let us now catalogue famous people

americans erasure seems so innocuous, especially compared to other appropriations of photography like sherrie levine or richard prince. I'm kinda surprised people are so apparently shocked by it.

i was at my friend's place looking through the vivian maier book last night, i had seen it before & know a bunch of her photographs from the blog but it was probably the first time that i had sat down & really looked at her photos, & the book is very nice & just well represents everything & i guess the stuff lends itself to that kind of full page hi-res treatment & all of that kinda thing. but man it was such a knockout seeing all of her photographs. there is a part of me that still sorta expects to find out, really, that the photographs weren't in fact rescued from a storage locker but were computer generated, are a fake, that they're too perfect in both narrative & content to be real. they're like a photographic marvin pontiac record. you see things like

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dVcQnF0-tpU/T9kVOHQV4PI/AAAAAAAAAUw/fhNwuBFUNAI/s1600/59-1730.jpg

& it hews just so closely to what you want from a historic photograph - this profoundly old-time looking dude so perfectly rendered (i think there is actually a different shot of him in the book?, i couldn't find it, maybe, maybe not); they're just absurdly well phrased, so apt to be dug up now. in the same way that i can understand that there are tides that, after their initial appearance, control whether biggie records sound better now or tupac records sound better now, whether keaton is more relevant now than chaplin, these just seem to land so extravagantly - i think i saw some weird-usa-MF shots dayo posted a couple of days ago & did my usual self-indulgent eyeroll at the slight grandiosity of MF, but seeing these just spins me around, that they so elegantly & in such detail - not even like granular detail or contextual detail, but actual rich social & interpersonal detail - capture & just adhere to a narrative of the time was just so surprising to me. it's like eggleston having had the foresight to shoot this woman in memphis knowing how she'd anachronistically pop twenty years later. she's very modern throughout - a kind of abstract, evans-ish composition of shadows falling on a wall, her classic self-portraits,

http://concretejunglez.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/vivianmaier_self_1953.jpg

& her social eye is better even than her more explicit portraiture

http://the-apartment-gallery.com/wp-content/gallery/vivian-maier/2370.jpg

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--0dz2_3DriI/T_1MtwqoSSI/AAAAAAAADvE/q4yuLQXo-I8/s1600/Vivian-Maier-Undated-New-York-NY-%C2%A9-2012-Maloof-Collection-Ltd.-%E2%80%94-All-Rights-Reserved-1.jpeg

there was also a lot of boring technical stuff to admire; her rollei & seemingly long strap. such a good look.

jamal shabazz photos in a more digestible form

http://everyday-i-show.livejournal.com/205125.html

http://www.nowness.com/day/2013/5/5/3013/everybody-street

hand-on-hip woman & $20-in-mouth woman photos both really popping in this trailer
i am maybe not leaving my apartment anymore if this further legitimises aggro street photography tho

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/08/an-open-road-and-narrative/

http://www.americansuburbx.com/wp-content/gallery/fire-island/tumblr_me9u5vqoz11r3ulqfo1_500-thumb-500x608-11449-b.jpg

love these

yah those are great

http://www.yesmagazine.org/multimedia/yes-photo-essays/james-baldwin-in-turkey

love both of those last two

wkiw james baldwin

NSFW http://www.americansuburbx.com/series-2/r/ren-hang-new-china NSFW

http://www.americansuburbx.com/2013/05/asx-interview-emma-wilcox-where-it-falls-2013.html

i dig the darktoned muted blankness of these

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18old4hqwee27jpg/original.jpg

& dennis hopper:

http://media.paperblog.fr/i/506/5061372/dennis-hopper-photographs-from-the-60s-L-s99yBJ.jpeg

modern update on mark cohen's bubble gum pic http://internethistory.tumblr.com/image/51586358768

http://blakeandrews.blogspot.com/2013/05/missy-prince-what-was-she-thinking.html

oof, ouch, yikes
http://gawker.com/sun-times-lays-off-its-photographers-on-slow-crawl-to-i-510490745

http://blakeandrews.blogspot.com/2013/05/missy-prince-what-was-she-thinking.html

― 乒乓, Thursday, May 30, 2013 8:51 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is great

i think i want to read a more leiter-esque commentary on photographs - the ~process~ here is really interesting but i think for a lot of people photography is way more brainless!, & it would be cool to hear people explore those dumb instincts that make them lift a camera. i was reading about friedlander's america by car a couple of days ago & dug this:

When asked about his approach, he once said: "I only wanted Uncle Vern standing by his new car (a Hudson) on a clear day. I got him and the car. I also got a bit of Aunt Mary's laundry, and Beau Jack, the dog, peeing on a fence, and a row of potted tuberous begonias on the porch and 78 trees and a million pebbles in the driveway and more. It's a generous medium, photography."

i think i could claim premeditation for some awesome aspects of photographs i have taken but for the most part these alignments & symmetries are luck, are part of the translation of using a camera.

wow i really like missy prince,

http://24.media.tumblr.com/88ca40d670bb53464c1aba71a06ebe2e/tumblr_mg9tumEhvt1ro9hzyo1_1280.jpg

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8071/8291187501_c4226ebb23_b.jpg

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8203/8205640938_0f6d00d5c4_b.jpg

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8362/8368374160_db4231ff5c_b.jpg http://25.media.tumblr.com/8029816cde17b020af74463d24c828a9/tumblr_mka63zH1oL1ro9hzyo1_1280.jpg

something that has happened since i started scanning photos/negatives is looking at other people's photographs & only seeing them in terms of quality of scan, enviously wondering how they got such a good, dust-free image. but with these they remind me of something else, wondering why my colour photographs lack that slightly formal, to-me-dye-transfer-seeming bold gloss, something to do with black blacks & f-stops of sixteen.

I think one thing here is that she generally shows scans or photographs of chemical prints. makes a diff.

http://www.americanphotomag.com/article/2013/06/sun-times-photo-layoffs-what-were-losing

http://www.nieves.ch/catalogue/giasco2inside.html

i love internethistory http://internethistory.tumblr.com/image/52754256637

wow

like a late frank polaroid

was reading abt this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventh-Kilometer_Market

and came across this fantastic shot:

http://farm1.staticflickr.com/145/358088930_a0f1b9ffb9_o.jpg

which is from here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/glueckauf/sets/72157594480699415/with/358088930/

http://www.americansuburbx.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/2007.40.13_1a-Custom.jpg

jon gossage, from the pond

http://25.media.tumblr.com/77e7c082aab82730cc945b1ce3f62ccc/tumblr_mksl2mfXOX1rp5n5lo1_500.jpg

wow,
http://altairnouveau.tumblr.com/post/49769158271/untitled-on-flickr

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7i7xbMjVy1rbjg2mo1_r1_1280.jpg

very soft madi ju photo, http://madiju.tumblr.com/

i think china said something when somebody posted a nice & colourful picture of a girl with red-dyed hair, a while ago, about a certain clear, rich, egglestonian/sothian aesthetic being a norm at the moment, which is true. i like this though. the blur is very poetic, tactile. i think with photography i oscillate between it is all about sunlight & it is not all about sunlight.

aka malick's wager

jody rogac,

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mf1m72e1b71qa6e7g.jpg

http://media.tumblr.com/562ccdc9345b39b29551cfeabc87257c/tumblr_inline_mj1ouvPCyv1qz4rgp.jpg

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_me4bo9Pixe1qa6e7g.jpg

http://www.jodyrogac.com/files/gimgs/155_kyla-subway.jpg

http://www.jodyrogac.com/files/gimgs/33_pig-sara.jpg

http://blog.jodyrogac.com/

http://www.aplaceofwork.com/images/sized/images/uploads/yellow-0x600.jpg

yellow, from sara cwynar's color studies

any good stuff on Lens lately? have skipped over about a month's worth of posts : \

wow the jody rogac stuff you posted is pretty beautiful, schlump. I love the first one especially.
catching up now on this thread. ha glad you like the photo of that wall! and I think that the comment I made was probably mostly about the soth-y respectable documentarian, medium format, low contrast, sober style that many people seem to shoot for currently. a lot of it looks like delicate portraiture I think. and it's very technically finessed. I don't necessarily think it's *bad* but it's my instinct to recoil from anything that seems to have become so codified as the current mode that signals *seriousness*.

i am sort of overwhelmed by color studies rn

ha, the first JR shot is totally in your zone, China. incidentally I caught the tumblr shot I posted after hopping around from your IHKH (or flickr, myabe; IHKH rip?); so many arresting shots, lately, really nice. I'm actually p deep into Cwynar's tumblr, which is terrific, right now. there's a lot of way more casual flow of non-studio stuff I'm really enjoying, w/a greater interest in tone & texture,

http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_l3elx5KIds1qan65ho1_1280.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAI6WLSGT7Y3ET7ADQ&Expires=1371780398&Signature=SyTyzn3IHqPrhOClGLIdA5dpnvc%3D#_=_

& re: the contemporary aesthetic thing; it was actually this I was talking about, more than the reverent Sothian thing. though I was just thinking about that, too, after admiring one of Rogac's MF shots (from tearsheets), which looks very nice & carries little of the baggage I associate with MF (as can a lot of stuff shot with those cameras, it must have just compared favourably with something else I'd just seen):

http://www.jodyrogac.com/files/gimgs/33_polanski-2.jpg

I've been thinking about that - perhaps chemical? - warm brightness a lot, lately, like the set I posted last week. I just bought a new issue of Apartamento, which has this great set of busy Japanese interiors photographed by Tony Cederteg I'm trying to find a picture of

really glad you liked, 乒乓! there's an older "green" that's actually way more in the lilac spectrum, on her tumblr, that's really lovely-

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lh75hpfmal1qan65ho1_500.jpg

man i used to dream about doing a series of flower photographs but in black and white

ha, it's funny: at the moment i will shoot five or six rolls of colour in a row, & then load some B&W for a change, which slows me down a lot cause it's summer & i have a stephen shore book from the library & i'm mainly drawn to flowers. but it always feels interesting approaching flowers in B&W. like you're turning them into stone. i think i have a picture of some blossom i took that i kinda like, somewhere.

http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/3211/186uhv.jpg

as for Lens i think the last few of note all got posted here, though there's a recent (few day old) entry in the same sort of ~haunted b&w reflection-strewn urbanity~ vein, & then a not-necessarily-beautifully-photographed entry on barber shops that is nonetheless clustered w/killer art, cf the tupac painting & outdoor illustrations (slide #18) from Senegal, http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/documenting-west-africa-one-barbershop-at-a-time/

It is hard for me to actually put black and white film in the camera during summer too.
I'm gonna check out the links that have just been posted, but... tomorrow. Walking around today has me beat. Swear I'm loading b&w tomorrow.

http://www.shootingfilm.net/2013/02/woody-allen-poses-with-bunch-of.html

me irl

http://shihlun.tumblr.com/post/53407664258/walker-evans-robert-frank-nova-scotia-1969-71

yeah that's a beautiful portrait. you guys have looked through the walker evans archive on the met site, right? it isn't especially easy to navigate but is amazingly comprehensive. a lot of beautiful, frame-by-frame sets of him gallavanting w/the home-improving franks in NS, & a lot of just really nice angles to WE i didn't know about. cf his drawing,

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BH2Gxo-CMAArds9.jpg

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/henri-cartier-bresson-living-and-looking/

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/21/cartier-bresson-there-are-no-maybes/

http://i.imgur.com/Y5mykoL.png

i almost want to bawl

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/art-of-inner-turmoil/

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/05/memories-of-a-boys-life-reconstructed/

4x5 serious photography to make cv's eyes roll

hey, you know that eggleston's paris book is filled with drawings of his... they're great!