photo-breezing

Yeah, he did CTCL and LLSS, most of the exhibition was work for those magazines and a few others. It was at Static Collective on the Saltmarket, a pop-up gallery that use disused retail units.

https://www.facebook.com/events/452830751474850/

got drunk on bourbon and watched william eggleston in the real world last night. seemed appropriate.

ha ha. I like the kinda realitytv vibe, just watching eggleston chill in hotel rooms, cruise with his son. I tried to find some of Winston's photography after but couldn't (did anyone ever see any of Emmet Gowin's son's photos. they looked not so hot to me. like sparklehorse album covers). lol at eggleston's drawl being subtitled throughout. the last, kinda mystified conversion between MA & WE is so great. really inspirational. I like that doc about Andy Goldsworthy that's similarly kinda non-expository, like he doesn't know why he's doing stuff or have some grand allusive purpose.

I have one of the other couple of WE docs to watch, soon, I'll report back

Watching the Maier doc on iPlayer, drinking a beer.

http://www.altairnouveau.com/A-30.jpg

still going at it with the slide scanning

weird cross-cultural vince cable cameo:
http://i3.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article1207683.ece/ALTERNATES/s615/British+Business+Secretary+Vince+Cable+speaks+at+the+Global+Investment+Conference+2012+in+London

yes despite the decades they all just read as 'politician' which is sort of comforting for the sake of continutiy

and universal language

http://www.altairnouveau.com/A-95.jpg

I would murder people for a streetscape like that one. new york is all wide roads and cars.

I could live there and never leave the block

fred herzog on kodachrome,

"Kodachrome was the best film and the most reliable development, but it was far from reliable. I was so frustrated at times I sent film to Palo Alto or to Rochester, just to get them developed right. And of course that entailed an extremely long wait. You’d take the pictures today and they would come back in two weeks or something.”

“But Kodachrome was the best film. I have to thank Kodak for making that product. Without that product, we would not have the pictures. Pictures that were taken on other films have suffered more than Kodachrome. Kodachrome was thought to last 50 years, and it has.””

think you have to take your infrastructural yearning to one of the city threads. I have been looking at more street photography lately (just as a consequence of looking at more photobooks in general, lately; the deserted-through-summer library is really delightful - I have chromes coming, soon) & while explaining to myself why I am not making profoundly interrelating street tableaux of modern day society have just been attributing this to the relatively modest amount of time I spend outdoors anywhere as crowded or populous as New York. not sure where your slides are taken but it goes both ways I think. maybe somewhere smaller you'd be schlepping a tripod around & Robert Adamsing deserted cityscapes.

well I think the photo above was taken in Vienna (but let me check the notes)
and, yes, plenty of good photos to be had in nyc (except lately, with gray skies, and much work in the office), but I'm talking from the urban planning perspective.
which, ah, yeah, that's sorta suburbs thread appropriate.

but foreign environments are great. after a while I find myself just setting the camera to a reasonable shutter speed/f stop setting, prefocused to about 10 feet, sometimes 8, or 6, etc., but basically I just end up doing snaps of people I'm walking past. It's not that compelling! the composition is rudimentary, and the subject matter is just kinda, you know, normal stuff.

it's easy to get dull in nyc too. a change in location is always good.
my photos look really flat to me lately.
I want to, like, go to paris or something for two weeks.

$$$

man, what a rut

I prefer the scan of my uncle's snapshot above to just about anything I've taken in the last few months, pictures of my girlfriend excepted, of course.

the red car, the intersecting lines at the top etc.

I watched the Maier doc on my phone over the course of two commutes. Amazing. I was inspired enough to switch my 40D to B&W JPEG, ISO 400, and shoot a bunch of things. This lasted about five minutes until I realised I was late for work.

but foreign environments are great. after a while I find myself just setting the camera to a reasonable shutter speed/f stop setting, prefocused to about 10 feet, sometimes 8, or 6, etc., but basically I just end up doing snaps of people I'm walking past. It's not that compelling! the composition is rudimentary, and the subject matter is just kinda, you know, normal stuff.

yeah i feel you. it's interesting seeing how photographs change over the tenure of living somewhere, too; partly because you burn out on certain fixtures and styles & partly because you're so fresh at the start. i have some nice pictures of montreal i took from the cab when i moved here, & they're very different in character from what i take now. it's funny, sometimes when i go to new cities i notice that i haven't taken any photos in the first little while, walking around, maybe, & it's like i don't speak the language, or have the same kinda crutches or instincts. but that's a good thing too. i guess i am delineating street stuff as being something p specific & winograndian in its aims, here, though, in which landscape is secondary.

i went to paris awhile ago & have barely touched the film i got back, i'm p psyched to. the vienna slide you posted is nice, & it's kinda tantalising having glimpses of something that would be alluring in its novelty. have to thank you for your slide posts, btw, i started on the kodachromes i have last night. i might try not to talk about them too much because i'm not sure if i'm really at liberty to share them, & i assume just describing the wonders they contain is going to be frustrating in the vein of black and white '70s paperbacks of colour masters, but just: they're pretty beguiling, & there are some areas of just aqueous, soft-focused radiant colour that remind me of stephen gill. really transportive.

wow I forgot that I wrote that last night! this summer is doing weird things to me.
I'm not as down on my current shooting as all that, but I would love to have the money to afford a trip abroad! and I *am* tired of a lot of the passing-strangers-in-the-streets photos. but I think my recent increased pickiness has been good, and I've been thinking less and less about my photos' online lives and more about what *else* I can do with them.
man, I listened to some great music and had a blast last night, and over the course of the day I've been remembering a few other things I did as well (nothing bad).

I suppose I'm not totally sure if the slides I'm scanning are really really supposed to be for public consumption, but I've been telling myself that's why I'm only putting low res versions on this site only, and then only ones that show landscapes or strangers. no relatives or acquaintances.

and I get the same feeling about initial photographs in a given city as you, schlump. I've learned the reliable patterns too well. but on the other hand I think I've gotten better as a photographer when I really muster the effort. I think that's part of the problem: I know that I've become better, so I don't work as hard. some early successes are the result of me pushing in new and uncomfortable ways.

i started thinking about other stuff to do with photographs, lately. once in awhile i am on somebody's blog & there is for sale their $3 printed & folded one-sheet pamphlet collecting not-necessarily-totally-showstopping b&ws, & it feels kinda appealing, the smallness of uniting & finalising some photographs you took, like the old editions of four of photographs or even records. i feel like maybe there should be some kind of healthy, complaisant counterpart to shooting & editing which even gently tries to engage, some, or to propogate one's photos (i was just reading this rad khaela maricich piece about the lines between art & audience) somewhat. for me at the moment this is just website stuff but i'm sure i could be doing cool inventive things with my photos. printing them onto mugs.

in other photo breezings i am still so into reading szarkowski atm. i'm reading his essay on winogrand from the big book. very curious to see some of the later work realised; sorta almost disgusted by some of the contact sheets excerpted, which i think reflect drives in which he's shooting & winding & shooting & winding non-stop (leaving a third of a million LA-era exposures unseen, apparently), but some of the late stuff is really democratic & interesting. also his grain still just makes me swoon. szark referred to the expressive ugly gray scale of '60s art movies as influential on those guys.

It was the Crystal Palace Overground Festival last weekend; two years ago I was one of the official photographers - stumbling around with my hired lens, trying and failing to find parents to sign waiver forms when I found I'd snapped an unidentified kid in one of my crowd shots, generally making a bad job of it, etc.

This year I noticed a LOT of L-glass around, like our little local-bands-foods'n'craft in the park thing had become a big deal and pros were documenting it in glorious detail. Most interesting to me was the guy with an Auto Graflex 5x7 with Pentac lens (he was also shooting with a 5D2 and a Hasselblad) - gorgeous stuff...

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3774/9175102820_cc05a55896_z.jpg

http://uploads8.wikipaintings.org/images/balthus/th%C3%A9r%C3%A8se-1938.jpg

http://uploads7.wikipaintings.org/images/balthus/the-white-skirt-1937.jpg

http://a397.idata.over-blog.com/550x442/4/50/71/33/oeuvres-contemporaines/balthus.jpg

http://uploads2.wikipaintings.org/images/balthus/the-cherry-tree.jpg

i have chromes from the library; it is just unreal,

http://www.duncanwhyte.com/Images/Layout_Production/Eggleston_Chromes/pages/Eggleston_Chromes_1_Fin_Page_13.jpg

http://www.pacemacgill.com/gfx/images/rf/robert_frank_730.jpg

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-tU1axBJcRjw/UebKYZky29I/AAAAAAAABks/aOFQUhtRDNQ/s0/jf.png

grumpy breezing
one time when gawker had one of their general calls for new writers, I semi-drunkenly sent a letter that instead said that they should have a new heavier photography thing going on, and that I'd be into working something like that. I never expected a response (it wasn't convincingly written) and didn't get one, but man, within a few months (maybe a little longer I guess) they unveiled that dodge and burn page, and let me tell you, it suuuuuucks.
if you like boring pictures of things that ought to be interesting it's cool though I guess. ymmv I guess but I don't get it.

I guess

do any of you like hedi slimane's stuff? http://hedislimane.com

i'm not a photogapher; i'm into it

also, if you know of anyone else who does shit sorta like his, i'd be interested in checking it out!

http://24.media.tumblr.com/63e201e46e7617b00e121a1b90b8114f/tumblr_mrwj2uFz8F1snq421o1_500.jpg

i feel not very interested in focus anymore. even focusing my eyes.

http://ruinista.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/blurry-street-1.jpg?w=720&h=480
(hong-an tran)

huh. lots of nice photos there.

home along, drinking nothing but vermouth (blanc) and scanning. catching up on summer. the weather has cooled down, I'm getting a breeze in the place, and am in a techno zone at the moment.

my girlfriend just texted me with a vague fuzzy picture to prove that antony from antony and the johnsons is at the restaurant she's at.

this is breezing.

she is good I think. she came up before somewhere? I think maybe Michael knows her a lil. she does a lot of things I generally think of myself as immune to nicely. peaceful modern landscapes. shallow focus restaurant-table photos that make me think about qualities of lens glass.

I am scanning spring too. may second right now. I just finished the first roll cluttered with pictures of the sky. I was kinda bummed out last week & walking along this one long road in Montreal with an uncluttered horizon & watching the gradient slowly change, I feel like photographing the sky is simultaneously totally useless, & impotent, & then also kinda beautiful, to be moved to just sloppily document something so blunt & obvious & huge, in spite of its bluntness, obviousness, hugeness. I know my spring photos are just going to be pictures of the sky & flowers. like that Emmet Gowin interview where he talks about some photographer he liked who thought his late work of skies was his best stuff. I like ageing into unavoidable cliche.

hey btw, have you ever seen any Nathaniel Dorsky films, China? ccing dayo here, some are playing at NYFF & they are precious photographic research ime, like he owns his own wavelength.

not aware of dorsky, but looking up now. looks like he got a really nice NYT writeup.
could it be steichen who's sky photographs we're thinking of?

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/49.55.29

they're some of my favorites, although I don't think they come of as well online. in a book or on a wall though they are really great. I've got a big stieglitz book in which that series (equivalents) is printed pretty small on the page, and pretty low contrast.

http://sandrakontos.wordpress.com/2012/12/14/alfred-stieglitz-equivalents/

whose not "who's"

I need to learn to proofread before posting.

cheap film in candlelight

http://altairnouveau.com/631-19.jpg

just realized that's the lawn mower above is a paul graham

proofreading again

hey guys. i don't have much to breeze about right now, but i'm sitting on a commuter train for the next hour or so drinking beer.

i have a technical question/problem i've been meaning to ask you guys about but i'll wait till i'm back on a real computer and can upload some scans.

for now i'll share this girl's flickr i came across today while looking for photos from a show that happened at my old apartment 10 years ago this month. (apparently she lived in the same apartment years later).

kind of ho-hum subject matter but she really has a wonderful eye and i want to know more about what she shoots with

oops use this for the 2nd link http://m.flickr.com/#/photos/skylookslikearoad/6866627636/

i kinda don't wanna go over the top in describing Dorsky, here, for fear of hyperbole or else overloading the expectations one could arrive at a screening with, but: i saw his film hours for jerome, recently, & it's a new favourite film, something i didn't know existed. he has been around for a long time, supremely attuned to the stocks he's working with, & i think a kind of longstanding ghettoisation of what i understood by experimental film meant i'd never really got into him. his stuff is only ever screened, not available online (even clips! no nothing!), & just i would endorse checking him at some point - nyc an easier place to intermittently catch something than most - because he's both expert & dedicated to something that i think anyone walking around with a camera is dedicated to. this is my way of elevating myself to peer-status by virtue of taking blurry pictures of flowers, sometimes. (i'm on my phone right now so had limited success finding out what was playing at nyff, but i think at the very least there's some event in which he's screening unscreened footage as part of wavelengths)

& those steiglitz photos do look good. i take back all the mean things emmet gowin thought about them. i'm reading (/staring at the plates of) a book aperture just re-released right now called the edge of vision, dedicated to the various stages of abstraction in photography (which kinda almost has just got increasingly less abstract in some ways, given the sorta image denigration, non-reprsentative chemicals & romantic structure of everything early), & those steiglitz photos fit in. the cyanotopes throughout are killing me. i like the way that i understand photography (like a bunch of other stuff) so much better working backwards. i only just kinda got imogen cunningham. it takes me a long time sometimes.

cheap film v nice. it lazily just makes me think of gerard richter & sonic youth.

squinting at small phone thumbnails but otm about her eye, they're nice

man there is something so devastating about seeing photos of spring, & feeling alive with the possibilities afforded by copious light, i september. I guess at least that low autumnal sun is comin.

get ready to shoot dark pictures. underexpose. get down with it.

I ebayed a video camera and am watching old videos from the early 90s-mid 2000s so I'm getting a bit lost this eve /breezin

for real scanning has kinda limited my comfort w underexposure; I mean obviously I am doing it all the time anyway, doing it more often than not, but when I think of it as a strategy I just see visions of some accidentally solarised picture of one of my friends from which all the technology in the world can not coax a blue channel

really good article atm somewhere on the Atlantic site about XFR STN at the new museum & the work it's doing transferring old video before it's lost to technological incompatibility. are you talking video-video? I am fooling around with a friend's digital camera trying to get it to work, I would love to be able to shoot video somehow rn

here I was thinking I'd try to get into film photography but I don't think I can if it's this pricy...not to mention developing and turning it into digital so I can uhh use it?

just thought of the photo breezing thread since my brother's renewed interest in cameras has caused me to 1) take out my leica, load it up, and start shooting again, and 2) finally develop about 15 rolls from 2016, a mix of color and black-and-white. I'm relieved to learn that my scanner still works, after a software update that has forced me to relearn how to scan. might post more once I have some good scans. it's funny, since I've shot many many thousands of photos in the intervening years, but nearly all digital (and often work-related), now remembering how I shot 8 years ago, and getting the feeling back with the leica. holding it, I really do feel inclined to take very different kinds of photos! I also had no clue that film had gotten so expensive, and was happy to discover a bag of about 15 or so unused rolls, mostly Kodak Gold, Portra, some Ektar, and Tri-X etc. I can't believe how expensive this would all be if I were buying new rolls, paying for scans, etc.! Why do the kids do it??

the thing for me on film cost is that's the only barrier. it's jarring to come back to after not buying film but not to the point that it puts it out of reach if not ripping wildly through it. otherwise i don't mind. i don't have much to compare it to since i never got an updated digital camera. so apart from my phone, if necessary i still use a canon eos from the very early 2000s. it's good but it does require some effort to operate and make good pictures (less than shooting on film and developing, since it does just plug into a macbook still, but with more room for error and the chance of taking pictures all day and coming back with nothing).

70mm zoom lens is my business … and business is good!

I haven't taken a good photo in about 6 years. Except for microscopic tidepool shots with the little Olympus TG5.

https://i.imgur.com/EdLhOvO.jpeg

lookin good! philly?