let us now catalogue famous people

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