Do you have insurance? Do you need insurance? Is this something that you’ve thought about and then just not gone ahead and purchased? Photography is a hobby, so I’ll be covered with my home insurance should anything go wrong. Is there something in the small print that won’t cover your equipment at home or overseas?

If you are a professional photographer, you will have insurance that covers your equipment, public liability, and anything else written into the insurance for your particular business operations. But should you have it if it’s simply your hobby?

Setting the Scene

On a recent outing with the Nikon Z 7II to do some long exposures, I also took my Fuji X-T5, which, to be honest, was a last-minute decision. I simply took it to capture the surrounding landscapes. The X-T5 is normally attached to my camera bag strap at my chest for easy access while out hiking. 

Along the way, I photographed a couple of spots on my way to the waterfall using the X-T5, mainly for reference and to look back on for future compositions. While heading down toward my final location, I spotted a burn which was in full flow and thought to myself, “While I’m here I’ll grab a couple of long exposures on the X-T5.” I set up the camera on the unextended tripod a couple of feet away from the burn and fired off a few shots as I watched the light move across the small hills above, contemplating blending them together for the final image.

After about five minutes I was done, so I turned to get my camera bag which was to the side of me. In my peripheral vision, I caught sight of my tripod and camera taking a headfirst dive into the burn. In under a second, I was in the burn fishing them both out, which is probably the fastest I’ve ever dived into water. I was drenched, but more importantly, so were the camera and my Sigma 18-50mm f/2.8 lens. Sure, it’s not the fire depicted in the header image, but water is just as damaging.

I had been shooting on my knees for the last five minutes or so with no movement and a very light wind at times, so how could this have happened? But that is really not the question in this case. The fact of the matter is that it did happen. The only equipment survivors of this were the Smallrig L-Bracket, a Neweer variable ND, the tripod, and my SD card, which I grabbed straight away and left to dry for a few days.

Yes, as you can guess, I was upset, but I would have been even more upset if I didn’t have insurance, as the camera and lens were the only two photographic purchases I had made in the past year. That I suppose doesn’t even matter either, it’s the fact that I had insurance that made the whole episode bearable.

Insurance

Minor drama aside, this kind of thing could happen to anybody and probably has happened to you in some form with your equipment, so we’ve all been there. But have we all been insured? My own insurance company was excellent in their handling of the whole episode, and I had my new camera in just over a week.

My insurance covers me for this type of incident, and I’m glad I took the time to invest in it. Each piece of equipment is listed, and any new piece is added when I purchase it. Does this affect the premium? Well, yes in some cases, but each time I call and work out the finer points of what and where.

Teaching photography at college is my main income, so my policy states that my equipment is not covered when in my main place of work, the college, but is covered outside of this and in foreign countries. This may seem odd to those who have insurance presently, but as policies for your equipment are mainly written for you, this was fair, as it also kept my premiums down. I also just use the college cameras, which keeps my gear safe.

What Insurance Provides

With so many photographic insurance companies out there, how do you choose? Get quotes from them all and compare the policies. See what you are covered for and where the limits are relative to your specific needs. Budget can also be a big factor in choosing the right provider. If this is a factor, read all your quotes again and give your preferred provider a call, as they may be able to guide you in what would be best for you, and perhaps at a lower rate. Speak to providers who are experienced serving photographers, as they ultimately will give you the best advice.

Things to Consider When Seeking Quotes and What Should Be Covered

There are other considerations to be made besides the list below, but as I’m aiming this article at mainly hobbyists so that your peace of mind is kept should anything go wrong (which I hope never does):

• Theft and Loss: How is this covered?
• Damage: What type of damage?
• Coverage on and off-site: Are there any restrictions?
• Depreciation: Old for new?
• Public Liability: Does your photography involve working even part-time with the public?
• Venue Requirements: Some venues will not permit you to photograph without coverage.
• Insurance Excess: How much will you contribute towards replacement?

Always read the fine print. Yes, it can be tedious, but in the end, it’s worth it, so you know where you stand. Here in the UK, some home insurance companies will cover electronic devices including cameras up to a certain value with your home policy. If you are relying on this as your main insurance, I’d recommend checking the value amount and ensuring your photographic equipment is covered, because you may find that in some cases it is not.

Conclusion

Would I recommend insurance for your equipment even as a hobbyist? The answer is a resounding yes, as you never know what could happen. Sure, looking at the negative side is no way to think, but that assurance that you are covered is definitely worth it. Your equipment costs a lot of money to replace, so why wouldn’t you have it insured?

Tik-Tok Photo Trend with Colehearted Photography! – Good Day Sacramento

“Photography,” wrote Susan Sontag in the introduction to photographer Peter Hujar’s 1976 book Portraits of Life and Death, “converts the whole world into a cemetery. Photographers, connoisseurs of beauty, are also – wittingly or unwittingly – the recording-angels of death.”

Sontag’s seminal essay is reprinted in the catalogue – produced in the form of a newspaper – for Peter Hujar: Echoes, an exhibition at the 125 Newbury gallery in New York’s Tribeca neighbourhood. It could hardly be more fitting for a show that turns an unflinching eye on permanence versus evanescence and brings to mind TS Eliot’s lines: “Webster was much possessed by death / And saw the skull beneath the skin.”

Hujar was a mercurial talent who slipped comfortably into the role of outsider. Born in 1934, he was raised first by Ukrainian immigrant grandparents in rural New Jersey then, from the age of 11, by his mother and her boyfriend in New York. It was an abusive household and he left at 16 to fend for himself.

Hujar eventually found safe harbour in the queer avant-garde of downtown New York in the 1970s and early 1980s. His photo “Come Out!!” was created as a recruiting poster for the first gay pride march in June 1970 to commemorate the first anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. His work was underappreciated in his lifetime but is now gathering critical esteem.

“Peter was always around with a camera and always very intense and separate from the group,” says Arne Glimcher, founder and director of 125 Newbury, as he contemplates Hujar’s gleaming black-and-white images. “He took his art very seriously but he was not interested at all in people making him famous. He really shunned that so it hurt his career but it worked for him.

“The body of work is so serious and so unlike anybody else’s. Diane Arbus and people like that were coming up at the same time and they were very flashy and out there but Peter’s work is so different in that the work has compassion. Sometimes I think Arbus’s work victimises the subjects – those photographs were not her world – but this is his world and all of the subjects are treated very lovingly, not cynically, and he’s trying to get the most beautiful aspects out of them.

“He deals with very tough subjects and it was hard then dealing with the subjects. So I wanted to make this show not of the celebrity portraits – Susan Sontag is not in the show – but of these more ordinary people that were friends of his and that he’s photographed in the studio.”

Glimcher, who founded the Pace Gallery in 1960 and represented the artist Paul Thek, who was Hujar’s boyfriend, opened 125 Newbury last year as an experimental space to pursue his own tastes and interests. Visitors who stroll down Broadway and step inside leave the city heat and cacophony of traffic behind to find a cool sanctuary currently populated by Hujar’s ravishingly cinematic prints.

Hujar is best known for portraits of artists, dancers, drag performers, musicians and writers from New York’s bohemian subculture, but Glimcher wanted to do something different. The exhibition contains more than 30 works spanning 1966 to 1985 and combines two strands. First, there are images that Hujar made of friends, lovers and acquaintances who posed for him inside his loft on 12th Street in the East Village.

Second, there are candid pictures that Hujar took while cruising the dilapidated Christopher Street piers on Manhattan’s far West Side (theorist Juan Esteban Munoz described them as a “cruising utopia” for gay men outside the mainstream gaze) and in the Capuchin catacombs of Palermo, Italy, in 1963 on a trip with Thek.

Glimcher says: “This is a show that’s never happened before. Play these slick, beautiful, almost Pan-esque figures against the scrofulitic walls of the buildings on the piers and how they work together and how they tell you about the time, about the secrecy of this world – that’s what fascinated me.”

With that Glimcher walks across the gallery to a wall displaying Gary Schneider in Contortion I and II, both depicting its nude subject in extraordinary positions. He says: “These acrobatic images are really spectacular in that they’re so transformative. Is that a Western Pepper or is that a body? I’m very fond of these. The subject was his assistant printer who has subsequently printed posthumous works.”

Further along is Daniel Schook Sucking Toe – a young male nude with long hair, toe in mouth, eyes gazing unselfconsciously at the camera. Glimcher comments: “It’s a kind of astonishing thing to photograph and it’s not only about a boy sucking toe. It’s about personal intimacy and this is not sensational.

“It’s amazing certain subjects like this don’t come off as shocking or sensational but incredibly composed, printed so beautifully. When you look around, the range of colour in the photographs from charcoal to a kind of sepia – he pulls this kind of rainbow of colour out of black and white.”

Set against youth and beauty are images of decay and intimations of mortality. Cow Slaughter I, Germantown, New York depicts a cow carcass hoisted upside down with a shimmering monumentality. “You can think of [French painter Chaïm] Soutine. You can think of Rembrandt’s ‘Slaughtered Ox’. He did a whole series of animals and they are extremely tender. This is a really tough picture because he could sympathise with the cow. It still has such a sweet face.”

Another picture shows a beaten-up chair, its emptiness registering the absence of the body. Then there are the piers, where gay men cruised and made exquisite art, all long lost to the wrecking ball – yet preserved in Hujar’s prints. Glimcher says: “Here’s artworks, installations, graffiti in the interiors of your piers on these scrofulitic walls. It all comes to life as something extraordinary.”

Oliver Shultz, senior curatorial director, has been listening to the conversation and weighs in: “There’s this moment after Stonewall and before the Aids crisis. The piers are a kind of utopian space and, because they’re on the margins of the city, no one cares what happens there. Unlike gay bars, which are being busted by the cops, you can go and be free.

“A lot of artists did installations in the piers. People painted on the dilapidated surfaces of decaying buildings of the piers. Gordon Matta-Clark did some of his most famous cut-outs, ‘Day’s End’, in the piers. It was this space of radical possibility.”

Hujar was not approaching these subjects as an observer or voyeur but as active participant. Shultz continues: “The photographs bear a very direct relationship to the spaces they document. Yes, they document these spaces but they’re not documentation. Hujar was always so deeply and intimately involved with his subjects.

“That was one of the things that always distinguished his portraits, that he was interacting with them and there was this rapport, this intimacy between he and they. This happens on the piers, too. He wasn’t just walking around photographing people there. He was cruising the piers so he was involved in this life.”

Shultz turns to the images of the Italian catacombs. “That body of work, yes, it’s obviously about death but it’s also about this joy in the materiality of the body. In that way it’s elegiac but also looking to the future, like the persistence of the body through photography, because in fact we all die – even those of us who don’t die untimely deaths from a pandemic or a plague or a horrible illness like Aids. But photography lets us live forever.”

The pictures now feel like a foreshadowing. Hujar died of Aids-related pneumonia in 1987 at the age of 53, one of numerous New York artists cut down by an epidemic that Washington was trying to ignore. His boyfriend at the time was David Wojnarowicz, who would become a leading member of the Aids activist organisation Act Up.

Shultz reflects: “I think Peter’s death in ’87 catalysed some of David’s protests and very impactful public actions on behalf of Aids awareness and policy. Eighty-seven was still relatively early in the epidemic and ‘Silence = death’ as the motto of Act Up was so profound because people weren’t talking about it.

“Outside of the queer community, they were just afraid and were shying away from it until the early 90s and the work of people like David Wojnarowicz. In a funny way, even though Peter wasn’t involved in these overt protests, he really did play a role in galvanising a younger generation of folks in that community to stand up and demand that this be addressed.”

And the pictures persist, entirely of their time and yet entirely timeless. In her introduction to Portraits in Life and Death, Sontag wrote: “Fleshed and moist-eyed friends and acquaintances stand, sit, slouch, mostly lie – and are made to appear to meditate on their own mortality … Peter Hujar knows that portraits in life are always, also, portraits in death.”

• Peter Hujar: Echoes is on display at 125 Newbury in New York until 28 October

Top: Johan Orellana, Emma and Melissa. Image courtesy Johan Orellana, copyright 2022. Bottom: Johan Orellana, Meylin and Dayana. Image courtesy Johan Orellana, copyright 2021.

In Johan Orellana’s photograph Emma and Melissa, two arms meet in the middle of the frame, hands embracing tightly. Each is sheathed in a long velvet glove that stretches up past the elbow. The gloves—shared between the couple, one apiece— fit snugly. Beneath their iridescent surface, one can almost make out the contours of muscle and bone. The figure on the left (Emma, presumably) wears a shimmery silver dress; Melissa has opted for jeans and a tank top. They dance, swinging in a circle. A large pile of bags stuffed into a corner fills the background of the image. This party is elegant and messy, casual and kitsch.

 This photograph is one in a series of Orellana’s images centering intimacy in FUSION, running August 1 to Sept. 29 at the downtown co-working space KNOWN. The show is curated by Omola Studio for Kim Weston’s Wábi Gallery, which is temporarily exhibiting work at KNOWN while its permanent location is under construction. Other locations have included the Mitchell Branch Library and Ely Center of Contemporary Art.  

Artists in the exhibition include Saint Phifer, Susan Clinard, Orellana, Jeff Ostergren, MO, and Ronald Ferrucci. While the show is relatively small, the selection is wide-ranging, and includes painting, photography, sculpture, and collage. At times, this expansive scope can come at the cost of coherence, but for curator Mosho ‘MO’ Olagunju, such variance is precisely the point.  

“It’s a mix of ideas,” said Olagunju, the founder of Omola Studio, who has several paintings included in the show. “I want the viewer to be able to find something on display that they can resonate with.”

Paintings by Jeff Ostergren. Left: Woman with Parasol (Abilify). Right: Copse in the Head (Blue).

Olagunju noted that while KNOWN is not a typical white-walled gallery—works are installed throughout the hallways and alcoves of the fourth-floor office space—he finds the space conducive to displaying such a variety of art. “One of the tenets of a co-working space is about the crossing of ideas,” he said. In conceiving of FUSION, Olagunju considered “what it would mean to reflect that through an exhibition of a mix of artists across different mediums.”

Four works from New Haven-based painter Jeff Ostergren stand out in particular from this mix. Ostergren’s work, which has been regularly exhibited across Connecticut and featured in several international galleries, examines “the intertwined histories of pharmaceuticals and color.”

In Woman with Parasol (Abilify), a figure in a pink blouse and black skirt stands in the middle of a field. Rain pours down and she appears to shiver—arms wrapped tightly around her torso. Her umbrella, while offering some reprieve from the deluge, is painted with a set of large eyes which glare down at the woman. A yellow path curves off into the distance. Despite the vibrant, saturated colors, the mood is somber.

The composition is based off a scene from a 2012 television commercial for the antipsychotic drug Abilify, which Ostergren has reinscribed in his characteristic “pharma-pointilist” style. A vivid matrix of pill-shaped dots form the scene. Each of these capsules is based on the color, size, and shape of a real medication, and Ostergren physically mixes these medications into his pigments. 

The materials list for the painting, cataloged on Ostergren’s website, includes Aricept, Aspirin, Claritin, Lamotrigine, Lunesta, Luvox, Meclizin Hydrochloride, Oxycontin, Pantaprazole, Xanax, and Zoloft. Drugs have long influenced artistic production—perhaps seen most readily in psychedelic art—but Ostergren takes this a step further, physically imbuing his paintings with actual pharmaceuticals.

Beyond Ostergren’s conceptual rigor, the paintings themselves are technically impressive. “I wanted Jeff’s works to be in their own space because I felt like his work really deserves the time to be sat with,” Olagunju said. Standing in front of the modestly sized canvases—each about two by three feet—viewers are forced to reflect on the visual economy of the pharmaceuticals industry. 

But one just as easily gets lost in the fantastic textures of Ostergren’s pictures. His repeating rows of lozenges are precise without being rote. They almost look like textiles.

Susan Clinard, Journey Together. 

A small, subdued sculpture from Susan Clinard, one of several multimedia works of hers in the show, balances out Ostergren’s colorful scenes. In the piece, entitled Journey Together, two unpainted ceramic busts are held gently by a rough-hewn wooden box. The figures appear exhausted, eyes closed. One leans its head on the other’s shoulder. 

Details are sparse—just enough to define the fatigue in their faces and a few wrinkles in their clothes —but there’s a whole story in this small frame. They have stopped to rest, cradled by the timber frame in which they are mounted, and soon they will continue.

 “I think the exhibition is really just for art-enjoyers, art-seekers, to come and see the work that is being made in the city,” said Oalgunju. “When I was thinking of FUSION, I thought about how, as individuals, we’re not homogenous.” 

Wandering around KNOWN, not every piece will land for everyone. But across all the works, something is sure to stick.