let us now catalogue famous people

Bridges uses a Widelux. They used to be relatively inexpensive (vs. Xpan) but it looks like that's no longer the case.

I wanted an Xpan to try and stage deadpan-style 'movie stills' for a class but there was zero chance of getting one back then.

http://www.americansuburbx.com/series-2/f/fred-herzog-color

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

http://i.imgur.com/b2QlAgX.jpg

http://homemoviearchive.tumblr.com/

i love artificial environments

http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2013/03/mark-bramley-landscapes/?viewall=true

http://art.chicagobooth.edu/images/display_b_Zuma_F_.jpg

has this thread ever had any discussion on john divola i don't remember?

I feel like he's been linked before but not discussed (not like most things itt get discussed anyway)

oh i know but sometimes they do as well. i just think hes really interesting because his photographs are really interesting pictures but that interest sits uneasily with how they function conceptually, their relationship to performance and social intervention almost.

like i think he needs a different access point than most of what we end up talking about on this board especially re other photographers in that we never talk about say gabriel orozco or like john baldessari even and those legacies are not marginal or extraneous to photography anymore i think like elad lassry is maybe the most obvious example or that guy who runs americansuburbx who does that google car as dorothea lange stuff.

john divola is one of my absolute favorites.

xp

yah for sure - I'm as guilty as anyone for perpetuating the 'grand old tradition' of photography, venerating black and white documentary work, etc., consuming from within the tradition. and partially it's because I don't know too much about the people you've mentioned, and that's a failing on my part because I don't have the critical armature to really engage with that. but yeah, the idea of photography as primarily being about representation (as elusive as that concept is when embodied by a still image) is definitely dying, or at least heavily muted, in the media world of today. I don't know what value there is left to 'straight' photography in today's world, other than to show future generations that we were here, that we existed, that people at this specific place for 1/500 of a second were configured in this position, and that light reflected off of them and was recorded by a machine and was transmogrified into silver on acetate, ink on wood fiber, ones and zeros on silicon.

it's probably pretty telling that the photography I find most interesting nowadays are those tumblrs of 'found' images, like home move archive or internethistory or internet k-hole (actually a blogspot) or w/e. maybe that's because what I personally want out of photography is - show me how you live! show me how you have lived! I am here and you are there and the moment is long past but I like to imagine and gawk, so - indulge me!

well i just mean that with divola as with orozco i think there's this elision of the photograph as document *and* the production of the photograph itself as a performance, an indivisible centre. like with the series zuma. we were here. its that as well, this beach, this document, the allegorical gesture, this burnt out shell becoming something else, a synechdoche, LOS ANGELES. the significant detail that made the images real for me was reading that the house was also being used by the fire department for training purposes, burnt out repainted, squatted. these holy rituals that are part of the soil shift of the city. local administrative functions and naming the earth. it can't be understood as mere catalogue, the image is produced by the intervention of multiple actors, the image is produced as an intervention. i think when you are thinking about the kinds of vernacular image making that you mention, it helps to keep open a certain way that the image tells us "this is how we lived." we were here. that form and imagery are produced socially. im grasping a lot here because i can't quite explain it properly. but i take a photograph of you because im flirting with you, watching you put your shirt back on, and the image remains as a document of how you looked that morning with the LIGHT COMING IN SIDEWAYS. and i stick it on the fridge door, and when you go i throw it away, or in a drawer somewhere. its impossible to extract what it shows from what it does. does this make sense? between the part and the whole there is no cut.

i say this, i get annoyed when people are dismissive of like "style." style is super interesting for a whole ton of complicated reasons.

yeah style is the best, it took me a really long time to be able to 'see' style

for sure, though, the photographer as actor and complicit in the staging of the scene, of making it a scene, of happening upon something that would exist only in the memories of those present were it not for the intervention. I think photographers have been trying to erase themselves from their photos for so long, c.f. HCB's credos that the best photographer should be 'invisible,' when clearly that is becoming more and more of a fiction. the gulf between admiring what a street photographer does, and feeling discomfited when you see her at work, like the videos of winogrand, cohen. that the public, the spaces, are themselves becoming aware of the possibility of their own spontaneous existence in photographs, through the proliferation of the sex tape, surveillance footage, dashcams, facebook albums. the caricature of the photographer Im most familiar with and find most comforting is the oft-made one to the flâneur. but that doesn't feel right to describe what the photographer does today. there needs to be a new method, a new type, a new frame.

holy wow at the home movie archive link

http://25.media.tumblr.com/47df6e452954eb77af4b0e306ed02233/tumblr_mhj82tPCft1s4nnkuo2_1280.png

http://25.media.tumblr.com/70bf93d29031d7e93077b3d25e0e9b46/tumblr_migbmdAZpZ1s4nnkuo1_1280.png

films could be optioned from their scenarios. the prelinger archives are super fascinating & exemplary to me, maybe it should be an ILP roadtrip someday.

really v much enjoying what plax & 乒乓 are writing here. I mean I almost want to post something by Duane Michals, you know, because he writ large some of that photographic function, just he did it in actual writing. I sorta wonder if some of this doesn't relate back to a Janet Malcolm stage for the medium in which the photographer had to be acknowledged, brought into the room, & in which that step becomes necessary in order to differentiate the image from the stream of others which might or might not be similar but when viewed without such context mean just about the same thing - that something existed/was captured/was green/cast shadows/we were happy. this maybe/obviously comes with the same caveats about deep unreliability. I just sent an e-mail to my friend talking about Unchanging Window, which I am always writing about here, cycling through why it means a lot to me. & so much of its effect is cumulative. like when we were talking about Hirano Tacaki's log, the eventual weight of seeing five hundred variations of the guy walking behind his girlfriend lifting his camera to take a shot, she has already noticed so there is her photographic smile or, better, kind of presented non-smiling but camera-acknowledging expression, & then sometimes there are shots when she's not even looking, & there's not her face, & then with minimal textual accompaniment we know she is gone & the two days later the guy is taking dumb what-is-this-camera-for pictures of the sandwiches he's eating. seeing a bunch of stuff photographed regularly, & tracked - shots from the same window, the same person's trips to the same sort of events, the same friends reappearing, the same path to work - strings such a strong impression because it gradually just betrays a habitable sense of space, somebody's (inaccurate, or fictional, sure) life. I am stuck with something descendant from those Emmet Gowin images, & typified by photologs like those I mentioned, when I think about what a photographer is doing now, just because those things are obviously not what the kinda classic-era 'representative'/newspaper-style photographers were getting at, & they are maybe even less strictly pure "photography", in terms of referring to some of the extra-textual metadata the images come wrapped up with (even with Frank, now, I'm not looking solely at the images, I'm thinking about the immigrant story, the grant, the cops, the contact sheets, his later work). I feel like if the photographer is making you think of something it's not what's there but what's seen. like that line from the Jack Gilbert poem: Degas said he didn't paint/what he saw, but what/would enable them to see/the thing he had.

i thought about this afterwards, that i should have made a distinction somewhere but then the where seemed arbitrary, a distinction anyway that delineated more precisely different kinds of interventionist moves. not based on an axis of intent though. i think there is a broad seam of photographic tradition that seizes on the social function of the snapshot, one that seems especially linked to like SCENES and social spaces that are "subcultural," nan goldin, catherine opie, mark morrisroe, etc. the social mileu. the photographs intervenes and is partially constitutive of social bonds and affiliations. i always wonder about these kinds of photographers because of how everything freezes in a social situation when you take out a camera, about how everything in these photographs seems to exist in relation to the camera. but with nan goldin there's this sense tragic glamour that needs to be photographed, fading as quickly as the bulb flashes, a different need.

http://leaveryap.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/morrisroe-sex-photo.jpg?w=710

but maybe what i mean is addressed more explicitly in this mark morrisroe photograph, taken to reply to a sex advertisement. the photograph not only harbouring reflected light in its chemical surfaces, but materialising this erotic transaction, it functions as a document in multiple ways. these photographers could not be taken as flaneurs, but then the flaneur implies an entirely different notion of the world as inherently erotic, the city opening itself to a particular roaming gaze, flat on its back. these guys are implicated. the gaze is dialogic, social, affective. i'm not sure that divola sits easily in relationship to that kind of work at all. his work intervenes into something alien, almost like a site of overlapping non-relation, the hollow syntax of a vacated space.

to think about divola you need words like topology, civic function, erosion, transposition, blunt, toxic

http://edge.neocha.com/posts/hunag-jings-photo-series-pure-of-sight-wins-the-leica-oskar-bernack-newcomer-award/

http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2013/03/07/mike_brodie_a_period_of_juvenile_prosperity_documents_life_as_a_freight.html

http://lightbox.time.com/2013/03/07/let-there-be-dark-bill-brandts-shadow-and-light/

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/gordon-parks-harlem-family-revisited/

more hiroyuki ito:
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/08/one-cat-three-lives/

these are all so killer. those brodie photos are really something. it is more than them being like modern updates of bruce davidson kinda shit, a few telltale signs of today, they're just really arresting. like they are a compelling argument for documentary/representative photography even if it is a genre that's pretty loaded w/tropes & caveats.

those huang jing phots are really special also; like they're almost calm enough to be just kind of sedate and reassuring but how formal & measured they are makes them more interesting:

http://e✧✧✧.neo✧✧✧.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/huangj✧✧✧@neochaedg✧✧✧.j✧✧

also i feel super cold-hearted for being way more into the range of photographic approaches deployed in the meeno piece than i am the supernatural cat life arc but it is a v fine series either way

michael engler put up a bunch of segments from his doc on youtube

http://www.youtube.com/user/EnglerMichael?feature=watch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1gICU1H78s

lol that his studio is so big in nyc. =(

never change mark cohen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qcgEnC3bLY

http://www.ishupatel.com/bresson.html

blake andrews catalogues the incoming winogrand pieces: http://blakeandrews.blogspot.com/2013/03/more-thoughts-on-winogrand.html

klein http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/15/william-kleins-paint-and-light-show/

http://www.americansuburbx.com/2013/03/john-szarkowski-photography-and-the-mass-media-1967.html

http://www.unchangingwindow.com/content/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/thirteen-10.jpg

http://www.unchangingwindow.com/content/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/training9.jpeg

unchanging window so nice right now, digi & film

new michael jang book from hamburger eyes looks delightful:

http://www.hamburgereyes.com/2013/03/18/college/

butter smooth

everyone's cataloging famous people these days

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/arts/artsspecial/photographys-stature-rises-at-museums.html

i was thinking this eve nbefore i got to this part:

Museum directors are realizing that photography exhibitions attract crowds, particularly the young audiences they covet, so they are giving more attention and space to the medium than ever before.

like, yeah, right? milions of people with dslrs trying to figure out how best to adhere to imitate the canon :)))

summer 2014 instagram retrospective at the Met

"i just took these with a disposable camera!" - contemporary practices in photography.

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/22/guided-by-blindness/

wow those are stunning

yeah, dang

don't you wanna just be sent on an assignment

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/2013/03/bobbys-book-bruce-davidsons-photographs-of-the-brooklyn-gang-the-jokers.html

awesome:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/Bobby%27s%20Book_07.jpg

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/27/a-wars-cold-comfort-in-china/

yeah so good. lens is great lately.

http://www.nigelshafran.com/images/precinct_web/john.jpg
teenage precinct shoppers by nigel shafran

& from that book the guy kickstarted for his roadtrip pictures of malls in the '80s, which is coming out through steidl

http://rumur.com/wp-content/uploads/joystick.jpg

http://rumur.com/wp-content/uploads/sleepin-bench.jpg

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdfckiAR2w1rehyapo1_1280.jpg

http://alioutfit.tumblr.com/

eagerly awaiting my copy of malls accross america-- dude has sent like 800 "backer updates"

in december he gave everyone a free print just as a peace offering for how long it was taking, i got this one:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/projects/27979/posts/327257/image-169618-full.jpg?1350061479

http://www.lenscratch.com/2013/03/yang-yongliang-silent-valley.html

dope but this is also basically what HK looks like at night

that photograph of eggleston that's been showing up everywhere: http://www.gomemphis.com/news/2008/oct/10/power-house/

shot by http://www.maudeclay.com/