let us now catalogue famous people

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!

this last part:

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.

it's def true! and kind of scary. because what if that one you don't take, out of learned restraint, is the one that turns out to be really good?

yeah the stuff about learning lessons from your editing rings so true. there are a bunch of categories of picture types that used to show up in droves on my rolls that were always disappointing. the instinct is now sort of "hey put that camera down, you've shot this a million times. you know what it looks like by now. it's never that great"
I don't worry about it that much though I guess? I mean, it's not so much that you're giving up striving for certain pictures, more like you can give yourself a reality check and say "right, this looks good to me in real life here, but I know now what it will look like as a photo and it won't be that great." if there's a chance that you might be wrong then you probably feel it and take the picture!

in some ways I think I fret just as much over the opposite - I am forever taking pictures of configurations of litter or leaves on the ground, & know that it's a picture that I get a lot of satisfaction from & that I can sorta successfully compose & record. I feel like the byproduct of this, & the byproduct of "am I missing out on rarer pictures that have some difficulty to them but that would be worthwhile" - the things you learn to skip in favour of something that is more satisfying - is choosing a successful formula over some kind of new thing. there has to be some kind of awkward, salient new angle on how things look now that can be worked towards & it's hard to know where it fits in terms of aesthetically assessing what you've taken. i think the cognisance you have of your process if bigger than wisdom - it's knowledge of technique & reflection & purpose & other things.

I think you're talking about something different though, cuz "a picture that I get a lot of satisfaction from & that I can sorta successfully compose & record" is exactly what I *don't* get with the photos I now pass up on. possible pictures that I didn't take because they were too challenging or fleeting etc. are definitely a thing too though, and I have a lot more regrets about not following through on those.
but yeah, those in the former category, that editing has taught me to avoid, don't even really give me satisfaction to shoot (I always just did it on autopilot) and I've now seen that when transformed into photographs they just aren't that compelling or successful.

no, sure. but i just wonder if the slight risk of forgoing some photos, from cognisance of your style & results - what if that one you don't take, out of learned restraint, is the one that turns out to be really good? - is similar to the risk of too keenly working that style elsewhere, & missing photos that you aren't committed to or sure about.

possible pictures that I didn't take because they were too challenging or fleeting etc. are definitely a thing too though, and I have a lot more regrets about not following through on those.

otm, it's frustrating that you can't just have your finger on the trigger all the time.

there's def some recurrent shit that looks nice but doesn't come off (idk, close shots of your hand doing anything). it's kinda like the category of things that are just too easy to photograph, paint-peeling signs, things under tarps, old cars. you try to find something more ambiguous.

k, this is where I mention that there's a strain of Stephen Shore aping photography that I see on flickr quite a bit, consisting largely of pictures of old cars. like 70's models etc. and it drives me nuts! those cars weren't old when he photographed them dudes!

and they're all like lovingly exposed medium format pictures w gentle contrast etc.
just drives me up the wall

i feel like a lot of the recently seen eggleston stuff that's surfaced is cars, cadillacs and just full shots of car grills low against the road (this is a rewarding google image search, incidentally). stuff that didn't make his edit! i totally get the gravitation towards that sorta thing, bc 1) 'iconic', 2) weird chromy/decayed/super-tactile textures and surfaces (decayed anything is sorta hyponotising, paint-peeling-facades always tempting to photo) & 3) kinda sheer presence, but it's a pretty lazy/exhausted/nostalgic canard yeah.

i maybe meanly mentioned here a couple of days ago that i have a problem with the same MF treatment being extended to contemporary scenes as well, like it being just too deadpan to shoot a semi-urban scene like a car park or beachfront promenade or unpretty high street shopsign without any particular focus or detail (like it's always on flickr w/a super literal or moody one-word title with a full stop after it but okay i am being a hater here). it's hard to catch what stuff is like now, the language that makes sense of objects is so different - digital, diffuse, multifaceted.

harmony korine & william eggleston:

HK: So you didn't lament the passing of old America? You'd photograph a Kroger or a Piggly Wiggly [supermarkets], and I'm sure at the time they seemed common and maybe even architecturally bland. But now there's a beauty and a strangeness to the old Kroger.

WE: It was something new that was happening everywhere. You couldn't miss it. If you needed to go to the grocery you would go to the predecessors of the big supermarkets of today.

HK: Would you take photos of a Kroger today?

WE: Certainly.

HK: And do you think it would have that same effect looking at it 20 years from now?

WE: I think so.

HK: So you think time makes things more exotic?

WE: I don't think exotic is the word.

HK: So what do you think happens?

WE: Well, probably the best way to put it might be that at some time, not just in an instant, but over some period of time I became aware of the fact that I wanted to document examples like Kroger or Piggly Wiggly in the late '50s, early '60s. I had the attitude that I would work with this present-day material and do the best I could to describe it with photography, not intending to make any particular comment about whether it was good or bad or whether I liked it or not. It was just there, and I was interested in it. That's what I still do today.

huh, speaking of all this medium format talk, there is definitely some kind of deadpan-y alec soth-y, sorta documentary medium format aesthetic that is much emulated currently. and it's another one that kinda rubs me the wrong way, I think just due to the overly seriousness of it all. sooo deadpan and sober. not a lot of room for playfulness.

more than anything I'm feeling like a totally horrible grump now. I really do love a lot of photographs! and speaking of modern medium format aesthetics, I love Paul Graham's stuff. he's very heavily invested in medium format-looking depth of field conscious stuff, but it's just a bit looser and more playful and surprising. Shimmer of Possibility is especially great and actually *fun* to look at.

after my earlier so-daring street photography culture rant, and now my so-serious medium format photography rant, I've gotta start getting a little more positive I think. but at least it's good to know what you don't want to do, I guess.

xpost... that interview kinda gets at where I think the Eggleston and Shore worshipers who photograph old cars and 60's-70's era signage really miss the point.

yeah writing this stuff down makes me feel like an asshole. or it makes me feel like through self-preservation i've carved out a tenuous, idiosyncratic reason why my less proficient pictures get at something better or non-specifically more spirited & deep. but it reminds me of thomas mann - "Our capacity for disgust, let me observe, is in proportion to our desires; that is in proportion to the intensity of our attachment to the things of this world" - & i think it's okay so long as you still have things stacked in the enthusiastic positive column, & aren't just hating on everything. when we were talking about digital photography here, a while back, someone was saying they didn't like the way people thought digital pictures should look, & i feel like that's a lot of what it is, wondering what the photographic solution to depicting objects is; i know a MF photographer who takes these super gradienty portraits, which almost become examples of photography itself, of granular rendering technology & light processing & practically of dermatology, much more than they become evocative or even provocative renderings of people, objects. the problem with all of these conversations is that i inch closer and closer to coming up with the answer, by being like yeah i think really it is looking like digital is the thing, now or probably photos should have some kinetic sense of movement to express the fluid nature of our times or spitting absolutes. & that's stupid! because obviously there are a thousand ways to get at something real (i have the same argument with myself watching films, when i see tsai ming-liang and know that the answer to engineering empathy is that the camera should never move, & then see kieslowski, in which i know the camera should always move). but maybe that's just a plus of flickr, getting to hone your critical sense of what you should be taking a picture of, not just on the pictures of yours that you saw & learnt not to repeat but with everyone else's, too.

so on a positive note i'm gonna check out paul graham

absorbing your post, but yes check out paul graham! good stuff. also he wrote this essay: http://www.paulgrahamarchive.com/writings_by.html

stephen shore used large format, btw! ha ha ha

guess these guys are also cheaper then

I think maybe the real thing is, no matter what your fav type of photography is, there is probably a whole flickr group or five dedicated to it, and you will come to hate it

ha ha. i was browsing one of you guys' flickr streams a while ago & found a group called something like Dropped Stuff. it was simultaneously amazing & brutally embarrassing, having previously considered myself a photographic, outsider-art-style pioneer in the world of documenting haphazardly framed sidewalk objects. i mainly-only use flickr to check out film stocks so the kinda styles stuff bypasses me a lil.

absorbing your post, but yes check out paul graham! good stuff. also he wrote this essay: http://www.paulgrahamarchive.com/writings_by.html

― lou reed scott walker monks niagra (chinavision!), Monday, 2 July 2012 16:53 (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this was really beautiful, btw, ty. The old houses? The new houses? Do I go to a war zone on the other side of the world, or just to the corner store, or not leave my room at all?

oh yeah, that second essay is amazing in the way it just makes you want to run out into the street (or walk into the kitchen, or stare in the mirror etc.) and make a million pictures. it makes you excited about the whole enterprise!

hey, ILP: I feel like this should maybe be a thread but it's the kind of thing that I would have to prop up with evidence, & I don't have any yet. I was thinking a little, about film photography & all of the Paul Grahamy stuff mentioned above about what one should depict & all, how to form the meaningless world into photographs, then form those photographs into a meaningful world. & I wondered if anyone wanted to try to suggest an example of what contemporary film photography 'looks like'. because historically, by decade, there's kind of a look to photography, right, whether it's the rise of that wave of isometric photography that caught a newly urbanised landscape, or walker evans' dark, contrasty subway citizenry, or whether it's nan goldin style intimate and distinctly colourful photography, or whether it's some kind of bold flashbulb-lit angular ninetiesism. & i wondered what everyone has for the twenty first century. what either captures or distinctly belongs to it, looks like it or tries to depict it. i have a couple of ideas - something orderly, i think, & 'democratic'. but does anyone want to put anything forward? holga-colourflashed pictures of young people? medium format photos of vintage cars, working like richard prince reappropriations of historical large format photos of contemporary cars?

obviously some of this would veer into digital, but i thought film would be interesting to look at just because of its obvious relationship with previous models and eras.

The model for contemporary film usage is Alec Soth, IMO. Deadpan, use of larger-than-35 formats, neutral in tone/saturation/finishing

maybe something like this? http://flakphoto.com/feed

although, I think a lot of the styles that you listed above are overlapping/simultaneous etc. like 90's flashbulb-lit angularism is at the same time as philip lorca di corcia stuff, or andreas gursky. and walker evans' dark contrasty subway citizenry is simultaneous with walker evans' clear and sober full-daylight pictures of buildings and vehicles. nan goldin 35mm color snapshots simultaneous with robert adams medium format b&w new topographics stuff, while simultaneously friedlander and winogrand are making b&w photos w/leicas and christenberry is making some low tech color photos of southern structures.

xpost agree about the soth thing. it's evident I think in a lot of stuff at the link I posted.

yeah that's a good call. so:

http://alecsoth.com/photography/wp-content/gallery/sleeping-by-the-mississippi/thumbs/thumbs_Luxora.jpg
http://www.ahornmagazine.com/issue_2/review4_gust_soth/alec_soth_006.jpg
http://alecsoth.com/photography/wp-content/gallery/sleeping-by-the-mississippi/thumbs/thumbs_Cemetery.jpg
http://alecsoth.com/photography/wp-content/gallery/sleeping-by-the-mississippi/thumbs/thumbs_Joshua.jpg
xp

yup! the aforementioned "deadpan-y alec soth-y, sorta documentary medium format aesthetic" in action

although, I think a lot of the styles that you listed above are overlapping/simultaneous etc. like 90's flashbulb-lit angularism is at the same time as philip lorca di corcia stuff, or andreas gursky. and walker evans' dark contrasty subway citizenry is simultaneous with walker evans' clear and sober full-daylight pictures of buildings and vehicles. nan goldin 35mm color snapshots simultaneous with robert adams medium format b&w new topographics stuff, while simultaneously friedlander and winogrand are making b&w photos w/leicas and christenberry is making some low tech color photos of southern structures.

no, sure. & i'm both being reductive & lacking a good art-historical knowledge of what was happening (ty for the ref for 'new topographics', is what i was shooting for by 'isometric', confusedly). there's that book which goes through the twentieth century with art in years, rather than eras, to allow for the simultaneous development and existence of style and trends. but even so, to get an idea of the various strands that are kinda current or distinct from previous strands, even just in their prominence or use if not technical innovation or w/e.

how about the fully saturated rinka
new Japanese egg lesson stuff?

??

I just feel eggleston copying is much more new 00s film photog than soth is

haha, kinda ^^ (google image search mainly turns up porn). wasn't 100% sure to what this was referring. (xp)
i wondered if it was those very clear, soft medium format photos, with radiant blues, that i maybe remember dayo invoking eggleston for - they were very simple linear details of plants & stuff. the reference point in my head for it is things that look like nagisa ni te album covers (this, this), but i didn't really have a reference i could look up. feel like some were on that white and orange japanese photography blog.

anyway if they are the thing i am thinking of then yes, otm!