Artist Statement

I search intensely in the urban environment for those compositions specific to my moral obligations. It's an instinctive process, yet it also requires the obviously removable augmentation of mechanization. I find the images in the urban environment that are somehow endemic to my forms of creative irony in light of urbanization, industrialization and mechanization. It's become a grassroots approach. I did not specifically decide to focus on local protests, rather the decision was made casually. I'll bring a camera, although I can't say if I definitely will find that element of which I seek. It has become so that I am uncomfortable missing what I consider to be a photo-worthy event. Through process I know to be excited when big photo-worthy events are on the horizon.

I saw an article in the San Jose Mercury News, and it was several paragraphs long, several pages into the A section of the paper. The article confirmed that the Berkeley California Memorial Oak Grove Treesit had been on for at least a month. This was the end of winter 2007. I spent most of the spring and summer of 2008 supporting the treesit via camera and presence. 

Urban Studies became a formulation of political science as I comprehended the evils of post-modernist, trans-national, neo-liberalism, and its subsidiaries, the capitalist, hegemonic, oligarchy. Viewing macro-cosm from micro-cosm. 

My group thesis at The San Francisco Art Institute was regarding urban farming. I was born in Berkeley, I went to school there for one year in high school, and I volunteered at The Gilman Street Project in Berkeley, California from 1988 to about 1995. Photographing at People’s Park in Berkeley became part of a natural accumulation of environment and familiarity. In a sense I feel that some of my work is giving back to a community that helped me grow.

My ethnographic research regarding The Gilman Street Project pertains to my MA thesis in urban studies at sfai. I revisited my life and the times of the 924 Gilman, as that time period is now widely regarded as a zeitgeist for the sub-culture in the region. I have since reintegrated into the Bay Area scene and I continue to make photography related to my interests in the urban periphery.

In 2010 I moved into the Emeryville, California Squat Hellarity adjusted for a couple of months, biding my time volunteering with East Bay Food Not Bombs, feeding the homeless and low-income, and then began photographing intensively with Occupy Oakland. I kept my volunteer position with EBFNBs, as it had become incorporated with #OO, and began an intensive listening experience, for which my conceptual perception of survival began to create new formulations that began to slowly supersede the rationale of urban logic and theory. Like the Berkeley Treesit @ the Oak Grove my photos were intended to perhaps be incorporated with organizations such as COPWATCH, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the National Lawyers Guild, and some of my photo essays that would appear in indybay.org would help lawyers develop their police brutality cases, as well as help give a community a visual sense of perspective, in a tumultuous time of comprehensive revolt.  

Now that Hellarity has met its demise, and tired of the instability of homelessness I have retired to the south bay where I have family and a roof over my head. I await the arival of my MA urban studies degree, and work on my Phd research in sub-cultural sociology. Mechanisms of the micro-cosm can be formulated to supersede the macro-cosm. Old ideas can seem new and profound when they gain speed as they become part of a 21st century zeitgeist designed to save the planet. Recycle. Plant a tree.

Part of my research has been photographing bands in the bay area. This is a therapeutic way for me to connect with my former volunteering ideology in the 1980s and 90s with the Berkeley punk club Gilman, [Home of punk bands such as "Greenday," perhaps you've heard of them...] and to help me further comprehend the future of grassroots creative mechanisms.

To view my Indybay.org articles type ‘darin bauer,’ in the search engine task bar. Private reviews of non-public Indybay articles are available upon request and are listed in my Curriculum Vitae.

 My photography is viewable via http://www.flickr.com/darinbaueroakgroveberkeley/ .

End the Capitalist Oligarchy.*
[*Recently Martin Gilens of Princeton University, and Benjamin I. Page of Northwestern University did a consensus and analytical study regarding American Politics proving that American citizens have very little voter sway and no absolute power compared to economic elites and special interest groups, empirically proving that the United States is an Oligarchy and if nothing else making a superb argument against economic inequality. See; Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.]