1. How to make good pictures

    This quote from an article in the guardian strikes many chords for me.

    That sense of wonder, expressed by one photographer for another, speaks volumes about how the work of great photographers impinges on the consciousness of those that follow them. I’ll give the last word to Robert Adams. “Your own photography is never enough,” he writes. “Every photographer who has lasted has depended on other people’s pictures too – photographs that may be public or private, serious or funny, but that carry with them a reminder of community.”

    Read the rest of the article which is premised on the idea that photography books need text and photographers are often bad writers!

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  2. Tom Waits AND John Baldersarri.

    Swoon!

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  3. I’ve always enjoyed this series by Polexi.

    I’ve always enjoyed this series by Polexi.

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  4. via SFMOMA

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  5. ‘Editions’ & Photography?

    Making Editions of prints has long been a tradition in printmaking. Some people are advocates of it in photography too. Luminous landscape has at least one article on the matter, and my aprroch is not to make editions.

    My work, particularly my silver gelatin prints, can never be reproduced exactly the same every time. Firstly the materials are in much short supply, and secondly I may change my mind about how I feel the print should look, tweaking the exposure or the developer or some other post darkroom technique like, toning, at a later date.

    An art collector is up in arms about William Eggleston making new prints from old work using current technologies. The art collector’s beef is that a reproduced image is just that ‘another image’ distilling the value of the original especially if the original is made a long time ago, BEFORE current technologies existed to reproduce pictures existed.

    However I feel this is missing the point, and a more interesting question arises.

    Perhaps Sobel’s claim is more interesting as an ontological question than a legal one. What does it mean to create a new work of art in the digital age? According to Virginia Rutledge, an art historian and consultant to Eggleston’s legal counsel, the vintage and digital prints “are entirely different, as objects — viewers experience these prints quite differently, and the market clearly has placed a high value on both experiences.” In today’s plugged-in world, audiences frequently see images of artwork reproduced online and believe “they’ve ‘got it,’ but that is reducing the artwork to merely an image. These new prints are an affirmation that the particular tangible expression of an idea, the physical life of an artwork, has a unique power.”

    I find the more interesting question what does it mean to make a new or reproduced work of art in the digital age? And that there are indeed people who can appreciate the subtle is of a beautiful photographic print.

    Now getting them to see and buy my work is the issue?

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  6. God Bless America

    Some fantastic photography here from a group on flickr, who specialise in the zeitgeist of the U.S, of A.

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  7. Every day, we get to see a bunch of mediocre images captured by mediocre cameras on our overpriced phones, uploaded via our overpriced data plans. But for the digital upper class, it is worth paying to be a participant of this instant cycle of sharing. Instagram has placed itself as a necessary tool in this process, an easy-to-use mobile app that Facebook bets will serve as the definitive photo-editing and -sharing tool of the current digital era.
    Grantland
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