Amani Willett’s monograph “Disquiet” has just been published by Damiani. He was recently featured in the books Street Photography Now and New York: In Color and is a long-term member of the iN-PUBLiC collective of photographers. His pictures have been exhibited both nationally and internationally, and his work has been featured in such publications as American Photography, Newsweek and The New York Times. He holds an MFA from the School of Visual Art and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

I interviewed and featured Amani’s ‘Disquiet’ in Issue 5. The book was just released by Damiani and looks fantastic. I sat down with him last week in Prospect Park to talk about the book, editing, shooting street and his future projects, including ‘The Disappearance of Joseph Plummer’ which looks very interesting. Be sure to spend some time on his website. It’s very nicely done.

You can purchase Disquiet HERE. 

(Note: This was the second time I attempted to record an interview outdoors. The first attempt didn’t go so well (Sorry Amy Lombard!) I think I’m ok with some ambient noise and sort of enjoy the “being in public” aspect to doing interviews but ultimately it might just be too distracting. All feedback welcome!)

You can listen to it directly through the player below or DOWNLOAD it. Subscribe through RSS or iTunes.

From ‘Disquiet’

From ‘‘The Disappearance of Joseph Plummer’

From ‘Street’

“My siblings and I spent much of our childhoods traveling with our parents. They kept us in backpacks and kept us asking questions, opening up our sense of the grandeur and complexities of every community we encountered.” – Kitra Cahana

©Kitra Cahana – via ‘Joy, Compassion and Fulfillment: Kitra Cahana’s Spiritual Transformation’ [LightBox]

What do you do?

For my entire professional career I’ve always worked on side projects, whether it was ill-conceived screenplays or photography and publishing these days. I’m fortunate that my day job involves something I’m passionate about so it’s a little easier these days to explain what I do, but for many photographers, artists and younger people it’s a tough conversation. I got to thinking about this after reading an interesting article by Elizabeth Spiers in Medium: 

Among the niceties and travails of meeting people for the first time, there’s no more loaded question than “What do you do?” I would almost prefer to respond to “What is your favorite sexual position?” or “How do you feel about your mother?” because people would be less likely to read into my answer. I have European friends who loathe the question because they think it’s coded language that only means one thing: How much money do you make? But that’s only part of it. It means that, and several other things. It can also mean: Is what you do significant? Do you have control over what you do? Where are you in the hierarchy of your company? Are you allowed to be creative in your job? Does your job give you status, professionally and personally? and so on.

Answering that question in photoland can be even more difficult, something I touched on with Carl Gunhouse in the latest podcast. As I’ve said in the past, my own photography is so entwined with LPV at this point that I feel it’s all apart of “what I do.” Spiers went on to use Tim Hetherington as an example:

There’s a danger in conflating work with self, even if work has consumed everything we do. In Sebastian Junger’s recent documentary on the late photographer and documentary filmmaker Tim Hetherington, Which Way to the Front Line?, Junger chronicles Hetherington’s work in West Africa, Afghanistan, and Misrata, Libya, where he was eventually killed. Hetherington did extremely important work, and in his documentary, Diary, he explores the tension between his life at home and his life in the field. Just before he left for Libya, he expressed reservations about continuing to work in conflict zones. It had cannibalized other parts of his life. He wanted to pursue a long-term relationship with his girlfriend. He wanted a family. He wanted to explore doing different kinds of work. But he decided to go back into the field one last time and didn’t come back.

It would be disingenuous to argue that Hetherington’s work wasn’t part of who he was, but as Junger’s documentary so beautifully illustrates, it wasn’t all there was of Tim Hetherington.

Producing good work has many benefits, and it certainly contributes to a stronger sense of identity and purpose. But fullness of self is about more than that. It’s about those ancillary but more direct questions: What are our interests? What are our values? Where did we come from, and where are we now? All of these things are qualities that can develop in tandem with work, but they’d probably develop even if we had a job and not a career.

Now, what if I ask “What do you do on the internet?” How do incorporate the internet into your photography? Whatever your feelings about the internet and how it impacts photography, it certainly seems to be a topic that stirs up strong opinions in people. I recently started using Flickr again because I felt it was a safer outlet to share random stuff. Is there a hierarchy? Personal website for your best, Tumblr/blog for the flow, Flickr for the archive, Twitter for the news chatter, Facebook to prove you still exist and say happy birthday to people you barely know. That’s probably a little simplistic but my point is that we can always use the tools in smarter ways. It’s something I think about often which is probably why I was so fascinated by Brad Troemel’s latest essay “Athletic Aesthetics:

Visual artists, poets, and musicians are releasing free content online faster than ever before. There is an athleticism to these aesthetic outpourings, with artists taking on the creative act as a way of exercising other muscle groups, bodybuilding a personal brand or self-mythology, a concept or a formal vocabulary. Images, music, and words become drips in a pool of art sweat, puddling online for all to view. The long-derided notion of the “masterpiece” has reached its logical antithesis with the aesthlete: a cultural producer who trumps craft and contemplative brooding with immediacy and rapid production.

I’m sure that essay will cause a few rage blackouts, but there’s plenty to think about. Or you could just skip it and not think about it. I do that sometimes. If you do read it, you’ll find this quote from Franco Berardi: 

Today psychopathology reveals itself ever more clearly as a social epidemic and, more precisely, to be a socio-communicational one. If you want to survive you have to be competitive, and if you want to be competitive you must be connected, receive and process continuously an immense and growing amount of data. This provokes a constant attentive stress, a reduction of the time available for affectivity … If we bring this analysis to the internet we see two movements — the expansion of storage and the compression of time — making online work so stressful.

Can you relate?. I mean, I’m sure if you’re like me you often ask “what’s the point?” Why share anything? Why participate? What’s going on here? Perhaps thinking about it doesn’t do much good. It can be exhausting. Why not leave it to the experts like Jaron Lanier. I haven’t read his new book but I did read this excerpt in IO9 which made me realize that I probably should read the book.

The clamor for online attention only turns into money for a token minority of ordinary people, but there is another new, tiny class of people who always benefit. Those who keep the new ledgers, the giant computing services that model you, spy on you, and predict your actions, turn your life activities into the greatest fortunes in history. Those are concrete fortunes made of money.

If there’s a fortune to be made publishing an independent photography magazine, then I’m certainly doing something wrong. But it’s not really about that anyway, is it? Reviewing all these quotes is making me tired all over again so I’ll wrap it up with a few quotes from n 1′s essay “Cultural Revolution:’

 Challenging art and radical thought, with no hope of a large audience truly susceptible to being challenged, slip easily into administering “provocativeness” to the jadedly unprovokable. The idea of an avant-garde leading a general charge becomes, as it has, impossible; the infantry of a would-be popular audience has deserted, and an officer corps with no troops merely redesigns its uniforms according to cycles of fashion. Squabbles over medals and rank take the place of what Gramsci called the war of position; cultural hegemony?—?a prevailing climate of opinion?—?is left, uncontested, to capitalism.

And then:

Young people might give up hopes of gainful employment through art or serious writing?—?without giving up the production or consumption of those things. Holding down uninspiring and ill-paid day-jobs, they would huddle together in select neighborhoods of big cities and devote their evenings and weekends to culture (and laundry, shopping, and cleaning). This doesn’t sound so bad; it sounds in fact like the cozily disappointed existence, streaked with fear of unemployment, of half the people we know.

 Links of Note

The romance of narrative is perpetually at odds with reality,” Mr. Roth wrote. Despite this, many photographers “routinely submit the intrinsic factuality of the medium to the shaping and manipulation of storytelling. The ‘road trip,’ the ‘cycle of life,’ the ‘coming-of-age,’ ‘the war story’: all these are staples of photographic constructions. - “A White Road and an Ambiguous Narrative” [LENS]

©Ivan Sigal 

…after two years taking pictures of Soviet and post-Soviet urban spaces and leisure facilities, he declared the project a failure: the images were uninspiring and his own narrative struck him as untruthful, contrived and oversimplified. So, he explained recently, he made a vow to himself: “First images, then ideas.” He would “photograph, learn, absorb, then go back to my work and look for patterns.

John Edwin Mason’s great ‘Tribute to David Goldblatt in PDN:’ 

Finally, Goldblatt and Evans also share a photographic sensibility. In both there is a sense of distance, of an analytical step backward, that, in Goldblatt’s case, never threatens to become disinterest. There is also, in both photographers, an instinct to make understated images that refuse to draw attention to themselves, images that are much more about the subject than about the man behind the lens.

A quote from Raphael Rubinstein I found by read “…I’m going to take to the air and get vertical an interview with Nick Faust:”

There is, however, an excellent corrective to tendentious, cherry-picked accounts. I would encourage anyone curious about retracing the tangled lines of recent art to spend a few hours paging through back issues of art magazines from 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. There you can glimpse the raw footage of art history in all its messy, contentious, inchoate glory. Appearing side by side are ads for shows of forgotten artists at high-profile galleries and ads for debuts of now-famous figures in long-defunct venues; page after page of exhibition reviews written in the moment, before meaning is frozen, and perhaps never read since but preserving within their columns of dense type a sentence or phrase that might forever change your sense of an artist’s work or of the period.

Amani Olu’s advice to recent MFA grads: 

12. Look out for your artist friends.

13. Respect everyone, even the intern; you never know who will rise to power.

14. Do everything with grace. Just because someone is being a jerk does not mean you have to respond in kind.

15. If you are with an associate and you run into an acquaintance, always make an introduction. Otherwise, it is awkward for everyone.

16. Do not alienate people with unprofessional behavior. If you have no place to hang your hat, then how do you expect to show your work?

17. Stay in touch with the people who have supported your work in the past, especially in the early years. It is the right thing to do, and you never know when you will need their help in the future.

18. Be honest about what you want from people and your expectations.

19. Get it in writing.

20. Stay humble and hungry. To quote Sean Combs, “Treat every project like it was your first.

©Janna Ireland

When I moved to Los Angeles for graduate school in 2011, I began making photographs at my husband’s grandfather’s house in the San Fernando Valley. Once home to seven people, the large house is now inhabited by my husband’s grandfather alone. The ball machine on the tennis court is overrun with crickets. The pool is faithfully cleaned, but rarely receives swimmers. Many rooms have gone unchanged in the decade and a half since my husband’s grandmother died. Particularly intriguing to me is a suite of four now-unused rooms at the front of the house—an entryway, a parlor, a formal dining room, and a half-bath—all done up in shades of pink, still and well-dusted as period rooms in a museum. Filled with opulent furniture, silk flowers, and delicate figurines of porcelain and glass, they seem to me deliberately feminine rooms, designed for entertaining, not living. I made more photographs in that part of the house than any other. – Janna Ireland, The Spotless Mirror [via LENSCRATCH]

“SELF PUBLISHING: NO LONGER A VANITY AFFAIR” says NPAA: 

What I say to people now is, you can make a book tonight,” says Gittins. “For less than the cost of a pizza, just make a book and get it back and see what you think. Do you like the paper? The printing? Don’t think of it as, “The Book,” think of it as a maquette. You can send that out to publishers, too. It may not be the be-all, end-all design, but it shows the work curated in a way that makes sense.

Missy Prince says: 

I think photography and literature are both driven by the impulse to show something about life, to give our observations some kind of form. There was a time when I wanted to write. The desire isn’t so strong now, but I can see a connection between it and the role that photography plays in my life. Both involve imposing a narrative onto experience, noticing details, making connections, figuring out what is important or interesting about a situation and trying to put it into a form that makes you feel something. So much of the literature that moves me has a wandering theme. Stories from the road, people on the move, on the run, or looking for something, the recurrence of the familiar amid uncertainty and change. Such work is reflective of the spirit that made it. It carries the charge of life, always moving, always searching. My process is very much about wandering, being out in the world and coming back with pieces of a story that is hopefully held together by the thread of my own sensibility. I don’t know exactly what I will find when I set out, and that is the point. Photography, like writing, is a means of discovery, a filling in of (or working around) blanks, a fleshing out of ideas or feelings.

An old quote from Philip-Lorca diCorcia that I like: 

Reality has become a parallel universe with photographers returning with different versions of what it truly looks like.

“Photography by Sid Kaplan, a Master Printer, Emerges From Obscurity:”

I was more interested in taking pictures, and most of the time, I just didn’t pursue it,” Sid, 75, said. “I don’t like that whole system. Besides, to publish a book you have to be able to schmooze, and I just don’t have the technique.

©Gloria Baker Feinstein

I think it’s safe to say we all have a fascination with the aging process – how our faces and bodies change over the years. That reason alone was sufficient for me to begin this process of updating the pictures from “The Space Between.” - Gloria Baker Feinstein via [LENSCRATCH]

The return of Jeffrey Ladd: 

Much of what gets immediate attention in the book world I perceive as almost too well thought out or just extremely clever. It looks complete and well designed yet it leaves me wondering why I should ever pick it up twice. I sense almost a distrust of photography on the part of many bookmakers now. But I am also a self-described dinosaur. I want the pictures to make me fall under their spell when they are irreducible in form, not by the ideas laid upon them.

Paul Kopeikin says: 

The works I show together don’t necessarily have anything in common, except for the fact that I find them significant,” he says. “It’s my little kingdom. One of my clients is on the committee of a museum, and other committee members were calling him crazy for buying outside of the zone they deemed safe. ‘Why’d you buy that?’ they’d demand. I told him what to say the next time they ask — and it’s the only answer I think is valid. ‘Because I like it.’

Life Lessons with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: 

…one of my favorite quotes is from the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: “Talent hits the target no one else can hit; genius hits the target no one else can see.” I think the key to seeing the target no one else can see is in being patient, waiting for it to appear so you can do the right thing, not just the expedient thing. Learning to wait is one of my greatest accomplishments as I’ve gotten older.

David Kasnic in RAW File: 

I got into the idea of living your work, which was a really bad idea,” explains Kasnic. “I always thought that shooting party stuff was new and no one had done it. Then I went to Brooklyn and figured out everyone was doing it.

©Erika Huffman – via [Fraction Magazine Issue 50]

Jeff L. Rosenheim, curator, The MET: 

After 25 years, the enthusiasm and excitement are still palpable when Rosenheim discusses his latest exhibition, and the future of the field. “I think we’re going to continue to have breakthroughs and new bodies of work,” he says. “I think there are photographers who are right before our eyes who we don’t even know about yet.

Ian MacKaye says: 

I think that people are constantly thinking about capturing things that they’re not actually present for the moment they’re trying to capture. I’m quite sure of this. I think it’s insane how many pictures have to be taken these days. We have to realize there’s a level of documentation that’s just chatter, it’s noise, and beyond that, people who are truly documenting are going to have to find a way to puncture that.

Harvey Stein interviewed by Erik Kim: 

One of my guiding principles has always been to photograph for myself, to please me, and not to play to the market. I want my work to be honest, real, genuine. If others appreciate it, great, that’s a nice bonus. The work rewards me, not the market place or other people’s opinions.

 Bottom of the Page

• Controversial copyright framework receives Royal Assent [BJP]
• “Too Much Is Enough”: A Talk on Garry Winogrand by Tod Papageorge [SFMOMA] 
• Flash Forward – Emerging Photographers 2013 [Magenta] 
• At Home With Elliott Erwitt [Nowness]
• Redheaded Peckerwood, III and some thoughts on photobook editions [Joerg Colberg]
• Al Jazeera’s New African Photography [Okay Africa] 
• Hurtling towards photogeddon or why taking your photos off the net is possibly the worst thing you can do if you want to retain copyright [duckrabbit]
• Janette Beckman on What It Was Like to Photograph the Punk Scene [The Cut]
• RECREATING THE WALK by Jeffrey Ladd [hatjecantz]
• Announcing the Six Finalists for the 2013 Aperture Portfolio Prize [Aperture]
• Issue #15 of 100 Words
• Welcome to the New BagNews Originals [BagNews Notes]

“In 2005, author David Foster Wallace was asked to give the commencement address to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College. However, the resulting speech didn’t become widely known until 3 years later, after his tragic death. It is, without a doubt, some of the best life advice we’ve ever come across, and perhaps the most simple and elegant explanation of the real value of education. We made this video, built around an abridged version of the original audio recording, with the hopes that the core message of the speech could reach a wider audience who might not have otherwise been interested. However, we encourage everyone to seek out the full speech (because, in this case, the book is definitely better than the movie). -The Glossary”

Carl Gunhouse was born in 1976 in Boston, Massachusetts, but he spent his formative years in suburban New Jersey. Growing up, he developed a love/hate relationship with suburbia that led to the angst familiar to most suburban youth. With this unrest came the discovery of the anger and DIY ethics of hardcore punk rock. Yearning to be part of the hardcore scene, he started photographing bands, which began his love of photography.

To escape suburban New Jersey, Carl enrolled at Fordham University in New York City. While completing a BA in European History at Fordham, he discovered that photography could be something to pursue a career so he decided to simultaneously complete a BFA in Photography. After going on to earn his MA in American History from Fordham, Carl concentrated on street photography. In hopes of developing and refining his photography work, Carl completed his MFA in Photography at Yale University.

Since graduating, he has found a great deal of personal satisfaction teaching as an Adjunct at Montclair State University, Cooper Union, Marymount Manhattan College, and Nassau Community College. He has also gained some renown for his straightforward writing on photography for such web sites as Searching For the Light, Lay Flat, and American Suburb X. His photography has been shown nationally and internationally. As an artist, he has produced a body of landscape and portrait photographs by driving around the United States to expose the little visual bits of America that give voice to our shared history and experience. Carl currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

I have a confession to make. I actually only understood about %50 of Carl’s art references but I laughed at all of them. It was an educational conversation. Where to even start? Topics include, learning from Tod Papageorge, Trevor Paglan is the best contemporary photographer, Alec Soth is finally coming into his own, the Chelsea photography scene, critical writing on the internet, AIPAD, street photography, staying inspired when there’s so much good stuff out there, not getting depressed about the internet, the internet is awesome and exciting, the photography ghetto, the Bushwick art scened, just making photographs, and a list of references I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to digest.

It’s always a great conversation when you can leave inspired and hopefully just a little smarter. Be sure to check out Carl’s reviews on his blog, his photographs on his site and of course his Tumblr.

Also, if you’re enjoying these podcasts, please consider a digital subscription. It’s $7.99 for the year and you’ll be entered into the end of the year photobook raffle. We also B&H and Amazon affiliate links you can use, which for those of you that don’t know gives us a small percentage on all purchases. It’s apart of the indie publishing mix these days.

You can listen to it directly through the player below or DOWNLOAD it. Subscribe through RSS or iTunes.

Photographs Carl Gunhouse

I met Tom a few years ago at an opening at Lunasa, a small bar in the East Village. I started following his photography and over the years he has shown me a few of his maquettes, which he made by hand. I’ve always been impressed with his patience and dedication to the craft. He’s in no hurry and is one of those guys that you’ll probably always find roaming around the streets.

We had a good conversation at his apartment in Bushwick, although I did cringe at a few of my riffs. Recording these conversations has been a humbling and illuminating process. I’ve decided that I’m going to let them run mostly uninterrupted from now on and just let the conversation flow.

See more of Tom’s work on his website

You can listen to it directly through the player below or DOWNLOAD it. Subscribe through RSS or iTunes.

Photographs ©Tom Starkweather

“The internet, for lack of a better metaphor, makes up the branches of the tree,” he says. “But newspapers have centuries-long traditions of being the roots of the tree. If the roots of tree rot and crumble the rest of the tree will fall with it.” – Will Steacy, “Philly Inquirer’s Hard Years Are Microcosm of Newspapers’ Long Goodbye” [Wired Raw File]

The bombing at the Boston Marathon has dominated coverage in the US the last two weeks and naturally photography played a very important role. It was almost too much to follow, but it did bring up some issues that we’re going to thinking about more in the future. The biggest concern for me is the way that Reddit and 4Chan used photography to hunt for suspects in plain view on the internet. Not surprisingly they pointed fingers at innocent people. There were condemnations but at this point I don’t see how this type of behavior can be curbed. I followed much of the news on Twitter and it was a disaster. The amount of misinformation flying around was ridiculous and worse, much of it was coming from supposed reputable outlets.

I’ve listened to a couple of podcasts with Dougla Rushkoff who has a new book out called “PRESENT SHOCK: When Everything Happens Now.” I haven’t read it yet, but I’m going to. It seems more relevant than ever.

Rushkoff identifies the five main ways we’re struggling, as well as how the best of us are thriving in the now:

1. Narrative collapse – the loss of linear stories and their replacement with both crass reality programming and highly intelligent post-narrative shows like The Simpsons. With no goals to justify journeys, we get the impatient impulsiveness of the Tea Party, as well as the unbearably patient presentism of the Occupy movement. The new path to sense-making is more like an open game than a story.
2. Digiphrenia – how technology lets us be in more than one place – and self – at the same time. Drone pilots suffer more burnout than real-world pilots, as they attempt to live in two worlds – home and battlefield – simultaneously. We all become overwhelmed until we learn to distinguish between data flows (like Twitter) that can only be dipped into, and data storage (like books and emails) that can be fully consumed.
3. Overwinding – trying to squish huge timescales into much smaller ones, like attempting to experience the catharsis of a well-crafted, five-act play in the random flash of a reality show; packing a year’s worth of retail sales expectations into a single Black Friday event – which only results in a fatal stampede; or – like the Real Housewives – freezing one’s age with Botox only to lose the ability to make facial expressions in the moment. Instead, we can “springload” time into things, like the “pop-up” hospital Israel sent to Tsunami-wrecked Japan.
4. Fractalnoia – making sense of our world entirely in the present tense, by drawing connections between things – sometimes inappropriately. The conspiracy theories of the web, the use of Big Data to predict the direction of entire populations, and the frantic effort of government to function with no “grand narrative.” But also the emerging skill of “pattern recognition” and the efforts of people to map the world as a set of relationships called TheBrain – a grandchild of McLuhan’s “global village”.
5. Apocalypto – the intolerance for presentism leads us to fantasize a grand finale. “Preppers” stock their underground shelters while the mainstream ponders a zombie apocalypse, all yearning for a simpler life devoid of pings, by any means necessary. Leading scientists – even outspoken atheists – prove they are not immune to the same apocalyptic religiosity in their depictions of “the singularity” and “emergence”, through which human evolution will surrender to that of pure information.

Links of Note

©Vitas Luckus

Meanwhile, Mr. Luckus grew into a lightning-rod figure in the region’s art scene, a man whose brutal honesty, seemingly boundless creativity and aggressive empathy had the power to both divide and inspire the bohemian community in which he lived. Socially, he was “brilliant at certain moments, impossible at others,” the journalist Herman Hoeneveld wrote in “The Hard Way,” a 1994 book of Mr. Luckus’s work. “He had a unique inspiring and stimulating effect on others, and would work for days on end with a minimum of sleep and alcohol. - Vitas Luckus, Once a Luminary of the Soviet Photography Scene [LENS]

Sean O’Hagan on “How photographers joined the self-publishing revolution:”

Having long since shaken off the kind of stigma that still attaches to, say, self-published fiction, the self-published photobook is currently a mini-phenomenon within the bigger thriving culture of photography book publishing. The wider context for this DIY approach is the availability of relatively cheap digital technology and the attendant rise of social media-led networking, which allows photographers to disseminate, market and sell their own books without recourse to the traditional artist-publisher relationship. […] In an age when the alternatives to mainstream publishing are increasingly affordable and creatively liberating, self-published photography in all its different forms may yet become the norm.

Peter van Agtmael on “Revisiting Memory and Preserving Legacy: Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros:”  

The portrait of the journalist as hero is at-once seductive and misleading; after all, as journalists, we’re trained to probe beyond the societal and self-created narratives. In the wake of a colleague’s death, objectivity can feel like an impossibility. As time passes, a more complex and nuanced reality can find space to slide into focus. As Christopher Anderson explained: “Tim was really smart and really talented but he was a real human being too. He was so opposed to this idea of photographer as myth. It was kind of an obsession with him. To know he was being made into a myth was totally contrary to who he was. Part of him would be appalled, part would be silently flattered, and as the professional story teller it would make sense to him.

PDN’s “5 Financial Steps To Launching A Photo Career”

I think it is good to have an out,” such as a part-time job, says photojournalist Michael Christopher Brown. “This also allows one to spend more time and energy taking pictures of things they are genuinely interested in or passionate about, as opposed to being a professional photographer, which is time consuming and draining on one’s creativity.

I am intrigued with other people’s photographic recording of their lives both for the generic quality they possess — the family and social rituals, studio portraits, vacation shots — and for the feeling of sadness and nostalgia that acquiring other people’s memories provokes in me. I feel somehow that it should be illegal to own them, yet since they are for sale it might as well be me who buys them. – Lisa Koken, ‘Sewn Found Photos’ [LENSCRATCH] 

“Second Acts: Why “Rediscovered Artists” Are the Art Market’s New Darlings:”

We had a collector come in and ask about an artist we were showing,” said one art dealer who asked to remain anonymous. When the dealer told him the artist was close to 40, and had taken some time off before getting her MFA, the collector lost interest. “He thought she couldn’t be a true artist if she was starting so late in life.

“Adrian Fisk: Capturing the Fearlessness of the Youth:”

The beauty of digital cameras is that it costs nothing to take a picture, so shoot as much as you can. Like the athlete who runs every day, you need to do the same with taking photographs. There are lots of websites you can show your work and if you pursue it hard, have a talent, people will begin to notice your pictures. But it should be noted that never has the photography business been so tough as it is today. Right now it is going through a process in which all media is becoming digital and conventional magazines and newspapers simply don’t have the money to pay photographers. The market is flooded with young photographers all hoping to make a living from their hard work. This is not to put any aspiring photographers off the idea of trying to enter the professional photo world, it is simply to make it clear you are trying to break into an exceptionally tough business and it’s good to know this first and not be blinded by the romance of becoming a photographer. I am a firm believer that like anything in life, if you really believe you can do it, then you will do it.

“I am frequently asked by people who have not seen my work why I spend my life documenting one simple place like Decatur County, Georgia,” he wrote. “People confuse simple with small; they’re not the same thing.” – Paul Kwicki, “A Life Sold on Photography” [LENS]

Interview with Sean Stewart on ilovethatphoto.net:

I’ve fallen in love with photographs that occupy this gray area between mistake and ‘useful’ photography. I usually venture out with the intention of making a traditional photograph, either portrait or landscape that’s effective in telling a story or reaching an audience that can understand it. Instead, I often end up with images where the language is broken and the narrative is non-existent. By sequencing these one-offs, or mistakes, together in a series, it creates confusion (not intentionally), and elicits a response that is unlike the expected. For me, photo-journalism has the same problem. Photography is almost never factual, but it’s there as an aid our understanding of a fact.

Joerg Colberg, Reviews: After the Threshold by Sandi Haber Fifield:

Photography’s immediacy allows it to operate in pairs, triplets, or even larger groups. The larger the group, the trickier it gets – after all, the human brain does require a small amount of time to take in a single image. But that amount of time is small compared with how long it takes to take in a video, or listen to just enough of a piece of music to be moved by it. Two photographs next to each other thus manage to “speak” in ways that two videos or pieces of music never could. Use three of four photographs, and you get a little sequence that almost operates like a melody, a little line of music that hints at something larger, but that (potentially) triggers a reaction that results from something beyond the individual notes.

Christopher Schreck:

I just don’t think there’s any sense in shovelling sand against the tide. As far as my own work existing online, I think it’s important to have one central location – my website – where things are presented intentionally. I feel like I’m responsible for that much – beyond that, it’s really out of my hands. That lack of control can be a strange thing, for sure, but it can also be enlightening. Personally, I get something out of seeing how the content I produce can end up in these strange corners of the internet, in contexts I never could have predicted. It gives me a different perspective on what I do. I also think that observing how images function online can be instructive in understanding how people respond to art. If anything, it tends to refute the idea that a given work might ever have a ‘correct’ reading or stable meaning, which is something I’m very interested in.

“Alec Soth on Wandering, Storytelling and Robert Adams vs. Weegee:”

LBM Dispatches,” a series of short newspapers Soth and writer Brad Zeller are creating, which are published by Soth’s company Little Brown Mushroom, grew out of “the desire to be a suburban newspaper photographer,” Soth said. To create the newspapers, Soth and Zellar pick a place, then go and tell a story about that community. Quickly after they return from reporting trips, they print and release the newspapers. Soth noted his appreciation for the immediacy of publishing work so quickly, and for the processes of self-assigning and self-imposing deadlines.

©Jenn Ackerman

“Most of the time in winter you’re running from your car to the store,” Ms. Ackerman said. “You don’t stand in the middle of winter. You do that in summer. You stand and look at the sun, and that’s acceptable. There was a connection that I was able to make with people that were willing to do that.” – Jenn Ackerman, ‘Frozen in Place and Time’ [LENS]

Blake Andrews on Soth’s Portland Lecture:

Soth loves lists. His former business card is one long list, and I think he uses lists to guide his photo projects, not exactly as checklists but as rough guides. So he opened the lecture with a list. I think it was called Portland Lecture 4/19 or something similar, though I don’t remember exactly. There was The Eggleston Question. Robert Adams Vs. Weegee, John Cage and Ping Pong, Looking For Love, etc. There were about 15 items total but I could only write a few down before he was on to something else. Most of them remained unexplored. Each time someone asked a question it would trigger some brainstorm that he’d already considered. A folder on his desktop listed a few hundred of them roughly by topic. And inside each one were the bare bone graphics supporting a small train of thought. We’d watch him dig around through various files until he found the proper one, then launch into a 5 minute presentation. Adams/Weegee triggered one, as did Eggleston. We never got to John Cage and Ping Pong. For someone so focused on narrative, the lecture came off as something approaching the opposite. It took its structural cue from narrative’s enemy, Hyperlinking. That’s the form of the web and the trending structure of much creative content.

Romke Hoogwaerts:

In my essay I argue that, without discourse, art loses density. I set up the interview blog to begin with so that art online wasn’t just re-blogs, “likes” and comments, but had some real sentiment and context to feed the viewer’s imagination and understanding of the art. In the introduction I’m talking about art that rarely leaves the Internet, because it’s seen as inherently amateurish, valueless or net-kitschy. We can freely self-educate now and as a result there’s a wealth of brilliant artists online, getting next to no real exposure. They deserve it! Ultimately, this problem really gets me going; there’s so much to talk about that hasn’t entered contemporary art discourse yet.

Tom Griggs ‘On the Money Part II:’

While art institutions benefit from limiting the field, art photographers continue to search for ways in. The strategies used in the commercial market to stand out have begun to overlap with many current art photographer strategies for navigating the art market. The result is that fine art photography seems more blatantly a business than ever before, with similar dynamics to the commercial field and photographers employing similar strategies to stand out in the crowd. Flyers, leave-behinds, sleek websites, the right (i.e. expensive) gear for creating salable prints, and the co-ordination of fonts across publicity materials. We talk openly of our “brand.”

Bottom of the Page

• Mark Steinmetz and the Winogrand influence [Wayne Bremser]
• ‘Genius in colour: Why William Eggleston is the world’s greatest photographer’ [The Independent] 
• ‘Nearly Naked Women + Tumblr + Excellent Photography = Success’ [A Photo Editor]
• ‘Protecting the Right to Photograph, or Not to Be Photographed’ [LENS]
• ‘SOME THOUGHTS ON GOING VIRAL’ [Ben Roberts]
• 2013 PDN’s 30 on Tumblr [PDN]
• Radiate Magazine Issue 4

 Natan Dvir (b. 1972, Nahariya) is an Israeli photographer who focuses on the human aspects of political, social and cultural issues. He received his MBA from Tel Aviv University and his MFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts (NY), after which he became a faculty member at the International Center for Photography (ICP). Natan is based in New York City and photographs around the world represented by Polaris Images agency and Anastasia Photo gallery.

Natan’s series ‘Coming Soon’ has been circulating widely around the web, from blogs to mainstream outlets. His solo show at Anastasia Photo debuted on March 15th and will close on May 19th. Be sure to check it out if you’re on the Lower East Side. We’ve been in touch over the years, so it was finely nice to sit down and chat about his work.

You can listen to it directly through the player below or DOWNLOAD it. Subscribe through RSS or iTunes.

©Natan Dvir From ‘Coming Soon’

©Natan Dvir From ‘Coming Soon’

©Natan Dvir From ‘Eighteen’

©Natan Dvir From ‘Eighteen’

Uncle Charlie was my favorite uncle. He’s my godfather. My grandfather was a grade-A hood, hustling, pimping women, abusive. My mother got out, but Uncle Charlie never did. My mother made sure I had an education. I went to art school. In 1981, I started realizing that my uncle was an interesting person to take pictures of, and it became my family album. Charlie is fifty-one years old now and his life is a mess. He blames his kids, he blames his ex-wife, he blames my mother—he thinks he is the ultimate victim. I know enough about his life to know how he got there, but emotionally I can’t cut him any slack. I know it’s because he had an abusive childhood, but that doesn’t give you the right to fuck up your kids. Still, you know, I feel for him. He’ll always be my Uncle Charlie.” – Marc Ansin, CENTER AWARDS: Curator’s Choice Awards 1st Place [LENSCRATCH]

LPV Lately

It was nice to finally share Issue 6. Thanks to everyone that contributed, especially designer Wayne Bremser. We made a few last minute changes while he was on the road so we had to go back and forth a few times to get things straight, but we ended up getting it right I think. A big thanks to Blake Andrews and Mark Peter Drolet as well.

We’re offering subscriptions again this year, including a digital option, which is basically a tip jar. The money we raise will go primarily to paying writers, designers and editors. I’m also going to start commissioning a few features here and there. Look out for the first collaboration in Issue 7.

At the end of the year I’m going to raffle off three photobooks to those that subscribe. I have a few books in mind, but what I’ll probably do is head to Dashwood and see what I can dig up.

The podcast is rolling along and also taking up more of my LPV time. It’s been challenging to listen to myself as a host. Downright painful at times, but I’m learning. It’s been great getting some tips from friends obsessed with podcasts. It’s an interesting medium. What I appreciate most is that you have to invest some time to listen to them. It’s not like on the web where you can quickly browse an article.

I have three more to edit so I think I’m going to aim to release them bi-weekly on Fridays.

©Jeff Jacobson

Jeff Jacobson Interview on PDN

Very powerful interview (Part 1, Part II). I need to find a copy of Melting Point which Hin Chua recommended to me a few years ago. Most importantly though, I wish Jeff well in his battle with cancer. I can’t wait to get my hands on The Last Roll. Here are a few quotes I enjoyed:

I never know what I’m doing until I’m many years into a project. I always follow the pictures. The pictures tell me what I’m doing.

–

Because work that comes out of the documentary/photojournalism world is rooted in time and space, and work that comes out of the art world is often rooted in an idea that comes out of the photographer’s ego, and I’m less interested in that. There are certain photographers that are always exceptions to the rule, where they set stuff up and I think it’s wonderful, but not many. You know, I’ve almost never seen anything come out of the Yale School of Photography that remotely interests me. I just find it vacuous. I don’t think it’s very intelligent. I’m sorry.

–

But then that question of where do you stand becomes a much broader philosophical question. Where do you stand politically with your work? Where do you stand economically with your photography? Where do you stand in your life vis a vis photography? It’s a structure to help students very physically understand how to get to a picture. And a photograph is just a set of graphics. And I say, for the moment, forget about content, forget about subject matter, we’re just going to talk about photography in a graphic sense. Because when you boil it down, it’s a set of graphics on a piece of paper, or projected on a wall or on a computer screen, whatever. It’s not the world; it’s an abstraction of the world. But people don’t learn that. They think subject matter, subject matter, subject matter, and they never understand.

–

I set out to do my own pictures, and fuck ‘em if they didn’t like it. And they didn’t like it, and they kicked my ass right out on the street. On a certain level I’m very thankful for Magnum because they really helped me understand that you can’t make pictures for anyone else but yourself. You’ve really got to follow your own beat.

©Brandon Thibodeaux - CENTER AWARDS: 2nd Place Gallerist’s Choice Awards [LENSCRATCH]

Links of Note

Wayne Bremser on Mary Ellen Mark’s Prom: 

Every photograph of another person is, in weaker hands, an opportunity to humiliate the subject’s image. That has nothing to do with how the photograph was captured, or whether consent was given. When bad motivation exists, it only reveals the photographer. It never reveals anything about the subject, because it is only ever the subject’s image. I know nothing about the couple pictured above. The small miracle of photography is, in Mary Ellen Mark’s hands, images with very little context can generate compassion.

Larissa Archer on Winogrand at SFMOMA: 

I’m wondering if even street photography can be trusted to tell us anything beyond what is in the photographer’s own heart at the moment—I wonder if it is in fact the most deceptive of all genres, for the very reason that it posits a certain objectivity, not rehearsed and posed but candid and full of accidents, an imprint of a reality that is out there for anyone and everyone to witness together. I wonder if, regardless of the literal elements of the scene, the tone an image takes on and expresses is due to the photographer’s own moods, his own prejudices, enthusiasms, “abortive sorrows and short-winded elations.” And then I wonder if this is in fact any less reliable than the notion that the images can say something objectively true about their over-arching subject (for instance, America) when that subject is itself so complex, many-sided, and open to a seemingly endless range of interpretations.

©Laia Abril - CENTER AWARDS: Project Launch Juror’s Choice [LENSCRATCH]

Louis C.K.: 

There’s people that say: “It’s not fair. You have all that stuff.” I wasn’t born with it. It was a horrible process to get to this. It took me my whole life. If you’re new at this — and by “new at it,” I mean 15 years in, or even 20 — you’re just starting to get traction. Young musicians believe they should be able to throw a band together and be famous, and anything that’s in their way is unfair and evil. What are you, in your 20s, you picked up a guitar? Give it a minute.

Sarah Palmer: 

I see this as a delicate balance – how to make the work personal in some ways, influenced and affected by one’s vision, without being narcissistic. I tell my students making conceptual artwork all the time: nobody cares about you – that is not inherently interesting. The work has to transcend the subject, whatever the subject is. It sounds harsh, I know, but there is so much work out there, one has to set oneself apart.

Thomas Ruff:

I think that when I see a good photograph I recognize it. When I was teaching at the art academy, however, I knew students who ran around with their digital cameras. They’d fill their memory cards with pictures, and they then had a problem deciding which image was good, which one was bad. I don’t know whether that was because they never learned how to make such a decision or whether they conceptually refused to make a decision. But for them it is a big problem to deal with the flood if images and to make decisions.

©Timothy Briner – Sandy [Fraction Magazine Issue 49]

When Hurricane Sandy hit, photographers and Instagrammers alike made pilgrimages to the disaster zone. Like many of these photographers, Briner headed straight for the storm, focusing on Brighton Beach and Coney Island, two of the neighborhoods that were hit hardest. What has made Timothy stand out, is that he not only photographed the architectural devastation, but spent significant periods of time with residents of these neighborhoods. While his own neighborhood in Ditmas Park was not hit as severely, it gave Briner a kinship to those living a few neighborhoods deeper into the storms path, and a responsibility to tell their stories. – Jon Feinstein

Thom Yorke:

I like the fact that I still don’t know what I’m doing. Honestly. I’ll go through whole phases of months where I haven’t got a clue. I regularly lose complete confidence in what I’m doing. In some ways, the nicest bit about the creative thing – the nicest bit about recording and writing is this sort of weird limbo in between scratching away, scratching away, nothing really happening, nothing really happening, and then something wants to be built and starts to get built. You just have to let it happen. And then it gets to the end and you look at it a few months later and go, “Huh, how did that happen?” It’s sort of a weird amnesia.

 Blake Andrews ‘was there then:’

But for me date is even more important than name. With all art this is true, but especially with photography. Because time is integral to the form. Every photo is locked into a specific moment. If I show you a photo and tell you it was made last year you will understand it in a certain way. If I then say that it was actually made 50 years ago, your interpretation may change radically.

 Kramer O’Neill:

Let this be a lesson, young folks. You need not have any curiosity, anything to say, or even much photographic ability (and you certainly needn’t be competent at processing): just have a gimmick, something that seems novel and can be explained in one paragraph for Wired or Buzzfeed. [Bonus points if your gimmick involves a lot of neat-sounding technology that captivates/confuses baby boomers.] People who “like photography” actually like reading stories about how photos are made more than they “like” photos. So give them a novel story, that’s all you need.

©Geoffrey Ellis -  via ‘Someone I know’

Tom Griggs ‘On the Money’: 

While I don’t think that these issues are new, I do believe that these new models and trends in photography – particularly in distribution – have reduced our medium. They have had a homogenizing effect, limiting participation and putting a premium on access to the limited number of faces at the gates of entry and to publishing and exhibiting. These trends have eliminated views from photographers not able to surpass the equipment gap, get an MFA, survive post-graduation, and pay for networking. They have had the result of a more simplified collective vision: less can make work, a narrower range of work is distributed, and I think an argument could be made that it also affects HOW work is made. If the stakes are high, less adventurous work will be made to ensure some degree of reception to it once the necessary payments have been made for access to the right eyes.

Michael Mack: 

Very simply, a great book is something where the quality of the work and the quality of the ideas are sufficiently intelligent to be specifically applied to a book form. My biggest problem with most photography books is that they’re simply catalogues of images. They don’t necessarily need to exist as a book; in most cases it is vanity for the projects to end in a book. To me, the greatest books are the ones in which the relationship between the ideas, the images and the form are brought together to become a work in itself. When it becomes a distinct element of the artist’s practice. When the book is the piece.

Bottom of the Page

• Interview/Bobby Doherty [Wandering Bears]
• Mike Brodie, A Period of Juvenile Prosperity @Milo [DLK Collection]
• Limited Edition Photographs [The Online Photographer]
• The Ethics of Street Photography [Joerg Colberg]
• Jonathan Blaustein Reviews Tony Fouhse [A Photo Editor]
• SuperMassiveBlackHole [Issue 13]
• RIVERTOWN: A CONVERSATION WITH SEAN STEWART [The Great Leap Sideways]
• Elegy to the Polaroid SX-70 William Miller [The Morning News]
• 2013 Guggenheim Fellows in Photography [DLK Collection]
• How photographers joined the self-publishing revolution [The Guardian]
• Patti Smith Advice to the young [Louisiana Channel]

Legendary anti-war photographer and author of Viet Nam Inc, Philip Jones Griffiths, gives the interview of a lifetime only 48 hours before he died in at his home in London on March 19, 2008. With a voice impassioned by courage and enriched by his legacy of love for people and for taking real pictures of real people, Philip imparts his final words of wisdom on the subject of photography and sexuality.

Rare interviews with iconic photographers and people who loved him bring the most eloquent and clear headed anti-war photographer back to life. This movie is an hommage to being real in a time when documentary photography has fallen off the pedestal. This is the way and these are the words that matter. – Donna Ferrato, ‘The Magnificent One: Philip Jones Griffiths’ 

Mikael Kennedy is a photographer living and working in New York City. He is the author of the internationally acclaimed Polaroid travel blog Passport to Trespass and his Polaroid work is represented by the Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art Gallery of New York City and are part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, TX as well as in private collections nationwide. Kennedy’s photographs have appeared in The New Yorker, Nylon, Dazed & Confused, Blown (UK), Cosmoplotian, WWD,GQ.com, Esquire.com, TimeMagazine.com, Newsweek.com, Vison Magazine (Bejieng), American Short Fiction & Maine Magazine. He won ‘Cover of the Year’ in Munich last year at the 2011 BCP Awards for EB Magazine featuring a photograph from his series ‘The Odysseus’.

Each time I’ve met up with Mikael it’s been memorable.  I have a small collection of his books sitting next to my desk and I always pick them up when I need a change of pace. His photographs take me on the road and slow life down. It’s a good place to visit, especially living in New York. In these episode we discussed the road, shooting Polaroids, Tumblr and Mike Brodie.

You can listen to it directly through the player below or DOWNLOAD it.  Subscribe through RSS or iTunes.

Photographs ©Mikael Kennedy

Essay and edit by Dan Abbe 

A few months after arriving in Tokyo, and speaking almost no Japanese, I found myself at a small gallery opening. People were sitting around a table, and at one point a kind woman directed my attention to a sprightly older gentleman. “That’s Kazuo Kitai,” she whispered. “He’s very famous.” I nodded dumbly.

For a photographer from Japan’s celebrated generation of the 1960s and 70s, Kitai has had a relatively subdued reception in the West, and even, to some extent, in Japan. Still, that’s beginning to change; he was included in Martin Parr’s 2011 “Protest Box,” and a book of his early photographs (“Barricade,” designed by John Gossage) was published by the American bookseller Harper’s Books in 2012. Meanwhile, a career retrospective at Tokyo’s Metropolitan Museum of Photography, which just closed in January, will only help to raise his profile at home and abroad. It may have taken some time for audiences to recognize Kitai’s importance to Japanese photography, but then again, it’s nothing new for Kitai to wait around for others to catch up to him. In the 1960′s, he self-published his book “Resistance,” a pioneering document of his experiences in the thick of Japan’s student protest movement, but it met with little response.

Kitai is best known for these protest photographs, and it’s possible that he was the photographer most directly involved in the student movement. At the same time, it’s worth noting that there were other people with cameras who were similarly committed. In the notes for “Barricade,” John Gossage mentions photography books published by university photo clubs that show not just a similar level of engagement with protest movements, but also a similar aesthetic, so perhaps it’s best to say that Kitai is the most well-known photographer to participate actively in the student movement.

Kitai’s early work shows student demonstrations, and clashes with police. Still, in his recent retrospective, among the most powerful work was a series of photographs that Kitai took while living for months inside College of Art at Nihon University alongside fellow demonstrators, who had taken over the building. These images represent objects like a coat hanger or a chair in the context of this activity. Here, Kitai’s photographs are not violent, instead letting the objects—and the anti-government graffiti in the background—speak for themselves.

After the student protests in Tokyo, starting in 1969 Kitai began spending time in farming village of Sanrizuka, on top of which the Japanese government intended to construct Narita International Airport. As he did at Nihon University, Kitai spent months living alongside the farmers who fought against a forcible eviction from their land. It is a great privilege to introduce some of Kitai’s Sanrizuka photographs here.

Many Japanese photographers, even members of what was then considered the “old guard,” captured the raw power (so to speak) of students in the city, but Kitai’s documentation of Sanrizuka reveals a different face of resistance. The smiling face of an old woman appears next to aggressive graffiti declaring “Total Opposition to the Airport.” This woman, a group of children, and a man whose good looks would make him fit right in at any Japanese office all form part of the movement. Among other things, these photographs show that revolution is not the exclusive domain of the young and angry.

Sanrizuka eventually became a kind of stronghold, complete with a lookout tower. But when the government sent in troops to storm the encampments there, the village was taken rather easily. Kitai wryly notes in the text that accompanies these photographs that all of these places “are now beneath the runways of Narita International Airport.” Sanrizuka could be seen as the Altamont of the protest movement in Japan; not just the crushing defeat, but tensions between farmers and students led to a weakening of the movement in general. As for Kitai, he moved farther away from the city, and documented other rural communities like Sanrizuka. The existence of these villages was not threatened directly by government construction projects, but instead by a cultural shift towards urban economic growth. (This work was published as “Mura-e,” or “To the Village.”)

Look carefully at Kitai’s photograph “Old Lady Faces the Water Cannon.” Across the road, in the background, there’s another photographer shooting the scene. It’s entirely possible that he, too, made an image as visually dramatic as this one. That’s secondary, though; what’s significant about Kitai’s photograph is that he’s on one side of the road, and the journalist is on another.

 Well, Im not very ambitious, I have no grand artist’s statement, I just like making pictures. And I want to make them as good as I can. Making pictures is something that brings me tremendous pleasure. Sharing the pictures with an audience who appreciates them is gravy.  I like seeing into peoples little worlds, their souls or whatever, and capturing that essence, and I enjoy allowing people to gain access into mine, thru my pictures. In terms of goals, I would be happy if I could produce 25 to 30 great images over the course of my lifetime. Of course that presupposes that I live long enough to do so. In the mean time, I just hope I can make people laugh. – Justin Vogel via [Erik Kim ]

In this episode, I visited Justin Vogel in his East Village apartment to discuss street photography, Flickr and Terry Richardson. I first came across Justin a few years while I was an Admin of the HCSP group on Flickr. I didn’t think much of his photographs at first but I started to follow some of the conversations on his Flickr stream and soon came to appreciate what he was doing with his photography. For the last couple of years, he’s been the primary Admin in HCSP and has garnered a reputation for his vocal, sometimes brash, sometimes acerbic commentary on the group and street photography.

For those of you not all that interested in street photography, the Terry Richardson bit starts at around the 25 minute mark. Enjoy!

(Note: I know the audio quality on the interviews isn’t were it needs to be. I’ve started using lavs which has improved the quality but for Justin’s interview I messed up the settings so it’s not there yet. Thank you for your feedback and patience as I work through these things.)

You can listen to it directly through the player below or DOWNLOAD it.  Subscribe through RSS or iTunes.

Photographs ©Justin Vogel

He shot nearly 2,000 images between March 1968 and May 1969 before taking the negatives home. And there they sat, out of sight, but not out of mind, for 45 years, until a chance meeting brought them out of dormancy and into a digital scanner. At first, it was very difficult for Haughey to view the images and talk about them, especially not knowing the fates of many of the subjects of his photos. - [The Big Picture]

LPV Lately

I’ve settled on doing The Digest biweekly. That’s seem like the right frequency for now. I’ve been on vacation for the last week, so haven’t been desk bound all day which is nice. It’s been inspiring to get out in Queens to make new photographs. I do my best thinking when I’m out wandering around. We’re also putting the final touches on Issue 6. I’m confident we’ll publish in the next week, unless something goes haywire which could always happen. I’m excited about the issue but I’m in the phase where I’m already thinking how we can do things differently. Maybe I’ll write a post-mortem article about the issue and outline some of my thoughts. More on that soon!

I was able to record a few new podcasts in the last week as well, but it’s becoming more challenging to edit them. I’m finding the conversations are getting longer which I don’t mind but it does add more editing work. It’s always about editing. Editing, editing, editing. It’s one of my favorite topics.

Thanks to Time Magazine for including LPV in the “The 140 Best Twitter Feeds of 2013″ #humblebrag. I love Twitter. I use it everyday. Most of the information I share in The Digest goes on Twitter first, but the firehouse can be difficult to follow.

I try to keep the commentary to a minimum, mostly because conversations (or the inevitable argument) can get out of control. I know chit chatting is a big aspect of Twitter for some people but beyond one or two exchanges it can get rather confusing. I enjoy following writers and journalists because you can get inside their head to some degree. Random fleeting thoughts and observations may seem trivial but that’s some of the stuff I actually enjoy.

Anyway, enough about Twitter, let’s talk about Garry Winogrand. Oh wait, I think most of that was covered last time. I have the book sitting next to my desk. I have an article in mind. Should be done by 2015.

10×10 American Photobooks is close to hitting their funding. Three days left, take a look.  Included will be my short essay on Mikael Kennedy‘s book Housatonic, which I only have a vague recollection of writing.

Finally, to keep to up with our daily aggregation, follow us on Twitter and Tumblr.

Links of Note

Beijing Silvermine is a unique photographic portrait of the capital and the life of its inhabitants following the Cultural Revolution. It covers a period of 20 years, from 1985, namely when silver film started being used massively in China, to 2005, when digital photography started taking over. These 20 years are those of China’s economic opening, when people started prospering, travelling, consuming, having fun.

Jonathan Blaustein Interviewed Roger Ballan, and it was a good one: 

I do the art only for myself. I’m not doing it for an audience. I’m doing it to learn more about my own interior. That’s the only purpose. If it weren’t that purpose, then I wouldn’t do it. I’d rather stick to mining, because then it’s just another business. It’s my own journey into my own life. But if we take that as one point, and then look at the other point: what is the purpose of art for the third party? What do I want my art to do for the other person? To me, art should be making people delve inside. It should be a mirror for their own interiors, as I mentioned for myself. It should open them up from one part of their mind to the other part of their mind. It should be something that maybe even scares them, or gives them a jolt or shock.

And then:

The second point is that, like anything else, practice makes perfect. If you’re an athlete, or a lawyer or a dentist, the more you do it, the better you become at it. I gave a lecture yesterday, and said “What’s the best way of learning about photography? It’s just to do photography. You learn through doing. Furthermore, one needs to rigorously look at your own work and find the holes in it, and close the gaps.

©Stephen McLaren 

“Typically, I find if something happened and I’ve missed, I kind of log it, and think that there’s a good chance it’s going to happen again,” he said. “There’s nothing worse than beating yourself up about missed photographs. It’s a waste of energy.” – Stephen McLaren, ‘Wading Into the Weirdness of the Street’ [LENS]

Paul McDonough says: 

“The reaction is different today. Cameras are much more ubiquitous now. In the ‘70s there was a whole different atmosphere, it was much more laid back then. People didn’t particularly care if you were photographing them. By today’s standards, where there’s so much media trying to get information from people, people are much more wary. People see cameras as containing the possibility of exploitation. Everyone is spying. Local government, advertisers—they all want to know what it is you are thinking and doing. People were less paranoid in the ‘70s.”

Camilo José Vergara revisited via Burned Shoes: 

”(…) I have photographed urban America systematically, frequently returning to re-photograph these cities over time. Along the way I became a historically conscious documentarian, an archivist of decline, a photographer of walls, buildings, and city blocks. Bricks, signs, trees, and sidewalks have spoken to me the most truthfully and eloquently about urban reality.

I did not want to limit the scope of my documentation to places and scenes that captured my interest merely because they immediately resonated with my personality. In my struggle to make as complete and objective a portrait of American inner cities as I could, I developed a method to document entire neighborhoods and then return year after year to re-photograph the same places over time and from different heights, blanketing entire communities with images. (…)

I am a builder of virtual cities. I think of my images as bricks that, when placed next to each other, reveal shapes and meanings of neglected urban communities.”

©Harvey Benge – ‘NYC’

Yes, photobooks are integral to my process. I like the book format for a number of reasons. For a start I think one could well mount an argument supporting the book as the only vehicle for photography. Here I could mention some of the third rate shows of photographs on the gallery wall I’ve seen, where the work simply doesn’t work in that context. Photography is about building narrative, first within an individual image and then within a bookwork where the idea can be expanded into a much more satisfying, extended and layered dialogue. A finished bookwork also gives completion to a series and often a finished idea flows on to the next. Gallery shows are brief affairs, whereas a bookwork has legs and a lasting value. I use my bookworks sort of like calling cards, getting them into as many hands as possible. Limitations are mostly to do with production and distribution difficulties. - Q&A with Harvey Benge on fotatazo

 Nick Shere on Winogrand the Buddhist: 

He opened the talk by relating a presumably apocryphal anecdote about Wingorand going to a therapist, and being told to hit a pillow. Winogrand pounded on the pillow as instructed. The therapist then asked what Winogrand was thinking about, and he replied, “I’m trying to hit as squarely, precisely, and with as much force as I can.” The therapist said, “you mean you’re not thinking about your mother?”

Winogrand wasn’t thinking about his mother because he was thinking about hitting pillows. And when it came to photography, well, he made photographs with the intention of making photographs. To call it “just photographing” on analogy to Zen’s “just sitting,” would be too cute, but not necessarily wrong.

This presents a sharp contrast not only to the classic documentary mode of treating the photograph as evidence of a represented reality, but also to the personality-driven, psychological mysticism of photographers like Minor White, which treats photographs as metaphors or as channels for transmitting an experience — and which is usually identified as representing the “Buddhist” or “Zen” side of photography, something which has long puzzled me.

This gives Winogrand’s photographs a literal quality that makes them hard to write about or think through. It’s a kind of opacity or flatness that can mask how complex, loaded, and yet also emotionally raw they are. They are always full of significance, but at the same time it is seldom easy to say what, if anything, they mean or what they are for. This can lead to a lack of appreciation from both the high and the low ends of photographic culture. (See this Blake Andrews post for good examples of both.)

©Peter Hoffman 

Metaphorically speaking, I feel that our consumption habits—specifically dealing with precious natural resources—are out of control and unsustainable. I also feel that not many people care enough about it because they won’t be around long enough to see the mess they’ve started fully materialize. I wanted to transfer that feeling I had, which was maybe something like a sense of powerlessness or dread, to the image making process. I wanted to lose control, having the resulting work border on ceasing to exist in any recognizable form. —Peter Hoffman, fox river derivatives [FeatureShoot]

Dr Alexander John Bridger hates Google Street View: 

Street View users can “lose that experience of where they are and it just becomes a very automatic ‘I need to get from here and I need to get to here’… so it becomes a routinised mechanistic way of behaviour”, he says.

“I think it does prevent those chance, coincidental moments from happening.”

Arriving somewhere and relying on your senses, or conversations with strangers, can be much more rewarding, he says.

It’s the old fashioned way.

 Blake Andrews says ‘steal this post:’

For me this experience brought home the viral power of Tumblr, which works not so much as a standard viewing platform –à la Flickr– but more as a huge leveraging service.

I think it is this aspect which separates it from the previous paradigm when it comes to image reproductions. In the old world –way, way back, say 5 years ago– copying jpgs was viewed as outright theft, and photographers discouraged it. But with Tumblr, you want your images to be copied. Reproduction equals distribution, and distribution can lead to good things. It’s a complete sea change within just a few years.
Unfortunately much of the photography world still hasn’t caught on.

©Tom Griggs – from Medallo via [Urbanautica]

This gets into the most interesting part of the conversation for me: what information should we consider while analyzing an image? Should we be using the same information in different contexts of interpretation? What types of contextual information impact the meaning of an image? Does meaning depend on who’s looking at it? How should unseen contextual information surrounding the creation of an image change our reading of an image as this information becomes known to us?

Like almost everything in life, the answers are frustratingly gray: people interact with and read an image differently depending on their use of the image under consideration and what their needs for understanding are. The way people should be pursuing a consideration of context – including process – when they look at a photograph depends on when and where and how they’re asked to look at it. – Tom Griggs, Considering A Photograph:

Christopher Anderson in Vice: 

It’s funny, I was just thinking about this earlier. I guess I probably prescribe more to the Garry Winogrand philosophy – he said he photographed people to see what people would look like photographed. There’s not a particular subject I cover, I’m not a one-track person and I’d like to think there are different facets to my self. If I was to unify all of that visually into one thing, whether it is my photographs from documentary work, to more personal work, to family, I guess it is all linked together. There’s a unifying element, I want to see my time on this planet and communicate a certain emotional quality of that time. I photograph my own human experience and the things I have seen and participated in.

©Jennifer Shaw

Motherhood is the hardest job I have ever had. Photography allows me to embrace the chaos and connect with my children. As they explore the elements with carefree abandon, I marvel at their intensity and document them in all their wild glory. These images chronicle the adventure, traversing the spaces between shadow and light, delight and despair, dreams and reality. - Jennifer Shaw, ‘The Space Between’ [LENSCRATCH]

The Onion hits too close to home for many: 

I can’t stress this enough: Do what you love…in between work commitments, and family commitments, and commitments that tend to pop up and take immediate precedence over doing the thing you love. Because the bottom line is that life is short, and you owe it to yourself to spend the majority of it giving yourself wholly and completely to something you absolutely hate, and 20 minutes here and there doing what you feel you were put on this earth to do.

Photography’s Stature Rises at Museums says the NYTimes: 

Now everyone’s a photographer,” he said. “It’s part of the language of what we do. All you have to do is walk down the street. And with Facebook or Tumblr there are infinite possibilities. But museums should be devoted to the original thing. That will continue to give the public a reason to see what’s here.

©John and Teenuh Foster

For Foster, a print’s history is far less important than its visual beauty and the response it inspires. “It doesn’t really mean anything to me, who shot the image,” says Foster. “But when I do find an image that’s one of the best, I just flip out about it. I like thinking that it could be a Lee Friedlander or a Diane Arbus or a Henri Cartier-Bresson.”

Years of photo-hunting have helped Foster train his eyes to recognize an interesting composition among the thousands of snapshots at flea markets and antique shops. “I’ll pick up a handful of a hundred, and I flip them like a deck of cards, because I can tell that quickly whether they have any intrinsic visual power at all or not,” says Foster. “Out of a hundred, I might find a single one that’s even a maybe. That goes to show you how many average, boring, mundane, same height, same scene, same everything is repeated in these old images.” - ‘Take That, Instagram: The Enduring Allure of Vintage Snapshots’ [Collectors Weekly]

Jerry Saltz on the “Death of the Gallery Show” in NYMag:

I don’t even mind so much that the role of the critic is diminishing. Clement Greenberg was a bully, anyway. Primacy always belongs to art and the artist. I’ve tried to keep overhyped careers in check, and had no effect whatsoever. In fact, so many shows in so many places mean that we now have an overload of writing about art. Joseph Beuys said, “Everyone is an artist.” Now everyone actually is a writer. Like exhibitions that can’t get traction, commentary also has a hard time gaining a foothold, unless you yourself enter the arena of spectacle, becoming something of a spectacle yourself. (Believe me; I know.) Adding to this, a generation of academically trained critics were taught to believe they should write in impenetrable language and refrain from opinion and negative criticism.

Eggleston’s democratic forest is deep and overgrown, true. We perhaps feel that we are in danger of being lost within a wilderness of instagrammers and tumblerites. We forget that the passage of time always finds a way to distill our present, our manic confusion into a series of events, illustrated and proven by the documents in which we leave behind. It will not be up to us to decide which photographs will be important through the centuries, it will be time itself, and the only role we can play is to provide the material from which time will siphon from for the generations to come. – MJR – Collection 100 / A history

Etc.,

• “Judge Rules William Eggleston Can Clone His Own Work, Rebuffing Angry Collector” [artinfo]
• Civil Rights Photos and How NOT to Repeat History [No Caption Needed]
• Can 20×200 Be Saved? Anger From Collectors Mounts as Leading Art Site Flounders [artinfo]
• ‘Publishers Are in Love With This New Photo Platform Useful for advertisers, too’ [Ad Week]
• Expert Advice: Marketing to Fine Art Galleries [A Photo Editor]

Manjari Sharma (b 1979) is a photographer born and raised in Mumbai, India and based in Brooklyn, New York. Rooted in the study of relationships and personal mythology, since it’s inception Manjari’s work has been recognized as walking the line of fine art and traditional portraiture. Manjari ‘s work has been showcased in several group and solo exhibitions both in the US and internationally and she’s been invited to speak at the School of Visual arts and the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City.

In this episode I stopped by Crown Heights to visit Manj and talk about her photography, including her “Darshan“ project and “The Shower Series.” I feel we could have talked for hours about photography and life. Manj has an enthusiasm and energy that’s contagious and makes you want go out to make new photographs or have a chai and contemplate life.

You can listen to it directly through the player below or DOWNLOAD it.  Subscribe through RSS or iTunes.

©Manjari Sharma – from ‘Darshan’

©Manjari Sharma – from ‘Darshan’

©Manjari Sharma – from ‘The Shower Series’

©Manjari Sharma – from ‘The Shower Series’

People sometimes ask how I find all the stuff I share. My typical response is that it finds me. And one of the primary ways that information comes to me is through RSS and Google Reader. Well, this week Google decided to kill Reader, which is a bummer, but also a very stark reminder that these web companies can and will shut down free services when they want. Finding a replacement for Reader won’t be a problem but for the last fews days I’ve been wondering if I should just axe RSS from my process all together. I think that’s probably where I’m over indulging on information anyway. I tend to prefer Twitter and Tumblr these days because they are filtered for the most part, plus most publishers these days will have a presence on both platforms. Also, if something is really worth looking at, normally it’ll be shared by multiple sources.

It’s all very exhausting which is why I took a week off from The Digest. Sometimes I feel like I’m on an information assembly line, another set of hands helping to crank out “content.” For FREE too! Well, let’s not get into that debate. I’m happy people are discussing it though and my sense is that we’re very much in the beginning of a revaluation period over compensation for creatives on the web (everywhere).

I’m still not sure how often I’ll publish The Digest. I think twice a month might be about right though.

©Garry Winogrand – “An American Epic” [Time Light Box]

Garry Winogrand at SFMOMA

I think most of you know the story. I enjoyed this piece on the BBC by Stephen McLaren. 

The considered opinion on Winogrand’s posthumous archive was, “nothing much to see here”.

Finding it hard to believe that his mentor’s creative powers had deserted him so abruptly, Rubinfien decided that he would have to look deeper and more inquisitively into the archive.

To gain a new appreciation of what Winogrand was shooting in California and Texas, a team of specialists including Rubinfien and assistant curator Erin O’Toole have spent the past few years sorting through and appraising the massive stockpile of films stored at the Center for Creative Photography of the University of Arizona, Tucson.

As you enter the section of the exhibition devoted to those later years, it quickly becomes apparent you are looking at pictures of a different order to the ones which brought him recognition in the 1960s.

Gone are the punchy chaotic street scenes chock-full of oddball characters, animals and apparently haphazard framing. Instead we see more solitary and introspective characters, the mood is typically foreboding and in the pictures from Los Angeles, no-one seems to be living the Californian dream which had the Beach Boys harmonising.

“The late Los Angeles work is one of the great discoveries of this show,” said Rubinfien. “We were told, and we believed, that he dissolved in the last 12 years and trailed off and ended up nowhere.

“But he didn’t end up nowhere – he ended up in the middle of a very dark poetry full of its own kind of pathos and we’ve managed to give that a shape and a character and its here in the show.”

Mark Murrmann talked to Ted Pushnisky about his days with Winogrand in LA. Another good read. 

MJ: So do you feel like anything rubbed off on you?

TP: Perhaps a work ethic. Not anything in the way of teaching a way of seeing. I feel like I developed that myself. But Garry worked hard. He got up and started shooting. I get up and maybe read the newspaper. He shot an awful lot. It made me think, maybe I’m missing out if I’m not shooting.

Blake Andrews’ thoughts: 

I think Winogrand’s attraction to photographing people was psychological. He liked to play with figures as compositional figures, but more importantly he liked to get inside their heads. Many of his photos are like X-Ray mindreadings. They burrow right into the thoughts of the characters. It’s not easy to make photos like that without bogging down in sentimentality, without the thoughts becoming the primary subject. I see a lot of portraits nowadays concerned with that penetration, but they often leave the rest of life behind. Winogrand somehow combined X-Rays with surface level reality in a way that I think is rare. I know I can’t do it.

Nick Shere’s notes from a talk by Tod Papageorge:

GW on food: “No one murders eggs, and almost no one will murder fried chicken.”

GW resp. to a question re: how many pictures it takes to get a great one: “Art is not a matter of industrial efficiency.”

How much of GW’s work “resides in the power of the physical gesture.”

In Bresson, “the form is always working on being canonical,” while GW’s gestures break away from the canonical.

GW: “All great work is the result of great labor.”

TP compares GW’s teaching style to Socrates

“A faultless unity of mind and feeling.”

TP: “Forced to ask almost word by word, ‘what do you mean by that.’”

Re: chimps: Winogrand shoved TP out of the way because he was “ravenous” for that photo.

The Modern Art Notes podcast spoke with Leo Rubinfien. There are probably more articles that I missed. If you know more, send them my way.

©Doug Dubois – via [Time Light Box]

Links of Note

 Charlotte Cotton in the latest issue of Aperture: 

We are not only a civilization of amateur photographers; we are amateur curators, editors, and publishers. Some of the new amateurs are pretty noble—like the citizen journalists who put in serious hours of work and comprehend so thoroughly the intelligent capacities of our pervasive image-led technologies. And just as this pro/am (professional/amateur) school of journalism seems to be a counterpoint to the ever-decreasing realm of independent news media, we at least have to think through the groundswell of pro/am photographic artists who self-publish, collectivize, and find their audiences themselves, knowing full well that the professional infrastructure for art photography is never going to accommodate them during their productive lifetimes.

Jonathan Blaustein:

I’ve learned that “conceptual” can be a bad word in the Photo World. Just last month, I was encouraged by a museum director not to even breath the term, if I wanted to have my work considered by the institution. Many times now, I’ve heard people confidently state that they don’t like any “conceptual” work at all. No matter what. Why is that? I’d speculate that “conceptual” is code for the type of off-putting, intellectually narcissistic clap-trap that people see in Art Fairs run by condescending gallerinas who relish the opportunity to ignore. The exclusivity of the Art World makes almost everyone feel like a peon, and work that smacks of the “Art” vibe can bear the brunt of the understandable resentment. Especially as so many “concepts” described in art-speaky press releases are nowhere to be found in the objects themselves.

Will Michels, Co-Curator of War/Photography: 

For me, a photograph is a photograph. I don’t care who took it. It’s not about journalism to me. It’s about amazing pictures. It’s about good compositions, good storytelling; the photographer being at the right place at the right time, and the choices that he or she made to get there. I think journalism is one of the most overlooked genres of photography because it’s just pigeonholed as journalism, and not amazing compositions.

©Adam Kremer – ‘A studio visit with Charlie Engman’ [All of this is Rocket Science]

Tom Sachs on Ed Ruscha: 

Ed had the right combination of deadpan with a chili-pepper portion of creativity,” he said. “It was 1 percent of the idea. Take ‘Every Building on the Sunset Strip.’ He didn’t shoot La Cienega. It all boils down to choosing that right thing: that sense of style and magic and cool, that unknown 1 percent. You can’t learn that.

Carl Gunhouse on Trevor Paglen @ Metro Pictures: 

With the quality of photography in Chelsea at an all time low, man, Trevor Paglen just kills it. I am standing before you now and saying Paglen is the greatest photographer of our generation. Fuck Roe Ethridge, fuck Alec Soth, fuck… Ok, just them, and maybe fuck is a little too harsh, but man, those guys have to step it up, because Paglen just slaughtered them with his show at Metro Pictures.

Robert Hariman on ‘Photography’s Theory of Action:’ 

Photography is a medium that documents people acting and being acted upon. The action itself often can be taken for granted while attention rightly turns to its motives or effects. But action itself is a profound form of being in the world. It may not be limited to human beings, but it defines them nonetheless. Understanding action remains an unfinished task for philosophy, but it also might benefit from paying more attention to photography.

Ishu Patel on Henri Cartier-Bresson: 

“Over the years he had simplified the technical part of photography to suit his unobtrusive shooting style and still create a technically perfect photograph. For instance, he judged the light by eye, although he carried a small light meter in his pants pocket. Since he mostly shot in shaded areas he set his F stop at 5.6 or 8 and shutter speed at 1/60th to 1/125th of a second, so he could quickly pay attention to his subject matter. He made it clear that, “technique is not so important to me, but people and their activities are”. He said, “Think about the photograph before and after, but not during. The secret is to take your time but also to be very quick”. In other words there was to be no cropping of the image later, no dodging or other tricks used in printing. The image captured on film had to stand on its own merits.”

 Anya Jasbar: Reflections on found photographs and Melissa Catanese’s “Dive Dark Dream Slow:”

“Looking at vernacular/snapshot/domestic/found (here the list of terms is constantly expanding) photography, we fantasize about the narrative gap that those images produce. Nancy Martha West, in another essay from Now is Then, directs her attention to the role of found photographs and to our desire to “write a ‘discovery narrative’ for snapshots.” One of the questions that she proposes, one of the most important for our discussion, is “So why is it that we are not content to let found photographs remain silent” if they are, as Weston Naef stated, pure visual and liberated from textuality? Our need to fictionalize the world is unavoidable. The process of fictionalizing never ends; in a permanent movement, it takes power from the search for representation produced by the natural process of imagination, and it manifests itself in all our codified languages, whether verbal or visual.”

©Walker Pickering – ‘Canteen Magazine’s Naked Judging Winner’ [LENSCRATCH]

Brad Troemel: 

“Viewing a newsfeed or dashboard today requires a permanent sense of disinterest on the part of the viewer—to give any one update or image too much attention jeopardizes your ability to understand the news feed as a dynamic whole unfolding in real time. Artists like Lil B or Jogging flip this viewing mode into a mode of production, creating an excess of work that any one viewer probably doesn’t have time to view in its entirety. I call this mode of production athletic aesthetics, because its practitioners don’t present final products so much as they exercise creativity in an ongoing broadcast format.”

And Brad Troemel, The Accidental Audience:

“The accidental audience’s attitude toward what it sees is deeply predicated on the neoliberal vision of cultural migration, but its willingness to strip images of their status as property is so aggressive that it deserves a term of its own: image anarchism. Whereas image fundamentalists and image neoliberals disagree over how art becomes property, image anarchists behave as though intellectual property is not property at all. While the image neoliberal still believes in the owner as the steward of globally migratory artworks, the image anarchist reflects a generational indifference toward intellectual property, regarding it as a bureaucratically regulated construct. This indifference stems from file sharing and extends to de-authored, decontextualized Tumblr posts. Image anarchism is the path that leads art to exist outside the context of art.”

In this episode, Yoshi and Tamara Kametani stopped by Queens to talk about their work, including the ‘Switzerland of America’ which I featured on LPV last  year, and their recently published book ‘In Search of the Crying Lady.’ I enjoyed our conversation and it was great to get some insight into their collaborative process.

The Crying Lady refers to the term Placky who were professional mourners in Slovakia. Placky used to be an essential part of the Slovak death ritual and were hired by the family of the deceased. The tradition was believed to still exist in certain areas of the country. Despite the encouragement that IPG received from ethnographers and people they spoke to along the way, the Placky were never found. The journey had therefore turned into a search for the tradition that disappeared before anyone that IPG encountered had realized. In Search of the Crying Lady is essentially a collection of moments that crossed IPG’s path along their road to failure.

You can buy ‘In Search of the Crying Lady’ HERE! 

You can listen to it directly through the player below, or DOWNLOAD it. Subscribe through RSS oriTunes.)

It was a long week. Issue 6 is going to take us a few more weeks to publish. We’re tidying up some of the design elements and I’m re-writing some of the text. And then on Wednesday I was poisoned by a bodega. Down for the count. Out three days. I’ve banned the bodega from my routine as punishment.

I’m also thinking of changing the frequency of The Digest to monthly. Why not slow down even more? These days I’m more interested in articles that will have some longevity than the weekly disposable news. I’ll see how I feel next week.

PDN 30 was announced. Good list. Shout to: Rush Jagoe, Jessica Eaton, John Francis Peters, Mike Friberg and Meg Griffins. Congrats guys, well deserved!

Consider supporting 10×10 American Photobooks for their publication!

©Curran Hatleberg – via [Ahorn Magazine]

Links of Note

There’s a new issue of Ahorn out and it’s fantastic. I particularly enjoyed the Richard Rothman interview: 

I actually went out to shoot the redwoods with very limited intentions, which is to say, I need to feel a deep sense of curiosity about a subject, a desire to know more about it, but not necessarily to know too much about it from the outset. I want to engage with subjects that I want to look at and experience, while leaving room for unconscious exploration, the development of unexpected themes, and any number of digressions that might strengthen the work and nurture my engagement. It seems there’s always something I want to look at more than anything else, and if I follow that, as I did while I worked on Redwood Saw, it can point me in the direction of a self-generating, multi-layered project that can unfold organically in rich and exciting ways.

Over at Hyperallergic, An Xiao wrote an interesting article about Tumblr: 

I remember when I first started Tumblr. I used the same screen name for my Twitter handle and website, and I would post more or less the same things I do on Twitter. But that got old fast, and I discovered how easy it was to create a new blog. These days, I have almost a dozen tumblelogs: one for bots, one for my photos, one for poetry, one for translation, one for memes in civic life, one just for pictures of empty plates. Some are shared, some are just mine. Some are clearly tied to me, some float freely on the web. They are all part of my creative practice, but they exist separately, like separate studios in separate cities, allowing me to dip in and explore when I wish. Unlike my Twitter and Facebook accounts, I don’t have to worry about posting too much about any one topic at the expense of others; I can simply post as I’d like and draw the audience I’m looking for. Some of these blogs have sparked new projects and trajectories; others have faded away. Tumblr’s flexibility enabled me to test them all out in an open, public studio.

Francis Hodgson: 

One of the pleasing things about being interested in photographs is that it is really perfectly OK to admit to not knowing even important groups of pictures. In a narrower specialism, say in craft pottery or in modern literary fiction or in contemporary dance, it’s embarrassing to miss first-rate stuff. In photography you can even turn the whole argument around: far from being embarrassing to have missed something, it may be that to live only with those pictures that have good kudos in your particular neck of the photographic woods is to be limited, to lack curiosity and openness.

Thom Yorke hates the internet and he might be onto something: 

We were so into the net around the time of Kid A,” he says. “Really thought it might be an amazing way of connecting and communicating. And then very quickly we started having meetings where people started talking about what we did as ‘content’. They would show us letters from big media companies offering us millions in some mobile phone deal or whatever it was, and they would say all they need is some content. I was like, what is this ‘content’ which you describe? Just a filling of time and space with stuff, emotion, so you can sell it?

Meet Amelia from Project Amelia

Amelia is a photographer and a friend. She’s 28 and was recently diagnosed with stage III breast cancer. She does not have health insurance. Please consider donating to her cause. 

©Rahcel Hulin – ‘Baby Henry Flies Again’ via [Time Lightbox]

So, enough controversy for you this week? It’s been interesting watching the Pellegrin story evolve over the last couple of days, but as I sit here on Sunday evening I can’t help but think that it’s much ado about nothing. A few good points were raised and I think it’s good to ask these questions but this is something that will most likely blow over and be forgotten in a few days.

BagNewsNotes vs. Paolo Pellegrin

On Friday, BagNewsNotes published an article that claimed that the location and subject in one of Pellegrin’s POYi photos were misidentified. Furthermore, there was a plagiarism claim. While the claims were very serious, and I probably should have put more thought into them, I actually found myself most curious about Pellegrin’s process.

Paolo had first photographed me in my apartment with a plain white wall. He made some photographs of just Brett holding one of my pistols, which he can’t legally own in NY since he doesn’t have a NY pistol permit. Technically, he wasn’t even legally allowed to hold mine. After we were both photographed in my apartment, we went to my garage to leave for the shooting range. That’s when Paolo wanted to shoot a few more portraits of us down there. I’m assuming it was because it looked scarier down there and would go better with his story of “abandoned houses prone to become centers of drug sales and use.” As I recall, the photograph used was from when I came downstairs with my shotgun, as requested, but I think it was before he started shooting the portraits of me.

The caption bothers me even more than the photo itself, which says, “A former US Marine corps sniper with his weapon.” First, I was never a sniper and I never would have said that.

For any Marine who knows me and sees that image, are they going to believe the photographer and assume that I lied about my Military Occupational Specialty. That makes me look really bad and hurts my integrity. Second, the one line caption makes it sound like the weapon I’m holding is my sniper rifle, which it’s not. It isn’t even a rifle; It’s only a pump-action 12 gauge. And as a minor detail, the word “Corps” should have been capitalized.

Pelligrin responded, and again I was most interested in reading about his process:

“Shane also points out that I took his portrait. This is true, and his account of how we were introduced by Brett, who was assisting me, is also substantially accurate. I had been spending the majority of my time riding along with the Rochester police in the Crescent and otherwise interacting with the community there. I approached the work through a combination of reportage, portraiture, and even landscapes. I also realized that to tell more fully the story of gun violence in Rochester, as exemplified by what I was seeing in the Crescent, I wanted to make some portraits of gun aficionados. Like any journalist, I worked with my assistant to locate such people, and Shane was one of the people we located. I think his portrait, and even his reaction to it, add an interesting dimension to the story. Shane thinks he and his guns have nothing to do with the violence in the Crescent; I disagree. (For what it’s worth, there is no firm agreement in Rochester as to what constitutes the ‘Crescent;’ it sometimes seems to be a conceptual designation as much as a geographical one. I actually didn’t know where precisely Brett had driven me to meet Shane, which is one of the reasons I captioned the picture simply, ‘Rochester.’)

I started to lose interest in the story at this point. LENS has a good article that probably provides all the information that you need to know and think about. When I first read the story on Friday I thought about Daniel Shea’s quote from last week:

I fully embrace terms like “documentary fiction,” “post-documentary,” “expanded documentary,” etc. The thing that’s worth pointing out with these terms is that fiction is more of a frame than anything else. The problem with work that purports to have documentary intention is that the work adheres to unrealistic and slippery definitions, codes, ethics, and assumptions. Social documentary work tries to evade these adherences by foregrounding narrative and human qualities, the implication being that the emotional tenor helps expand what we might consider to be documentary.

It’s a tricky situation, and something documentary photographers need to think about. Or you can just stick to ‘fine art’ and leave the ethics debates to the photojournalists. Also, read Jim Johnson’s ‘Parachuting into Rochester.’

There was some question about why Bag published the article without contacting Pellegrin to get his side of the story. I think Michael and his team probably should have tried to contact him but I don’t think it was that big of a deal. They started the conversation. Was it a conversation worth having? I’ll let you decide.

©Adam Neese – via LENSCRATCH

Links of Note

Oh, there’s more. Christopher Anderson responded to John Edwin Mason’s article about the CNN ‘War and Fashion’ article:

I fully understand how CNN’s article is offensive to many. And I obviously agree that there is a debate to be had about the context through which we create, view and discuss images and the appropriateness of how to best do that. Like many other things, I think the internet is a flawed venue to have that extremely nuanced and sensitive discussion. Twitter even worse. But if it is to take place, I would just like to correct the record as a starting point: Magnum did not partner with CNN to create this article. Yes, I am solely responsible for giving permission for my images to be used, and yes I agreed to be interviewed. But contrary to the internet meme and the tone of this blog and its headline, this was NOT a “cobranding” partnership by Magnum with CNN. I assume that most readers do not usually hold the subject of an interview responsible for the opinions of the journalist who conducts the interview. I am not sure why the same logic was not applied in this case.

David Strettell, owner of Dashwood Books:

I’m primarily an enthusiast and thoroughly enjoy turning people on to the beauty that can be found in these books. I run the bookstore in a very old-fashioned way. My staff and I have personal relationships with most of the people who walk through the door. Hopefully, I can inspire them by introducing them to classic titles and little-known gems, as well as the best in contemporary titles. There are more and more books produced on photography each year, and my main job is in weeding out the strongest ones—it can be like panning for gold, but it means the collection I have built has integrity. My aim with the store was to build a community for artists, designers, people in fashion, film and advertising to develop a lasting relationship with photography and books—it’s not easy to get that from the internet!

Lisa Fairstein:

We might have to redefine the activity of photographic image-making. Not just photographs, but photography as a whole is losing its traditional context. I think it’s important to consider that the line drawn around what makes a photograph, or a photographer, or a photographic practice, is sort of arbitrary. And so photography has the possibility to grow, perhaps beyond pre-defined criteria, and artists working with photography will grow along with it. I continue to find work that interests me, that engages photographic concerns in a variety of expressions. I don’t see an end to that. And maybe the lines delineating photographic work eventually won’t be as defined, and maybe it won’t continue to be such a topic of discussion.

‘A Casual Conversation with Saul Leiter:’

The past few years, I have been doing what I call kitchen paintings. I get the little boards that they put between the bottles when you buy wine, and I make acrylic paintings. I wake up in the middle of the night and do one of these paintings while I’m heating the water for my coffee. I go into Starbucks, I have my camera with me. I look at certain things. I haven’t printed a lot of those things, though. I’ve done a whole series out of my window, in color and in black and white, and it could be a little book — if I were of the mind to do it.

Francis Hodgson reviews ‘Photography Changes Everything:’

For all the self-serving hoo-ha whipped up by press agents of interested companies like Sotheby’s or Magnum or the larger galleries or a certain number of publishers, and for all the ponderous and yet not very ambitious weight of our undergraduate teaching programmes, photography is not really, in the end, mainly controlled by photographers, nor mainly consumed by people interested in the photographic aspects of any question that it touches. This is a salutary enough thought that it ought to be engraved in scrolled poker work on every hard-drive.

Conor Donlon:

The man behind (or rather, in the middle of) Donlon Books is Conor Donlon. After working for Wolfgang Tillmans for six years he started the venture, initially connected to Herald Street Gallery but then later in a beautiful old shop in North East London. Conor, although not wanting to alienate his customers, says he finds the photography world ‘very narrow in what it appreciates’ (a sentiment echoed by Brian) and that ‘ninety percent of the books that Steidl produce are just a little bit dull’. In a nice, if rather unexpected, synchronicity with another interview he even complains that the photo world is made up of 40-year-old men (notwithstanding his own proximity to that club).

‘On art criticism:’

The artist Karen Schiff proposed that we use the term “consideration” instead of “criticism” when discussing artwork. Consideration is “not just a kinder, gentler” form of criticism, she said. She noted the etymology of the word includes looking at the stars. A critic should be an “analyst” of art, she said, using artwork as a source of information instead of relying on supplementary text. “There’s always more to discover,” she said.

Luigi Ghirri:

The daily encounter with reality, the fictions, the surrogates, the ambiguous, poetic or alienating aspects, all seem to preclude any way out of the labyrinth, the walls of which are ever more illusory… to the point at which we might merge with them… The meaning that I am trying to render through my work is a verification of how it is still possible to desire and face a path of knowledge, to be able finally to distinguish the precise identity of man, things, life, from the image of man, things, and life.’

Christian Patterson:

I began to disregard some of my earlier feelings about photography, the way that photography worked and notions of documenting truth and representation, and having to take a new position of not caring so much about what was what and where it came from.

©Cameron Wittig – via Feature Shoot

Etc.,

• Don Hudson: What Was He Thinking? [Blake Andrews]
• Interview: Doug DuBois, Part II [fototazo]
• Why Do Photo Contest Winners Look Like Movie Posters? [Petapixel]
• A studio visit with Asger Carlsen [All of this is rocket science]
• Canteen Magazine’s Naked Judging: Learning from Rejection, Part 1 [LENSCRATCH]

Daniel Hojnacki // An Idle Procession from The Coat Check on Vimeo.