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new stuff

since i keep finding ways to avoid processing my growing pile of film, i decided i should maybe try shooting with my digital. these images are very new and i don't really know where i'm going with them, but non the less you are welcome to take a gander over on the old flickr page.

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we've moved on

i often like to learn more about the photographers i choose for the flickrs. i try to pick images that are not only interesting, but that are made by interesting, talented artists. miranda lehman (aka fjordscape aka this weeks' flickr) is just such a photographer. i visited her site vouloire where i found a tightly edited group of 6 images from her portentously titled series their bodies breathed for three days after they died, some of which i had used for the flickrs, some of which i hadn't seen on her flickr page at all.

this foray into miranda's work of course led me astray.

i found an exhibition called we've moved on, why can't you curated for wheat toast by miranda (image above) and kamden vencill (image below). a poetic exhibition of sorts, the show features work by seven artists, five of which are photographers. these nostalgic, washed out pictures, unexpectedly composed in pinks and blues, draw from a collective visual vocabulary of seascapes, forests, and dreams. the images seem to have been selected with great care, as each series of photographs builds upon the same ideas as the last. as if all the images were cast into a bag, pulled out one by one, and then set carefully into place independently of their owners.

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new wedding images up

finally! i got some pictures on to our flickr page from alissa's sister's wedding. now i can go back to working out some website stuff.

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photo nerds

i added a bunch of new links to the "photo nerds" section for when you have an extra second to browse around some photo blogs.

maggie manzer

intellectually, i understand the urge to romanticize the life of the starving artist, to dream of living care-free with no responsibility but to your art. i myself posted about a group of crusty kids who rode a homemade raft down the mississippi; huckleberry finn minus the racial undertones. peter-pans wistfully avoiding growing up. make believe at its best.

but i prefer maggie manzer's simple explanation of photography's role in her life: "i've woken up everyday since i was 15 thinking about taking pictures. i like the idea of creating a really beautiful record of my world, of my experiences."

maggie photographs artists in a manner that somehow recalls the formalism of modern photography and the romanticism of pictorialism, sort of photo-sesstionist era alfred stieglitz (doesn't that image above look like one of his portraits of georgia o'keefe?). sure, her approach is equally idealistic, representing an image of the artist just as fictitious as the former. but somehow it resonates with me more. just beautiful documents of the things she finds beautiful. i like that.

you can read an interview with her here.

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debbie carlos

i was intrigued by the way the space is compressed. and how even though debbie carlos uses a shallow depth of field, and has limited control of the lighting, the scale and space is such distorted. i wish the clues to the artificial nature of these tableaux scenes (the backdrops of which add a dramatic, filmic quality that somehow reminds me of hitchcock) were even more heightened. as in the above image where the wire barely catches the light and reflects it back in the tense conversation it seems to be having with the lens-flare like reflection from what i can only assume is the birds' glass cage.

human nature by debbie carlos

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john pfahl lecture tonight

i really need to stop posting about events at the very last minute. but i guess better late than never. john pfahl is lecturing at drexel tonight. it promises to be interesting:

"changing the landscape" with photographer john pfahl

american photographer john pfahl’s work has been collected and exhibited worldwide since the 1970s, and has earned him a reputation, both nationally and internationally, as one of the leading landscape photographers of the twentieth century. his new series "scrolls" makes use of the computer to radically alter photographs that begin as one kind of landscape and end up as another.

on may 17th, pfahl will present a visual lecture about his evolution as an artist and the transformation of photography in the digital age.

stein auditorium (111 nesbitt hall, 33rd & market sts.), 7 pm

alec soth interview

i haven't had to do this in a while. don't get me wrong, i use merriam webster's thesaurus all the time. just not the dictionary too much. but today, while i was traipsing through alec soth's link list, i and came across the blog grammar.police from where i promptly ran to merriam-webster to look up a word. okay, several words. but i'm only posting one of them (it's a pretty good one i think):

epistemic
main entry: ep·i·ste·mic
pronunciation: "e-p&-'stE-mik, -'ste-mik
function: adjective
: of or relating to knowledge or knowing : cognitive
- ep·i·ste·mi·cal·ly /-mi-k(&-)lE/ adverb

but my visit to grammar.police subsequently resulted in a visit to artkrush where i found an interview with (wait for it) alec soth himself. he talks about his blog. articulately. as usual.

this was one of my favorite insights:
"a blog is not a diary. big or small, there's always an audience. one thing i've learned is that when you have an audience, there is a good chance you'll be misinterpreted. this is especially true of anything lighthearted...one of the great frustrations with internet communication is that you don't really have a voice. absent are the subtleties of tone and facial expression. people misread things all the time. it's frustrating."

and i hope no one missed this little gem at the end:
"with my photography, i'm a big believer in serendipity. the goal is to find the flow of things. with the blog, i feel like i'm exercising my serendipity muscle."

more than anything

more than anything. what a dramatic little phrase. i wrote this in my sketchbook a few days ago:

"learning to shoot under my own discipline. overwhelmed with a sense of peace and contentment. everything will be okay as long as i have my camera. a camera. any camera. everything will be okay. more than anything."

(aside from that being some of the cheesiest writing i've ever done) i assume that i meant to write something else after "more than anything," but i'm kind of glad i never got the chance.

this week i've been overwhelmed with thoughts that can scarcely be described as peaceful or content. they are more of the frustrated and stuck variety. i wish i could say that this could be solved by shooting some photos, but i shot a roll or two yesterday morning, so i'm pretty sure that didn't help (yes, i realize that it may help to actually process them and that the shooting is really only half the therapy). but no, this is just one of those weeks where the worry creeps up on me thick as fog and lays over me in my bed where i'm trying to sleep, and, like any storm, i just have to wait quietly while it passes trusting all the while that it will. while (more than anything) wishing it would just leave already.

i warned you it was dramatic (are you crying yet alissa?).

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life keeps getting away from me

i've had a crazy week. i hope to post something other than a flickr soon, specifically some of the images from alissa's sister's wedding that i have been diligently working on. but we'll see. those might not be ready till next weekend.

i did manage to find time to splurge on these today and i couldn't be more excited about them.

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chieda

.bijou

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me on the interweb

i googled myself and found this (the picture at the top scares me) and this. oddly enough they used the same image for both (not my best in my opinion).

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guy witnesses an accident

alissa made my morning with this.

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i'll take my music videos with a dose of smarts, thanks

i was just listening to the fray on my ipod at work, and despite the fact that i put it on because of its brainless nature, i found myself getting incensed. because even though i'm not really a huge fan of the fray or snow patrol (i swear), i was a huge fan of the first music videos i saw from each band. but the music industry in it's drive to make more and more money, replaced the awesome, smart versions with less intelligent, less visually stimulating and more annoyingly literal versions. and of course, now whenever i hear "how to save of life" (above) or "chasing cars" (below), it's all i can do not to think of the outrage that has occurred. grrr. these are the dissed original videos. and as with any videos i post, i enjoy them just as much without the sound.

take us anywhere, but take us now

interesting group show in washington d.c. at the warehouse gallery called "take us anywhere, but take us now." good luck finding any information about the show on their site though. i did, however, see it mentioned on must warn others.

featuring the work of:
1/ shane lavalette, image above
2/ bryan schutmaat, featured as part of the flickrs a short while ago under his flickr pseudonym lastleaf
3/ and greg wasserstrom

(i'm less than a little surprised that they didn't find/ask a girl to participate, but that's really a topic for another post, or maybe even another blog entirely, that would deal more directly with such apathetic displays of sexism.)

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and i have returned

i returned late last night from an invigorating weekend with family. i'm still trying to process it all. among the highlights of the trip: my aunt (my dad's sister) shared some photo albums with me from when she was a little girl that i had never seen before, and i'm dying to get my hands on them so that i can scan the good ones. and by 'good ones' i of course mean the wonderfully creepy ones. i had been searching for pictures just like them in my mom's family's pile of slides but those images, mostly from family vacations, have an unfortunate fake quality to them, the superficialness of which is incongruous to my aesthetic sensibility; my dad's family's had the darker mood that i had been seeking.

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road trip!

i'm taking an unexpected trip to new england this weekend, so i won't be inundating you with my usual gluttony of weekend posts. i hope you can survive without me.

fstop nonsense

jaime e-mailed me an interesting response to this post i wrote a few days ago.

"so, i was looking through some of your recent posts, and i came across this. i thought about how i always took my pics at f/22, or 45/64... then not too long ago, i flipped out, looked at this one image i took (above) and was just like.. 'wow.. i keep sharpening the shit out of everything... not only that, my light is constantly over everything.. why the heck do i keep doing this?'

.. just thought it was interesting."

i have to agree, it's interesting how committed we become to the aesthetic habits we adopt early on.

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johanna inman

more than anything, i was struck by how similar johanna inman's artist statement for her project "photographing (jo)hannah" is to the way i describe my own work:

"i began photographing my niece hannah as a way to recreate my experience at her age. i thought that by using her and her sister emma as models, i could visually reconstruct memories of my sisters and me when we were young.

through this process, i have discovered that the girls' own personalities are impossible to ignore. their stories are often revealed in more than just the subtext of these images. as I continue to photograph them, i recognize that the photographs are collaborations, reflecting us all."

this is my artist statement:

"i feel a strong need to photograph my life, and while for many photographers that often means recording their lives as they unfold, for me that means remembering things that had already happened. i approach these often painful remembrances the same way a writer would set about a memoir, letting the memories slowly work their way out of my head."

i'm considering adding this:

"by utilizing imagery from not just my memory, but from the mythology shared with me by my mom and aunts, the work becomes a sort of family-portrait with my older sister standing in as a representation of myself, and also as a collective representative of the two generations of women who grew up in the same house."

(i can't decide if the last part gives too much away) in any event, i certainly empathize with johannah's impulse to explore self portraiture through the use of a doppelganger.

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a discussion

if you are in the mood to read a spirited argument between liz and i over digital printing, head over to her blog (where i am also a contributor): liz's brazen declaration, my emboldened response.

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at long last, susan kae grant

a while back, i asked you, my readers, if you could help me determine the name of a certain photographer that i was having trouble remembering. you were, i'm remiss to say, extremely unhelpful. i learned absolutely nothing other than that as a group, you are an extremely quiet bunch. but don't worry your little heads, i found her, susan kae grant. unfortunately i wish i hadn't even bothered because the more of them i see, the less of them i like. except for the installations actually. maybe they are only meant to be viewed as installations so evalutating them as static images is unfair in the first place. i don't know. they certainly look more dynamic than the individual pictures. oh well. now i know her name anyway.