let us now catalogue famous people

thread for posting interesting articles/youtubes of famous photographers

http://www.jimarnold.org/downloads/winogrand/flash/

I must have watched this three or four times when I first found it - audio is a little screwy, you'll have to turn it up

I think these may be the youtube versions of the above:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl4f-QFCUek

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Zk1nkZ3-kE

pretty fascinating to watch him work on the street. I wonder if you can still get away with that nowadays, now that everybody is hyperaware of pictures/new media in general

bruce gilden works very differently on the street:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9rgxZ4_paA

joel meyerowitz shows us how to photograph like a creepy old voyeur:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qjym5uliDw

http://vivianmaier.blogspot.com/

pretty staggering

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_YUrw6ooCZj4/S2rPe95cthI/AAAAAAAAA74/EizBsN9s2c4/s1600-h/CHI-1176.jpg

more information:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/little-miss-big-shot-fifties-america-exposed-ndash-by-a-french-nanny-1811040.html

this site is full of good info about street photography and photography in general:

http://www.johnbrownlow.com/phb/home.html

No good photography docs on Netflix Instant. :(

recommended DVDs:
The True Meaning of Pictures (Shelby Lee Adams in Appalachia)
Sally Mann: What Remains
William Eggleston in the Real World

Just back from the Sally Mann show at the Photographers' Gallery (5min walk from where I work - why am I not in there every day?). Kinda obviously, it's Immediate Family that I love, but I was kinda startled by my own reaction at seeing those huge silver gelatin prints in the flesh. Real heart-in-the-mouth stuff.

"If I could be said to have any kind of aesthetic, it’s sort of a magpie aesthetic- I just go and I pick up whatever is around. If you think about it, the children were there, so I took pictures of my children. It’s not that I’m interested in children that much or photographing them- it’s just that they were there..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_RTnd3Smy8

belongs in WS thread too

this is also cool

http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2010/07/26/captured-america-in-color-from-1939-1943/

http://denverpost.slideshowpro.com/albums/001/496/album-125171/cache/color013.sJPG_950_2000_0_75_0_50_50.sJPG?1280349527

being awkward at dances...never goes out of style

I saw that exhibition when it came to the Amon Carter Museum here - the images are even richer in person. I've had the book for a couple of years but it's still shrinkwrapped. :(

the library of congress has a flickr feed!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/

my new favorite photographer based purely on the strength of one photo

http://mocp.org/collections/permanent/uploads/FaurerEL2003_20.jpg

http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/faurer_louis.php

also putting this quote here in case it ever disappears from the internet

My eyes search for people who are grateful for life, people who forgive and whose doubts have been removed, who understand the truth, whose enduring spirit is bathed by such piercing white light as to provide their present and future with hope.
— Louis Faurer, October 2, 1979

also, a transcript of a winogrand Q&A at MIT

http://2point8.whileseated.org/2010/08/22/winograndpapageorge-mit-transcription/

http://www.sevensevennine.com/?p=1220

two amazing photogs in this post

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuXcm35m50Y

this dude is a shredder

http://vimeo.com/18048548

http://community.livejournal.com/everyday_i_show/69544.html
Cool photos!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjmiU18UvK0

this guy is cracking me up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOr5MHlJQUA

(skip to 1:40 in the first vid)

I noticed that there's a reissue of his photographs out lately.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Khn5GN9cHWA

that Mark Cohen video reminds me of Bruce Gilden (who appears to be more of a dick, though):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRBARi09je8

Hiroshi Sugimoto has a section in the third season of Art21, episode "Memory," if you've got Netflix streaming.

I like this dude's philosophy

http://www.aphotostudent.com/2010/02/08/a-conversation-with-jason-eskenazi/

real dope

http://www.flickr.com/photos/liverpool1975/

Those are great!

http://www.amber-online.com/exhibitions/writing-in-the-sand/exhibits/whitley-bay-sept-78

the whole series is great but this one in particular made me laff

koudelka contact sheets

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ0SkmAh7d8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHWdEyvKkKQ

finally making my way through jason eskenazi's book and it's pretty staggering

dude is all time

Wow that guy has one unnavigable website. Seems the easiest way to see a bunch of his pictures is to see the Times profle/gallery: http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/showcase-15/

Oh wait, looking at his website though, he does have a thing "Double Zero" which is cool. First photo on the roll. It's better than my idea of compiling my "garbage shots" of windows, feet, and desks. The ones when you've just loaded the film. And his treatment is, uh, "Wagnerian."

Don McCullin & Eugene Richards from latest PDN
http://www.pdnonline.com/pdn/features/Heroes-and-Mentors-Do-3210.shtml

not famous but

http://www.flickr.com/photos/vouchey/sets/72157625828492479/

the colors here are just gorgeous. they don't make film like this anymore do they

I mean, that's kodachrome right?

There's a bit of a redcast to it (blues are a little purplish), so I would assume so.

http://www.akaaka.com/publishing/books/eric-china.html

some samples at the bottom

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K32E2qmg6tE

kind of boring but you can see some great shots interspersed with the video starting around the 9:00 mark

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/focusing-on-prison-photography/

powerful stuff, #6 just kills me.

lotta kinda-ilxy would-style in the chicago photos from last week:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/vouchey/5407316275/sizes/z/in/set-72157625828492479/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vouchey/5407315483/in/set-72157625828492479
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vouchey/5407925206/in/set-72157625828492479

my favorite part about that set is all the people in the comments who are like "I grew up there! I know that guy!"

http://www.diegolevy.com/index.php?/project/sangre/

i don't know whether my response to this guy is just conditioned by having found him while looking at examples of the website he uses, rather than expecting his photos, but man they're really powerful, & so well framed. the set directly linked is fairly brutal throughout (i haven't seen the others), so, warning if anyone is of a sensitive disposition re: crime scene photos etc.

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/08/world-war-ii-the-american-home-front-in-color/100122/

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/ww2_8/s_w05_1a35465u.jpg

so surreal

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/ww2_8/s_w42_1a35331u.jpg

those kodachrome blacks - look at how disembodied the hand is

Those are all available on the Library of Congress website in v. v. large TIFFs. Not the sharpest scans and often dirty, but you can make v. good 8x10s and pretty good 16x20s out of them.

those are great

http://www.gregoryhalpern.com/harvard.html

wow eskenazi is tremendous

yeah probably favorite book I bought this year

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCmvIMdpoW4

aside from the lol ghost world sadsack production, a good look at his working process!

guys what are good photo blogs

haven't looked at this for a while (i think the only actual blog i follow is photo booth at the ny-er, which can be great), but mexican pictures contains multitudes.

btw, not exactly relevant but kinda; i watched visions of light, the documentary about cinematographers last night, & thought it would totally be relevant to some of you-all's interests. it's about light. & framing. pros talking about their job. calling martin scorsese marty, etc. i recommend it.

I'm going to recommend the blog of a fellow ilxor, I recommend you follow from the dashboard as the default layout makes the pics small. but great stuff: kentpics.tumblr.com

this ilxor tipped me off to another tumblr who reblogs a gajillion other photoblogs but I think he's good gatekeepr: bremser.tumblr.com

other than that I look at the NYT Lens blog and not much else

I like this guy too but he doesn't update too often

http://thegreatbookshavebeenwritten.com/

(back to the OP for a second): think we should all appreciate this dude and his answers in this interview

not gonna lie I have come close to buying a 90mm on numerous occasions because of that interview

I think this site is great: http://www.americansuburbx.com/
Not a blog, but a good source of photographs and articles, some interviews, etc. Lotsa photographers

xp: rad b&w by leiter
http://fmrid.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/leiter2.jpg

wanna see the book

(back to the OP for a second): think we should all appreciate this dude and his answers in this interview

that is a delightful interview

theonlinephotographer.com can be good - it jumps around from covering new cameras to books to just highlighting good work
visualsciencelab.blogspot.com - blog for an Austin guy who's been a commercial shooter for two or three decades, but it tends to focus more on his personal work

I've been looking for more blogs about shooting vs. tumblrs aggregating good photos but they're hard to find

ILP actually has some of the best online photo dialogue I've seen. No inane Canon v. Nikon debates, no naked ladies or gaudy HDR stuff.

I've been looking for more blogs about shooting

yeah that's what i'm really looking for. and i'd agree that ILP has some of the best dialogue, it's just that sometimes it gets p slow around here and i am forced to turn elsewhere

david allen harvey's burn mag has good stuff too, a lot of it is too 'intense' for me tho

also if you're looking for more substantive stuff than blogs there are some people I think are worth reading. it's really really really hard to write intelligently about photography and there are only a few people who I think do it well, with that caveat:

john szarkowski, pretty much singlehandedly shaped the stream of american photography in the last 50 years - anything he writes is gold.
susan sontag - on photography (think that's the name) - I know, a bit wankerish, but there are 5 hard-fought insights on every single page, really
robert adams - eng. ph.d turned photographer, not sure if he writes much stuff outside of his monographs to his books but again, really excellent
gerry badger - really only has one 'trick' when discussing photographs but his stuff is reasonably interesting

I've been meaning to read camera lucida for ages, think I'm gonna do it this year (finally)

philip gefter, a former nyt photo critic also has a book out on aperture that has pretty good criticism, and is at least a good introduction to a lot of contemporary photographers (book is called photography after frank I think)

Re: Szarkowski, I absolutely love him, and you can in fact find quite a bit of his writing at the americansuburbx.com. I picked up his "Photography Until Now" a little while back (along with a nice Winogrand book!) and it's a pretty great history. Also regarding wankerish essays, I kind of love Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida. It's fun partly because of how much I often disagree with his opinions that he offers as certain fact.

totally into more substantive stuff, just figured bløggers would be a good place to start

just read a szarkowski interview about ansel adams and this sorta blew my mind? i mean, not ~really~, but i love trivia like that

Unlike the landscape photographers who had come before him, Adams was interested in the natural world not as a solid, immutable thing but rather as an event. He was always concerned with the ephemeral. In that sense, he was as much a photographer of his time as was Cartier-Bresson and the rest of them--photographers who had been born on the line between the 19th and 20th centuries, and who were concerned with the ephemeral partly because the technical vocabulary came to allow it. For example, when Ansel started his career, he used plates. Then he switched to film, and with film, you can make many more exposures. You can afford mistakes; you can take a chance because you've got another sheet of film instantly available. Then there was the introduction of panchromatic film, which allows filtering. If you were to look at all the mountain photographs made in the 19th century and compare them with all the mountain photographs of the 20th century, you'd find the 20th-century photographs have a lower horizon. Why? Because given the color sensitivity of 19th-century photographic plates, the skies always came out white or a streaky gray, so intelligent photographers pushed the horizon up and used the sky as some kind of a shape. When panchromatic film was introduced, and blue need no longer be rendered as white; you could deal with the sky as a space. These are merely specific instances of the general proposition that the difference between Adams's photography and earlier landscape photography lies in his concern with the ephemeral. His landscapes aren't about geology; they're about weather.

Lots of insights like that in "Photography Until Now!" I think it's pretty easy to find secondhand too.

"looking at photographs" and "the photographer's eye" are really great too

see also these threads

Books on photography. s&d

26 books every photographer must own

Here, this is good: http://www.americansuburbx.com/2010/11/theory-eyes-wide-open-interview-with.html

you guys are the best

essays by Robert Adams:
http://www.amazon.com/Robert-Adams-Beauty-Photography/dp/0893813680

kinda interesting book by Stephen Shore:
http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Photographs-Primer-Stephen-Shore/dp/0714859044/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1317049850&sr=8-2

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=354868915

^^^ looks v. interesting, but I don't know when I'll have time to watch them

I would like to revisit that stephen shore book - supposed to be a modern day 'update' of szarkowskis' photographer's eye. shore is not as elegant a writer tho imo

Thirty years after he had written on Atget, Evans wrote, briefly but perfectly, on Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus, and died with a perfect critical average.

oh man don't think I've seen this - anybody know what szarkowski is talking about here?

haha I love szarkowski so much

It is, of course, true that an enormously larger number of photographs have been made by dumb amateurs, commercial drudges, half-sober news photographers, celebrity merchants, real-estate salesmen, etc., than by photographers with clear and clean artistic intentions; which suggests that the former groups have likely made a great many pictures that might appeal to those of us interested in what photographs can look like, and in how they may contain and convey meaning.

god when he's on, he's on

Winogrand certainly did expose a great deal of film, and until his very last years he had an astonishing percentage of successes, even by his own high standards. The proof sheet containing the famous picture of the crippled beggar at the American Legion Convention includes three or four other pictures never printed by Winogrand that most photographers would count among their prizes.

you can't just say this and leave it at that :|

yeah that interview was g-d delightful.

Szarkowski makes me eager to take pictures, look at pictures, *and* read about pictures. Is there anyone doing similar writing today?

yeah I'm really excited to shoot.

haven't caught up on that interview yet, though excited to, so feel bad about changing the subject for a minute, but since this out of control freight train is as busy as ILP has been in a while i thought it would be okay to just turn it into a live blog of photo-related-activities:

i was in a library yesterday & ended up sitting on the floor with walker evans at work, a pretty broad survey of a lot of his i guess earlier work, a lot of portfolio submissions he'd sent to magazines, with scans of usually two or three or four negatives for each shot - maybe some where he'd tried it on a 35" first before changing to MF, of dustbowl folks & penn station & the subway portraits & skyscrapers &c&c&c. & god he was just the best. i'm trying to find some he shot for a 'william faulkner's mississippi' spread for harper's or something that are extraordinary - really narrative pictures, both nailing the landscape & the people but also capturing that you're very consciously looking 'at' them (there's this great shot framed through the window of the car it's taken from, of workers in the field, the diffused outline of the car barely a distraction but such a part of what you're looking at). but the whole book, seeing the guy shoot is just crazy. his lighting is extraordinary, given that a lot of the time he's on the street or walking around with a camera in a busy, probably socially unusual environment like a food camp or something.

(gonna read that essay anyway, am emboldened by szarkowski's shout out to the dumb amateurs of the world)

http://www.americansuburbx.com/2010/02/theory-introduction-to-william.html

this essay is like whoah

It could be said – it doubtless has been said – that such pictures often bear a clear resemblance to the Kodachrome slides of the ubiquitous amateur next door. It seems to me that this is true, in the same sense that the belles-lettres of a time generally relate in the texture, reference, and rhythm of their language to the prevailing educated vernacular of that time. In broad outline, Jane Austen’s sentences are presumably similar to those of her seven siblings. Similarly, it should not be surprising if the best photography of today is related in iconography and technique to the contemporary standard of vernacular camera work, which is in fact often rich and surprising. The difference between the two is a matter of intelligence, imagination, intensity, precision, and coherence.

kinda want to just print this on business cards and hand it to ppl when they start trashing jackson pollock paintings or w/e

I think the first photo is my favorite eggleston photo of all time

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/world/asia/in-south-korea-where-digital-tattling-is-a-growth-industry.html?pagewanted=all

I should take my creepin' skills to south korea

this dude

http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/cushman/highlights/slideShow.jsp?page=1

similarly

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/rediscovering-the-urban-palette/

mostly for this shot

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/09/28/blogs/20110928-NYColor-slide-AXH8/20110928-NYColor-slide-AXH8-custom1.jpg

wow
yeah the guy i linked was also in a lot of ways 'instances of alluringly coloured photography' as much as 'check this dude', on account of i guess his kodachrome smarts

http://www.chinasmack.com/2011/pictures/adrian-fisk-what-are-young-chinese-thinking-about.html

I'm not a fan of portraiture in general but this series ~speaks to me~

http://img.chinasmack.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/adrian-fisk-ispeak-china-what-are-chinese-youth-thinking-29.jpg

http://img.chinasmack.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/adrian-fisk-ispeak-china-what-are-chinese-youth-thinking-15.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/k4rOQ.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/KkajI.jpg

http://img.chinasmack.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/adrian-fisk-ispeak-china-what-are-chinese-youth-thinking-13.jpg

potentially valuable ilx poster

goddammit
http://img.chinasmack.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/adrian-fisk-ispeak-china-what-are-chinese-youth-thinking-13.jpg

into these btw

I'm not a fan of portraiture in general

?
just less so than you are of kind of 'live' photography, or?

it's just really hard to get right for the right effect, imo

I'll probably grant the environmental portraiture > studio portraiture

http://i.imgur.com/kikPf.jpg

to suburbs thread

http://img.chinasmack.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/adrian-fisk-ispeak-china-what-are-chinese-youth-thinking-27.jpg

^^ the right effect in five different ways

sure, yeah. i don't really, off the top of my head, have a portrait photographer i'm dying to throw at you to argue it, anyhow. i don't think i really make a big division between people who are taking 'environmental portraits' & just photographers, really - like i could sit walker evans in either because it's sorta both, where as studio isn't.

now that I've had 5 more seconds to think about it, I think it's because of the formalistic nature of the genre that it's really easy to fall into cliche. not that it isn't easy to fall into cliche with all the other genres of photography out there. but you really need to think about how to jazz up the same, head-on shot that has been done so many times before.

i don't have any strong feelings about portraiture, but i guess that when a portrait evokes any kind of response from me, it's almost exclusively a reaction to the subject, and not the photo itself. like, a momentary ignorance of artifice, just str8 lookin at a dude, wondering what he's thinkin baout. which is also why portraiture can be sorta boring---it's static pictures of people just sitting there, being people.

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/tyler-hicks-a-decade-in-afghanistan/

worth it as much for the accompanying text as for the pictures

when a portrait evokes any kind of response from me, it's almost exclusively a reaction to the subject, and not the photo itself. like, a momentary ignorance of artifice, just str8 lookin at a dude, wondering what he's thinkin baout. which is also why portraiture can be sorta boring---it's static pictures of people just sitting there, being people.

this is interesting - i'm still not really arguing either way, like vehemently in favour of portraiture or anything, bc i haven't thought about it much since the above was posted, but i wonder if there's a big dividing line, here, between photography you like & photography you take - because i think if you take a portrait of a friend or some family or whatever and you really nail someone, totally get what they're like, encompass their essence/tendency towards gazing into the distance/whatever, then that's a huge achievement & can feel as successful as any photography (obviously, you can achieve the same in non-portraiture, capturing a gesture or even better a kinda significant moment between people or whatever). but then if you're dealing with portrait photography you've seen, of people you don't know, then you have a different standard - like 'wow that totally nails beckett, what a grizzly old intense dude' etc. i don't know. i say all this because, i think i have said this on here before, i have got way more into trying to capture things about people i know when taking photos than be part of a bigger effort focusing on like 'humans' or 'society' or w/e. maybe plax's stuff is the same?, idk, like it isn't that it is or isn't portraiture, but that it's dedicated to getting that str8-lookin-at-a-dude thing, which is especially powerful when you know them.

love the bike in this:

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/10/09/international/09cnd-afghan.2.large.jpg

oh there's no doubt that a personal connection to the subject of a portrait outside the picture itself strengthens and colors the way you look at that portrait.

portrait portrait portrait

sure, & it feels obvious to even say so. but just i wonder whether, if the chief thing you're trying to elicit with portraiture is that sense of understanding or curiosity or capture, maybe it's a harder thing to either objectively judge or feel the appropriate connection to as with non-portrait photography, & so it's something that's going to be most successful 'locally'. not really - bc i guess the great portrait photographers of famous dudes (inc HCB, right) are also capturing a thing, albeit perhaps based on what's known of them publicly - but kinda.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/arts/design/25hipsters.html

the writing here seems a little savage, but it's sorta interesting to me, esp in light of

There is a paradox in Levinstein’s approach that is shared by legions of greater and lesser street photographers: he was hunting for the poetry of real life, but what he shot was generally the sort of thing that street photographers generally shoot. Not the types of people or situations that you barely notice because they are so ordinary, but people who seem strange, marginal or ridiculous.

it's the kind of criticism that has me scurrying to my collection, acutely self-conscious. i think i'm doubly sensitive because lately i have been thinking unkind things about some of my IRL bros photo sensibilities and i'm like "check yrself dude"

Not the types of people or situations that you barely notice

tbf this is becoming pretty common in online street photography circles as well.

xp that's the diane arbus critique, isn't it? that since her, why even bother? I too am pretty self-conscious about that... it's a tough call for a line-judge, you're trying to decide if there's something more beyond the inherent 'weirdness' that is worth photographing, committing to the medium...

I guess personally like compositional "interestingness" as well as ordinary/offbeat subject matter

there is real skill in being able to make souffle out of an egg. it's hard. really the answer is to not even think about that, to just take the photo and decide later in the editing stage.

Boy I really would not worry too much about whether it is more representative of life to shoot "interesting" or "mundane" subjects. Either way you're doing a lot of editing before during and after taking the picture and either way it's a big fiction.
What annoys me about a lot of street photography (especially the current revival as seen on In-Public and all) is the reliance on cleverness and visual puns. I know I'm the guy who just posted the photo of the woman behind the plant, but still...

Like there's a wittiness arms race going on.

true, true xps to dayo but to you too chinavision, really

also thought it interesting that the "best" photo in that exhibit (the handball one) was compared v favorably to HCB, who is an interesting counterpoint to the arbus/weirdness thing. because HCB is so frequently mentioned in terms of timing and the decisive moment (like, it's obligatory), it's hard to dismiss something as being "too much like HCB" or retreading the same ground or what have you. the exceptional qualities of his most famous works aren't as deeply grounded in subject matter as arbus or eggleston, nor does he have a particular formal axe to grind. they're just, uh, moments.

i think this is what elevates merely good street photography to great---it can't just be that the subject is interesting, or that the picture is well-framed. there has to be a sense that, had the photographer been just a split second later, the photo could never have been made. and, of course, that there is no possible way to recreate it ~just so~. like for me personally i think i have like three photos where, looking back, i'm like "man i can't believe i timed that right"

I know I'm the guy who just posted the photo of the woman behind the plant, but still...

i love this photo btw!

either way it's a big fiction.

^^^u&k

Like there's a wittiness arms race going on.

― lou reed scott walker monks niagra (chinavision!), Thursday, October 6, 2011 12:51 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

oh yeah this totally bothers me too. really hate it that nick turpin has become the 'voice' of modern street photography based on a career of finding barber poles and waiting for someone to walk by who also happens to be wearing a striped shirt.

otoh if you look at some of the other dominant factions like HCSP they've also got this particular winograndian 'aesthetic' that gets pretty old after a while too.

I've been meaning to start a thread about the winogrand revival - maybe I'll do that later today

man i need to get myself to the library and do some learnin' because i probably haven't seen more than 3-4 of any of the ppl you guys talk about in these threads

http://www.in-public.com/NickTurpin

in-public is a 'collective' of street photographers

http://www.flickr.com/groups/onthestreet/

every once in a while a good photo gets in

I think I respond most strongly to the *look* of a picture, followed much later by subject matter. This is something that I like about Friedlander, who can seemingly take any urban or rural location and construct a tangle of wires, poles, branches, shadows etc. in a beautiful way that seems like it should be simple but I can never replicate no matter how hard I try. It's also what I like about Meyerowitz's color street photos: they simply look beautiful apart from the subject matter. The framing and timing are part of that of course. A lot of current street photography looks like it comes from people who are just not moved by those same concerns *at all*. And so when I see a funny/clever visual pun I think, hey that's funny/clever but I have no desire or need to look at that photo ever again.

This is now a big xpost

yeah - those pics are called one-liners and feel like the photographic equivalent of m&ms.

see i usually respond the same way, except, as noted above, with portraiture. xp

And I was going to call out the In-Public stuff earlier. That and the Hardcore Street Photography group of flickr are two things I deeply dislike these days. At least Nick Turpin seems like a friendly guy. The HCSP discourse is often ugly. Makes street photography seem like a sport in which you earn points by being tough enough to get in the subject's face the most. Like somehow they've actually turned it into a macho thing.

ew

The fact that it's called "Hardcore Street Photography" is just ugh.

btw guys ILP is like my favorite subboard these days

yeah the discussion on HCSP is kind of shameful but they do highlight interesting projects sometimes in the forum. that said,

http://vimeo.com/29361738

this guy, who is held in 'high esteem' by the group, comes off as REALLY bad in this video

I used to think he had some pretty good stuff - knowing how he gets them, by channeling the Big Swinging Dick mentality of a lawyer/i-banker, is ugh. bruce gilden blew the balloon up pretty tight on that - no need to go further.

as far as visual puns go - after elliott erwitt, why bother?

btw out of curiosity: do you guys own prints of anyone? seems like most reproductions of good photographs are either dumb posters are crazy expensive limited run duplications or w/e

(nb i don't actually know anything)

I buy photobooks - usually when they're mentioned on TOP. printing tech is really good these days. a university library or even a public library is good for getting copies of OOP books, but not always. I wish someone would scan winogrand's 1964 already.

...on TOP?

the online photographer

No prints here, other than the odd amateur photo from a Salvation Army. Don't even have any prints of my own pictures! :'(

But yeah I buy books.

generally if a book comes out on steidl you know it's 1.) from a good photographer and 2.) going to be printed really well

There were amazing books available at the PS1 Art Book Fair a weekend ago! (that were often hundreds if not thousands of dollars)

And Steidl had a table that was fun to browse.

I have a couple of prints from people I went to school with and online print exchanges. I can't afford to buy prints from galleries and would feel weird buying prints anyway.

Lots and lots of photography books. My local used book store had an enormous amount of remaindered Eugene Richards and Robert Frank books for a while so I own pretty much everything that's easily available from them.

i think the used book store down the street from me has a huge photo section but i'm kind of afraid to look because it would mean going broke

I know we are all loling at this but I actually think this is a pretty good example of fresh photography!

http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/scared-bros-at-a-haunted-house

I mean put it on an exhibition wall and claim that it challenges conceptions of 'masculinity' in our culture and boom

haa yeah i was actually thinking that it was p interesting

really the answer is to not even think about that, to just take the photo and decide later in the editing stage.

In case it hasn't been said yet, I just wanted to stand up and declare total bullshit on this. Bull. Fucking. Shit. You don't make souffle out of an egg. You make fluffy lift out of an egg white, and custard out of the yolk and milk and cream (the same thing you make ice cream out of), and then you bake, and baking involves so much more science than I know, I can't even extend the metaphor much farther than that even for my own purposes. Photography is still photography, and you can't turn a bad photograph into a good one in photoshop, and you can't shoot a thousand photos and try to pick the good one if all of them are bad photos. You have to be there, and then, and catch something. If you did, you did. If you didn't, you should have known better. And if you post all of the thousands of crap photos you take to Flickr, that doesn't make them good. It makes them worthy of consideration, but often on your own behalf more than anyone else's.

I love the haunted house link. These guys may not be scared, tho. They may just be doing some doo-wop.

http://s3-ak.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/web04/2011/10/6/11/enhanced-buzz-32041-1317916773-35.jpg

kenan I don't think you're understanding what I'm saying

i'm a bit of a broken record on this but i've kindof said a little bit in the past of how maybe i'm not that invested in the photographs I take in terms of "photography." that is i take photographs p diaristically or like a tourist. just photographs of my friends or like bins and flowers and bus shelters, I have a bad memory and its nice to have a way of remembering things (there are almost no photographs of me between the age of like 12 and 22 except of horrible harsh flash out with my friends photos and holiday snapshots posing with a building). This is why i feel like i go in and out of having anything to contribute to this board bc like schlump kindof suggest, the photographs i take are probably primarily interesting to me as portraits.

re: what people are saying itt though, its interesting that its so easy for me to now consider that so outside of what photography is supposed to do, post-HCB especially and the "decisive" moment, photography seems to be about the instantaneity of the camera's mechanisms one way or another. This seems to me in a lot of ways why people find it so easy to dismiss photo-editing. It is especially interesting considering the fact that early photography kindof had nothing to do with this, the subject posed frozen waiting for the image to form on the plate. I think of something like Nadar's photograph of his wife as being maybe more what i'm interested in though, the lingering moment, how the image is composed not in a way that's necessarily about detail or action but about the moment accumulating.

http://www.all-art.org/photography/fotography/nadar_photographers_wife1890.jpg

I think though that this is really about being in agreement in some way with what a lot of you are saying though, that street photography gets misunderstood by these dbs as a kind of sport. like going beyond capturing a moment and doing something like taking a moment fucking hostage. There's something about the way the camera barges in and in a way it doesn't really take a photograph of anything other than like the act of photographing something.

^ ahhh great great post, plax; i hope it was okay me mentioning you, btw, i really rly like the photos you've posted on here (both yr friends & those bleachy contrasty colour studies) & was totally identifying w/you & their approach rather than being, you know, AND OF COURSE ON THE OTHER HAND THERE ARE LAYMEN, CF PLAX (ICO), FOR WHOM---.

i remember a few years ago i had a borrowed digital camera & would use it to take photos of things i didn't want to expend film on, i guess, so the things that i was documenting rather than 'shooting' (cf 1 2 3 (crossposting #2 aspirationally to dirt bag style thread). & since then i've changed and am as into recording those things on film as i was capturing them in a throw-away way, because 'documentary' is personally v important - not as a task, but as a resource, & - and i guess this is contrary to kenan, above - i think time can change a shitty photo into an interesting photo, even if it's still not a "good photo", seeing it some short time after the fact or whatever, seeing it from a place where you aren't anymore or of a place you've never been etc - it feels reductive to think of us only receiving photos as composition or craft when by virtue of what the machine does there is so much else going on in any frame.

the counterpoint to a single moment or instance you make is really otm, too, & i think the kind of thing where you are maybe fleshing out a photo with personality and specific identifiable human feelings, sometimes - not necessarily gesture but presence. that photo is great, i'd never seen it.

(there are almost no photographs of me between the age of like 12 and 22 except of horrible harsh flash out with my friends photos and holiday snapshots posing with a building)

ditto to this although there are still no photos of me except ones i've taken of my reflection in car windows on sunny days, i guess there should be a 360 degree camera to include the author and rectify this

yeah that was a nice post, plax.

really like this, btw: There's something about the way the camera barges in and in a way it doesn't really take a photograph of anything other than like the act of photographing something.

would be the pull-quote of choice but goes into hard competition against:

like going beyond capturing a moment and doing something like taking a moment fucking hostage

that's a champion bit of wording!

http://www.martinparr.com/blog/?p=282

wow @ rinko kawauchi

i think martin parr lives on my street
~brags only ILP would care about~
(i like his mexico photz, & british food, though have a harder time with the domestic stuff, irrespective of how totally expert it is. he feels like kinda an antecedent of the punchline/deadpan stuff that is v popular, maybe)

I paged through a parr book that felt like it was all food

that is a thoughtful piece, btw; i think between that & plax's post there is def something to the thought of shooting something that 'looks like a photograph'

the pages felt like they were made of ham

it was a bunch of close ups (with a ring flash I presume) of frosted cupcakes and hot dogs and popsicles and people's hairbands

pretty interesting and cool

I think Parr got known for doing point-and-laugh "look at how WEIRD these people are" stuff a la Coney Island beach shots

(coney island beach shots mentioned in this screed http://icplibrary.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/oaf.jpg )

I get all my stuff from TOP, btw

http://www.google.co.uk/search?gcx=c&q=martin+parr+british+food&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&biw=1366&bih=677 maybs. i just saw an exhibition of his; he really hits a stride for like five years in the late 80s/early 90s and takes a lot of poetic & charming group portraits, & skewers the british upper classes in school shots. he still makes me a lil queasy elsewhere tho; i wonder if part of the appeal of his mexican stuff, & japanese stuff, for me, is that i'm not from there and so don't really reflect on his image versus the kinda national identity so sensitively.

xp yeah absolutely, the garish-working-class-quintessential-beach shots, they can seem condescending.

Hmm. I've got "The Last Resort," the aforementioned Parr book of seaside vacations etc. and actually like it quite a bit. There's a forward that takes great pains to explain why it was controversial on first publication but that there is no condescension intended and if you look again you'll just see people making the best of a situation and enjoying themselves etc. etc.
I'm not sure if he's off the hook that easily though, since some pictures *seem* to be more grim than the forward wants to admit. But, I mean, it WAS grim, right?
Also, at that point, I don't think it was very punny at all. More like vignettes or portraits.

Yeah looking at the pictures now I don't think they're exactly affectionate, but they don't really seem critical or condescending of the *people* in them to me at least. But the forward really does protest too much.

it's interesting that he addressed it - i don't know that i knew the controversy was so overt. i think you should be able to document that kinda thing sure but i feel like those elements, the colour, the kind of head-on glare, the match of like 'brash' culture with hypersaturated imagery, it feels like it's going to evoke that potential reading. idk. it's funny thinking about them now because i'm looking for comparable touchstones, & thinking of roy andersson, visually, culturally, & mike leigh, tonally & in perspective, both working in movies. i think the photos not being affectionate, & not really locking into any kind of ... infectious or empathisable mood (you know, you aren't seeing the kids & getting a pang from their smiles) maybe means that they're coming across as 'a clinical study of the leisure pursuits of the working classes', which isn't "don't do that" but is sorta "who are you to judge".

ah but the UK has a special way of getting riled up, check the comments section:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2040260/Maciej-Dakowicz-Cardiff-After-Dark-binge-drinking-images-turned-Britain-laughing-stock.html

hey schlump thanks man, that wasn't me getting cranky and reacting though because i took what you said before as a compliment but it was just playing on my mind.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/589591535/harold-feinstein-a-retrospective

TOP linked to some really technical but also interesting articles about lens design, this one is probably the most readable

http://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2011/01/cooking-with-glass

two others

https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2011/08/lens-geneology-part-1

https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2011/09/lens-genealogy-part-2

into the idea that this image has any kind of rigid, useful, technical purpose:

http://www.pbase.com/rcicala/image/131372155/large.jpg

instead of being like a fun wrapping paper design for lens enthusiasts

dazzle ships!

videos w/ Eugene Richards
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR26B3Fws7w

http://lightbox.time.com/2011/03/14/war-becomes-personal-interview-with-eugene-richards-on-capturing-the-aftermath-of-the-iraq-war-at-home/

http://vimeo.com/21893848

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/reminiscence-stepping-through-the-ashes/

this is really, really cool - British documentary photographer/artist who puts her projects online in book form for free. I've never seen the software/website (Issus) she's using for this, but it's pretty awesome - full-screen on my iMac looks great.

http://ameliashepherd.com/silent-voice/

this is neat, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/2011/10/great-mistakes-vanessa-winship.html#entry-more

her black sea series is quite great too

http://www.vanessawinship.com/gallery.php?ProjectID=146

(there are two parts)

yet more great photography from eastern europe. what is it about the place?

great run on TOP today - think you would dig this site, schlump

http://www.katehutchinson.blogspot.com/

ha, TY. definitive moment: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YJrCrmitONQ/TWb-ybpxURI/AAAAAAAAChs/hnUGbCBov1Q/s1600/cats%2B3%2Bdone.jpg

i think that kind of series makes a better argument for the power of photo journals, more than the shots themselves; you get a really nice sense of place through the light & suggestions of routine, etc. still constantly enthralled by unchangingwindow.com for this.

since there was the martin parr discussion itt, which included a link to his meditation on what photographers tend to take photographs of, i find myself thinking about that a lot. partly because i think i got past a stage of taking those deadpan shots of things you walk past and would just want to straight up capture & uncomplicatedly relay - a funny thing on a street, a suggestive juxtaposition of mundane details or w/e - but then partly because i'm still wondering what it could be. like it does feel like you want to capture 'the space between things' somehow in a way that means something.

"space between things" is a very apt phrase, friedlander-esque

lens did a story on nina berman, she has some really great sets

http://www.ninaberman.com/

love megachurches

also, I have never seen this picture before, but goddamn it is moving (the interview, too):

(warning: graphic image)
http://www.salon.com/2007/03/10/berman_photo/

man if you don't check out lens every week then I just don't...

but I gotta link to this

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/from-out-of-the-dump-to-the-top-of-the-heap/

heartbreaking + uplifting at the same time. the best eye is sometimes fresh and green.

http://www.everybodystreet.com/

from that, discovered http://www.artcoup.com/

==== amivitale

know i was enthusing about it like four posts ago BUT i get all man if you don't check out [X] every week then I just don't... about unchanging window, & this seems like a kinda exemplary/typically great intro in case anyone isn't checking/hasn't seen, &c. sorta also joins up with: arguments in favour of digital photography, & the thing about what to take photographs of now; she gets something so profound & sensory from details

http://www.unchangingwindow.com/content/?p=15687

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/11/documerica-images-of-america-in-crisis-in-the-1970s/100190/

color film really has come a long way hasn't it? nevertheless love these color shifts and weird white balances

http://www.chinasmack.com/2011/pictures/north-korea-leader-kim-jong-il-dies-his-life-in-59-photos.html

http://www.americansuburbx.com/2011/07/garry-winogrand-class-time-with-garry.html

I just can't get enough of these pictures by Ed Panar: http://edpanarchive.tumblr.com/

they really grew on me as i scrolled
this was the first i really liked:

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lwp5i5XcBA1qehamgo1_500.jpg

http://www.life.com/hdgallery/23295/life-classic-eugene-smiths-country-doctor#index/0

yes

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jun/18/war-photographers-special-report

I should really stop reading about war photographers, it leaves me gutted every single time.

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/red-rain-and-loss-in-tokyo/

really great and affecting post, the write-up is as good as the pictures

wow yeah that's awesome. feels skewed to say something technical rather than emotional after reading - because it is so affecting - but it's so well done. i love the photos arranged in fours, they look great.

this guy is awesome btw, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/nyregion/thecity/18abst.html

he is living my dream life (well, I hope he has health insurance)

DP: Can you imagine yourself doing anything other than photography? Is that what feeds you?

HI: I love drinking tea and talking with friends all day. I wish somebody would pay me for that.

DP: If you were not doing what you are doing now, what would you dream to do?

HI: It would be nice to be beautiful and just exist.

http://dianepernet.typepad.com/diane/2009/01/hiroyuki-ito.html

i feel like he has graduated to some next level photographic zen to which i do not have access

gonna go buy some ilford 3200 & see if it helps

I get to allot myself about an hour a day to pretend to be at one with the camera and the city, then I go back to work in my cubicle. It works ok. At least I get that health insurance that way.

looks like he's shooting neopan 400 and/or 1600 xp (just from looking at the tone of the pictures)

yeah i imagine so; i remember some of yours that iirc were pushed from 400 & were getting very stark. i am still not a developer but i guess you have a lil more leeway to go high contrast if you're in the darkroom. he's p out there in blacking out a lot of a shot.

ha:

I've heard his name before. He was an ex-photographer even before he died. Two thumbs down.

ha ha, this is amazing:

HI: I've heard his name before. He was an ex-photographer even before he died. Two thumbs down. For the same reason, Robert Frank and William Klein go down the toilet. These three are quitters. Look at Lee Friedlander or Daido Moriyama who still go out and take obnoxious amounts of bad pictures. They refuse to be canonized but keep shooting. They are, to me, more interesting. But I'll be honest. I love Cartier Bresson. I love Frank and Klein. Who doesn't?

Friedlander is truly the greatest. Loooooove Friedlander.

friedlander and eggleston do that trick of pointing a camera at the most banal thing possible and making it interesting, it's amazing

yeah i imagine so; i remember some of yours that iirc were pushed from 400 & were getting very stark. i am still not a developer but i guess you have a lil more leeway to go high contrast if you're in the darkroom. he's p out there in blacking out a lot of a shot.

― quick brown fox triangle (schlump), Wednesday, January 18, 2012 10:32 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

haha yeah - well, delta 3200 was technically designed to get as much shadow detail as possible in low-light situations. neopan 1600, some say, is actually only about 640 in true speed (people peg delta 3200 + tri-x 3200 at around 1000-1200) - I think fuji was aiming to get completely black shadows. dante stella calls it a 'film noir' film iirc

a moot point, since neopan 1600 is dead and 400 is rumored to be so. :(

i just bought a roll of 3200, i was not bullshitting, & it was $$$, but i'd totally forgotten the thing about neopan 1600 being discontinued, damn. i really came around to it when i p much used to just use those two kindsa film.

Neopan 400 seems to be readily available again. I suspect Fuji slowed or stopped production to dry up the relatively cheap supply out there and raise their prices.

Tri-X @ 1250-1600 in Diafine looks good, if you develop at home

pulling for fuji - knew they wouldn't pull neopan 400. my hope is that the devotion japanese camera users have to film will singlehandedly make sure that 35mm film is produced somewhere for the next, hopefully, 10 years. and hopefully, a roll of basic black and white 400 speed film will not exceed $10 a roll.

http://canopycanopycanopy.com/12/looking_fast

http://canopycanopycanopy.com/static/0000/7627/EgglestonField_clean.jpg

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/18/the-heart-of-the-matter-love/

ty for that. lovely. hands. some more here: http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/essay-6/

hey dayo do you know this guy? allan king, he was canadian. it isn't really much of a link with the above but i wonder if you might like; it isn't some sensationally-shot film, though parts of it are v beautifully framed, & the 'presence' & distance of the camera is sorta fascinating i think, but it seems like it would maybe intersect w/some things that interest you.

no I don't! will look but was just finishing the other link you posted.

http://i.imgur.com/tNe77.png

this is an absolutely amazing photo - and at the risk of being a boor, I would like to point out how seductive (from a technical standpoint) the B&W tonality is here.

never a boorish observation. totally valid and on point.

it took me a while before I realized that there are different 'kinds' of B&W pictures. like, prior to seriously engaging with the medium, they all 'looked' the same to me or perhaps mentally I just conceptualized them all in one big category of 'black and white' in my brain. now, after being told that there are different ways that B&W photographs can look, I can 'see' the difference, and it's very hard to unsee.

the same with color photographs, too. everytime I watch a movie now it's hard for me not to imagine what the cinematographer was doing for each scene in the film.

cinematography always amazes me. photography but it moves! and there are many different conflicting light sources, and the camera might move from indoors to outdoors, etc. after getting into photography, whenever I look at motion pictures I'm aware of how much underexposure they often get away with, just motion on a largely black screen. and considerations about clipping whites can't be so important if the brightest thing in the frame is constantly changing.

the b&w tones that really did it for me were, as I probably mentioned before, Friedlander's. Especially with the more recent medium format work there's so much nice gradation all over. it looks superb.

tbf, film handles clipped highlights a lot better than digital

totes xp to dayo

def for bw movies too. like the first time I saw dr strangelove, the black and whiteitude was just there. seeing it again recently I was just amazed by how artfully composed and deliberate each shot was

oh yeah! I watched citizen kane for the first time recently and WOW

http://i.imgur.com/tZd7Q.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/LnhlR.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/MF4X4.jpg

dang

interesting to me that my generation (IMO) grew up thinking that black and white films weren't just not in color, but also lo-fi, just because we only saw them on small tube TVs via shitty transfer and with terrible audio.

kinda pumped to explore blu ray versions of classic flicks

hahaha, i remember seeing ck for the first time a couple of years ago and being so blown away by how modern it still felt, and also there's always that surprising thing when super-cannon things are actually great. like idk i just expect certain things to be massive chores in the end. but i mentioned this to a girl in my class and she said she had had the exact same experience and then it became this thing that this weird cult of citizen kane happened in that class. i mean, obviously this is the most celebrated movie of all time possibly, the ridiculous part was how it felt like we had discovered how good it was in spite of that. like i just wanted to tell people "no i know you know how good its supposed to be, but its like REALLY GOOD"

is it on the netflix I wonder

thinking that black and white films weren't just not in color, but also lo-fi

have had this experience with just "old films" period. They always had such terrible looking video/television transfers that I thought people in, say, the 70s had awful cinematographers. pan and scan was no doubt related to this too.

Canonical Works That Aren't A Chore would be a good ILE thread.

I saw a restored print of Vertigo years ago, that was a holy shit experience. Not sure anything has ever looked as good as that movie.

I've seen vertigo in 35mm, holy shit agreed

vertigo is one of of only three or four american hitchcock movies i've never seen

fave movie of all time. see it in a theater whenever I can. boy oh boy do I love vertigo!
ps. restored looks good, but original print (cared for) looks even better!

i have never seen a hitchcock film!

yes you have

can't believe I said "boy oh boy" ...who am I??

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/life-and-kodak-remembered/

the salsa dancing pic is pretty exquisite imo

ha i saw a weird digi restoration of vertigo recently that looked like it was presented in glorious jpeg-2000, it was really strange. def a gorgeous film though; the greens. in the film thread, morbs linked to a 2011 repertory recap that singles out an old marilyn monroe film notable primarily for its print, which i wouldn't mind catching; i sorta get fascinated w/cinematography when it's a rich/inseparable part of the film - can't really think of anyone with whose work this is the case more than kieslowski - more than when it's just an aesthetic bonus (cf that tom ford flick), but it can be nice just to see stuff that's beautifully shot. one of my least fav wong kar wai movies is one of the most striking things i've ever seen:

http://i175.photobucket.com/albums/w147/clubhouse1/ashes_of_time/07.png
http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/1006/41934757rz5.jpg
http://i175.photobucket.com/albums/w147/clubhouse1/ashes_of_time/10.png
http://img3.imageshack.us/img3/1215/12988917lj5.jpg

i think i had the 'this is so modern!' reaction w/stuff like the misfits, which is kinda a weird text anyway but looks like it's from space or something

http://www.ernst-haas.com/archive/misfits/misfits06.jpg

it took me a while before I realized that there are different 'kinds' of B&W pictures. like, prior to seriously engaging with the medium, they all 'looked' the same to me or perhaps mentally I just conceptualized them all in one big category of 'black and white' in my brain. now, after being told that there are different ways that B&W photographs can look, I can 'see' the difference, and it's very hard to unsee.

yeah this is so true!, & it's hard to think it isn't tangled up with the hierarchy of images related to how colour was phased in as an 'advance'. looking at the life essay you linked is interesting, the scans of the slightly distressed photos are really soft, almost sepia. looking at any of this stuff, like the gednes archive linked above, makes me feel like i should be a better photographer, stop fucking around shooting 100 speed film indoors & getting blank prints back.

ps milo, re:

Canonical Works That Aren't A Chore would be a good ILE thread.

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Friday, 20 January 2012 02:23 (8 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

try to catch the bfi rerelease of l'atalante if it's playing near you, it's great to watch

http://books.google.com/books?id=rEoEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA88&ots=IOvOjkZnlz&dq=grey%20villet%20%20Lash%20of%20Success&pg=PA88#v=onepage&q=grey%20villet%20%20Lash%20of%20Success&f=false

the grey villet photo essay mentioned in that lens post

i think of the subsequent creepy ads i pick 'the proving ground', p102, as the narrow victor over the weird auto-syrup dog food bowl

Schlump, thanks so much for that 'Looking fast' link, fantastic stuff there!

yes!, it's interesting. i generally think 'familiar but finite things' vs 'endless sprawling potential newness' is a p big debate ~of~our~time~ & it is pretty well embodied by books versus the rabbit hole of the internet.

hey btw le bateau ivre, i can't remember seeing any phots of yours on ilp, do you drop in here much?

I'm a big photography lover, buy way too much photography books I can't afford and go to exhibitions etc. I don't take much photographs though, or at least don't share much. I think only once I shared some here. So yeah I'm probably a lurker here, but soaking up all the wonderful links and photographs and discussion!

ha i'm glad, i feel bad for asking, it feels like maybe a product of how cosy ILP is, WAIT IS SOMEONE ELSE READING THIS EVERYONE BE QUIET I THINK THE CURTAIN JUST MOVED.

cool beans anyway. post some phots if you ever feel inclined, i think everyone here just likes looking at photos of other places/lives as much as anything.

i think also that a few people decided to "get into film" at around the same time and this ushered in the particular era of ilp we're in now

I don't have that incrowd feeling with ILP at all Schlump, I feel fully at home! :)

yeah its super nice

it's still surprising to me to see an ILP thread that has 50+ new answers regularly

oh sure, i didn't so much mean cosy as in cliquey, more just familiar, like the brady bunch setup that is i love vinyl, etc. i generally don't know who everyone is on other threads, let alone feel familiar enough to sense stranger danger when someone new is around. there was that thread about why people use ILX/what it means to use ILX recently; how well being able to think about & see photography here is a v good example of its appeal

gbx: szarkowski published a book of his photographs before he became famous photo critic. it's title? the face of minnesota.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Fgw6ArCYqv8C&lpg=PP1&dq=the%20face%20of%20minnesota&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=the%20face%20of%20minnesota&f=false

omg thank you

i have been feeling v minnesotan indeed lately

also: ordered

i just watched gus van sant's restless, feat:

http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/9314/vlcsnap2012012201h07m57.png

two other eggleston things; makes me want chromes real bad

chromes looks fantastic

did you guys know that that americansuburbx site is some guy's blog?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UC02bm7ZxM

this photo is great; it's a crop, slightly, but so classic:

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2012/1/27/1327695388947/Clinton-and-Obama-007.jpg

obama's collar is somehow like something out of margritte, where it's the platonic ideal of a man's collar. hills looks like a composite of the characters and statuses in cassavetes' faces, the earring & the expensive jacket

like it reminds me of a raymond pettibon drawing or something.

i thought these were really interesting, too. i guess i like seeing this sort of thing lauded because it's so obviously for content & feel & gesture, etc, which is as close as i am going to get to taking good photos.

ha oops: these

http://theexposureproject.blogspot.com/2007/07/liyu-liubo-13-months-in-year-of-dog.html

I think the full set is here

http://fotofestbeijing.visualserver.com/Image.cfm?nK=683&nL=0&nS=0&i=5864

http://www.talkingbarnacles.com/

are you guys into this

yeah this is v nice
this & the old photo essay stuff posted here makes me want to take more sequences of shots, they look v good, here.

Do other people check out LPV Magazine? I've sometimes liked it, sometimes not, but it's often pretty decent, and the regular digest that's been a thing in 2012 is nice: http://lpvmagazine.com/2012/01/the-digest-–-sunday-january-29th-2012/
Hope it keeps up.
I love those Talking Barnacles pictures. Been on that site all day.

that url didn't paste right btw, best to copy and paste

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/2012/01/magnum-contact-sheets.html

Ties in a bit with contact sheets I guess: since I've been enjoying Talking Barnacles and Kate Hutchinson's photos so much, I find myself really wanting to take MORE picture and display them more serially, rather than doing the stand-alone image thing. I like the way that it deflates the epic-ness of any individual picture. Kinda helps to destroy the illusion of the pinpointed perfect moment and 'perfect photograph' in favor of just a series of moments that just happened to be the ones captured in a particular place. Deflates the 'definitiveness' of pictures. I like that. Of course I don't know if I have an interesting enough daily life to sustain something like that, and my instinct is on the side of taking fewer photos (outside of short bursts that can run through a roll in a minute or so, which *does* happen occasionally). I like the looser composition of a lot of the barnacles shots too.
in other words, schlump otm

I haven't enough film in bulk, nor an organized workflow for it so I'm one of those guys that tip toes through a roll over the course of a month or more

dunno about organized workflow, but I just found a place selling fuji superia 400 for $2.49/36-exposure roll. this makes a big difference re: film supply.

the best part about the talking barnacles pictures is the datestamp, and how the setting is always the same setting - really gives you a sense of belonging

btw, for htat new yorker magnum contact sheet post upthread - if you view the contact sheets in a separate window, you get much bigger versions of them

I got a book out from hte library once, jim marshall's contact sheets. very interesting

and I bought the expanded edition of looking in: robert frank's the americans for the contact sheets alone

oh duh it says so right in the instructions

just kinda throwing this in here intending to follow up later, bc i don't have all the relevant tabs i dug up open in front of me:

http://www.ajapanesebook.com/2010/05/shincho-mook-out-of-photographers-001.html

do you know this guy, yonehara? he had this japanese magazine, out of photographers, that afaict published photos people sent in & also some phots by famous people? i guess this sounds like a pre-tumblr tumblr, but i can imagine it being very different in the way you consume the images. some photos in the link above, & i know there's an anthology of stuff from the different issues, somewhere. i'd really love to see a copy, & it appeals to me as an antithesis to the 'photographer'-style book, w/an emphasis either on single images or sets, by pushing abundance & freely made connections between images, instead. re: china's post, although i know there was still an implied grouping to the kind of set you get with a contact sheet, etc.

every couple of weeks i start to type & then delete another mention of unchanging window, bc i know i've mentioned it before, but it's sorta again relevant, here, & she is my fav photographer, most for what i get from looking - the space between the images, the familiarity of things i've never seen. it's definitely diaristic, so the simplest way to think of what you are looking at is just that it's tuesday, or whatever, the things that happened in the day, but the fact that what you end up concentrating on - big things vs small things - is k fascinating to me. the past five or six entries have all been really great:

http://www.unchangingwindow.com/content/?cat=17/

xp & ha no i'd missed that info, too, i should go back & look at them large.

ilx is my fav photographer iirc

http://www.helenaschaetzle.de/de/portfolio/oestlich-von-hier/

courtesy of recent ILP poster rent, the sense of composition is so strong

just picked up American Landscapes, curated by szarkowski. The essay is so good.

i never read any szarkowski - i think i only heard of him last time he was getting discussed itt, though i guess i flicked by whatever he had to say about willam eggleston's guide - is there anything online i should read? i can actually get a bunch of the books (photography until now, looking at photographs, the photographer's eye & a bunch of single artist books) from the library here also. shortish essays would be good

start with looking at photographs, def

there's some great essays posted upthread i think? over at ASX?

yeah that rings a bell, i will go look, i always get kinda swamped in that site, like maybe i open ten tabs and read none

ty

i think the interview with him on that site was as good a primer as any. i became increasingly obsessed w/ it last summer. guy is such a quote machine.

oh guys found a copy of Eggleston's Democratic Forest over the weekend... psyched! Great stuff in there.
This board is like home base for Egglestonmania and I love it.

Egglemaniacs

i think the interview with him on that site was as good a primer as any. i became increasingly obsessed w/ it last summer. guy is such a quote machine.

yeah the interview is great.

This board is like home base for Egglestonmania and I love it.

ha i was just about to gratuitously repost an eggleston thing & didn't, for fear of unsolicited overkill, but since you mention it; i posted this somewhere upthread but one of the pics is my desktop background & has been reliably soothing for awhile & i keep coming back to it:

http://images.albrightknox.org/luna/servlet/view/all/what/33+photographs+from+the+Jamaica+Botanical+series

so good
also dipped back into some shots from 2 1/4, after szarkowskiing on asx, which i think i only ever saw as a neo-egglestonyte, looking for flashier images. lots of it super striking, though:

http://americansuburbx.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/two_and_a_quarter_e.jpg

i've never looked through democratic forest, the stray google image search results look really good though

i think szarkowski fits p well w ilp aesthetic consensus

he is our critic emeritus

Not famous and not really ILP's thing, but Allister Freeman does some rocking wedding photography
http://www.allisterfreeman.co.uk/blog/

those are good. little bit of spontaneity and tongue-in cheekness. facebook these days is full of foregrounded brides with out-of-focus grooms looking all lonely stalker in the background.

i think the only part of wedding photography i'd find at all interesting would be the location scouting.

http://www.killeryellow.com/blog/2012/02/15/simon-kossoff/
http://simonkossoff.blogspot.com/

ah yeah... that guy's been a flickr contact for quite some time! He has some good pictures, but also runs the Altered States of Agoraphobia group, which is often nicely curated and has occasional features on LPV. Good stuff.

http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/william-eggleston-untitled-1970/5536829/lot/lot_details.aspx?from=salesummary&intObjectID=5536829&sid=23680e67-4f89-4198-bc47-a34df7ccfc96

should we all chip in and buy it for the ILP lounge?

oh nice
http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/ZoomImage.aspx?image=/lotfinderimages/d55368/d5536858&IntObjectID=5536858

can somebody check how much is in the ILP swear jar?

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/02/19/magazine/vivian-maier.html

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/a-lonely-gaze-on-the-times-and-its-city/

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/a-life-fashioning-art/

I picture plax opining on portraits when I look at these pictures

loved all of those. frank's woman in a taxi. his ability to work to photos featuring the new york times. the other lens piece on maier, too. i hope the retro on her gets into how photography fit in her life, to some degree, because it's so impossible to imagine, her technical proficiency and like presumably long-refined & thoughtful process, how she built those things. so good.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/120213_presidentsday-09_p465.jpg

seeing those Frank phots & remembering them, since, reminded me of how it's kinda annoying how good he is. like as much as it is awe-inspiring or inspirational or whatever. like just annoying.

lol I know the feeling

i was just scanning some photos i took at a thing for a friend, shot on ilford delta 3200, bc it was dark, & i think just the memory of the tones, the successful capture, of frank's stuff was haunting me. i said a thing here a couple of days ago about always having the workman-blame-his-tools out of 'well if only i had a leica/developed my prints', &c&c&c, & so there's some comfort there. i'd love to be 'on assignment'.

I mean there's that philip gefter book called 'photography after frank' and there's emmett gowin talking about how in his early days he was just trying to channel frank. I don't know why there seems to be a fracture in photography pre and post frank, and I'm sure you could find antecedents to his style (i.e. louis faurer). but for better or for worse it does seem all photography subsequent seems to lie, even obliquely, in his shadow.

yeah. i mean i found the emmet gowin idea really profound, and heartening, & it fits with the place that i think photos can have, now; there isn't necessarily this window with which to authoritatively just show, so much, & have it carry so much weight, per Frank's state-crawling nation-defining glut, but in stripping us of the duty or license to document we're also afforded this kinda indulgent, personal attention to ourselves - to edith gowin, to the girl who lived next door, etc, to the nyt photographer guy who goes back to japan for the funeral. the thing that compels me to un-sequence and scan and crop and resize and upload and add the imageshack url to the html of my internet thing is that those personal windows are really compelling, just as vicarious, transportive clutter.

so in this instance i think i was probably just talking more technically, because they're so measured:

http://ettagirl.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/picture-4.png

though i think some of it is staring at something slightly blurred, or something that inadequately renders someone you know, & knowing there's that accuracy in timing & gesture, as well as composition/tone:

http://meathaus.com/wp-content/uploads/robert-frank.jpg

gah http://www.kenschles.com/About/compare/NewYorkIs/NYIs.html

great mid-60s photos of the Hell's Angels
http://life.time.com/culture/never-seen-hells-angels-1965/?iid=lf%7Cmostpop#4

very reminiscent of Danny Lyon's Bikeriders series/book

http://www.adammarelliphoto.com/2011/09/henri-cartier-bresson/
HCB and composition

i like the idea that hcb was like the terminator, & when he glanced around his vision suddenly tinted & looked like this:

http://www.adammarelliphoto.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Henri-Cartier-Bresson-Likeness-003-Overlay.jpg

I've seen people analyze HCBs photographs as if they were just relations of geometric shapes on a spatial plane and it was just like ugghhh

oh, it's the one linked to

well, I'll just come out and say I don't agree w/ that viewing of HCB at all

It's not 'just' relations of shapes and lines - but composition can be the line between a photograph that merely imparts information and something more. The knock I'd have on the essay there is that some of the compositional claims are stretched a bit thin (like the one linked here).

HCB was very much a formalist and spoke of the supreme importance of lines/shapes/values in a lot of interviews.

"But this takes care only of a content of a picture. For me, content cannot be separated from form. By form, I mean a rigorous geometrical organization of interplay of surfaces, lines and values. It is in this organization alone, that our conceptions and emotions become concrete and communicable. In photography, visual organization can stem only from a developed instinct."
http://www.americansuburbx.com/2012/01/interview-henri-cartier-bresson-famous.html

yeah - I mean, HCB was def a painter by background. maybe that's why I'm not a big fan of HCB - and I keep on thinking of that frank quote re: hcb.

nothing against you milo - just that I feel like that kind of analysis is really mechanical. like...

Photographers, especially in their formative years, focus only on their subject. They forget all about the background. Since we cannot paint in supporting ideas, we need to watch for shapes in the background to echo our subject. Cartier-Bresson framed the image to include the spokes of a wagon wheel that mimic the ribs of a starving child and then he pairs it with the bony fingers of their malnourished mother.

feels like inappropriate analysis

it's a component, at least. doesn't mean it's the only component, or that that component alone is sufficient.
I like HCB but don't really like the cult of HCB. as discussed elsewhere I'm not in love with the emphasis on the 'moment' and the virtuosity and mystique, but something really works for me with a lot of his pictures. a significant part of that is the composition.

I do think the diagrams with the heads/spires, etc. are a little much though, since you can kinda play that game with most photographs. it's like in high school art classes where teachers take great pains to show you golden ratios in everything.

drawing that seashell shape over every damn painting in history...

I like HCB but don't really like the cult of HCB. as discussed elsewhere I'm not in love with the emphasis on the 'moment' and the virtuosity and mystique, but something really works for me with a lot of his pictures. a significant part of that is the composition.

― lou reed scott walker monks niagra (chinavision!), Tuesday, February 21, 2012 9:46 PM (37 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i'd agree with this

I understand why Frank thought of himself as oppositional to HCB's method, but I never thought it was necessary as I see them as different schools.

HCB is kind of a single-shot photographer - the power of his images is self-contained. His iconic photographs stand alone as prints on the wall, as paintings might.
Frank is more modern in the way he works in series - the power and brilliance of The Americans doesn't come from individual shots, but from experiencing the whole (as book or exhibition). (That, IMO, is a big part of what is meant when people talk about the existence of photography pre and post-Frank.)

I don't think that's strictly true - walker evans was just as a talented, if not more so, "series" photographer!

i think that while that's true of frank, that there's a great contextual power in the narrative & variety of his shots, he can still, imo, go toe-to-toe with anyone in terms of folding a huge amount into individual shots. & i think i could argue this even with his most 'specific', or 'mood' shots, which are so remote but resonate as archetypes, but if you didn't wanna do that you could just be like

http://metropolitician.blogs.com/scribblings_of_the_metrop/bus.jpg

LOOK IT'S AMERICA. i can understand that what is creating a singular image isn't the painterly quality, but how much they carry socially is incredible.

unsolicited & righteous defence of frank, idk why

looks pretty compositionally strong! hands grasping at, hanging out of white bars, reflections overhead. could put a bunch of red dots and lines over that.

ha it looks like a filmstrip <3

the big difference between Frank and HCB to me is Frank's pessimism vs. HCB's prolificness (and occasional anecdote-ishness). not so much in the relative strength of their compositions.

a big part of Frank's legacy is also about making one focussed book and then quitting.

well I think the received wisdom is that frank replaced the classical formalism of photography til then with this technically very imperfect, underexposed, haphazard style - like he wasn't afraid to leave huge blank spaces in his pictures, negative values become just as telling as the thing depicted. like you could apply the three or four part test in that article to frank's photos and probably half of them would fail.

maybe what's valuable is that HCB's composition-ality points is one way to take good pictures, but it's not the only way, and perhaps you can take just as good pictures by not following those rules

I've always thought that it's illuminating that this is the picture that inspired HCB to start taking photographs

http://i.imgur.com/pjUqd.jpg

hopefully-real-quick clarification, but could you just define/expand on 'negative values' in your post, dayo? sorry to jerk back to technical q&a but i'm sorta interested in whether you're specifically talking about like gradation and rendering, like with the eggleston thing about the difference between seeing different prints of photos & what it was that made them come alive. i can see how those aspects would be particularly relevant to the affect of frank's stuff.

oh I just meant negative space

like I was thinking about the one that you posted from New York Is... like how the lady, ostensibly the subject (or is she...) of the photo, is at the very rightmost of the photo - cropped off.. what are we to make of the rest?

http://ettagirl.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/picture-4.png

or idk, like the way he'll fill in the foreground with... undifferentiated mass, what does that do for the picture compositionally?

http://www.artcritical.com/appel/images/frank_med.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/jcYnS.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/fa8sW.jpg

didn't read the article about HCB but i will say that those last three frank's are hell of formal

Blog dude would probably draw red squiggles on 1 &3 about leading lines and the rule of thirds.
I've always been drawn to imbalance in composition, but I also worship at the altar The Dog

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/38/Goya_Dog.jpg/300px-Goya_Dog.jpg

Blog dude would probably draw red squiggles on 1 &3 about leading lines and the rule of thirds.

that's also kind of the point - you can draw red squiggles + look for congruences in pretty much every picture ever taken

also w/ those pics I was pointing out that there wasn't a 'figure/ground' relationship per se as the HCB blog post was so keen on emphasizing... and the shadow detail was pretty crummy... &c!

well I think I agree that the squiggles/red lines thing can be applied to most pictures. still maintain that Frank's photos are pretty solidly composed. negative space being a tool he used frequently and well.
read this last night, btw, which includes some entertaining line drawing renditions of some Frank compositions: http://jnocook.net/frank/frank.htm
Have yet to read this: http://jnocook.net/frank/rfa.htm - today at work maybe

now that I finally put in a RSS subscript to american suburb x I will probably be posting a lot of links to there too

http://www.americansuburbx.com/series-2/s/suzanne-opton-vermont

this one made me really sad, I wonder what the backstory is

also I realize that plax is probably cringing at my compositional analysis upthread, there are probably v specific painterly terms to be used, it cannot be helped tho

so I got this book from the library and was gonna scan a few of the interviews because they were good, scanned one and did a quick google search and look somebody already put the whole text on the internet

http://www.archive.org/stream/photographywithi00well/photographywithi00well_djvu.txt

I recommend the frank, the szarkowski, the w. eugene smith, probably the sontag as well (haven't read that yet)...

Have yet to read this: http://jnocook.net/frank/rfa.htm - today at work maybe

― lou reed scott walker monks niagra (chinavision!), Thursday, February 23, 2012 9:04 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark

I like the first half of this essay - a 'european perspective'

Blog dude would probably draw red squiggles on 1 &3 about leading lines and the rule of thirds.

that's the thing, I don't think the rule of thirds would work for either 1 or 3 - a good 'rule of thirds' photo of a road would place the horizon line at either the top third or bottom third, with maybe clouds or some scenery filling in the other 'thirds' lines. frank is pretty consciously squeezing the horizon + sky out in 1 and 3, imo

Look at 1 as thirds vertically and divide the top third in half again. It's just at the bottom of edge of the top third that the values change - the road is lighter, there's a semi-horizon as it dips over the hill, etc. - before you get to the real horizon and sky.

Rule of thirds is the laziest and most overrated compositional rule, though (IMO).

even so, the part where the semi-horizon occurs is nowhere near the line delineating the top 'third' of the photograph

the essay CV linked to mentioned that the top pic is just a reinterpretation of this dorothea lange pic

http://i.imgur.com/0CaYw.jpg

which, imo, feels much more stable and composed and probably does yield to a rule of thirds analysis

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/02/an-amateur-snapshot-of-kodaks-early-days/

oh & http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/02/kodaks-amateur-photographers-new-york/

these are pretty stunning: richard mosse, went to the congo with some militarized infared film that turns everything with chlorophyll red http://richardmosse.com/photography.php?pid=1

http://www.emptykingdom.com/main/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Richard-Mosse_web1.jpg

I see Jason Eskenazi has been brought up - just ordered his Wonderland book.

Love his video on Kickstarter:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1903672981/the-black-garden-a-new-photography-project

wonderland is prob my fav photography book after the americans

http://www.adammarelliphoto.com/2011/06/robert-capa/

dude who wrote about HCB does Capa
I do think he had a point w/ some of the HCB shots (like the Japanese women facing different directions)
but a bunch of these are silly, with the 'diagonals of the Chinese pilot' the worst. His eyes are horizontal to the frame and don't line up diagonally with anything else, but they get a black line (instead of red)

http://lalettredelaphotographie.com/entries/5602/mort-de-ishimotoyasuhiro

xp when you have a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail

you could probably do a lines analysis of every flickr member's gallery

Harry spoke of his work as an extension of his life; in a grant proposal he wrote that he would use the money “to photograph as I felt and desired; to regulate a pleasant form of living; to get up in the morning—free, to feel the trees, the grass, the water, sky or buildings, people—everything that affects us; and to photograph that which I saw and have always felt.”

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/2012/03/eleanor-callahan-harry-callahan.html

photo booth v good this week

http://life.time.com/culture/its-about-time-gjon-milis-stroboscopic-portraits/

i know this isn't double exposure, exactly, but double exposure is one of those early-attractions-of-photography, cf lens flare, that i never play with anymore

I love taking pictures of stores with glass displays because in B&W it looks like a double exposure, you get two for the price of one

however I'm not sure I've ever fully understood conscious double exposure - transposing two radically different scenes - don't really understand harry callahan's double exposure photographs, wish somebody would explain them to me

Got 'Wonderland' today - normally I'm 100% opposed to photos crossing the gutter at all, but this is the perfect binding if you're going to make everything a double-truck spread, it lays flat enough that the images aren't compromised.

have generally hated pictures across the gutter too, but I like the way that a lot of japanese photo books through caution to the wind wrt cropping, printing quality, image placement etc. AND I just discovered an amazing store in NYC, Kinokuniya, that has a *lot* of photo books. picked up W. Eggleston's Paris which I've wanted for a couple years and put off getting, and a Morimaya book. They've got full shelves of Morimaya and Araki books though, and many more that are a mystery to me, AND tons of Japanese photo magazines, including ones that seem to have endless profiles of all manor of vintage film cameras, only I can't read them!

ugh through = throw, where is my brain

and manor = manner, of course

anyway, I was never in the mood for that sort of high contrast, heavily cropped, low quality printing before, but I appreciate it now as a change of pace from the immaculately printed and pristine photo books I'm used to.

they stocked Photographica magazine, but sadly not this back issue: http://kenshukan.net/john/archives/2009/12/30/travel-photography-by-photographica/

tons of Japanese photo magazines, including ones that seem to have endless profiles of all manor of vintage film cameras

by stuff, I mean magazines that aren't really stories or histories of vintage gear, just pictures of it with cataloging details

gaaaah I wanted to pick this up but now it's sold out

http://www.japanexposures.com/books/product_info.php?products_id=10336

oh man kinokuniya, how have you lived in new york without a japanese stationery hookup? the bookstore there is v nice.

thought of you when i read about this in the nyer, china: it's work by luigi ghirri & a bunch of other mid-century guys, it looked interesting: http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/art/galleries/current-and-upcoming-exhibitions-3

guess I should have know about that place sooner indeed. I might check that Hunter thing out. looks cool.
today I trade in (probably) my nearly unused Voigtlander 35mm for an old Leica screwmount Summitar. psyched.

i spent the last couple of days wondering how i need to change my life to acquire a leica. i am thinking about becoming an arms dealer.

hey look at this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt7HhRMUUxY

it is obviously so hilarious - trembling hands, a generally weird solution to books-on-screen - but you know, still, chromes.

the photobook website/video thing is so weird. folks worried that not enough people will come over to see how great their book collection is I guess.

guess I should have know about that place sooner indeed. I might check that Hunter thing out. looks cool.
today I trade in (probably) my nearly unused Voigtlander 35mm for an old Leica screwmount Summitar. psyched.

― lou reed scott walker monks niagra (chinavision!), Tuesday, March 13, 2012 8:54 AM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark

hmmm - that voigt is a $300-400 lens no?

it used to be that you could get a summitar for around $200. they're nice lenses but they don't have clickstops.

yeah $350 or so? The Summitar is $199 at Adorama. I don't know what they'll offer for the Voigtlander but if it's low I'll just eBay it or Craigslist it instead.

schlump, do you have a budget for buying a camera? sometimes a Leica can be cheaper than you expect.

also, the summitar takes a weird filter - it won't take a standard 39mm filter, you either need to source the special leica filter or find a 3rd party custom job. if you care about filters, that is.

incidentally - I got my canon 50mm 1.8 back from essex after I sent it to be CLA'd - handles really nicely. I got mine from KEH - think I got lucky because this one had, afaict, no scratches on the front or rear elements but it was still listed as BGN. previous copies I've owned have had scratched to hell front elements, also sourced from KEH.

been shooting with the 50mm for the past few weeks as a result. feels weird!

I mean, it really is a short telephoto. HCB must have been standing a-ways back to get those shots.

pretty much don't touch filters, so I'm not sweating it. I see the color skopar going for upwards of $300 used on eBay though, so I'll keep that in mind when at Adorama

xxpost

speaking of 'cataloguing famous people' has anyone read the Todd Papageorge "Core Curriculum" book? He goes on at one point speculating that HCB must have actually used a 35mm from time to time (mostly in the early days), despite the 'only 50mm' reputation.

yeah I've read a few stories of HCB that mention he DID use a 35mm, also someone saw him with a 90mm at some point in the 70s.

btw, if any of you were in nyc, I'd suggest looking into this M2: http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/pho/2866360714.html
$500 and this listing has been sitting for a while. I'm kinda surprised!

wow, I didn't know that M2s came with buddha ear strap lugs (really inside baseball, apologies)

what'd you usually shoot with if not 50mm, dayo - 35? i'm so used to the 50mm on my om-1, never really occurs to me to swap, & i figure the combination of like my height and that lens explains any continuity between any photos i take

schlump, do you have a budget for buying a camera? sometimes a Leica can be cheaper than you expect.

― lou reed scott walker monks niagra (chinavision!), Tuesday, 13 March 2012 13:14 (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well, ha, kinda just not now, really, i think, which is the thing that makes it so unimaginable. but as someone who has never really spent a lot of money on camera gear, i can only envisage it as a feasible thing the way that flights & trips are sometimes feasible, which is that one month i can get paid & recklessly just throw down as much as possible of my wages on something. i guess i can imagine a time in the future where i might be able to compel myself to spend like £300, £400 (/$600) on something if i figured it would be kinda forever (/would permit me to join the weird housing-market-esque ladders of camera-trading, on a specific rung). i can't even tell. i think part of the leica-despair-thing is just noting the equilibrium between body and lens prices, when i look around, something which for me isn't even really a factor on the level i'm working at; like if i wanted to just acquire an slr i could probably get a cheap practika on ebay that would come with whatever lens it had as a single thing, without much further preparation required. it was really encouraging to hear some of the discussion on here about acquiring and then trading/swapping out leicas, a while back, though i don't know whether i'm quite eligible right now.

(also back to the thread:

http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg546/scaled.php?server=546&filename=briefcaser.jpg&res=medium

^ william eggleston's camera briefcase)

actually, that looks like a M2 with a M3 body shell. xp

wauw @ eggleston the gearhead

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2010/05/ebay-treasures-the-7element-summicron.html

It went on to become the first "normal" lens for the M3, a new model that combined a huge viewfinder with the rangefinder patch in the same window and used a proprietary bayonet mount. Modern Photography magazine called the 50mm Summicron the sharpest lens it had ever tested, and the Summicron was the lens that Henri Cartier-Bresson was to use on various cameras for the rest of his life. Although he also carried a 35mm and a 90mm, and experimented occasionally with other lenses (hey, he was a photographer!), the overwhelming majority of his pictures were taken with the collapsible 7-element Summicron.

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2009/04/top-ten-recommended-cameras-8.html

Mike,
I got a personal tour of Magnum in New York from Erich Hartmann, who was a past President of Magnum, and who let me look at some of Cartier-Bresson's proof books (there are *lots*). Although H. C.-B. carried both a 35mm and a 90mm as well as the 50mm, Erich told me that you can look through proof book after proof book and not see more than a shot or two taken with the 90mm (I know of only one of his iconic images that was taken with that lens), and almost none taken with the 35mm. Erich and Henri were good friends for 40 years or more.

Like any photographer, H. C.-B. experimented with lenses from time to time. But he used the collapsible 50mm Summicron from the time it was introduced until he stopped photography, and he indeed used it for almost all of his shooting--at least 95%, and very likely well over 98%.

Mike

Posted by: Mike Johnston | Wednesday, 15 April 2009 at 01:54 AM

the doc the image above links to is interesting - it's from a british tv programme that weirdly cannibalises existing programmes, so i can't tell whether it's one of the other docs about him carved up and renarrated. but it's good, sort of a nature documentary about eggleston, capturing him in the wild, roaming around, prowling around an abandoned fridge behind a convenience store. i wondered sometimes, maybe around the time of the first twange of its c. 2004 era low-budget new-american horror-movie score, whether it would be better & somehow soothing to watch on mute.

i kinda can't imagine being eggleston and just cruising around neighbourhoods looking for something to shoot though. strange. i wondered, too (the excerpts of his B&W stuff featured being so persuasive - the guy on the phone, &c), whether he ever loads b&w film, still. like it feels like it would be weird not to, even if you're william eggleston.

xxp

xxxxxpost

wow, I didn't know that M2s came with buddha ear strap lugs (really inside baseball, apologies)

I thought the same thing!

no way re: M3 body shell! M2 doesn't have the bevelled embellishment around the rangefinder/viewfinder windows.

the top plate is definitely a M2 top plate but the body shell is definitely a M3 - look at the lens release button

also schlump, a leica iii or similar (like in w. eggleston's briefcase there) is cheaper than an M!

is the metal rim something that was only on the M3?

may have been on some early versions of the M2 but that serial number, over 1 million, makes it unlikely

man the HK leica forum I used to buy gear on, that was populated by some gearheads. they would devote threads to talking about stuff like this: http://forum.hklfc.com/upload/992519-440c9a.jpg

I definitely appreciate that spirit

bonus to buying a used Leica: you'll only lose Ebay/Paypal fees if you ever go to sell it

Eggleston Trust auction raised over $5 mil for an Eggleston Museum in Memphis.

awesome - feel like it should be built in some rundown novelty shop for the full effect

you get to get drunk and shoot guns inside, do drugs and play the piano

feel like it should be built in some rundown novelty shop for the full effect

http://collections.walkerart.org/item/object/907

haha I both can't believe/think it's awesome that sherrie levine has a successful art career

ty for the leica advice china. thinking about it always, maybe i'll google it around. buy a briefcase with my budget surplus.

i spent some time flipping through democratic camera last night. it is just funny, i end up turning the page & looking at

http://www.moma.org/collection_images/resized/349/w500h420/CRI_232349.jpg

& just being all HOW DID THIS HAPPEN; HOW DID YOU MAKE THIS HAPPEN

like i think i forget about how invisible he is in so many of his photos; there is that thing about how his framing - cutting off subjects at the borders - maybe insinuates that the action continues outside of the frame, but even still i never really see him, there, in a hotel room. i remember hearing him say that the naked guy in the room with words scrawled on the walls was a dentist. it seems impossible.

also never knew this was an alec soth photo. to be used as a guide when recreating the william eggleston museum playpenn.

http://blogs.eciad.ca/photo/wp-content/blogs.dir/57/files/articles/soth_eggleston.jpg

hah that eggleston photo might be my favorite eggleston.

the naked guy in the red room is a friend of egglestons, yeah he is a dentist I think? the eggleston book I have has information on him.

it's just amazing that he's a dentist. i don't know any dentist. i didn't think they had interior lives, daubing the names of deities & swearing on their walls, stumbling around like harvey keitel, howling, drunk, broken. their crazy hands in my mouth.

it is a good pic. it is one of the few that have names, he names the guy in the background (the driver?, perhaps?, rather than the guy in the white, i never saw the driver until now), & the bayou. i never noticed the class & flower in this picture either:

http://hapstancedepart.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/william-eggleston-two-girls-on-couch-1976.jpg

it was always one of my favourites. like how is he in the room. but then you see him & remember he was this snappy young guy.

dentist as plural of dentist, like sheep, memorable mistake

http://www.americansuburbx.com/2012/03/william-klein-the-new-york-school-photographs-1936-1963-1992.html

some good quotes from klein

I've flipped through a copy of new york once - very stunning, I wonder if it's still in print

klein is the guy, if you think photographing reflections or skewing the horizon or blurring the frame is somehow outrageous... well you just can't top him

http://edge.neocha.com/chinese-creatives/the-night-in-the-day-from-si-chuan-photographer-feng-li/

http://blog.jiazazhi.com/2011/04/feng-li/

wow.

works as a govt photographer. uses mostly point and shoot.

I sold a camera to a govt photographer once. said he mostly shot boring stuff like state banquets on the job. in his personal time, shoots 4x5 and 8x10 view cameras. hires migrant workers to carry his (very heavy) view camera equipment up to scenic lookouts because hey, it's cheap!

the photos in the second link are pretty spectacular - feel like some verge on being mean-spirited but I've got a few of those in my archives too so who am I to talk.

http://www.landezine.com/index.php/2010/10/stephen-tamiesie-photography/

taken mostly in the american west iirc, and the harsh light here and its recording reminds me of robert adams - like if robert adams shot color

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/2012/03/lost-found-project-japan.html

slideshow very much worth clicking through

puts me very much in an eternal sunshine frame of mind

RFI: Japanese/Chinese/AZN portrait/lifestyle photographers who are not Nobuyoshi Araki

also, Hi everybody, I want to start lurking here more.

Daido Moriyama?

I'm taking whatever you all have idk

Ah I've seen him. I recognize those chairs. I've been commissioned to do an album cover and I know their influences are primarily j-pop; also this question is rooted in the fact that I have no idea what it means to be an asian artist (even half of one) and I am interested in researching. I think most of my work is p mannered, so I fit in in that way, but I lack the weird sex shit that modern asian artists seem to have.

RFI: Japanese/Chinese/AZN portrait/lifestyle photographers who are not Nobuyoshi Araki

― Waxahachie Swap (Jimmy The Mod Awaits The Return Of His Beloved), Monday, 2 April 2012 06:22 (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this book:

http://img.zvab.com/member/16306a/3004632.jpg

is a really great intro to some japanese photography, including & outside of araki. i love hiromi tsuchida, who was a great societal photographer:

http://infocast.nl/storage/TsuchidaHiromi01.jpg?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1276960760555

& shomei tomatsu, who i think was mainly famous for photographing debris and relics from nagasaki - clocks stopped at the time of the detonation, etc:

http://i172.photobucket.com/albums/w9/fyamma/ShomeiTomatsu11heure02Nagasaki.jpg

i also just caught an amazing marc riboud retro, some of which was stuff he'd shot in japan

http://blog.madame.lefigaro.fr/stehli/7-%20femmes%20japonaises%20mains.jpg (v large img, so good though; all of my favourite stuff was of japanese working women, in offices and behind glass, i can't find a lot of it online)
http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lhy30kGs0c1qawyaco1_500.jpg
http://www.hackelbury.co.uk/images/artists/riboud/riboud_pic14.jpg

also some of his chinese stuff is just interesting because it's so good:

http://cameraobscura.busdraghi.net/wp-
content/uploads/2007/10/marc_riboud01.jpg (i think this is china)
http://www.theartkey.com/photos/news/9/5/thumbnails/440x460/3008w.jpg (china)

this looks maybe useful also: http://www.michaelhoppengallery.com/exhibition,past,2,0,0,518,41,0,0,0,_woman_with_artificial_flowers._aoshima,_miyazaki,_.html

wow, his recent colour stuff is real pretty also (towards the bottom of this page):

http://www.marcriboud.com/marcriboud/accueil.html

http://www.marcriboud.com/marcriboud/portfolio2/images/87.jpg

http://japan-photo.info/blog/2007/07/10/john-szarkowski-1925-2007-and-japanese-photography/
also
wrt ilp patron szarkowski

struggling to remember the name of the 'japanese eggleston'

ah: http://japan-photo.info/blog/2006/09/20/rinko-kawauchi-at-galerie-priska-pasquer-cologne/

also: http://japan-photo.info/blog/2007/10/18/mikiko-hara/

the floating girl is really popular with tumblr type ppl: http://yowayowacamera.com/

yasuhiro ishimoto recently passed away, is well regarded by the_west

there's hiroshi sugimoto but u2 has plowed that furrow already

you can go here to see what some chinese photographers are doing w/ portrait: http://edge.neocha.com/category/photography/

http://invisiblephotographer.asia/ collects street photography from asia, it's pretty uneven but maybe you'll find something you like there

I really like those photos by Mikiko Hara, posted above.

more here: http://www.amadorgallery.com/Mikiko_Hara.html

thx everybody for this

sad to see the end post on talking barnacles

i love this last series http://www.talkingbarnacles.com/2012/03/celebration-1-of-36-by-growing-up-on_25.html

oh that's great, i'd forgotten to keep checking in there

y'all should add Junku Nishimura to your Flickr contacts
http://www.flickr.com/photos/junku-newcleus/page1/

xp

patrick tsai's website: http://hellopatpat.com/menu_e.html

pretty good stuff in here with Meyerowitz, including some discussion about color vs. black and white: http://blog.leica-camera.com/photographers/interviews/joel-meyerowitz-icon-with-a-leica/
I've always dug his color pictures in NYC quite a bit

good bits in the accompanying video too. there's a brief glimpse at what seems to the be the scanning and printing process for reproducing a bunch of the street pictures.

hah yeah. so disappointed when he held up the m9. and the s2 is just sitting there in the background! although he did make mention to a '4x5' camera.

so amazing what a close-knit coterie of photographers those people were. meyerowitz friends with winogrand and frank, before any of them were famous I think

this article's great, it's like pro-leica propaganda

"William Eggleston appears in the movie Great Balls of Fire as Jerry Lee Lewis's father."

http://hiranotakaci.jp/pic/tottoriukraine/0802/080212.html
http://hiranotakaci.jp/pic/tottoriukraine/0801/080126.html
http://hiranotakaci.jp/pic/tottoriukraine/0802/080214.html

famous people i dunno but
i really like these series

http://hiranotakaci.jp/pic/tottoriukraine/0802/080227.html
http://hiranotakaci.jp/pic/tottoriukraine/0803/080308.html
http://hiranotakaci.jp/pic/tottoriukraine/0804/080418.html 3 more

hah the one of the snowy land, those are 'technically' 'bad' because the snow caused the meter to underrexpose by 1 stop, but I like how the underexposure actually accentuates the barrenness of the land

ahh these are great!

yeah i really like them too wondered what u guys would think

there used to be a nice index and there are a lot of series of pictures in there but he
had to hide them because he got in trouble after the university he works for in the ukraine googled him and found pictures of naked girls and him peeing in sinks
i worry that my tastes in photography are coarse because i hate "pictures"
but i love pictures
but i like looking at this half or three quarters for the voyeuristic thing of being able to examine the life of the person taking the pictures and the life of the people in the pictures

oh for sure. like i think something that gets obscured by weird, mathematical/geometrical analysis of 'pictures' is that so much of the specific appeal of pictures is way more communicative & human than that, it's how much we can read from environments or from expressions. like if you showed our canon of best-phots to another species, say bears, they would go for totally different pics, because they wouldn't be interested in the subtle nuances of mood & manifest familiar behaviour. still looking through those pics but they're v nice.

http://hiranotakaci.jp/pic/tottoriukraine/0808/080812-2.jpg

i just like looking at pictures of her too honestly and it was this horrible feeling that brought me to tears the first time i clicked thru the whole thing and came to the series where you see his apartment emptied out and a picture of her (m, she's referred to) in bed in her crowded tiny apartment laying in bed face against the wall and then these three smiling matter of fact flat pictures of her and you see them eating at the turkish place where you saw them eat when they came back from central asia and then there's a photo captioned "契約の解除をもって、わたしとmの恋人関係は解消された。 We ended the contract about our relationship. That meant we had broken our relathionship./" and she disappears. the pictures are so good it would work even without the minimal captioning.

do you have a link to the first entry? these are v good even individually

http://hiranotakaci.jp/pic/tottoriukraine/0801/080126.html is the oldest one i can see but i just emailed to ask for the earliest

ty. i love diaries, it's nice people are doing it on film, like the barnacles person or ruinista. it's like breadmaking or something, to have got to the stage where it's just part of your routine, dropping off/scanning/chronicling. i was on a local photographer guy's site, recently, & he had a section with photos going back to 2000, showing younger, angelic incarnations of some people i know. it just becomes such a good archive. all of your days.

what you wrote about this is so otm; just seeing their life is really enthralling, all the times they're just going somewhere with a heavy bag or collapsing to eat in a room

http://hiranotakaci.jp/pic/tottoriukraine/0803/080305-8.jpg

just to bring the tone down, can anyone work out what camera he's using:
http://hiranotakaci.jp/pic/tottoriukraine/0803/080315.html

maybe an autofocus/autoexposure canon eos kinda thing??

just in case it's driving anyone mad: http://hiranotakaci.jp/pic/tottoriukraine/0805/080524.html

i'm only curious, about film, too, the colours in his stuff are really beautiful

http://hiranotakaci.jp/pic/tottoriukraine/0805/080505-4.jpg
http://hiranotakaci.jp/pic/tottoriukraine/0805/080505-5.jpg

(oh)

he uses a nikon his ex uses a canon, that's probably why they broke up

http://hiranotakaci.jp/pic/tottoriukraine/1107/110727.html

new girl uses pentax btw

awww i hadn't got to new girl yet! spoilers
but i am glad. not to overshare but the main thing i am getting from this is sweet memories for the times you have a camera & a girlfriend & you shoot all day

in keeping with the news, I think this is kind of an amazing photo

http://i.imgur.com/E3o4i.jpg

it's like a flag

hah the barbs and stripes

also:

http://www.americansuburbx.com/2011/04/theory-point-and-shoot-how-abu-ghraib.html

(warning: some graphic photos)

thought this made some pretty good points about the role of the image* post-digital and post-blogging and post-social media networks

In any case, it seems fair to agree with Sontag and say that photographs no longer serve mainly as first drafts of history, or ciphers of memory, or treasures of affection, or any of the other high-sounding social functions ascribed to them in the twentieth century. They now are simply visual talk. And rarely are they capable of complete or coherent sentences–they speak in a contemporary patois of whatevers and what have yous.

I think framing pictures now in terms of literacy, of language, maybe gets more at the role they play in the world today

*there's probably some artcrit or critspeak thing out there that ascribes difference and importance in the space that exists between the terms image, picture, photograph, capture, blah blah blah

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/2012/04/bruce-davidson-los-angeles.html

this is put together like it's gonna turn into an inspirational cellphone advert but it's p interesting regardless

http://hiranotakaci.jp/pic/tottoriukraine/0808/080804.html
real good one

i just like looking at pictures of her too honestly and it was this horrible feeling that brought me to tears the first time i clicked thru the whole thing and came to the series where you see his apartment emptied out and a picture of her (m, she's referred to) in bed in her crowded tiny apartment laying in bed face against the wall and then these three smiling matter of fact flat pictures of her and you see them eating at the turkish place where you saw them eat when they came back from central asia and then there's a photo captioned "契約の解除をもって、わたしとmの恋人関係は解消された。 We ended the contract about our relationship. That meant we had broken our relathionship./" and she disappears. the pictures are so good it would work even without the minimal captioning.

^^^^^

photography is the best

I need more irl photo bros

one of my dudes is an actual professional photo/videographer but partly because of that we have very different ~ideas~ about photography as such and can really only talk shop in a technical sense

I mean <3 the dude but he shows up to casual functions with a 5d that has one of those viewfinders that goes over the screen and I'm like c'mon man, keep it social

ha ha
idk that's interesting to me. i think i probably have various small aesthetic partitions between me and some certain friends, to do with what films they like and what music they think is good, & photography is at a strange angle with that. a couple of friends were in town and i was showing them around & they had little digital cameras & it was so interesting what made them stop & shoot. like we walked through this real nice neighbourhood with great houses, where you'd look through the window & there'd be a table w/a box of cereal & loads of empty chairs, sunlit, like residential family life made photographable, then someone's neatly cultivated garden, then a plaque on a house about how the guy from penguin books lived there a hundred years ago, & the streets make dramatic angles as they turn into each other, & saucer magnolia trees were in bloom, & all they were taking photos of was the graffiti closer to town. YOU PHILISTINES. but what i mean is that it feels like what a photo-bro is invested in is a really personal strand of looking at things or relates to what you intend a photograph to be - like a reminder or a document or a synecdoche or w/e. like even if you just intend to take an orderly photograph doing justice to something as a monument or a messy, subjective photo of something as experienced.

i think a good thing about having international photobros is that you're reminded of the specific value of someone's locality, like of how fairly mundane streets-of-my-neighbourhood phots might be interesting to someone far away, the way takaci's japan's super beguiling when unfamiliar.

http://todayspictures.slate.com/20120411/

Most of my collaborative foto work is w/, like, illustrator and designer friends. I can't imagine rolling around for lols and talking shop w/ other photographers. We (my circle of photo kids) are all too self-centered and suspicious to do anything but drink together

If I could play nice with other people I'd have gone into film.

I went into film and still don't play nice.

oh. t.b. continues.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-16509382

so sinatra coming out of the helicopter was shot by yul brynner!

First one (started on 27th, jul, 2002):
http://hiranotakaci.jp/pic/tottoriukraine/0207/020727-1.html
But it doesn't continue till the recent page. I mean, there is a big
blank of the work.

The second start (since 16th, dec, 2004):
http://hiranotakaci.jp/pic/tottoriukraine/0412/041216.html

Old photos are small, because the spec of comp was much worse than now.

oh wow. thanks so much! i am still working through this. still kinda acclimatising to ukraine but it's nice seeing he has a muse again. after the break up i was so depressed to see him just taking picture of like the sandwich he was eating or something, it's too much.

just came across this arbus and think it's stunning: woman with a veil on 5th avenue

http://i.imgur.com/FjlOP.jpg