Highway rain No. 9

If you don't read FOAM, you should. My favorite magazine that deals with photography.

From the current issue, themed "Displaced," from an interview with Francis Hodgson, the Head of Photographs at Sotheby's London, by Anne-Celine Jaeger.

Jaeger asks:

What makes a great photograph?

Hodgson answers:

It has something to do with the photographer's ability to express him or herself. If you've got nothing to say, then say nothing. It's not really about f-stops and technical perfection. It's about the photographer testing what the viewer already knows, being confident not to say the same again, but adding a bit. Take a picture of a car, lit by 40 lights for an ad campaign, that ad might be a great picture of a car but it won't tell you what the photographer thought about the car. I think it's hugely important for photography students to have knowledge of the history of photography, to know what's gone before. It's shocking how so many students expect to be considered artists, whilst being completely illiterate in their own art form. I think photography is the home to an awful lot of lazy thinking. It's not enough to have a great idea. If I'm going to spend 30 seconds looking at a picture, I want to meet you. I want to hear what you've got to say. When I see a picture that tells me what the photographer thought, suddenly I'm his willing listener.

Yesterday I drove to Philadelphia in the rain to see Zoe Strauss and her time monument called I-95. Diana, Brendan, and Brendan's friend Perry went with me. We stood under the dripping interstate, traffic thump-thumping above us, embraced by the wet-chill, and wandered from pillar to pillar catching America.

The other thing about photographers brave enough to show us their world is that it changes how we see our world.


We drove home to Brooklyn through Zoe's world of fragments and hope and struggle, in a certain honest frontal embrace of where we are. On the slow turnpike in the slow rain I glimpsed post-industrial color field paintings and 21st Century updates of Robert Frank. In the rain of New Jersey, in the rain across Staten Island, in the rain in Brooklyn after parking the car two blocks from home, I feel somehow the weight of the world is lighter, and I'm happy, lucky, walking on wet sidewalks with Diana and two 13 year old birthday/bar-mitzvah boys.