This brown paper bag has a thousand bucks in it. The cash comes from the pockets of citizen trustees looking to make stuff happen in their community with the lowest conceivable overhead.
The hand belongs to my friend Brian Douglas, social worker by day and hard working photog every other waking hour around the clock, apparently. He gave a 5-minute pitch for his 5AM project, where he goes out in the community and photographs and captures the stories of night workers. The trustees liked what they heard and awarded this round’s cash to Brian. That’s Brian, whose photos are in the—you guessed it!—BOX Art Show & Sale this weekend Nov 16/17.
That’s the KW Awesome Foundation at work.
Brian, Joe Martz, and I had some dinner+beer down the street at Imbibe, not shown here (which has an amazing all-credit-to-Bill beer selection and awesome food), and afterward I happily tagged along with Brian to his pitch. Always been curious about KWAF, and just never connected (3 years!), so down to The Little Bean Coffee Bar (above) we went.
6:30pm. Meta.
TLBCB is…
also…
a…
cool…
place.
OOoooh, *video*.
TIL Doug Moen of kwartzlab fame is one of the trustees.
As is kwartzlab president Jaymis Goertz (seated, black hoodie)
Not everyone was there to hear KWAF pitches.
So, I only thought I was shooting in the dark this week as I followed the BOX Art event setup. This KWAF event was in inky-black-auto-focus-doesn’t-work-switching-to-manual darkness. And, here, I’m also panning. Challenge! I love it.
Every pitchee gets 5 minutes to sell their cause to the 12 trustees.
Brian mentally rehearsing his pitch. He pitched the 5am project at a previous KWAF night and was not chosen. He then went out, shot 9 sessions with workers in the community and brought those photos back to KWAF, demonstrating the work in progress. The photos look great.
A ha! Gabrielle Clermont, also a trustee and everywhere that art/culture stuff is happening.
Pitching for cash to help orphans.
This capture came out well. Thank you exposure gods.
Brian pitching 5am. My manual focusing in the dark using The Force approach not quite honed yet.
Cate Huston and Gabrielle review 5am in progress.
Pitching for cash to support a group of film makers.
Pitching for organ donor awareness.
Pitching for cash to support a film about… I forget, but kept thinking Game of Thrones.
Pitching for cash to do seed ball workshops.
Trustee deliberation.
Gabrielle is… sceptical. Of something.
Cate Huston and Ben ‘Mo-stache’ Brown. Also a trustee. It was a regular kwartzlab hoe-down here.
More chatting, and…
Ding ding, the trustees chose Brian’s 5am photography project out of the lot.
More looking at the 5am photos so far.
Spread out and chat, while the karaoke gets set up. No photos of that.
Very cool, KW Awesome Foundation crew. Your no-red-tape-or-contracts-let’s-shake-on-it approach is my kinda GSD in the community. Congrats to Brian, looking forward to seeing the whole series of photos when the project is complete.
DW