which the characters spend a lot of time with Irish holodeck holograms. Seems fitting for the eve of the St. Patrick’s day parade, and also means that I’ve been writing this entire post with an Irish accent in my mind — I had to resist the urge to write “a fine lass” more than once. And then I gave in.

Last October, Kodak discontinued their line of surface “E” Supra Endura papers due to the “declining sales” of this particular paper. I, however, didn’t know this and had recently started to use E as an alternative to my normal N surface when Central Camera had been out of stock. I found it a most agreeable and even preferable alternative. Well, those days are over, because Central Camera in Chicago is officially out of this discontinued surface and we’ll all have to make do with its close match, the semi-matte surface N.

While this is a.) old news and b.) not very interesting to most people (unlike renaming the Sears Tower - wth?), it was undereported! As color darkroom users, we don’t have all that many options as it is. (How I would love to be able to purchase a pack of color paper smaller than 8×10.) So for those of you with some E left in your yellow boxes, enjoy it while it lasts! (Although it appears that it’s still available at other vendors in unknown quantities.)

If I ever have any doubt about being a photographer, I can put it aside for the moment and trust in my friend Mimi, age 2, who was inspired to remember me all the way from Kansas the other day, after having only met me once at the tender age of 20 months , and who according to her mother asked her to “Draw Kristen, Kristen has a camera, draw Kristen’s camera.” Some of the most thoughtful people I know. At any age.

My dad visited Chicago last week for a TV interview his publisher set up with Lou Manfredini and the producers of House Smarts on HGTV. It was lovely to spend an afternoon and the better part of a day with my dad, since our visits per year are few, and it was really neat to be with him on the set while he was talking about his book, Be Your Own House Contractor, and his website, buildyourownhouse.com on camera. My dad knows his stuff, and he puts a ton of work into updating his website with really valuable information about building your own house, being a general contractor, and estimating costs before building. It’s a field of knowledge that I have yet to put to use in my own life, but when I’m ready, I’ll know just what to read to prepare me for it.

A friend of mine was working on a graduate school project a couple of weeks ago for her project management class, and she called me up to tell me that she had just spent a good deal of time on byoh.com, having found it in google, before she realized that the guy in the website’s photo is my dad, Carl Heldmann, who she’s known since elementary school as “Skip,” his nickname. She was really excited and said that the website saved her a ton of time on her project and it was such a fun coincidence. Reason #reallybignumber why I’ll never stop loving the internet.

Here is my favorite shot from the taping:

1810 W. Cortland photo by Kristen Heldmann, noted only to avoid the confusion ensuing from taking a photo of a building where a guy who took photos of buildings lived

This past fall I became familiar with the life and work of Richard Nickel, a Chicago photographer who made it his life work to preserve elements of Louis Sullivan buildings being demolished throughout the city in the mid-20th century. He photographed the buildings and collected physical artifacts from the demo sites, terra cotta ornament and even staircases. He died quite young while he was doing just this in the Chicago Stock Exchange building while it was being torn down. He was buried under rubble for a few weeks before his body was recovered. The arch of the Stock Exchange is on display behind the Art Institute next to Grant Park, and it stands as a quiet monument to Nickel, I think, for people interested in Chicago history and Nickel’s important work.

There’s a new book out on him as of 2007 and a couple of his photographs were displayed in the Lasalle Bank collection at the Cultural Center this past fall, but his work is primarily seen as architectural and technical, and not in the tradition of art (although he did study under Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan at the Institute of Design), so as a photographer, he falls into a subdued place in history. The earnest story of his life and his gorgeously-correct large format photographs were captivating to me and the work done by Richard Cahan and John Vinci make the work very accessible in book form. I was enchanted enough by what I had read to find the building that he bought and renovated before his death, the only place he had called home outside of his parents’ house in the suburbs (which isn’t to say that he was unworldly - he had been a photographer for the army after WWII) to see what had become of it. I took my meager, distorted 35mm shot of the building (seen above) and noted with some amusement that the recent tenants of the storefront had been photographers.

I was reminded again of Richard Nickel’s home again tonight after a fellow city resident and photographer, Noah Vaughn, noticed my photo of it. Wondering how one might find this photo in the archives of my photostream, I googled “Grimm’s bldg,” the name that one sees in the ornament above the second floor. I sadly found this .pdf file that indicates that this building is in danger of demolition itself. It’s one of 7 buildings on preservationchicago.org listed as most endangered.

This is, of course, terrible news.  I hope it doesn’t get torn down, but I’m glad to have seen it when I did should it ever make way for some characterless condo complex not unfamiliar to the changing neighborhood.

Read more about Richard Nickel on NPR.

I recently updated the Chicago section on my portfolio website. Before I had attempted some kind of visual consistency, but now I’ve just included my favorite photos and I think that’s a better way to string it. Shooting in this city represents so much to me — historical approaches, multiple perspectives, moments of photojournalism, memorable strangers, sudden adventures, like a friend getting stuck below the wall of the frozen lake in mid-February — that I have no interest in expressing a visual style here yet, and I enjoy the juxtaposition that each new roll of film presents. It reminds me that the enjoyment of taking pictures is the exploration of a place and the ideal feeling of that exploration is a naivete, almost a blindness in the moment to savor that hyper-vision later as the images are picked over.

Last night while scanning some images in a lab, I overheard the person next to me share a discovery regarding an image that he had taken while traveling last summer. He had taken a photograph of the back of a man’s calves because there were two monochrome and rather unassuming, symmetrical tattoos the size of a palm on each leg. When the photographer was taking the photo, he was unable to stop long enough to decipher the tattoos, he seemed to be standing behind the man while on an escalator as the legs are about halfway up the image. But when he scanned the image last night, he finally saw them in all their medium-format glory: they were visual representations of two mountain climbs the man had done, the name of the mountain and the height achieved by those very legs on which the tattoos were affixed.

I spent the morning in the color darkroom preparing a batch of photos for my semiannual mailing list — the first one in color! Those on the list are still on the list, and those who’d like to be on the list should email me with their addresses. kristen at kheldmann dot com. You needn’t worry about what continent you’re on; I will send you a photo wherever you are. So just drop me an email, don’t even worry about being cordial - an address will be sufficient!

My fat little monster of a cat, Drane, is sick with an ear infection of some nature, has a goopy eye, and can’t eat solid food due to a recent dental procedure. Needless to say, I’m worried about the little dude. However, if all goes well, he should come out of this a little thinner and in better dental health! So, maybe if you have some room in your daily incantations, say a magic word for my furball.

Drane is doing much better and back to bugging me mercilessly as I sit and attempt to work!

As we were walking the ten blocks home today from the Y, my face damp and warm under a cowl, I thought back to the feeling of a cold face growing up in Michigan and how I never wore scarves - a visceral memory that had been buried under six years of California year-round spring. And then I pleasantly remarked that this will be my 17th Midwestern winter.