let us now catalogue famous people

yeah I can kinda see that. probably something to write in there too about how our tools dictate our way of seeing. simply easier to take a horizontal.

this is true but i remember feeling all wowed when a friend & i were talking about cameras, how they'd arrived at their shape & form (like that steven wright thing, if photos are square why are lenses round), & we realised that the horizontal/landscape format resembles the actual height x width ratio of our eyes. like something about them makes sense! my favourite thing since then is shooting horizontally & presenting the photos vertically, it's such a satisfying editorial move.

china otm about some of those presentation tropes. i snobbishly always felt a little that way about getting white borders on prints at the lab.

http://thenoumenonrevelation.blogspot.com/

feel like u would vibe with this schlump

― 乒乓, Tuesday, February 12, 2013 10:41 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ty for this btw, am only just getting to look at it, am finding it weirdly hypnotic. i think bc she's a technically gifted photographer who is shooting v messily sometimes for the effect of it?

feeling this:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--vlQ1AU0Ui8/UFiESeRbWdI/AAAAAAAAHRk/QyygZCqcaI4/s1600/Arianna&theFlame.jpg

please ignore my prior white-bordered-prints sass

http://lightbox.time.com/2013/02/13/everyday-life-in-the-hood-new-york-1970-1973/

man...

http://timethemoment.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/x52_hoe-ave-at-e-172nd-st-south-bronx-1970_.jpg?w=735

thinking about those kids watching this, and wondering where they are now and how they dress.

”Neither Evans nor Atget presumes to put us in touch with a pure reality, a thing in itself; their cropping always affirms its arbitrariness and contingency. And the world they characteristically picture is a world already made over into meaning that precedes the photograph; a meaning inscribed by work, by use, as an inhabitation, as artifact. Their pictures are signs representing signs, integers in implicit chains of signification that come to rest only in major systems of social meaning: codes of households, streets, public places“

otm

http://lightbox.time.com/2013/02/19/a-casual-conversation-with-saul-leiter/#1

leiter is so good. I wish I could be like him.

so many echoes of the future in those leiter pics - of [tomatsu & barth, & that totally painterly abstract quality that makes them confusable for richters or rothkos

http://timethemoment.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/xpf77522.jpghttp://timethemoment.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/xpf107793.jpg

interesting to note the last shot is 2004 - would love to see more of his recent stuff, that single image does seem to have more of that kinda new, "democratic" sensibility

he puts the telephoto to such good work - the telephoto is not meant to zoom in on far away objects, it's meant to frame the immediate present

http://www.zhangkechun.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ow6C-4pyjw

haha, from that leiter page

And his color photographs predate those of “pioneer” William Eggleston by a quarter of a century.

huh, sure Eggleston, "pioneer," whatever nice try

they have almost nothing in common besides working in color

I should have properly put that sentence in quotes in case anyone thinks that reflects my thoughts

And his color photographs predate those of “pioneer” William Eggleston by a quarter of a century.

-Time Magazine, 2013

http://www.findingvivianmaier.com/Finding_Vivian_Maier/Trailer.html

guessing you guys know about this, right

oh wow. & there's film, too.

her portraits - the girl in the car, say - are just so almost unrealistically good.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/2013/02/joshua-lutz-hesitating-beauty.html#slide_ss_0=1

i sorta hmmmed through that, they are kinda clunky imo :/

yeah, patternizing the images is a little heavyhanded - but the first one, man. probably feel affected because mental illness scares me.

no, sure. i feel like getting to put together a set of images with stray captions & to sorta work the space in between them is doing a lot. I would read stories about the Invisible Man even if they weren't well written, just because it's interesting territory, & this all - the old photos, &c - is a lot to think about.

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/when-violence-is-against-domestics/

feel the personal reverberations from this one :/

they're really fine. feels crude to talk technically when its power isn't really coming from there but the kinda less-contrasty/more midtone-y vibe makes the interiors so vivid.

btw can we change the board description to "the pretty toney album"

haha agreed

we've linked to jeff bridges' stuff before but this post has a lot more

http://everyday-i-show.livejournal.com/203503.html

fabulous stuff makes me wanna go out and get an xpan rite now

also v appropriate that he would use an xpan on a movie set

http://photographyofchina.com/Zhang-Yaxin#.US44LOvF00x

linked to him above thread but there's some new pics in this post

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/01/chinese-family-memories-recycled/

also more bertien! http://lpvmagazine.com/2012/04/bertien-van-manen-lets-sit-down-before-we-go/

http://i.imgur.com/vezsB3P.jpg

can you even imagine.

where's that from? I didn't see that photo in the bertien link.

oh never mind, I see it's on her website: http://www.bertienvanmanen.nl/

there's a time lightbox article on her too

Bridges uses a Widelux. They used to be relatively inexpensive (vs. Xpan) but it looks like that's no longer the case.

I wanted an Xpan to try and stage deadpan-style 'movie stills' for a class but there was zero chance of getting one back then.

http://www.americansuburbx.com/series-2/f/fred-herzog-color

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

http://i.imgur.com/b2QlAgX.jpg

http://homemoviearchive.tumblr.com/

i love artificial environments

http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2013/03/mark-bramley-landscapes/?viewall=true

http://art.chicagobooth.edu/images/display_b_Zuma_F_.jpg

has this thread ever had any discussion on john divola i don't remember?

I feel like he's been linked before but not discussed (not like most things itt get discussed anyway)

oh i know but sometimes they do as well. i just think hes really interesting because his photographs are really interesting pictures but that interest sits uneasily with how they function conceptually, their relationship to performance and social intervention almost.

like i think he needs a different access point than most of what we end up talking about on this board especially re other photographers in that we never talk about say gabriel orozco or like john baldessari even and those legacies are not marginal or extraneous to photography anymore i think like elad lassry is maybe the most obvious example or that guy who runs americansuburbx who does that google car as dorothea lange stuff.

john divola is one of my absolute favorites.

xp

yah for sure - I'm as guilty as anyone for perpetuating the 'grand old tradition' of photography, venerating black and white documentary work, etc., consuming from within the tradition. and partially it's because I don't know too much about the people you've mentioned, and that's a failing on my part because I don't have the critical armature to really engage with that. but yeah, the idea of photography as primarily being about representation (as elusive as that concept is when embodied by a still image) is definitely dying, or at least heavily muted, in the media world of today. I don't know what value there is left to 'straight' photography in today's world, other than to show future generations that we were here, that we existed, that people at this specific place for 1/500 of a second were configured in this position, and that light reflected off of them and was recorded by a machine and was transmogrified into silver on acetate, ink on wood fiber, ones and zeros on silicon.

it's probably pretty telling that the photography I find most interesting nowadays are those tumblrs of 'found' images, like home move archive or internethistory or internet k-hole (actually a blogspot) or w/e. maybe that's because what I personally want out of photography is - show me how you live! show me how you have lived! I am here and you are there and the moment is long past but I like to imagine and gawk, so - indulge me!

well i just mean that with divola as with orozco i think there's this elision of the photograph as document *and* the production of the photograph itself as a performance, an indivisible centre. like with the series zuma. we were here. its that as well, this beach, this document, the allegorical gesture, this burnt out shell becoming something else, a synechdoche, LOS ANGELES. the significant detail that made the images real for me was reading that the house was also being used by the fire department for training purposes, burnt out repainted, squatted. these holy rituals that are part of the soil shift of the city. local administrative functions and naming the earth. it can't be understood as mere catalogue, the image is produced by the intervention of multiple actors, the image is produced as an intervention. i think when you are thinking about the kinds of vernacular image making that you mention, it helps to keep open a certain way that the image tells us "this is how we lived." we were here. that form and imagery are produced socially. im grasping a lot here because i can't quite explain it properly. but i take a photograph of you because im flirting with you, watching you put your shirt back on, and the image remains as a document of how you looked that morning with the LIGHT COMING IN SIDEWAYS. and i stick it on the fridge door, and when you go i throw it away, or in a drawer somewhere. its impossible to extract what it shows from what it does. does this make sense? between the part and the whole there is no cut.

i say this, i get annoyed when people are dismissive of like "style." style is super interesting for a whole ton of complicated reasons.

yeah style is the best, it took me a really long time to be able to 'see' style