Backyard

Enjoying the warmer weather, took a few snaps in the backyard.

zig when they zag

A friend was kind enough to remind me again about picking the path less travelled. We were talking about lens choices for a possible trip to Yellowstone. Considering renting high quality, long telephoto lenses. I mentioned about bringing a 500mm mirror lens. Crappy optics. Not worth using. Manual focus. She pointed out that I'd get different shots to most people. Same with shooting portraits up close with a wide angle lens. (and congratulations to Kate for finishing her first triathlon this weekend)

Some times it is worth picking your favourite piece of received wisdom and doing just exactly the opposite. You'll get something different. You might find something new for you. Maybe it won't work, maybe it will. But you could well be surprised. I like this shot of American football, by Winograd as another fine example of this idea. A friend of mine was lucky enough to study with Winograd and is also constantly trying to go in the other direction to everyone else. His blog is well worth reading as a result.

So your mission, if you chose to accept it, is to go and do something you think 'shouldn't be done' this week. Try doing the opposite of what you think is the right way to take a picture. Let me know how it goes.

taking the narrative machete to the democratic jungle

Attended the Alec Soth lecture at the Austin Center of Photography last night. They are doing a fantastic job for such a young organization, getting in great photographers who are giving interesting talks. Alec Soth talked about his ennui with photography as a medium. Starting out quite frustrated and negative about image making. Partly this was in the context of what he called the democratic jungle, riffing on William Eggleston's idea of the democratic forest. That everything is equally important as a subject and everything is up for having pictures taken. No need for much in the way of subject selection or thought - everything is a viable subject. In the same context, he showed the 2-billionth picture that's been photographed and uploaded to flickr - it looked a lot like an Eggleston image. This morning I had a look. They've passed 3 billion images now (some time in 2008 - shown above on the right) Facebook has over 10 billion pictures. Ten billion pictures.

As he tried to lighten the dark mood, he proposed that he thinks the narrative machete is the way out of this democratic jungle. That using photography to tell stories and create sequences of images is the only way forward, to do anything interesting. There was a section of 'understanding comics' shown to support this and then off to the portraiture. I'd looked through a lot of his portraits again, before going along to the talk. I'd been struck by how just slightly out of the normal each of the subjects were, often in their placement or relationship with the camera. He described much of his portrait process as really trying not to connect with the subject. Working with a large format camera, hiding under the fabric, not talking much. Waiting until the subject disconnects and withdraws into their own thoughts, before taking the pictures. He described trying to not take a picture of the person, but of the space between the person and the camera. That does a good job of describing what I'd felt was slightly odd about all the portraits. The disconnect with the subject, viewer and photographer, that repeats in his portraits.

He also delved into various parts of his published work, describing the process he follows to find images (something of a freeform word association with a slightly odd twist) and how those themes repeat throughout his work. It was interesting to hear how he uses overarching, obvious themes to help explain the work, even when often his own personal motivation is something quite different. This seems to come from early shows that he had a hard time explaining. So something like 'sleeping by the Mississippi' is superficially about that river, but mostly he's trying to explore other concepts - that are quite visible in the images. Similarly with Niagara. All in all, a fascinating and insightful chat about photography. Inspired me to try harder and depressed me about the whole state of photography in equal measure.

I think the ACP is doing a great job. Mary Ellen Mark talked about how great things were in the past and complained about how things are, how frustrated she is now - towards the end of a career. Alec Soth was much more interesting. He's at the middle and currently at the height of his career, 1 year after being accepted at Magnum as a full member. He just talked about how things are, exposing all the troubling flaws in this easy access visual art and describing his way forward. Next up, in September, Elliott Erwitt.

mama-san say...

Deb Hall has put together an inspired portrait of her mother, for SoFoBoMo. Some lovely images, great individual portraits that made me laugh out loud, and wise words combine to give an insight into the person that her mama-san is. One of the best parts of SoFoBoMo is getting to see what other people are capable of putting together within the constraints of the challenge. This is a fine example and worth taking the time to look. Great.

houston

A few candid portraits from the weekend. Kirk has me thinking in black and white and in squares.

Engine 2

Well, Amanda and I have been on the Engine 2 diet now for almost a whole week. I'm continually surprised about how good the food tastes and how full I feel. So much so that it provoked me to make a self-portrait - something I haven't done for a while now. Inspiration is everywhere...

vivian

Shameless ad: ride the Rosedale Ride on Mar 28. Great Ride. Good People. Worthy Cause. www.rosedaleride.org Make Vivian's dad happy.

run recovery

mary ellen mark

Went to the ACP Mary Ellen Mark lecture last night. I was amazed by how many people showed up - they had to turn some people away at the door I think. A packed auditorium and an interesting array of images. One thing that stood out was she kept using the word 'relentless' to describe how to achieve the images she made. Going back, time and again, facing rejection and just turning up the next day to eventually get the acceptance and access she wanted to make the images. I'm already looking forward to the Alec Soth talk on the 4th of June. You can see more of Mary Ellen's pictures in the USA Character project. The rest of that body of work is also fantastic, with some great portraits by 11 photographers. Some really arresting images.

evening spin

From an indoor spin class, this evening. This time of year, much of the classes are done after dark or before sunrise. Not a lot of available light to work with. I'm hopeful that in a few weeks, when the clocks change and there is a bit more daylight, that I'll be able to work that into the shots. For now, I'm enjoying working with the artificial available light and living with and exploiting the softness and grain that comes with that. My radio poppers arrived today, (thanks to TriCoast Photography) and I'm thinking about starting to work in a little bit of strobe to some of these shots. But I still like the softness and blur.

expressionless

Bag by Hendrik Kerstens

While in London I was lucky enough to get to spend some time in the National Portrait Gallery. In fact, the weather was so wet and cold that we went back twice over a couple of days. The first time we visited the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2008 exhibit. A wide variety of portrait subjects are on display in this contest, with work from professional and amateur photographers. I was particularly interested in the Young Guns image, Platon's Puttin and the Thai Boxing portrait, along with noticing something I hadn't really appreciated in portrait photography before. Nobody smiles. In fact, most people are almost expressionless in the portraits that were selected for this collection. I can remember only one image that seemed to be expressing or displaying any real expression - Steve McQueen by Chris Floyd. The rest are almost blank, settled into a resigned non-expression. I suppose I've noticed this before when looking at some portraits, but it was strange to see this repeated, over and over in such a wide range of portraits from so many different photographers.

On the second visit we took in the rest of the portrait gallery, looking at a lot of portraits from British history, of important figures from royalty, politics, the arts and sciences. Looking for it this time, I noticed again, no expressions on the faces. Now as many of these paintings were created over many, many sittings, it isn't surprising to see an accurate representation of an expressionless face. I am left wondering if so much of that artistic style still influences modern day photographic portraiture, even though the fundamental reason for those blank expressions has changed. Talking to my friend Chris today, he mentioned that he thinks Dan Winters has a lot to answer for, in this style of modern photographic portraiture. I found a good interview with Dan in PDN.

hazlitts

She couldn't resist the old-fashioned bath. Particularly when the only shower option was the mixer tap at the end.

Second photo from my spangly new G10. Liking it so much more than the Panasonic LX1 - it actually takes decent quality pictures!

london

spin

paul and other denziens of the zoo

I took a portrait of Paul, in front of the first brightly coloured wall I could find. Didn't want to disappoint him, after all. Also took some pictures of the few animals I saw. I always find myself more interested in seeing how the visitors to the zoo interact with the animals, rather than just trying to take clean pictures of the animals. I'm a bit uncomfortable trying to take images in a zoo that attempt to hide the fact that the animals are in cages. There seems to be something of a deception in doing that, that doesn't appeal to me. So instead, I step back and try to find a different point of view.

feature photography

Good collection of portraits from a variety of photographers, in the feature photography exhibit at the National Portrait gallery. The online portion of the exhibit provides some background on many of the portraits and there is also an audio presentation, by a couple of the photographers. I'm continually fascinated both by portraiture, but also hearing the stories behind the portraits.

rock band

We went around to Arun's this weekend to play rock band. Rather than make people suffer my singing, I took pictures and played guitar. Such a fun game! Not bad lighting for in someone's living room, either.

salgado's workers & priour's chairs

Was lucky enough to catch the latest show at the Austin Museum of Art today. In the past I've always been slightly disappointed in the exhibitions I've seen there. Never quite reaching their potential. Thought provoking and stimulating, but always missing something. Today was easily the best pair of exhibitions I've seen in that space.

Damian Priour makes chairs. Small chairs, constructed from limestone and glass. Hundreds of chairs. He had the idea of sending one of those chairs to 100 of his favourite Texan artists, that agreed to return to him a chair that they themself had made, that would fit in the 8"x8"x8" box he had originally sent their chair in. The exhibition shows the myriad of responses he got back. Constructed from a wide range of materials and in a variety of styles, the results are exciting and surprising. Photographs, paintings folded and packed into the box. Snow, globe chairs, repurposed Tecate cans. Dollar bills and gold painted toy soldiers. Works in intricate detail from wood, neon chairs, a great array of different styles and approaches, within such a narrow set of constraints. That's the key for me in this - the end results were interesting themselves, but the concept was fascinating. A good example of how such a narrow constraint can let the imagination and creativity soar. I also really was inspired by the collaborative aspect of the project. Rather than working alone he involved many other people and the results from each are so much greater when combined than if they were considered individually.

This was paired by an exhibition of Sebastiao Salgado's Workers series of documentary photographs. Calling these images documentary is almost unfair. They were a lyrical and dazzling array of beautiful photographs, of some of the harshest conditions I've seen people working in, in the present day. Photographing for 7 years around the world, these images show fishermen and pig slaughterers, ship breakers in Bangladesh, Gold miners in Brazil, oil workers in Kuwait. The photography is great, the images harrowing and the spirit of the people really shines through the conditions they are found in. I was moved and inspired in equal measure. The power of still photography to show these situations and hopefully even effect change is unmatched.

Also really enjoyable was the audio tour, which for a once presented the artists talking about their own work and process, rather than being interpreted or explained by a curator. I much prefer hearing about it in their own words and learning about the struggles they faced or what they feel the work represents.

The current exhibition runs until February 9th, 2009. Good value for $5!

thanksgiving

I made pie.