Monthly Archive for October, 2008
I talked with Brent Phelps yesterday about the missing crux in my thesis. The issue of influences and where I am placing myself in the medium came up. I started going on and on about how my work started with humanism and is moving toward American photography, like what Joel Meyerowitz did back in the day when he plugged into color. He had his Leica and Kodachrome. I have digital camera and 24mm f1.4 lens. This choice is obvious for me, like the Leica was for him.
The hard part of me is to stand back. My newspaper years trained me to get in close. The photographic problems I am dealing with now are: How far back can I stand? How small can people be? Does there need to be obvious action in the frame? Can I improve upon what Meyerowitz did? How is digital different when it comes to photographic description?
I want stand back, fill the frame and describe. “You placed yourself in the medium,” Brent said. Great I thought to myself, it always seems to be the periphery thoughts. I had read a fair amount of Meyerowitz and undstand his dialect of photography, but I was not expecting to line myself up with him like I did. This interview with him on The Candid Frame really brings out his directness and passion for photography. I need to head back to the library and check out a few books and focus my research, again.
This video shows his passion for photography and how you can easily blend in on the public stage. Watching him work makes me want to take pictures. Like this one. This picture is better than any Eggleston.
NYC, West 46th Street, 1976
I never check the stats of this blog because in all honesty, I do not want to know how many people read this. If I knew, I might feel more responsible.
One thing you may have noticed too is that rarely do I deal with my own images. They can be found on my website. Graduate school has slowed me down when it comes to getting my work out there. I really did not want this blog to be about me, but about how I see photography. Since I have over 200 different feeds plugged into my Google Reader, I see a lot of things get cross blogged, which is fine, but it is also something I do not wish to do. So, I do not post as much as I would like because I am busy reading posts or reading for class, or my thesis or I am with the kids. Sometimes I take pictures.
One thing I realized today was that I have not done as much with this space as I wanted to. Originally, this was a place for me to keep all the stuff together for my thesis. But, that did not always work out, and I sometimes get distracted.
I want to put more here mainly so I can work out some thoughts. Starting later today, I will be doing this. Look for more to come, I think I have written this before on a blog…
Gilles Peress ventures down to Wall St. to describe the chaos. It is featured on Magnum Photos’ new site, InSight America.
Peress was one of the first photographers whose work I was drawn to and I tried to consume as much of it as I could. His photographic language makes sense to me visually, even though I do not always understand what exactly it is he is saying.
I think this essay is good. But does it live up to the idea I have of Gilles Peress in my head? No. The repetition of similar images adds to the package. I wish that I could manipulate a wide-angle lens like he does. I think the biggest distraction of the piece is the video. I want to see just still images. Also, having Peress cover something that is not foreign land conflict based is interesting, but is that why I am attracted to it? I am not sure. Some of the pictures really stand out.
This interview helped me understand Peress more.