Hamburger Eyes at the Mission Cultural Center.

SFMoMA

Am part of a SFMoMA group show called The View From Here.

WIRED Interview

Here’s the story.

Pirate Cat Radio Flyer

Checkout the making of a SLIDESHOW. And READ about it.

Exhibition.

S.F. University High School asked me to do a little show and speak to the photography students. Got some great press from the San Francisco Chronicle and the check out the OPENING!

krakow

The City of Krakow hosted a month long Photography Festival and chose my Garageband series as one of the exhibits. They flew me in, put me up in a hotel, and even printed the show. It doesn’t get much better than that. Big red banners and flags were all around the city announcing the event. Here are pictures from the EXHIBITION. Call me an idiot but I never went into an old church or museum. I was content to just walk around observing the little things. This is what I saw in and around the various Streets.

Decided to make a rare public appearance.

BUZZ

Did a nice little 10 page spread for San Francisco Magazine on the town’s Best Coffee. I told them I just wanted to use a point and shoot. Their design director, Ellen Zaslow, is a joy to work with. Blue Bottle, Coffee Bar, Ritual, and Trouble Coffee (see picture) are all winners.

Hotel CHELSEA

THE HOTEL CHELSEA. This New York landmark was everything I thought it would be and more. For a look at all the art and some of its inhabitants, look here. I was in town for a release party for our Hamburger Eyes book at the amazing Powerhouse Arena.

Check it out: Hamburger Eyes, THE BOOK!!
Hilarious yet scary, hardcore yet charming, the Hamburger Eyes crew put out the illest lil’ photography magazine the world has ever seen. Since the first issue of 30 xeroxed pamphlets was printed in 2002, Hamburger Eyes has become an elegant yet underground periodical combining the documentary approach of National Geographic with the hit-‘em-hard sensibility of a late-night tagger. A pictorial history of both the intimate and iconic moments of everyday life, Hamburger Eyes is a travel journal, a personal diary, and a family album. Inspired by the traditions that began with LIFE magazine and Robert Frank, the magazine revitalizes the sensation of photography as a craft as well as a tool to record and document.

LOVE.

GOLD. Well here it is. My beloved Leica that is a vintage model M2 from the Sixties. You can see what I’ve done with this in my Portfolios section: The Jangs, Havana, Premiere, anything 35mm. I’m at a place where I need to decide if I want to move on with the latest that digital has to offer or to stick with what’s tried and true. I can envision decades to come being spent anticipating the next big thing in cameras and thinking how this is going to help one take better pictures. But once you’ve found a Stradivarius, why look any further?

NEW YORK.

NEW YORK. This picture was taken during my last visit to the Big Apple. Obviously it’s been way too long. Take a look at a recent week’s worth of adventure. Just hit SLIDESHOW in the upper right.

Dude

DUDE!! aka Jeff Bridges. He is also an accomplished photographer. Now I have finished the Bridges Trilogy having also shot both his dad and brother (Lloyd and Beau). Jeff said he was growing a beard for a part in IRONMAN.

PETER’S CASE

From Peter Case’s Journal:

1974 was the year I started getting proficient at “living on the street”. I had come west on the Greyhound from Buffalo, New York in early 73, a young acid casualty looking for someplace to land…Got off the bus one morning at the foot of Mission Street, in San Francisco, and dove in. I was 19, hair down to my shoulders, and playing a cheap Japanese guitar (the Yamaki deluxe:$99.95: it had a rockin’ buzz to it). I was carrying a fork in my coat pocket, in case I ran into dinner somewhere. I was drinking THE WINE, as it would come to be known in numerous songs of the day.
I first met Peter when I photographed his band the Plimsouls back in the late Seventies. The original troubadour is still at it. I caught him recently at Cafe Du Nord. Here’s the video.

ACDShe

ACDSheEver wonder what the person in the next cubicle might be doing after hours? Meet Amy. Mild mannered marketing wiz for a hot SOMA architectural firm, she had hired me to do some portraits. See what happens when you give a gal a microphone and a shot of whiskey.

HAMBURGER EYES. The new Rock and Roll issue is out! Looks like another winner. They have included some of my Sex Pistols, Devo and Ramones shots. Thanks Ray and Dave Potes for the great release party!

HOT TICKET. CESARIA EVORA. I’ve been waiting to see the Barefoot Diva from Cape Verde for a long time. Great seats. She even sat down half way through the set and had a leisurely smoke with a glass of wine. How cool is that. Check out the view.

TROYODA. Meet Troy Alders, Lucasfilm Art Director. We had lunch in their beautiful new Presidio complex and discussed a little photo project. For a special treat, he got the keys and opened up some vaults that you wouldn’t believe. Sorry no cameras, you’ll just have to imagine what I saw. Troy’s next project: Indiana Jones.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has ten of my photographs in their permanent collection, including this shot of David Bowie that I took in 1973 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel (see PREMIERE in PORTFOLIOS section).

Say it isn’t so Kramer. Here’s a shot of Seinfeld’s Michael Richards at a party back in our college days. Being caught on camera wasn’t nearly as hazardous as being caught on a cell phone.

THE ROLLING STONES. OK, well I guess we all have to start somewhere. I took these photos of the Stones in 1966 with a Kodak camera and Kodacolor film. Looks like I was in the second row. That’s Brian Jones on the left, Mick singing, Charlie on the drums , Keith and a bit of Bill Wyman. Look closely and you can see a folding chair next to Mick holding an instrument. And the sound was pure garage with just the small amps.

Speaking of garage, URB MAGAZINE has published a nice spread on my GARAGEBAND SERIES. Teenage bands in SF. Shot some video too, see below.

Two Turntables and a microphone. From the Seventies.

THE LOVED ONES Called an old friend- Bart Davenport (far right) who sang for The Loved Ones. He’s got a new band named Honeycut. Check out the video I made of them at the Rickshaw Stop in SF. For a complete selection of my new videos, checkout YouTube and do a Search for Michael Jang.

In the Pit. Just took this video in the mosh pit of a Fleshies show. Welcome to the HOTEL UTAH….such a lovely place, such a lovely face…

ANNIE.

ANNIE. Recognize the most famous woman photographer in the world? This is a snap I took of Annie Leibovitz the day of her sister’s wedding. She had just gotten back from a jog. We both shot the wedding together. See FAQ for details.

GUITAR HERO. Shot a story for GAMEINFORMER Magazine about the release of GUITAR HERO II for Sony Playstation. The madman behind all the licks is Marcus Henderson.

I made a little book on baseball in my hometown of Marysville, population: 9,000. I found out we had a history going back more than a hundred years. Sports writer Dwight Chapin of the San Francisco Chronicle writes: Bucolic baseball: Every so often in this business, you stumble onto an unexpected treasure. Such is the case with “the Local Nine,” an oversized paperback book that photographer Michael Jang produced as a paean to little-known baseball history in Marysville (Yuba County), where he grew up. The names and faces that are featured will be unfamiliar to most people, but that won’t matter to anyone who loves the sport. The early portions of the book are filled with Anywhere, America-styled photographs that capture eras and styles as well as individuals ( including barnstormers Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Jackie Robinson), a metaphor for the lasting impact baseball has had on towns and small cities around the country. The latter pages contain a body of stunning work by the highly skilled Jang on more modern incarnations of the sport in the Marysville-Yuba City area. The book definitely rates as a collector’s item.

A Russian Magazine has published a ten page spread on my series on the West. I have no idea what they said about the pictures. Anybody speak Russian? (see FICTION).

THEME MAGAZINE

THEME MAGAZINE THEME MAGAZINE has published a ten page spread entitled THE WAY WE WERE. These photographs were taken in 1973. I was taking a summer workshop in San Francisco with Lisette Model (her most famous student was Diane Arbus). I needed a place to stay for a month and fortunately had some relatives who lived near the city. Unless you’re Sally Mann, it is difficult for most people to photograph their own families. Often when you see things everyday they tend to become invisible. With my cousins I had the perfect combination of knowing them well enough to be allowed into their world, yet I had the personal distance to experience everything about them as something new.

GETTY IMAGES.

It’s one thing to be represented by Getty Images but what an honor when Tony Stone (a subsidiary of Getty) also decided to use one of my images as a full page ad for the company in Communication Arts. You can try forever to get in that magazine and then something like this just happens. This is how the caption reads: ” In 1900, average life expectancy was around 54 years. Today, in industrialized nations, it is around 78. As science increases longevity, people will retire later. Or the retired will re-enter employment because of financial needs, boredom or both.” The photograph is of a man who works for us who we call Joey “Fists”. If there is any kind of a problem, we send in Joey.

JIMI HENDRIX.

JIMI HENDRIXI got my first camera when I was in high school, a Pentax Spotmatic. One of the first things I did was to shoot a Jimi Hendrix concert. It was outdoors at Cal Expo on April 26, 1970. $3.75 per ticket. They didn’t mind if you brought in cameras or other recording equipment back then. Almost thirty years later one of my images taken as a teenager literally ends up on a Jimi Hendrix CD. Wow. See faq for the full story.

SELF PORTRAIT. Yes, that’s me on the right. Found this at the bottom of a drawer today. Definitely early Seventies in the San Francisco Financial District. I remember walking around Montgomery Street with a 21mm on the Leica.