let us now catalogue famous people

http://zaijietou.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ere.jpg

Japanese photographer using medium format P&Ss, possibly on a beach - anyone know who I'm thinking of? I thought Daido Moriyama was him but no searches seem to pull up the work.

http://www.emphas.is/web/guest/discoverprojects?projectID=616

not an answer to the question above obv but
overwrought advertising for rian dundon in changsha photobook that looks kinda dope

http://www.burnmagazine.org/essays/2012/03/rian-dundon-fringe-life-negotiating-modernity-in-chinas-provincial-grey-zones/

yes rian dundon is great

Idk if I've posted this yet but my favorite photography blog probably is http://internethistory.tumblr.com/

nb: the dude just scours the web, usually other people's photo albums, iirc

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/dec/01/train-thought-subway-photographs/

bruce davidson on taking pictures on the train in the 80s

doesn't mention that he used to go in there with plainclothes cops though!

http://www.complex.com/city-guide/2012/02/1980s-photo-shows-undercover-nypd-holding-thief-at-gunpoint

the writeup of that story is so juicy.

i took a trip somewhere yesterday & shot a whole roll of ilford delta 100, which i've never used before. i find photo-pushing math really hard, but i pushed to 400 & overexposed a little, assuming that I had to give the paper a little more light, since i'd set it if it were more sensitive than it was, all of this hoping to get something a little more contrasty than i usually get out of 100 speed bw film. googling around, though (for general pushing advice), it sounds like delta 100 pretty much isn't intended for that kind of leap. i'm gonna mention it to the shop, who are sending the film away, but i'm kinda nervous. i think i shot a really nice roll, & it was light whenever i was shooting, so part of me feels like it can't go terribly wrong. but i feel pretty stupid.

dug this up for something else but the more i look at this, the more i'm convinced it's an amazing picture

http://a8.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/s720x720/296504_10101263353705980_1532196224_n.jpg

like, formally, even

http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/multimedia/videos/484

Stephen Shore artist talk at SFMOMA

I'd never seen his 4x10 street photography project. That's pretty dope.

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/28/stranded-on-a-not-so-strange-land/

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/china-up-close-personal-in-flux/

rian dundon gets a lens write up!

btw he has a tumblr http://riandundon.tumblr.com/

lots of nice work of various kinds on stephen gill's site (link to fairly specific non representative thing)

where is my lens write up

http://hiranotakaci.jp/pic/tottoriukraine/1108/110816_2.html

hey wait where do i go from here?

i took a trip somewhere yesterday & shot a whole roll of ilford delta 100, which i've never used before. i find photo-pushing math really hard, but i pushed to 400 & overexposed a little, assuming that I had to give the paper a little more light, since i'd set it if it were more sensitive than it was, all of this hoping to get something a little more contrasty than i usually get out of 100 speed bw film. googling around, though (for general pushing advice), it sounds like delta 100 pretty much isn't intended for that kind of leap. i'm gonna mention it to the shop, who are sending the film away, but i'm kinda nervous. i think i shot a really nice roll, & it was light whenever i was shooting, so part of me feels like it can't go terribly wrong. but i feel pretty stupid.

― blossom smulch (schlump), Wednesday, 25 April 2012 16:04 (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

in case the suspense is driving anyone crazy, i have good news about this film, it came out really nicely. scans to follow. i wish i knew what they'd done with it so i could be prescriptive next time, but i like it more than any other 100 i've shot.

there are a few shots that are badly exposed because trying to over expose, for the film, as well as expose appropriately, while shooting someone stood in front of a light source, was all too much for my brain.

(1, 2, 3. just fwiw in terms of varial-artworks style reference points for film stock solutions)

china and super grainy B&W go together really well huh

http://edge.neocha.com/photography/black-white-photography-works-from-taizhong-based-photographer-chen-jiajie/

aw I love that horse shot. and the one one on the rocks. and the one in front of the store.

ty! i am playing with pushed b&w on the regular now: i just shot some delta 400 at 1600, & some of the other ilford 400 at 800. i'm overexposing quite a lot, too, which i don't think is totally necessary but makes stuff nice & kinda bleachy. i think since it's sunny it is harder to go wrong, with this. i couldn't work out whether you're meant to set your camera at the box speed or the speed you're pushing to, with this whole thing, there are a lot of weird countervailing variables.

chiachieh stuff is nice. i don't know how much of this is how well BW/grain/blocky shadows click with an idea of urban China, ie of small spaces, hard concrete textures, &c. talking of china in B&W, are you gonna put any colour stuff up on your site, or are you keeping it monochrome for continuity?

If you've got 400-speed film and want to shoot @ 1600, set the meter to 1600 and tell the lab to push two stops. Overexposing at that point is just getting you back to normal-ish exposure.

hey thank you, that's useful. have been setting the meter for 1600. i think i still just think of pushing as an impossible act of alchemy so err on the side of caution.

casually migrating discussion of my phots into the famous people thread

feeling flo fox at the mo, & some of this. #3 has a gbx-lab-scan vibe.

pushing is basically over-developing (say 10 minutes instead of 7 - those are completely arbitrary numbers, it all depends on temp/developer/film) underexposed film - by underexposing you're losing shadow detail, by pushing you're getting back some of that shadow detail but highlights can lose detail. Because you're gaining shadow detail at the expense of highlights, this gives the appearance of higher contrast.

old-style films (HP5, Tri-X) tend to push best because they way they're constructed, they tend to hold on to highlights a bit better

thanks for that; all of this is me vaguely understanding pushing & so trying to enrich my understanding by just blindly playing around. i'm moving to somewhere with pretty good darkroom facilities, soon, i might actually start playing around with developing instead of packing stuff off and sending it to the developers, which might help my progress. i think i've slightly misserved some rolls of delta 3200 i shot on 1600 by packing them off w/o referring to how i shot them, so it'd be good to be able to be in control & remember what i did.

http://www.americansuburbx.com/2012/06/theory-poetry-of-plain-seeing.html

first thing I've read that really goes into evan's personal leanings

To some extent these sentiments belong to what Malcolm Cowley called “the eternal warfare of bohemian and bourgeois”–”on one side, the great megaphone of middle-class America; on the other, the … disciples of art and artistic living.”Though today we associate him first with the ’30s, Evans was shaped most powerfully by the 1920swhis disdain for the “apostles,” his political atheism, would have felt right to the Hemingway of A Farewell to Arms, for example—and Evans said of himself in the earlier decade, “I was the young bohemian artist, absolutely typical, although at the time I didn’t know it.” On behalf of all those of whom Evans thought himself typical, Cowley wrote “we admired and hated those happy ones, those people competent for every situation, who drove their fathers’ cars and led the cheers at football games and never wrote poems or questioned themselves”; his friends believed, he said, that “life in this country is joyless and colorless, universally standardized, tawdry, uncreative, given over to the worship of wealth and machinery.” Harry Crosby, Evans’s first publisher, raged likewise at “civic federations … boy scout clubs … educational toys and [the] Y.M.CA. and [the] congregational churches and all this smug self-satisfaction.” America was “horribly bleak, horribly depressing,” and “this damn country … smelt, stank rather, of bananas and Coca-Cola and ice cream.” The last four items Evans lists in “Contempt for:” (though the semicolon at the end suggests that more’s still on the way) are “school spirit, Christmas spirit, gallant spirit and whatever is meant by the American spirit; …”

I mean, this is America!

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/quietly-finding-haitis-audacious-beauty/

amazing. #12, w/accompanying caption, it's like a scene from a film or something.

http://www.unchangingwindow.com/content/?p=19048

I have been really really diggin Stephen Gill lately http://www.stephengill.co.uk/portfolio/portfolio
And discovered that you can buy a great combo of two of his books (Coming Up For Air and B-Sides) for not-so-much here: http://nobodybooks.com/shop/
I really like the overexposure and super loose focus! Composition just looks so good throughout.

yeah they're lovely. i sorta only remembered his more out there stuff, the buried prints, &c, so it was lovely to see the blurrier things like b-sides, &c. so warm. i think i am building up to an unintelligible, half-formed 'critique'/expression of suspicion of the kinda new-wave of very calm, often medium format, sorta deadpan landscape photography, of which some of gill's stuff would qualify i think, but i'm not there yet. like, car park photos. it feels like it could almost be a definitive non-digital language of our time & yet somehow it can feel really inadequate or reductive to me.

i like this, i think, the democracy & physicality of it: http://thephotocopyclub.com/

I have been really really diggin Stephen Gill lately http://www.stephengill.co.uk/portfolio/portfolio
And discovered that you can buy a great combo of two of his books (Coming Up For Air and B-Sides) for not-so-much here: http://nobodybooks.com/shop/
I really like the overexposure and super loose focus! Composition just looks so good throughout.

― lou reed scott walker monks niagra (chinavision!), Saturday, June 23, 2012 5:40 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

these are so good, thanking u

http://a3.idata.over-blog.com/450x300/1/69/67/46/images_5/narahashi3.jpg
http://a1.idata.over-blog.com/450x300/1/69/67/46/images_5/narahashi1.jpg
http://a21.idata.over-blog.com/1/69/67/46/images_5/narahashi5-copie-1.jpg
http://a10.idata.over-blog.com/1/69/67/46/images_5/narahashi8.jpg

Asako Narahashi

most of these are from half awake and half asleep in the water, her other series are really worth looking through too:

http://www.03fotos.com/photograph/index.html

those are amazing

i wish i could post some of the pics from her other series - there are some from canals and bodies of water in more urban spaces, as well as a lot of really nice non-aquatic landscape stuff - but it's embedded in flash on the site & google images is slightly dominated by the water stuff. her artist statement at the end of the half awake slideshow is, maybe uniquely for an artist statement, really interesting & not awful, also.

those really are amazing, and to be all obv about it but also kinda eerie from a post-tsunami outlook

i've been cruising flickr a little, recently. i'm still playing around with pushing film & it's useful having a vague frame of reference for how different stocks come out. this guy gets some really nice muted, quiet detail in the dark, shooting tri-x at 1600:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hizuan/tags/1600/

There's a really good Stephen Gill feature in the July issue of the British Journal of Photography.

a little searching around their site for that article lead me to a piece on self publishing, & this interesting site about photographers making books: http://selfpublishbehappy.com. the colours of these Joe Leavenworth photos are killer.

I've been reading the SPBH site for a while, some interesting stuff on there. It's definitely made me want to put together a zine or book of my own, just need to get the content sorted, the easy bit!

And you're right about the colours of the Leavenworth shots! Think the first is my favourite.

i was skimming some of SPBH when it got too submissionsy, but some of the books are really terrific looking. i love that the printers are being cited, too.

nice corollary to a discussion about portraiture we had somewhere here some months ago, from an interview with Julian Germain (PDF):

"Until then I had been using 35mm, trying to record people's lives without interference, trying in a way not to be there. When you're taking portraits however, your presence is directly acknowledged as the subject is looking back at you. I found that if I use 5 x 4 people are more patient with me. It looks a cumbersome and complicated procedure because it is, so it changes the experience of photography. People realise this is not snapshot photography and that from my point of view it's important. I find the people who I photograph in this way are interested in the process. The event of photographing then becomes two way, we are both curious and interested in each other. People often say photography is about capturing a moment, but in a portrait there is something a bit different happening, which is about the anticipation of the moment. The subject is waiting for me to choose the moment and I am waiting for them to be ready to be photographed, we are both waiting."

really feeling his photos, too - the early work on single parent families is great, & feels so of its time, both in fitting in with photo-essays & in capturing a look of the time

gonna just blanket this thread while i'm blog-hopping. in love w/ these Saeki Shinryo phots:

http://selfpublishbehappy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/O_004.jpg

http://selfpublishbehappy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/O_006.jpg

http://selfpublishbehappy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/A_008.jpg

http://www.saekishinryo.com/img/photo04/photo04_0029.jpg

(again via SPBH)

(okay, invisible phots available through the link)

yah joe leavenworth ones are pretty fantastic - this one is teal and orange in a great way

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

i love photography

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/the-art-of-industry-the-making-and-meaning-of-edward-burtynskys-new-exhibit-oil/258654/

Manaugh: To go back to something you said at lunch yesterday, you mentioned that you consciously exclude green and blue from your photographs, and that, for the most part, you don't like to shoot in summer or at certain times of day. You also mentioned the way that the light during "the shoulders of the day" -- early morning and late evening -- makes space much more volumetric and filled with shadows, and that, conversely, shooting at high noon from 8,000ft helps minimize shadow. I'd love to revisit that conversation in the context of this interview and hear more about the role of color, light, and shadow in your work.

Burtynsky: I love the tones of browns and grays -- I love more neutral tones. That's why I like going to the desert and working in the desert. I find that green trees and things like that have a tendency to lock us into a certain way of seeing. When I look at green trees on a sunny day, I don't know how to make an interesting picture of that. We're familiar with that already.

Instead, I like the transparency that comes when leaves are off and you can look deeper into the landscape -- you can look through the landscape. When I did try to make those kind of green-tree/sunny-day pictures, I'd find myself not ever putting them up and not ever using them. Eventually, I just said, well, I'm not going to take them anymore, because they never make it past the edit.

There's a certain point where you learn from your own editing. You just stop taking certain pictures because they never make it through. Your editing starts to inform your thinking, as far as where you want to go and what you want to look for when you're making a photograph.

That what's different about me after thirty years of doing this kind of work -- there are a lot of pictures I don't have to take anymore. I think that's called wisdom -- learning what not to waste your time on!