let us now catalogue famous people

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://www.yanming.im/country-of-ambition/

any guesses where http://www.yanming.im/files/gimgs/3_35_v2.jpg is

some of those are really exquisite

my guess would be southern china

http://dynamicafrica.tumblr.com/post/137680431998/the-power-of-love-an-interview-with