Profiles & Interviews

10 Articles
Cynthia Daffron

Editor’s Note: This post first appeared July 29, 2011.

She of the Earth, Formed of Light

When Christine Tomaszewski, a photographer I met when we worked at the same tech firm, excused herself from a lunch table of coworkers to climb a wobbly bar stool, lean way over the bar, and shoot a photo of the glasses lining the back wall, I knew we would get along. The pursuit of art and pretty shiny things continues to infuse our conversations and so I was more than pleased when she agreed to an email interview.

Derek Bridges

A few years ago I started noticing many of my photos were getting uploaded to Wikimedia Commons–which was perfectly legit as I’d uploaded them to flickr using a Creative Commons license that allowed anyone to use my images so long as I received attribution. The Wikimedia uploads, mostly pictures of musicians, second line parades and politicians, were diligently attributed to me and increased the likelihood someone would see them. I liked the idea there was some guy out there who thought my photos were worth the effort–his effort, slight as it may have been.

At some point I finally connected that the guy uploading my pics to Wikimedia was one of my flickr contacts, Infrogmation. I poked around and found he was quite active in Wikimedia and Wikipedia, and judging by some of his photos, he seemed to play a little trombone. He didn’t shoot with a high end camera but he had a decent one (Canon PowerShot) and a patient eye and he covered a lot of ground (a good example of his dogged work is his series documenting Banksy’s graffiti art around New Orleans). He also uploaded photos he inherited of family members from the 1920s and 1930s and he had a good feel for oddball but revealing historical ephemera:

Derek Bridges

Joseph Crachiola is from a small town outside Detroit that got swallowed up by the suburbs (same story for me, except replace Detroit with Chicago). He worked 15 years for suburban Detroit newspapers and 22 years as a corporate photographer before he got bought out and decided to move to New Orleans about 2 years ago. He recently served as road manager for the Pinettes Brass Band in Turkey, and photographed the Umbria Jazz Festival in Perugia, Italy.

Cynthia Daffron

When Christine Tomaszewski, a photographer I met when we worked at the same tech firm, excused herself from a lunch table of coworkers to climb a wobbly bar stool, lean way over the bar, and shoot a photo of the glasses lining the back wall, I knew we would get along. The pursuit of art and pretty shiny things continues to infuse our conversations and so I was more than pleased when she agreed to an email interview.

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