April 2011
1 post
Robert Frank’s Unsentimental Journey -> Vanity... →
America felt good about itself in the 1950s. It had won the war. It was rich, and the magazines and television programs were promoting the American Way of Life. Patriotism, optimism, and scrubbed suburban living were the rule of the day. Myth was important then. And along comes Robert Frank, the hairy homunculus, the European Jew with his 35-mm. Leica, taking snaps of old angry white men, young...
February 2011
1 post
The Julie Project -> Darcy Padilla →
“For the last 18 years I have photographed Julie Baird’s
complex story of multiple homes, AIDS, drug abuse,
abusive relationships, poverty, births, deaths, loss
and reunion. Following Julie from the backstreets of
San Francisco to the backwoods of Alaska.”
January 2011
2 posts
The essential Rovogin: An in-depth conversation ->... →
“My photographs are straightforward. I always asked permission before taking pictures. I wanted to get close and make the people be the most important thing in the frame. I never directed them or told them where to stand, how to hold their hands, or what to wear. The only thing I asked them was to look at the camera. I liked it when I saw their eyes and that’s when I knew I was ready to make...
Interview with Lucas Foglia -> Daniel Shea →
“In the current work, I am leaving room for more surprises. For instance, I went to an area south of Eden, Wyoming, where a rancher was herding his sheep across a wild landscape. The railroad company that owned the land nearby had recently sold the mineral rights to a company based in Houston for natural gas drilling and the land was about to be mined. When I arrived the rancher was counting...
December 2010
1 post
PHOTO TALKS: "PHIL UNDERDOWN" -> Urban Nautica →
“I often felt while photographing Grassland that this is what is left to us, as residents of the Northeast of the US––a managed landscape with little virgin wilderness. How do you explore what is so well known, so well mapped, measured and ordered? I think you explore what is close at hand and see what happens when you keep going back. The history of photography is full of grand vistas of...
October 2010
3 posts
How Annie Got Shot -> FT Magazine →
“The Leibovitz story, however, is more than a tale of a photographer who got absorbed into the high-spending world of the people she portrays. It is a reflection of something unexpected – that, despite all her celebrity and talent, Leibovitz lacks earning power as an artist.” (…)
Chris McCaw on his Sunburn series -> PhotoEye... →
“The simplicity of the ocean’s straight horizon paired with the burned path of the sun is one of my favorite areas to work with. It seems like it would get redundant quickly but when you look at each work, they are all very different. With this piece, I wanted to do an extended burn and break it up between 2 negatives. Playing with the abstraction of this simplified landscape, I...
Brian Ulrich by Lynn Saville -> BOMB Magazine →
“You go to these places, and they’re ugly, and they’re not spectacular. The hard part of this project is figuring out where to point the camera. How am I going to get people to think about this idea? I have to make an interesting photograph. I have to pull them into a narrative that has an aesthetic basis.” (…)
September 2010
4 posts
Eyes Wide Open: Interview with John Szarkowski ->... →
“In a few cases photographers’ writings on their own work became highly influential. Among younger working photographers, Cartier-Bresson’s introductory essay in The Decisive Moment (1952) had constituted something close to an article of faith, until the authority of that text was undermined to some degree by Robert Frank’s Statement of 1958, which made it clear that...
Martin Parr on Brighton Photo Biennial -> British... →
“There is less socially engaged photography in the UK now: first, because of the difficulty in actually doing it; secondly because people don’t seem to want to engage. They like this idea of being an elitist artist, working in a studio, and not particularly connecting with the world. You know, for me the fundamental thing about photography – why I’m a photographer – is because I’m a nosey...
The Death of Photography -> Darius Himes →
“Kodak, established in 1892, has, of course, been synonymous with photography for over 100 years, one of the true empires of the modern age. The large-format color work of Robert Burley centers on the dissolution and dismantling of a part of this last photographic empire: the 100 year old Kodak plant in Toronto.” (…)
John Gossage Reflects on "The Pond"-> Smithsonian... →
“I don’t work as a conceptualist. Let’s say the conceptual art model is that you have a project idea, or a set of concerns, and then you illustrate those concerns in whatever manner you see appropriate. For me, it has always been that the world suggests far more subtle and interesting variations than I could ever come up with. ” (…)
August 2010
5 posts
The Photographer's Eye -> John Szarkowski →
“The first thing that the photographer learned was that photography dealt with the actual; he had not only to accept this fact, but to treasure it; unless he did, photography would defeat him. He learned that the world itself is an artist of incomparable inventiveness, and that to recognize its best works and moments, to anticipate them, to clarify them and make them permanent, requires...
Dismantling My Career: A Conversation with Alec... →
“People always say to me, “Your pictures are so lonely.” I think if you look at the vast majority of the books [I’ve collected here in the studio] with pictures, they’re lonely. Photography is a very lonely medium. There’s a kind of beautiful loneliness in voyeurism. And that’s why I’m a photographer.” (…)
The Wrong Side of the Bed -> David Ondrik →
“Forget Eggelston and Shore; Bouguereau is where it’s at.” (…)
An Interview with Garry Winogrand -> Barbara... →
“D: And how do you expect the viewer to respond to your photographs?
W: I have no expectations. None at all.
D: Well, what do you want to evoke?
W: I have no ideas on that subject. Two people could look at the same flowers and feel differently about them. Why not? I’m not making ads. I couldn’t care less. Everybody’s entitled to their own experience.” (…)
Video: Garry Winogrand with Bill Moyers, 1982 ->... →
“I learned a long time ago to trust my instincts. You see? When I’m photographing, I wanna — if I’m at the viewfinder and I know that picture, why take it? I’ll do something to change it, which is often the reason why I may tilt the camera or fool around in various ways. You don’t learn anything from repeating what you know, in effect, so I keep trying to make uncertain.” (…)
June 2010
5 posts
Photograms -> MetaFilter →
In 1895, a picture of a woman’s hand introduced the world to a revolutionary new kind of photogram. (…)
(via heyhotshot)
Weston Naef on Eadweard Muybridge -> ARTINFO →
Also, at this point in London there seems to be no documentation that Muybridge was interested in art or in photography. This raises the question: When did Muybridge learn the fussy procedures of photography — to operate a camera, and to mix the chemicals required to coat and sensitize a glass plate in the field, and to develop the plate in a tent nearby afterward, and then to make prints from the...
Joe Deal (1947-2010) -> Robert Mann Gallery →
Joe Deal passed away Friday, June 18, 2010 in Providence, Rhode Island following an eight year battle against cancer. Over the course of a 40-year career, he developed one of the signature bodies of work in American post-war photography. Born in Topeka, Kansas in 1947, Deal studied graphic design at the Kansas City Art Institute before moving into photography; he went on to earn advanced degrees...
Photography in the Age of Falsification -> Kenneth... →
“The photographer set off in quest of this vision, traveling the East African savanna for weeks with a captive leopard, killing antelopes, draping the carcasses in the branches of various thorn trees, and cajoling the leopard to lie proudly on the “kill,” a tableau that the photographer shot against a succession of setting suns.” (…)
Right on Time, by David Levi Strauss, with link to... →
“the history of photography is full of examples of work that was misjudged and maligned according to the prejudices of the time it was made, and then eventually rediscovered and celebrated.” (…)
May 2010
8 posts
Art for Everybody -> Susan Orlean →
“Thomas Kinkade lives in a large handsome house in a magical suburban community the name of which I am not at liberty to disclose. It is easy to understand his wish for privacy: ten million people own some product featuring his name, and most editions are signed with ink containing DNA from his hair or blood, to prevent fakes.” (…)
American Pastoral -> A review of two books about... →
“For the mask-like portrait, she moved her camera a few inches to her right, so that the razor-edged triangular shadow of the man’s nose exactly meets the cleft of his upper lip, and lowered it to make him loom above the viewer. What is remarkable is how she transformed the merry fellow in high sunshine into the unsettling and deathly face of the print. It might be titled The Last of His...
Video: Eirik Johnson discusses his series "Sawdust... →
A culmination of four years photographing throughout Oregon, Washington, and Northern California, Eirik Johnson: Sawdust Mountain focuses on the tenuous relationship between industries reliant upon natural resources and the communities they support. Timber and salmon are the bedrock of a regional Northwest identity, but the environmental impact of these industries is increasingly at odds with the...
Source Photographic Review: Learning Packages →
A series of structured learning packages, combining specially commissioned essays with selections of images from Source’s back catalogue.
Interview with Toshio Shibata -> eyecurious →
I take a lot of photographs and show very few. If there is too much reality, too much identifiable sense of time and place, I don’t show these images. I have taken around 4,000 plates with my 8 x 10 camera and of those I show about one percent. I try to eliminate the reality, time and any sense of specific place. Of course this is extremely difficult with photography. Within a frame there are so...
Revisiting the Valley of the Shadow of Death ->... →
Fenton’s most famous photograph, Valley of the Shadow of Death, of which there are two exposures, was taken in the Crimea. A Martian landscape recedes before the camera, the packed dirt road winding to the distance, pocked by scattered cannonballs lying in the ruts and gutters. No tree breaks the horizon, no solitary figure wanders the road. For a photograph of a war zone it is remarkably silent;...
Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Portraits -> Utata.org →
In a 1991 interview in Le Monde Cartier-Bresson said “a portrait is like a courtesy visit of fifteen or twenty minutes. You can’t disturb people for any longer than that, like a mosquito about to bite.” (…)
Man Ray in the Garden -> GardenHistoryGirl →
The artist Man Ray is best known as an experimental photographer but figures in garden history for his documentation, both still and film, of the innovative landscapes commissioned by Charles Vicomte de Noailles and his wife Marie-Laure. (…)
Also noteworthy is the link to Man Ray’s video, Les mystères du château du Dé
April 2010
19 posts
Chuck Close: Thoughts on photography and personal... →
Anybody can be a marginally capable photographer, but it takes a lot of work to learn to become even a competent painter. Now, having said that, I think while photography is the easiest medium in which to be competent, it is probably the hardest one in which to develop an idiosyncratic personal vision. It’s the hardest medium in which to separate yourself from all those other people who are doing...
Sean O'Hagan meets photographer Stephen Shore ->... →
In his spare time, Stephen Shore is a keen fly fisher. In 1982, when his first book of American photographs, Uncommon Places, was published, he said: ‘Fishing, like photography, is an art that calls forth intelligence, concentration and delicacy.’ When I read that quote back to him, he nods and says: ‘Now I’d add the word “attention”. That’s the big...
Reporter's Notebok: Alec Soth ->Minneapolis / St.... →
“I would just photograph every type of person.” He says, flipping through the prints. “It was the process of learning why one person is more interesting than another. I was terrified. I would be shaking.” (…)
An Interview with Todd Hido -> SeeSaw Magazine →
“I like your idea of “riffing” off one of Frank’s photographs—that is a great notion. But I never really said I’m going to do a project on “road pictures”. It just sort of happened. When I am out in the landscape, I am often attracted to things with perspective, and I often find myself on a roadway or a path that stretches deep into the distance, so it is...
The New American Pastoral: Landscape Photography... →
The photographers seem to take a critical view of what they are depicting, although in some cases an ambiguous viewpoint is crucial to their success. John Pfahl’s are perhaps the most ambiguous and most engagingly complex pictures in the show. He has photographed nuclear power plants in warm, lambent light, giving them the look of transcendental, Hudson River School paintings. And in the...
Mapping the Traces Man Leaves on the Land -> Andy... →
Although they share a surname and a reverence for the American West, one would be hard pressed to find two more dissimilar landscape photographers than Ansel Adams and Robert Adams. The widespread popularity of Ansel Adams’s pictures is rooted in a purposeful exclusion: he photographed primarily in wilderness preserves and eliminated all signs of human presence. Robert Adams’s images...
Jeff Wall, The Luminist -> New York Times →
In his early work, Wall self-consciously emphasized how weirdly hybrid his enterprise was. He overlaid allusions to great 19th-century painting and to current feminist art criticism in studio pictures that showed off their artificial construction. For example, in “Picture for Women” (1979), he reconceived Manet’s masterpiece “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” by changing the setting to a photographer’s...
James Welling puts five questions to Stephen Shore... →
Photo Listen: Fred Ritchin, Luc Sante, Paula... →
Fred Ritchin investigates the future of photography, Luc Sante looks back at the real photo postcard craze of the early 20th century, Paula McCartney takes pictures of birds, Robert Voit takes pictures of trees, Adam Frelin takes pictures of trees hit by cars, and Bejamen Walker proves his photo book collection is better than Martin Parr’s.
(…)
Interview with Ron Jude, by Daniel Augschöll and... →
I’ve never set out to emulate another photographer, regardless of how much I admire their work. When I started shooting what would become Other Nature, I very consciously looked at photographs by people like Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz, and the later “New Objectivity” work by photographers such as Thomas Struth and Joseph Bartscherer and asked, “Okay, what else can be done with the landscape?...
"Chronologies", An Interview with Richard Misrach... →
“It was also kind of liberating to rip the pictures from their tight narratives and see what kind of work they would do outside of their original themes. By laying out the book in chronological order formal and conceptual connections surfaced that hadn’t been obvious before. For example, in 1988 I photographed the effects of civilization on Yosemite, juxtaposed with the timeless...
Darius Himes interviews Roger Ballen -> PopPhoto →
There is a small measure of collaboration with the people. But don’t ever underestimate the animals. They play a large role in my photography, and even I am not quite sure what they represent. The metaphor or symbolism of an animal is quite different from that of a human being. Animals have endless mythology and metaphor wrapped up with them, and that mythology and metaphor is particular to...
Rephotographing Atget -> Christopher Rauschenberg... →
On a 1989 trip to Paris, I suddenly found myself face to face with a spiral-topped gatepost that I knew very well from a beautiful photograph by Atget. I rephotographed his gatepost from memory and wondered how many other Atget subjects might still be holding their poses.
(…)
James Welling by Deven Golden -> Bomb Magazine... →
Charlotte Rampling gave an interview in which she talks about how she has no idea what’s she’s doing with her face or her body when she’s acting. There’s that sense that she’s completely outside herself. I often feel that way when I make a photograph. I prefer photographing emotional things. Maybe they don’t appear emotional at first glance…
(via la pura vida)
The Beautiful Burden -> Blake Andrews on La Pura... →
Since its inception, photography has been a uniquely accurate method of visually describing the real world. Photography can also be applied —and has been used increasingly for roughly the past quarter century— as a tool to illustrate what’s in an artist’s head. Point a camera at a food prop and the picture might describe an advertising idea. Photograph an elaborate set on the street and the...
Navigating John Divola's 1970's Output, and... →
Above all else, the glisteningly bitter surface of punk rock is iconoclastic, usually masqueraded, but often sourced in the deeply misanthropic sentiment of its wielders. Additionally, punk is frequently pitched as nihilistic and leaving the physical trace of infant-like gestures (kicking and screaming, unabashedly destructive to myriad environments), which reveals an interesting congruency to...
So what's your secret? -> Conscientious →
“I drive around. I sit in donut shops. Walk malls. I look at people. Once in awhile someone catches my eye. Why? It is a hard thing to describe, but I think it is similar to the feeling you get when you see, you know, the attractive person across a crowded bar.” - Alec Soth
(…)
Is Photography Over? -> SFMOMA →
Is photography over? To anyone who spends time looking at photographs in galleries, museums, art fairs, flea markets, books, and magazines, the question seems absurd, unthinkable. When photography seems to pervade, if not dominate, every aspect of our culture, what could it possibly mean? Sure, there’s been some anxiety about the continued survival of the medium at its most traditional — the...
Charles Harbutt - I Don’t Take Pictures; Pictures... →
I became a photographer because photographers did have to be wherever they wanted to take pictures, or at least their cameras did. And because there was some connection, inherent in the nature of the medium, between that place and its picture. And the viewers, despite any pitfalls or roadblocks put in their way, could still to some extent be there too. This has always struck me as somewhat...
March 2010
36 posts
Writings by Peter Brown →