let us now catalogue famous people

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