Water Main Break: 6th & Bainbridge Streets. Philadelphia
Text by Tony Ward, Copyright 2021
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Water Main Break
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In the early hours of Sunday, July 25th a 100+ year old cast iron thirty inch water main broke at the intersection of 6th & Bainbridge Streets in Philadelphia, causing a massive flood of epic proportions. Water department officials on the ground at the epicenter claimed that it was the largest main break they had ever seen.
At approximately 2:00AM a resident of The Ward Studio was awakened by a large crash of water breaking glass on a floor below her bedroom prompted her to get up to see what was going on. The resident, a close friend of the Ward family, had the presence of mind to immediately begin videotaping the wall of water descending onto the property.
Within minutes all of the below grade rooms including; lounge area, kitchen, dressing room, darkroom suite, editing room, workshop and bathroom were all under approximately 24 inches of water.
There was extensive damage done to the property, including thousands of vintage black and white and color negatives that I was preparing to review in anticipation of an upcoming exhibition in the fall.
The city of Philadelphia has stepped in to mitigate the damage while my family sorts out the damage and loss. Mitigation efforts are currently underway to save as many negatives as possible. All activities including studio and darkroom rentals have been suspended until further notice.
Portrait of Diana Desiderio by Tony Ward, Copyright 2021
Text by Diana Desiderio, Copyright 2021
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Photography by Tony Ward, Copyright 2021
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2006 is feeling closer and further from me everyday. I was wrestling professionally on PPV, a guest on the Howard Stern show and I had finally done an amazing shoot with Tony Ward for Hustlers Taboo magazine. Things for a then 24 years old me were happening. I didn’t have a set career or any clue as to what direction I was going to go. That’s what you do in your 20’s. Aimlessly going on with life as it was coming, just riding the wave. July of that year had made everything stop when my older sister had passed away that summer in a car wreck. The devastation hit me harder than one could ever imagine. I wiped out off of that wave I was riding and found myself over the next five years slowly sinking to the bottom of the abyss that was called life. Self destruction quickly set in. I had left wrestling; was being over medicated with psych drugs, which led me to my journey of self medicating which led to a full blown narcotic addiction.
Rock bottom is a lonely place, but a perfect place when your down, hopeless and out. I had managed to push everyone and anyone that ever gave a damn away. Undoing all that I was working for or towards. That’s how quickly you can rise and fall. When your young, things are there for the taking and you just take it all for granted. Why not, it’s all right there being handed to you hand over fist. And I took it all, but when my life was hit by tragedy I was 100% accountable for letting it all go to ruin. I don’t regret facing those bad times. Talking about it and doing what it took to get through them. Putting in the work and getting help so that I can get the real me back to myself. It’s not easy and for everyone. I had to realize I was meant for so much more; that I deserved way better than what I was encountering. By this time, December 2011; I was 29. And I signed myself in at a rehab facility voluntarily and got the long awaited help I needed. I chose life. Coming back into the world after being down so damn long is surreal. You are not only relearning who you are organically; but releasing the demon that carried you through the darkness and didn’t want to let you go. Life feels like a night swim; alone and bare allowing the universe to see every bit of you. Raw, exposed and unapologetic.
I worked really hard through the years trying to figure out what direction I wanted to take in my life. Not many people who go where I’ve gone get to live to fight another day. I also had faced a new struggle with body image issues. I was no longer a 20 something thin model type. I was healthy, but I let my physicality go as I was more focused on staying the course of the straight and narrow instead of looking at all of me and keeping on top of myself. I needed to find a purpose again. I needed to continue the work. It was time to manifest change across the board.
In 2015, a lifelong film producer friend of mine offered to host me for a visit to her L.A. home. At that point life went stagnant and I needed a reset. While visiting, she had gotten a quick commercial gig for a popular money app we are all familiar with today and asked if I wanted to make a few bucks being a Production Assistant. Going on runs, being on set, supporting the big wigs. In the freelance film industry; you take the work when it comes but on your own terms. This had my attention right away. Take as much work as you want, make your own schedule, and gain a career without having to drop 100k on film school?! SIGN ME UP. I saw if you worked hard and put the time in this could blossom into the career for me.
I came home from my trip to SoCal and decided that this was an opportunity that I could not turn down. 33 years old, I packed up and drove across country with hopes that this could be my shot. It was. I’ve worked with recognizable names; commercials, short films, still work and music videos. I had worked hard and made my way up from a PA, grabbing Directors coffee and running errands to a Production Supervisor. Being a Production Manager/Supervisor you are the center of the universe of a shoot. You prep the job by getting everything all the crews need in order to support the Directors creativity so that we can make the project come to life, while hiring the crew and vendors as well.
It is all a chaotic world until we actually get up to the day of shoot; that’s where I can focus on the accounting aspects for the company and start pulling all the behind the scenes elements together. There’s no business like show business. It’s 24/7, and thankless at times. It would be a lie to tell you something was missing for me out there in LaLaLand. I’m East Coast born and raised. Home was calling.
I had arrived back home to Philadelphia on New Years Eve 2018. Humbled, harmonious and able to continue everything I had worked so very hard for in my career, I was welcomed with open arms in the city of brotherly love. It’s been a crazy journey to say the least, life’s been give and take; times are up and down. Whenever I feel like I start to lose myself again; I try to remember who I am during that night swim; raw, exposed and unapologetic. And keep going.
About The Author: Diana Desiderio is a motion picture production manager based in Philadelphia.
The expected fall surge in COVID-19 cases seems to have come early, hitting many states. Here in Southwest Virginia, we’re surrounded by surges in Tennessee and North Carolina.
Statistically, the news media are telling us, 95% of the new cases are people not vaccinated or not fully vaccinated.
But, hold on just a minute, and think about what that really means. That means that 5% of these new cases are in fully vaccinated people! Now, 5% seems like a small number, but on the scale of this new surge, it’s one hell of a lot of people! Fifty out of every thousand.
Pfizer is saying that people who’ve gotten both shots will need a booster shot to protect against the Delta Variant. Other vaccine manufacturers haven’t suggested this — yet. And here comes the Lambda Variant, just entering the USA. Here we go again!
This current surge will likely become an explosion when cooler weather comes.
And don’t forget the millions of young people only now becoming eligible for vaccination. They now have no protection at all.
The Los Angeles Times reports on an ongoing study in the UK that has shown that COVID causes ‘significant brain shrinkage’ in people who’ve had it, even when they had only mild cases or were asymptomatic. This probably explains the ‘brain fog’ often reported by people who ‘recovered,’ often long after their ‘recovery.’
The brain areas most affected are those related to smell and taste, senses often reported lost or diminished in COVID sufferers. Those brain regions are also involved in memory, particularly memory of experiences that evoked an emotional response. Perhaps ‘full recovery’ from COVID is an illusion.
As Theunis Bates said in an editorial in The Week, “A happy ending to our national Covid horror remains a long way off.” To that I’ll add that there may never be a happy ending.
In my book ‘Cosmic Dance,’ written largely in 2018 and published in April of 2019, long before anyone heard of COVID-19, I said:
“We’re only now starting to understand the language of the DNA code, yet we’re already tinkering with it to ‘improve’ our crops and livestock, or do silly things like make cats that glow in the dark.”
“We must be very careful in playing with a code, a language, that we’re just beginning to understand, or our foolish fingers may get burned. I’m very concerned with the willy-nilly introduction of genetically modified organisms into the world’s ecology. We could unintentionally unleash a plague that destroys us or the crops that sustain us.
Voices have been raised in alarm, but their cries are falling on plugged ears.”
I usually like it when my predictions prove true, but this time I wish I’d been wrong.
And I singled out China as the likely culprit, too! Right now, it seems that Australia is the only country to have the guts to point the finger at China. In an editorial in ‘The Age,’ Peter Hatcher says, Australia won’t be bullied by China. Relations between the two countries became hostile last year when the Australian government called for a probe into the origins of COVID-19, and banned the Chinese company Huwei from Australia’s 5G network. China decided to make an example of Australia, levying high tariffs on Aussie wine and beef, then cutting off economic dialogue completely.
Now China is blocking $ 20 billion worth of Australian exports and holding two Australian journalists in prison on political charges.
The Australians are not scared of the Chinese bully. Two thirds of Australians surveyed say the country should stick to its values and speak up about Chinese abuses, even if it hurts their economy. “China’s efforts to break Australia’s will has only solidified it.”
I say ‘Bravo Australia!’ and urge everyone reading this to go out and buy Australian wine and anything else made in Australia! If only the American public had the strength of will of the Aussies! It is time to lay the blame for COVID-19 where it belongs, squarely on China’s shoulders.
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About The Author: Bob Shell is a professional photographer, author, former editor in chief of Shutterbug Magazine and veteran contributor to this blog. He is currently serving a 35 year sentence for involuntary manslaughter for the death of Marion Franklin, one of his former models. He is serving the 13th year of his sentence at Pocahontas State Correctional Facility, Virginia. To read additional articles by Bob Shell, click here: https://tonywardstudio.com/blog/photography-2/
Editor’s Note: If you like Bob Shell’s blog posts, you’re sure to like his new book, COSMIC DANCE by Bob Shell (ISBN: 9781799224747, $ 12.95 book, $ 5.99 eBook) available now on Amazon.com . The book, his 26th, is a collection of essays written over the last twelve years in prison, none published anywhere before. It is subtitled, “A biologist’s reflections on space, time, reality, evolution, and the nature of consciousness,” which describes it pretty well. You can read a sample section and reviews on Amazon.com.
Someone asked me recently why I wasn’t posting much about photography anymore. Before my conviction in August of 2007, I was ‘a renowned photographer with a long-established reputation,’ to quote Federal Judge Glenn Conrad. I’d been doing photography/cinematography since my teens in the early 1960s, following in the footsteps of my father, who was an avid photographer/cinematographer. He had numerous cameras and lenses, still and 16 mm movie cameras, and a nice darkroom in the basement of our house in Roanoke, Virginia.
The first time I saw an image I’d photographed magically appear on a blank sheet of photo paper when I dunked it into the developer, I was hooked.
People today who grow up using digital photography on smartphones never experience that magic moment. I find that sad.
Over the years I’ve been in prison I’ve watched traditional photography die. First one, then another, then one by one, all of the photography magazines have died. At its peak, there were dozens of photography magazines. I’d get seven or eight a month. Popular Photography had over a million subscribers at its peak.
Today, I get two photography magazines, Nature Photographer (www.naturephotographermag.com) and Professional Photographer, the magazine of the Professional Photographers of America, to which I belonged for many years. If others have survived as print magazines, I’m not aware of them.
Even Digital Camera, the magazine I worked for after Shutterbug, is now gone. My favorite of all, and one I wrote many articles for, Rangefinder, is history.
I also get Digital Imaging Reporter, today’s incarnation of Photo Industry Reporter, a trade publication I used to write for, but it’s published erratically these days.
Of course, there are some Internet photography magazines, but, so far as I know, nobody has been able to make any real money from an Internet photography magazine, and if a magazine can’t make real money, it can’t attract, pay, and keep good editors and writers, who have to support themselves and their families.
The once-popular hobby of photography has seriously declined. Any hobbyist who wants to own the finest film cameras ever made can do so for pennies on the dollar, although if they need service, finding someone who can repair them may not be easy. Friends of mine have bought Hasselblad, Mamiya, Bronica, Rollei, Contax, Leica, Nikon, Canon, Minolta, Pentax, etc., outfits very cheaply. Darkroom equipment is even cheaper.
Although the selection is limited, film is still readily available, but you may be unable to buy it locally. In fact, increased demand has even induced Kodak to put one version of Ektachrome back into production.
I’ve tried to keep up with photographic technology, despite the fact that I haven’t so much as touched a camera in over fourteen years, and have yet to even see one of the mirrorless cameras that are fast taking over for SLRs.
My cameras, lenses, and other photographic equipment is all in storage, and will remain until my release. Hopefully I won’t be too decrepit by then to rebuild my studio and life as a photographer.
I used many different cameras over my years in photography. During two different periods I owned camera shops, first for several years in the 1970s, then from 1980 until 1990. The cameras that were my workhorses in 35 mm were Canon, and continued to be until my career was ended in 2007. I wrote several books about Canon, including ‘Canon Compendium,’ the official history of the Canon Camera Company.
In medium format, I used Bronica S2a cameras with their superb Nikkor lenses before switching to Rollei SL66 in the mid-1970s. I continued with Rollei, using their advanced 6000 series up to my last Rollei, the 6008i, an amazingly capable camera.
In large format I used a Toyo 4 X 5 monorail view camera with several Schneider-Kreuznach lenses in my studio, and a Zone VI field camera outdoors with those same lenses.
In the rare instances when a client wanted 8 X 10, I had an old Eastman 2D camera made in 1918 that I used. It still worked fine. I fitted it with a Voigtlander Apo-Lanthar 300 mm lens in a Compur Electronic shutter, matching old to new.
When Polaroid made 8 X 10 film, I shot quite a bit of it in that camera using a borrowed Polaroid processor.
I was an early adopter of digital photography, though, and was doing most of my work with Canon and Nikon digital SLRs by 2002, but the speed at which traditional photography collapsed was a total surprise, and shock, to me and most of the industry. Luckily, I was able to sell most of my medium format pro cameras before the bottom completely dropped out of the market, using the money to pay lawyers, several of whom said, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll never spend a day in prison.’ Here I sit, fourteen years later, still in prison for something that never happened. It is ridiculously difficult to get a false conviction overturned in today’s American legal system.
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About The Author: Bob Shell is a professional photographer, author, former editor in chief of Shutterbug Magazine and veteran contributor to this blog. He is currently serving a 35 year sentence for involuntary manslaughter for the death of Marion Franklin, one of his former models. He is serving the 13th year of his sentence at Pocahontas State Correctional Facility, Virginia. To read additional articles by Bob Shell, click here: https://tonywardstudio.com/blog/hidden-truth_ufos-pentagon/
Editor’s Note: If you like Bob Shell’s blog posts, you’re sure to like his new book, COSMIC DANCE by Bob Shell (ISBN: 9781799224747, $ 12.95 book, $ 5.99 eBook) available now on Amazon.com . The book, his 26th, is a collection of essays written over the last twelve years in prison, none published anywhere before. It is subtitled, “A biologist’s reflections on space, time, reality, evolution, and the nature of consciousness,” which describes it pretty well. You can read a sample section and reviews on Amazon.com.
Like most UFO investigators, my first reaction to the Pentagon’s UFO report released in late June, was disappointment. I suspect the report was carefully crafted to produce that response in people knowledgeable about the UFO phenomenon at first reading. The Pentagon would like for us to just go away.
But deeper digging shows the report actually is a very important contribution to our knowledge of what the Pentagon calls UAPs, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. Importantly, it could be summed up as ‘Yes, they’re real, but we don’t know what the hell they are.’
The study was restricted to 144 credible reports by military personnel. In those 144 encounters the report rules out four categories; one, a secret technology from one of our adversaries, two, our own classified technology, three, airborne clutter such as balloons, and natural atmospheric phenomena. This leaves a fourth category they call ‘Other.’ That’s where the meat of the report lies.
Very importantly, 80 of the encounters classified as ‘Other’ ‘involved observation with multiple sensors,’ in other words, they could not be observer error by human observers. The report concludes those 80 encounters were with actual physical objects. That’s the grains of wheat among all the chaff in the report. More than half of the encounters were with real physical objects. Unknown real physical objects.
Of those 80 encounters with actual physical objects, 18 manifested seriously anomalous behavior. This includes instant changes in direction, moving at speeds impossible for aircraft of any sort, and no observable means of propulsion. So these are actual physical objects using technology we don’t have, and we’re sure no other country on Earth has.
As usual the ‘scientific’ brigade came out to debunk. Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb said the encounters probably have ‘mundane explanations.’ ‘Mundane explanations?’ What ‘mundane explanations?’ Are we back to swamp gas, swarms of fireflies, and other imbecilic explanations thrown at us in the past? I hope not.
Someone named David Axe wrote in TheDailyBeast.com that we may not know what these objects are, but ‘we can say with reasonable certainty what they’re not.’ That’s space aliens, he says, and asks why extraterrestrials would travel ‘galactic distances’ just to fool around with military pilots and make no effort to communicate.
Remember in Star Trek they had a ‘Prime Directive’ not to interfere in developing civilizations? Maybe the beings visiting us have such a rule. It’s quite logical to let civilizations develop on their own, each going in a different direction. Our own cultural anthropologists try to interfere as little as possible with the primitive cultures they study.
Maybe, from their perspective, communicating with would have as much use as us communicating with beavers!
Besides that, Mr. Axe’s argument has a fatal flaw. He assumes aliens would have to travel ‘galactic distances’ to get here. That’s an obviously false assumption. They’re already here and have been here a long time.
Anyone who has studied the subject deeply, as I have, knows that whatever UFOs are, they’ve been here a very long time. There are reports from ancient Rome, medieval reports, reports from every period in written history. The Biblical report of Ezekiel’s encounter, if converted to modern language, is a classic ‘Close Encounter of the Third Kind.’
When I interviewed an elderly member of an isolated indigenous tribe in New Mexico in 1996, I learned from her that her people had a very old oral tradition of encounters, and considered seeing a UFO to be a very bad omen. This was not something they normally talked to white men about, but a relative who’d left the reservation to work construction in big cities heard me interviewed on Art Bell’s radio program, contacted me, and convinced her to talk to me by telling her that my great grandmother was Cherokee (true).
Human encounters with this ‘Other’ is not a recent phenomenon!
In the 70s Jefferson Starship, that great old band, asked, “What I would really like to know … what are they watching us for?’ We don’t have an answer to Paul Kantner’s question — yet. The truth is still out there somewhere.
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About The Author: Bob Shell is a professional photographer, author, former editor in chief of Shutterbug Magazine and veteran contributor to this blog. He is currently serving a 35 year sentence for involuntary manslaughter for the death of Marion Franklin, one of his former models. He is serving the 13th year of his sentence at Pocahontas State Correctional Facility, Virginia. To read additional articles by Bob Shell, click here: https://tonywardstudio.com/blog/nudes-in-state-parks/
Editor’s Note: If you like Bob Shell’s blog posts, you’re sure to like his new book, COSMIC DANCE by Bob Shell (ISBN: 9781799224747, $ 12.95 book, $ 5.99 eBook) available now on Amazon.com . The book, his 26th, is a collection of essays written over the last twelve years in prison, none published anywhere before. It is subtitled, “A biologist’s reflections on space, time, reality, evolution, and the nature of consciousness,” which describes it pretty well. You can read a sample section and reviews on Amazon.com.
