let us now catalogue famous people

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