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- But to qualify that, I will say that the likelihood of a good image coming out of a camera increases if the photographer and the camera are in sync, and work together to produce the vision of the person holding the camera.
- The truth just might be that we can’t handle the truth — the digital “truth,” at least. We’ve somehow been convinced by companies such as Canon and Nikon — to cite two photography conglomerates that have successfully transitioned their product lines from analog to digital — that megapixels don’t lie. That higher resolution is somehow truer to life
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Memory and experience
Most online imagery is less spectacular and the drama is usually of a more mundane nature, but the principle of streaming communication is the same. It’s a flow of information without editorial architecture that the viewer assembles over a period of time to learn about the author’s experience. Time becomes the crucial component. Few single images convey the message in isolation but like the frames of a movie they accumulate to express the experience of the author, and to become an experience for the viewer. If there were a photographic precedent it would be David Hockney’s joiner images of the 1980’s. Hockney’s joiners were more than a two-dimensional collage of fragmented subjects, they were a study in time that show the subjects in space and across the hours or days that it took to collect the elements. The legacy of cubism that was absorbed by popular culture through the Twentieth Century was harnessed by Hockey in his joiners and is finding a vernacular voice in the Smartphone as the social media community intuitively adopts the principle of taking multiple fragments and stitching them together in our minds.
The consequences are significant, not only in the evolution of narrative storytelling but maybe even more in the necessity for active engagement required of a viewer to understand the message. The old photographic process of show and tell is a relatively passive process for the audience (recognising of course the imaginative work needed to reconstruct the meaning of even the most basic still image), whereas the streaming process becomes an active experience for the viewer. The viewer must work to establish if the source is credible, or at least interesting, and then they must collect the elements across time, which requires effort often because components are missed as the viewer steps away from their screen or is distracted by other narratives (or maybe even by their own lives). The process requires the viewer to check in frequently or to otherwise fill the gaps, and of course we’re woven into the story by our own responses along the way.
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Part of the places I’d rather be, series of videos.
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Very interesting style
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Gotta love a glitch; now if I can just make it happen when I want?
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In 1998, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta asked Richard Misrach to produce a body of work for their “Picturing the South” series. Misrach decided to focus on “Cancer Alley,” the Mississippi corridor that stretches a hundred and fifty miles between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, a startling landscape where antebellum mansions and current-day communities line the swamps and levees among gargantuan industrial plants that produce a quarter of America’s petrochemicals.
Over a decade later, the Museum asked Misrach to return to Cancer Alley to shoot, and then combined this new work with the original series for an exhibition and book called “Petrochemical America,” published by Aperture.
Click-through for more from Suzanne Shaheen on the exhibit, and for a slideshow featuring more images: http://nyr.kr/QgT2zT
Yet another book to buy; so little money, so little time!
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If you live in or near Paris; check this guy’s gallery out, it’s a must!
(Source: s-h-a-g)
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A couple of days ago, I wondered about a small piece of land I used to traverse on a regular basis. It has been recently swallowed up by a large infrastructure project being undertaken in this suburb. Since writing that post, I have foraged though my archives looking for images I have made in the past, usually on my way to catch a train and usually with my phone, as time tended to be somewhat of an imperative . I found a bit over 60 pictures that I had made from about 2009 to the present day. Here are the best 7 that represent the changes that occur over time in even the most banal of places.
Of course photography’s ability to record and create nostalgia is well documented, and I now wish I’d more of an effort to make more pictures there.
The space was marvellous to wander through at dusk, and even more so in summer; I guess that’s one for the ever growing pile of missed photo-ops.
- Art will always transcend life, because it remains essentially unimaginable to contemplate life without art. In the end we make art for what hides in the margins. We make art because we need to and we don’t mind where the revelations come from. We reproduce those things that matter the most to us, even though we may not consciously understand everything that we are doing at the time… It is a commitment to ourselves and the things in this world that matter most to us.
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Cartier-Bresson roamed the whole world years and years and came back with thousands of photos that don’t give you the foggiest idea what he felt about any of it.”
— Robert Frank, paraphrased by Bobby Abrahamson, July 2006 -
The kinds of choices that a photographer makes in the process of defining his subject cover a broad spectrum, ranging from gross choices to exquisitely subtle ones. Beginning on the gross end, the photographer must decide whether he will work in his own backyard or sail off to Egypt or to the moon. Once in Egypt, he has to decide whether to photograph Egyptians or pyramids. From this point on, the decisions become not more important, but subtler: which pyramid? from what vantage point and in what light? in what relation to the picture frame? with what combination of exposure and development in order to achieve a just resolution of the conflicting claims of surface texture, space, volume, and pattern? and then the decisions bearing on the making of a print that will most closely approximate the slippery memory of that true and ephemeral subject that was defined on the site.
John Szarkowski on American suburb X
- Our modern DSLR cameras represent not a single device but numerous devices; cameras for everyone but no one in particular. To the beginner these possibilities are camouflaged, indeed imprisoned behind the illusion of being able to be ‘wherever you want to be’ while the reality is elsewhere. Camera manuals compound the problem because they are rarely written for anyone other than the initiated. Navigating the seemingly endless menus, flavours and purposes consumes endless hours and days. Confusion, which is usually an enriching and engaging past time, quickly becomes a nightmare in digital photography .
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Great ideas create great pictures
s2z photo art & ephemera
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photographic ephemera; created or gathered, then thrown to the wind.
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