let us now catalogue famous people

paul graham is definitely on that art world radar too. and of course a lot of old-timers who do staged photos in the same way they've been doing for a decade or two (di corcia, wall, sherman, etc.). but now that I think of it maybe that's not what we're thinking of re: current, since those last three have been making stuff that looks the same for 20-30 years at least.
this post ended up less helpful than I had initially planned.

I mean, for me it's

->new era of digital photography = color photography becomes, even more so than before, the dominant mode
->we need to discover its ~roots~
->eggleston revival, stephen shore and christenberry latches on by the coattails, meyerowitz at the edges
->while we're venerating heroes, let's give a shoutout to evans, hcb, frank
->everybody calls it a day

somehow the above chain radiates out onto flickr

alex webb seems to be a really good name to say

how does the jeff wall sonic youth cover figure into this

http://www.culturebully.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/sonic-youth-the-destroyed-room-b-sides-and-rarities.jpg

->new era of digital photography = color photography becomes, even more so than before, the dominant mode
->we need to discover its ~roots~
->eggleston revival, stephen shore and christenberry latches on by the coattails, meyerowitz at the edges
->while we're venerating heroes, let's give a shoutout to evans, hcb, frank
->everybody calls it a day

i wonder if maybe we should not be excluding digital from this discussion after all. because i want to stop the chain before we get to its roots; i'm more inclined to zip back to eggleston when i see an alec soth than if i am looking at a mary manning, his seeming to have obvious precedent & hers not-necessarily-not having precedent but existing very currently. & maybe that's the thing i was wondering about. one dimension of this is what will record our time - when in 2045 we look at the start of this century, which renderings will seem valid & evocative (which: maybe). & with that i'm more inclined to wonder if it might be harsher digital stuff that more immediately & literally resembles what's real now. & then the other aspect is how do we portray ourselves right now, about which soth seems right, yeah.

also someone answer this dylannn q, think this is interesting.

i might try to round up some flickr stuff to flesh out the vague idea of style i have in my head. may include some of those horrific fever dream shots where the sky is three different billowing blues & each building is perfectly illuminated, just as a historical oddity, like drum machines or witchburnings.

may include some of those horrific fever dream shots where the sky is three different billowing blues & each building is perfectly illuminated, just as a historical oddity, like drum machines or witchburnings.

This is a terrific encapsulation of HDR!

Hellish Dream Rendering

This run down body shop and old rusty Dodge van made the perfect composition for a 7 frame HDR photo.

I think people should have their Nikon D4s confiscated by the authorities if they do things like that with them. Maybe their computers too.

(I am a terrible man for a radical LR preset though, so I can't talk, seeing as I deal in cliché too.)

lol: http://blakeandrews.blogspot.com/2009/07/william-egglestons-album-cover-guide.html

lotta sad crops and dull typography there :(
big star, joanna newsom, and the paramount pictures 90th anniversary comp (!!) stand out (typography aside on that paramount one).

stand out in a good way I mean

Phone makes it hard to respond in detail, but Egglestonia seems more a digital thing than film IMO - a lot of Eggleston rips won't work and digital makes it easier to experiment in that vein.

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/06/24/sunday-review/24CAMP.html#1

the house, of that first portrait-in-front-of-house shot, is really sad. his homemade tripod, though, "repurposed" from latrine fixtures & scrap wood.

those donna ferrato pictures on lens are really something, too

http://southerndocumentaryfund.org/uploads/images/private-violence-janice.jpg

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/leaving-abuse-behind

love this shot from another series flagged up on lens, also:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/flash/Lens/2009/09/20090907-Showcase-Ferrato/20090907-Showcase-Ferrato-190px.jpg

http://goodephotography.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/koda-7.jpg

sweet story about roadtripping to Dwayne's Photo before the Kodachropocalypse. (the nicest shots are all Portra, just try to ignore that). I'm so mad I never shot any.

http://www.rosegallery.net/data/photos/5370_1eastersunday.jpg

http://images.artnet.com/artwork_images/911/134159.jpg

from Gary Stricherz' Americans in Kodachrome

getting lost in this vivien maier:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZuFDqW1rxxM/TZS0IVeQsiI/AAAAAAAABzA/VAlPXBTvWjU/s1600/y_ee71a4f6.jpg

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/16/a-different-approach-to-civil-rights-images/

i feel like i am just reposting these, because some of his stuff was on here a while back, but i hadn't seen most of these early colour saul leiter images before, & they're v nicely laid out:

http://www.gungallery.se/#/saulleiter/images

oops, http://www.gungallery.se/#/saulleiter/images

http://www.johnsypal.com/assets/images/johnsypal.com/injapan/medium/1f8c2dd2b2f85d666.jpg

http://www.johnsypal.com/assets/images/johnsypal.com/straight/medium/d6cb9d9a41e3e9a0c.jpg

good street photographer-guy, John Sypal

i feel like i either posted these a while back, or didn't post them, because i think they were on Photo Booth & so maybe on the radar of some ilxors, but i just came back to some of the Kiana Hayeri photos that got some attention a while back. her portraits, which i think i like as much as any portraiture of its kind-

http://www.kianahayeri.com/veilphaseii/06Mina.jpg

& then her other, storyish series (choose 'Projects'), a bunch of which are Iran. they're so subtle & well observed. i'm kinda posting them as an addendum to the thing about a ~look~ of contemporary photography

http://www.kianahayeri.com/maygodedit2/Hayeri13.jpg
http://www.kianahayeri.com/maygodedit2/Hayeri15.jpg
http://www.kianahayeri.com/maygodedit2/Hayeri04.jpg

like sometimes in trying to gauge the success of some of my photos I find myself wondering if I've created some kind of noble excuse for them, in not having achieved this very technical quality that would make them similar to the street photographer guy i posted above's photos - very immediate & aesthetically upfront, & of a tradition (ie they're quite Robert Frank-y) in the way they look. but Kiana's are at a tangent to that style, i think, relying on semi-naturalistic camera functions, like the non-defined upfront blurring of characters or use of reflective surfaces, things that code as real and familiar or slightly exagerrated variations on those feelings, more than they come across as clever or novel metaphors or depictions. i've included the pretty blue-ish ~excellent colour photo~ one above, but they're subtler & more interesting than that one, i think, & do a really good job as understanding how things look.

not so much praising, but this was linked from LPV, and gets to a bit of that soth-like look that seems to be prevalent and prized right now.
http://www.nearbycafe.com/artandphoto/photocritic/

including this description of the elements that tend to make up the "well-made photograph" done in this vein:

The primary subject (there’s rarely a secondary subject) receives central placement within the frame.

The primary subject is the largest object within the frame.

The primary subject is addressed frontally and head-on.

The primary subject is closest to the picture plane within the frame.

The primary subject is in sharpest focus.

The primary subject contains the most intense highlights (in a b&w image) or the most intense colors, sometimes both.

This literal subject matter and image format then get repeated until enough variants accumulate to constitute a book, an exhibition, or some even larger aggregate.

and on this page: http://www.nearbycafe.com/artandphoto/photocritic/2012/07/08/trope-the-well-made-photograph-2/ the elements of the "well-made project"

Identify a literal subject matter. Just about anything will do: teenagers in their bedrooms, veterans suffering from PTSD, discarded purses from your local thrift shop that you’ve frozen in blocks of ice . . .

In their own environments or in some version of the studio, photograph 40 examples of your chosen subject matter (preferably using the image-structure template described above).

If your subjects are human, transcribe interviews with them, or get them to write their own stories to accompany the images. If they’re animals, or inanimate objects, find apropos text fragments or create your own.

Draft an artist’s statement explicating the significance of what you’ve chosen to point your camera at.
Voila! C’est fait!

not to say that all relates to alec soth's aesthetic, but it does seem to relate to the current vogue for reverent cataloging documentary or post-documentary photography.

it's nice to look through this thread and see that practically nothing posted here fits that formula! with the exception of the time we were trying to identify the 'style of the times'

still reading through this but even the way it's written seems to err towards a kinda hyper-literate, pristine & literal style, as per the photos. so much of it is reverence of the technical act - it sorta reminds me of "do you know how many chords are in this song?". like the prog of photography. or like w/super-neat tumblr-wave graphics in which things are spelled out in capital letters perfectly centred & typefaced per the Rules Of Design. so fussy!

tbh I'm not crazy about the writing style, and I don't really buy his thesis that higher education uniformity is to blame for the consistent style, but I think his list of project/photo traits that are in abundance at the moment seems spot on.

ha, sorry - i'd been reading that here rather than at the link & had thought it was instructive, like a ten photographic commandments, rather than a commentary.

oh yeah "well-made photograph" is meant as a pejorative term

happy birthday, william eggleston

obviously ^^; i was looking at some of his paris photos, recently, i would love to see like a lot of his more recent work to get a better hold on it.

just caught this

I really like eggleston's fairly recent Paris

http://www.fotonet.org.uk/images/Portrait-William-Eggleston.jpg

yeah me too - i've never seen the book but coming back to the photos i think i was surprised by how good it was; i think in my head i have a very brief, remembered judgement of some of his recent work being kinda the same but feat. landmarks of contemporary life (which fwiw i think is p much how eggleston sees it, too - that he doesn't consider any of his photos as inherently or visibly belonging to a specific era of his work). but that had superseded appreciating how fresh they are or how measured - sometimes appropriately a lil more muted than his older work, & still so good on catching some salient detail. this is why i wanna just see more, like enough to get a hold on his range. his framing's so interesting & fucking careless, now (like per his whole 'action outside of the frame' framing & all but seriously).

paris:

http://www.alexihobbs.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/testuser5_mar2009_01_EGGLESTON_TO_300309_dkapjY_WMNXZa.jpg
http://files.fluctuat.net/IMG/jpg/Eggleston4.jpg

in the 21st century (<- most of the series here):

http://www.scaithebathhouse.com/data/artists/assets_c/2010/09/william_eggleston_main-thumb-728xauto-494.jpg
http://www.scaithebathhouse.com/data/exhibitions/assets_c/2010/09/s_santa-window_300-thumb-550xauto-9.jpg
http://www.toimg.net/managed/images/10130205/w482/h298/image.jpg
http://prod-images.exhibit-e.com/www_cheimread_com/8752256b.jpg

(also notable & found while googling around, this archival chinavision shot, date unknown)

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6nqu2R7Un1qc65n4o1_500.jpg

[img=http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/objects?exhibitionId={66E4D6CB-A9AD-41A3-B40D-9150BDE16E4C}&pg=1&rpp=20]photography in the dark[/url], at the met, looks interesting

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/26/a-dip-into-the-black-sea/

intrigued by the notion of a 'communist aesthetic' - immediately I slot this in with jason eskenazi, vanessa winship (http://www.vanessawinship.com/gallery.php?ProjectID=146)

http://visualisingchina.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/JC-s037.jpg

via the blog of the visualising china project, which looks p interesting, the portraiture especially.

http://bremser.tumblr.com/post/30059941847/baptiste-giroudon-afghan-worker-in-us-military

this photo made me really sad today

http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2012/08/the-modern-art-notes-podcast-robert-adams/#more-23639
http://firstbookprizephoto.com/robert-adams

robert adams rules

yeah I'm gonna go up to yale to look at that exhib

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/05/breaking-down-the-beast/?hp

oh hey there's a Robert Adams opening at Matthew Marks in Chelsea this Thursday, for any NYC area people.
I'm gonna try to drop by (if I can work it in before meeting up w folks for DNC viewing night)

http://kenshukan.net/john/archives/2012/09/07/on-photography-as-of-late/

gets at my thoughts and worries a bit

yeah, feeling that. again, two questions: why shoot? why exhibit?

I like to analogize to writers - the novel, as it exists now, is similarly a mature artform. what do literary critics think of modern writers who ape chandler, who still strive after the well-crafted, simple and direct and perfectly forged sentence? or poets who still write poetry. maybe just accept that you are producing work only for a small community of individuals with like-leaning hearts and eyes.

http://www.npr.org/news/specials/2012/cushman/
http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/cushman/index.jsp

http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/collections/cushman/full/P09317.jpg

john sypal blog reminded me of abe shinji and i really love it raw loud contrasty non jokey (international street photographer DARK SKIES OVER TOKYO/SAN DIEGO: THE SUBTLE GLINT OF THE CORONA/THE PAST MEETS THE FUTURE MEETS ENTROPY IN KUALA LUMPUR eric kim harsh flash head-on photo of a fat woman holding an ice cream cone = modern street photography)

http://www.japanexposures.com/images/2010/01/shinji-abe-6.jpg
http://www.japanexposures.com/images/2010/01/shinji-abe-9.jpg

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