That’s me above, Stanley W Rogouski, amateur photojournalist. Not much to look at. About 6 feet tall. About 200 pounds. Male pattern baldness. Polish/German descent. Born and raised in New Jersey. Graduated from Rutgers with a BA in English and from Union College with an AS in computer science. Like Bruce Springsteen and Chris Christie, I’m the typical New Jerseyan from central casting.
These days I mostly take photos with a cell-phone camera like everybody else, but during the 2000s I was obsessed with photographing protests against George W Bush and the American occupation of Iraq. I started using my middle initial “W” when I noticed it was identical to the President’s. I thought it was amusing. As a left-wing “ethnic white” from “blue” America, I’m about as different from a fundamentalist Christian and war criminal like Bush as you can get. But we both have the same middle-initial.
Eventually I got bored with taking photos of protests. More specifically I got bored with the sense that protest marches, which after Occupy Wall Street in 2011 became more and more dominated by masked “anarchists,” weren’t meant to be photographed. Eventually perhaps I will buy a 4 x 5 view camera and take one photo per month in black and white film. Digital SLRs make it too easy to take so many photos it’s difficult to keep track of them all. There are a lot of photos here.
I have two other websites.
Writers Without Money (a pun on the novel “Jews Without Money” by the communist writer Michael Gold) is a long running community blog where I write mainly about film, although it also has photo galleries and some uniformed musings about politics.
Cinema of the Balkans is a site I built when I realized Writers Without Money wasn’t quite focused enough. I so decided to build a site dedicated to one regional cinema. I didn’t realize how broad and how extensive Balkan cinema was. Perhaps it should more accurately be called “Cinema of Serbia” but since the most striking images of the area tend to be in Bosnia, I thought I’d throw in the rest of the Balkans as well. I’m still trying to figure out if Turkey can be considered “Balkan.”