considering pictures | sean justice > open journal

Harbor, New York [light version](3 breaths) 2011

2012-01-21T10:40:00.001-05:00

Harbor, New York [light version](3 breaths) 2011, a photo by seanjustice on Flickr.

Harbor, New York [light version](3 breaths) 2011

2011-08-30T17:15:00.002-04:00

Harbor, New York [light version](3 breaths) 2011, originally uploaded by seanjustice.

from the Breathing Pictures project.

Also, there is a code-animated version of this that plays in a browser (it loads into a loop automatically on open; a modern browser and fast processor is needed or else it blocks up....sorry!)

Tech Thoughts on Teaching & Learning

2011-04-11T08:36:00.000-04:00

A question we keep coming back to: how do we balance skill-learning and skill-teaching within the multifaceted conversation about ideas, history, and practice that makes up art education?

If you're studying photography, design, new media, or art in any of a dozen guises, this question is at the core of what you're doing — whether you explicitly ask it or not (because the folks who run your course have asked and answered it for you).

And if you're teaching photography, design, etc., it's even more critical — because your answer affects, de facto, the lives of everyone who studies with you.

There are several ways to divide this up, and many different rationales for arguing this side or that side, but the equation basically comes down to two options: either skill is more important than history and theory, or vice versa. And perhaps a third option — oops, almost forgot — skill, history, and theory might be equally important.

That seems simple, but in actual fact, on the ground, in the trenches, on the street, in practice — there are many (many!) different recipes. However, in my experience teaching (and learning) in several contexts (high schools, colleges, community colleges, graduate schools, museum education and continuing education programs), the weight of the teeter-totter comes down, almost all the time, on theory. That is, generally, most programs in art — at any level beyond the most basic summer camp craft table, or recreational art center — put the weight and the emphasis on the why over the how.

Flatly put, though, this seems absurd — don't you have to first learn how to make a picture before you can talk about why you made it?

There's not much outright argument on this point. But if you listen closely, or read between the lines of the program mission statement, you'll often find that introductory courses deal solely with the mechanics of technique and tools, while upper level courses talk primarily to theory and criticality — and that there's not much overlap between the two.

Moreover, once you get into the courses themselves, you might find a weird disconnect in the day-to-day classroom action; that is, the skills teacher might not seem to have read anything more taxing or more relevant than the daily newspaper, while the history and theory teacher might appear to not know how to plug in a hard disk or convert a file.

How can this be true? And is it true?

Yes, it's true.

Art education is in crisis, in more ways than the obvious news-of-the-day budget-ax-again headlines. In fact, because of its insidious and foundation-undermining logic, this problem might be the more serious issue facing art educators and art students. That's because art and art-making requires a whole person — mind and body, body-in-mind — a contextually embedded, relationally rooted, experientially active human being, but the way we most often learn and teach art is split and processed into two apparently opposing camps.

The issue started rolling back in Plato's day, if not earlier (as did much of anything regarding education in the West), and accelerated all down the line — from Descartes and his famous mind/body dualism, sweeping up Kant's rationalism, surging with the post-Enlightenment waves of Romanticism, Modernism, and so on — right to our present day, drenching us with a conundrum: do art or talk about it (but not both, at least, not in the classroom).

Obviously, I wholly reject this split. Making art helps me talk about it; talking about art helps me make it. The process is essential in its entirety — because it is an entirety — and from whichever direction we emerge into it. To teach and learn how to be artists we need to read, make, talk, make, think, make, and do it all again.

A work of art no matter how old and classic is actually, not just potentially, a work of art only when it lives in some individualized experience.
--John Dewey, Art and Experience

And, by extension, teaching and making art, no matter how new the tools or how current the motivations, is not actually teaching, and not actually learning, unless and until the process takes root, and lives, in someone's individualized experience — that is, a whole, embedded, contextualized, experience of process.

One reason I keep writing about this is because it's on my mind all the time, not only because I'm doing a dissertation on new media art education at Teachers College, but also, perhaps primarily, because I'm puzzling through these dichotomies while working, wherever I'm teaching and whatever the specific subject.

Another reason is because I've just finished an amazing term with the GS students at ICP. Our class was titled Technical Seminar, and the catalog dictated a diet of Photoshop tools and workflow (which we hit hard and often, over and over again), but the most invigorating conversations came from the intersection of technique and thinking, from the how and the why of the pictures themselves.

This is why I teach photography: to arrive at the lab and find you already there, printing, color correcting, retouching, with focused intent and purpose — and when I come in you stop and ask if the thought is more clear with a masked sky or an unmasked sky, with a slight blur here, or with a sharper detail there.

And as we click through the layer structure, playing the subtleties against each other, we talk about the previous pictures you've made, and pictures you want to make, and about pictures you've seen at galleries, in books, and on websites, and about pictures you will see, or essays you will read, in the future, because of a recommendation from a friend, fellow student, or from me, or another teacher.

None of this is an accident; none of it just happens. We build our history together, whether we set out do so or not, because it's in this conversation that looking and thinking and making inform each other and become real.

And then, in the next print we see the movement of the idea, or the shape of a new concept, because you've nudged the ink brighter, or darker, or more contrasty. Which leads to the next print, and the one following. And then, a week later, with new pictures now on the monitor and on paper, the conversation picks up again, continues, and we see our tracks stretch out behind us and into the future, because we're making that future together, in the collective practice of our individual art.

These have been good days. When I see the evolution of your process, when I see your intent begin to merge with your technique, your thinking with your tools — this is human. This is making a life in pictures.

And, frankly, these are rare days. Too often these exchanges don't happen, or don't happen robustly, because they're smothered in the details of short-sighted course descriptions and narrow curriculums. And because, as part-time itinerant teachers, unfortunately, many of us don't have much weight to throw against the system.

But here's my plea, for all of us, teachers and students: let's focus on opening it up. Let's get the details, the nitty-gritty, but not at the expense of the broad sweep and balance of the entire process, both the how and the why. Let's make pictures, videos, and network installations, and write code, poetry, and code-poetry — let's learn the tools, the grammar — but let's not sacrifice the history and the context. And, mostly, let's stop pretending that any of us work as isolated automatons, as if we live in an atomized world where idea is separate from material. We don't breathe that way. We don't learn that way. We can't teach that way.

Here's a thought: tech teachers, let's do reading lists, and ask for writing in response; and theory teachers, let's do physical philosophy, and ask for artifacts in response. And students — keep us honest. We're learning more from you than you probably realize.

The pictures illustrating this short essay are from students in the General Studies Digital Tech Seminar, Winter 2011, at ICP. Thanks for a great term, and thanks for letting me post your work on this blog.

Marking the week

2011-04-02T12:51:00.000-04:00

...so many amazing conversations this week...my head is spinning...

These pictures and essays and websites and code poems...all of it. Your work inspires me.

I am reading Maxine Greene and thinking about being an artist educator within the framework she illuminates.

We may have reached a moment in our history when teaching and learning, if they are to happen meaningfully, must happen on the verge. Confronting a void, confronting nothingness, we may be able to empower the young to create and re-create a common world—and, in cherishing it, in renewing, discover what it signifies to be free. (Dialectic of Freedom, p. 23)

The common space emerges from our conversation and I am transported to the edge of something I don't know how to describe. I'm on the verge. I am the young and your work is the teacher; in class and at the coffee shop I learn again and again that mark making matters (whether with a camera, a crayon, a line of text or a string of code on a computer), and that I am so lucky to be sharing this journey with you.

Thanks to everybody.

Pictures from the week at Teachers College, Columbia, in-between reading and writing and teaching and talking.

See also: Maxine Greene: The Importance of Personal Reflection and the Collection.

Surplus of Achievement

2011-03-20T09:14:00.002-04:00

Surplus of Achievement a photo by seanjustice on Flickr.

Is there something this is for -- rather than what it simply is -- this relentless rush towards more and more, this accumulation, this surplus of achievement?

Everyday pictures mark our individual paths. The process reminds us that work comes from work, inspiration from doing, and reward from waking up and doing it again. Breathe in, breathe out.

My friend Tony is on a journey to mark the days, each day, with a new picture. Can you chart it?

It's a Hotel by AMRosario

What art is and cannot be....

2011-03-18T07:58:00.003-04:00

JR: Palestinian and Israeli citizens: Face2Face

A paraphrasing from the TED talk:

Art can't change the world. Art has no power to change the world. Art can't do anything like that. Art is a neutral space, a place where nothing matters, a place where new ideas and new questions can be asked, a place where new thoughts and feelings can take root. And maybe they bring new ways of thinking...that change the world.

If you've seen JR's work over the years, and perhaps especially if you haven't, you're going to love his TED talk:

What we're talking about...

2011-03-13T22:43:00.000-04:00

Chrisler Building From Pongal Restaurant, by Luis Paris

This photo was snapped by my colleague and former student, Luis Paris. Last week after class at ICP we went over to Jerry Vezzuso's opening at the Camera Club of New York, and then got a quick bite at Pongal.

Along the way, walking from ICP to the CCNY, and then briskly from there all the way to Lex and 26th (a long chilly stroll!), we talked about photography and how one knows if the pictures are making sense, if they're working, if anyone likes them, and if it even matters -- or, more precisely, how it matters.

At dinner Luis summed it up with a few thoughts about what he's looking for from the conversation whenever he's showing his work.

From a critique I'm looking for two things: first, whether or not my pictures appear visually similar to other pictures that I might not know about, and, second, if there's an interpretation of my work that I don't want to have anything to do with.

This is perfectly said, in my opinion.

The tricky thing about learning photography is not the gear -- the cameras, lenses, printers; not Photoshop, not Lightroom, not ACR: not any of that stuff.

No, the really important bit comes down to figuring out how to make something meaningful from the practice itself. That is, the how and why of making pictures is rooted in the actual making, the doing, the walking, the talking, and the showing. No matter what tools you use, meaning emerges from the conversation that evolves while making the pictures, showing the pictures, talking about the pictures, listening to what others say about the pictures, and then making more pictures.

I really don't care what camera you use, or even -- truthfully -- if you use the Curves in Photoshop. What I care about is what you're seeing, and what you're saying with what you're seeing. As an artist, photographer and teacher, this is the root of my work.

And yes, as well, snapping from the hip with the Hipstamatic is part of the process too -- there are lots of ways to mark the path as we pass along it.

On that score: you've got to check out Jerry's work from Mexico City, and his zines, at the Camera Club, through April 30.

D.F.
photographs from Mexico City by Jerry Vezzuso

Evolving Series: Story Vessels, 2011

2011-03-05T10:47:00.003-05:00

The evolving work with China keeps me occupied when I'm not in class teaching, or on my way to class, commuting. Here are some pictures from the evolving series. Click through to flickr to take a look.

Ceramic 31 (Two Birds), 2011

In 2005 I went to Beijing to investigate Chinese contemporary culture—art, business, and education. After two tumultuous weeks of meetings and random discoveries, I landed a temporary teaching contract that required me to travel back and forth between Beijing and New York five separate times in 2006. Since then I’ve returned numerous more times to curate exhibits and lead workshops in Chinese culture for Western artists. In a sense, strangely, I’ve never fully come back from that first trip.

The continuing challenge of working in China—the reason I keep going back—is that I never know what to expect, or what I’ll see. Surface clarity might mask confusion, or it might not. Language difficulties might shroud understanding, or it might be something deeper. Among the many things I find engaging about China, this tension between knowing and not knowing draws me in deepest, and provides the underlying motivation for the Vessels pictures.

In form and subject this series is inspired by contemporary Chinese art practice—from Ai Wei Wei’s falling antique pottery, to Rong Rong’s documentaries of Zhuang Huan’s excruciating performances—and by my memories of growing up in South Korea, where my father and I picked up ancient celadon from country fields.

~~~~~

Come to Beijing with me this summer: check the program description on the International Center of Photography website, and see pictures from the adventure here on my courses website.

Tree Project, Winter

2011-02-24T08:26:00.008-05:00

Tree Project, Winter

My gingko is asleep.

Last month all the leaves turned, finally, and winter crept inside. We're connected; the cycle reaches through us.

At first I wondered if, somehow, my small tree was somehow exempt from the gray hibernation settling on the neighborhood. In fact, I was worried that maybe keeping a gingko in the house had somehow ripped it from the seasonal fabric that it needed in order to survive. I didn't think it could be so, but week after week the small leaves remained green, long after all the trees outside had become bare. Now the transformation is complete, finally, or nearly so.

That is, the gingko leaves never dropped, though winter's desiccation appears complete.

I'm watching the snow melt outside and anticipating the first new buds of spring, which I know will emerge in about a month, and I'm hoping that this small tree is, in fact, asleep, merely, and that it will awake when the cycle turns through again.

For more, see previous posts on the Tree Project or link directly to Hiroshi Sunairi's project here.

Branch, 2011 (Animated)

2011-02-20T08:29:00.005-05:00

branch2011, originally uploaded by seanjustice.

I'm only averaging a moment a month to write and share pictures. That's not a great pace. Space has closed in around me and the grit of the term is under my feet. I know you know how that feels.

This piece was almost a year in the making. I knew what I wanted but not how to see it, nor how to get it. There's an early still image posted on flickr at the very beginning, back in April 2010, but the long slog through technology and imagery and idea that finally brought me to this point is lost in the background.

It looks best in a separate browser frame , where it'll play on a continuous loop. See it here: http://seanjustice.com/branch.

Reactions so far have been mixed. Some people don't see it. Perhaps they're looking too hard. In the periphery you might feel the shift, or you might not. The piece (and the project as a whole) activates a way of paying attention, for me, and that's the underlying question: what does it mean to breathe? Can you feel it?

Slow down has become a my mantra. But saying so doesn't make it so. I wish language had that sort of agency.

Tea, fine

2011-01-31T08:27:00.001-05:00

Tea, fine, originally uploaded by seanjustice.

Hot tea on a cold day. New York slush and sleet can't spoil the warmth of a good conversation with an old friend.

On Broadway pedestrians slouch against a sudden wind and shield themselves from slanting snow. Inside we wonder about wisdom and doubt ourselves for going back to school at this time in our lives. What use are advanced degrees for us now?

A sudden break in the overcast brightens the tea in front of me.

What do you notice? Make pictures everyday.

Sunday Morning, Staten Island

2011-01-30T10:24:00.003-05:00

Sunday Morning, Staten Island, originally uploaded by seanjustice.

Starting a day of printing, but going slowly. Earlier this week it snowed again. More coming Tuesday, they say. The world is quiet and slow. The morning sun slips over the Eastern ridge and makes hard shadows of the trees and street signs. I'll stay inside today to print a new portfolio of the Breathing Pictures. Ironic, that is, because I've caught a cold and can only sniffle and sneeze my way through it. Distracted. This can be photography too.

I like to start masking with the fun and funny Photoshop merge. It can be taken seriously but I prefer to feel the humor in it. This 'frame' feels loose and dreamy to me -- a lazy brush eases the transitions just a little bit, but without getting too uptight about it.

I especially like the way the lens warp/distortion becomes so evident. The proof that indeed we are not living in a flat world. In other words: Surface matters.

Putting the edge on

2011-01-14T09:07:00.000-05:00

Last week at ICP we ran with Collage/Montage again. This is one of my favorite ways to teach. Basically it's like finger painting. We throw ideas on the table from many different directions -- that is, pictures from the history of collage and montage, pictures from today, Photoshop techniques, darkroom techniques -- and then cajole folks into letting their intuition loose.

Headless Barbie on the scanner.

By the end of the week we were zooming back and forth between the computer lab, the black & white darkroom, and the color darkroom. People were scanning and printing and rescanning. Stuff was getting cut up, recombined, and then re-cut up.

An inkjet negative getting ready for the darkroom.

The organizing question at the root of this workshop is about the role of the edge of the picture within the picture itself. When you shoot a photography, what do you include inside the frame? What do you exclude? Normally that boundary is invisible (we don't think about the stuff we don't see). But not always -- sometimes the edge of the picture (the non-picture) is the point of the process. Why? What is gained?

The wall at the end of the week

At the end of the week intensive, after the whirlwind of history, ideas, techniques, and just good old fashioned digging into the process, Jean said she felt ready to begin the workshop! And we all wished there had been more time to play. Too brief!

Thanks to Jean, Leon, Ana, Cat, Katie, Andrea and Katherine. I had a great time playing these thoughts and materials though with you. Keep going, keep messing with the edge.

Year End Wonder

2010-12-30T11:41:00.000-05:00

Wonder Horse, March 2010

Yikes. I've been away. Not in body but in spirit, and no time to post for far too long.

Hasn't the year just galloped past? Not for me.

This hobby horse appeared on my front stoop early in the year, randomly, and then one day disappeared. I remember wondering why and where it had come from. I also remember that seeing it each morning reminded me of whimsy, curiosity, and imagination. I'm remembering all this again, suddenly, because I've just rediscovered the picture.

And more: in thinking about this past year, the thought occurs that Wonder Horse is a fairly accurate illustration of right now — a lot of motion but not much movement. That's the way 2010 feels to me here at the end.

Picture-mining is the year-end ritual of sorting moments from the past twelve months. When we used film we'd do this by pulling out the proof sheets (not the edited prints) from the year and passing them around. Or the boxes of never-discarded slides. (See Kodachrome if you haven't.)

Today, of course, we dig the data/sort of the Lightroom catalog. I'm showing 6,900 frames from 2010. That's an oddly round number. But there's still another day or two left to messy it up.

If you've got a moment to take a breath now, before the new rush begins, I recommend it -- linger a bit in the moments that snapped your attention from the last twelve months. What were you thinking? What stands out? Can you see themes in the moments that mattered in the pictures?

The exercise feels like mapping the time we passed together.

Lens Warp, Houston, March 2010

I've written about this idea before here, and it's part of the regular conversation in class too.

Surfacing nearly

2010-11-28T12:15:00.000-05:00

As you know, I'm an advocate of using the camera to connect to life. By the looks of it, though (no posting here for far too long, and very little new pix on flickr), it would seem that I've not been following my own advice. And that, perhaps, I've become disconnected. Both are probably correct at this point.

But, actually, I make pictures almost every day: at odd moments in-between breaths, on the ferry, before starting to shave in the morning. Really, though, all I'm doing is clicking the shutter. That is, I'm not sure it's truly picture-making because that's as far as the process goes. There's no time for sorting and editing; two thousand latent frames sit unseen in my Lightroom catalog.

Do you remember that word? Latent.

Once we mystified that state of existence. Between the click of the shutter and the emergence from the D76, we had time to romanticize the unknown, the half-known, and the almost but not quite ready to be known.

Today we move so fast that the suggestion of latency has evaporated from our conversation. We surf a ready-known world. Always-already-known. There's no time for mystery, no patience for confusion, no time for latency.

But the mystery itself hasn't gone away, even though our fast connection high-bandwidth lifestyle makes it hard to see. We still need time for latent possibilities to emerge because understanding grows slowly at the root of our lives. That's the way it feels to me. Switching tools didn't change the process all that much.

In class, however, we're moving fast into the end of the term. Three meetings left. Portfolio projects must be finished before they've had the time to mature.

The structure feels forced and artificial, and I feel hypocritical. I'm working on something I'm calling Breathing Pictures, though I haven't had a moment to make any prints. But of course I'm not roped into a grading schedule. I don't like the enforced falsity of this situation. But it is what it is.

Today I feel very far away. It's difficult to see the connections. I'm still hoping that making the pictures moves us towards each other and allows the latency to emerge.

Four Breaths on the Staten Island Ferry, from the Breathing Pictures series, 2010
(multiple frames overlain on each other -- the fuzziness comes from the interval
between my breaths while pressing the shutter)

Tree Project Update

2010-10-17T09:12:00.001-04:00

We're moving through the fall, wondering what the next stage of this small plant's cycle will look like.

Watching this Gingko sprout and grow is a metaphor for what I'm doing in my work as a teacher and artist. Autonomy is crucial to this discussion.

Did you do that on purpose, with intent? Or was it an accident. Are we free to make things that can exist in and of themselves? Or does everything we make exist only and forever embedded within a vast net of other things. What is the purpose of making?

Watching the Gingko, watering it, wondering if its leaves will turn with the season, I ask: what is the purpose of growing? These days I wonder if that's the wrong question.

Now the fall brings wonder and expectation that perhaps the green interior light of my budding sprout will turn yellow, orange, and eventually brown. I don't know. There's a dryness on the surface of the small leaves.

See my previous posts on this project: click on the topic label "tree project."

And keep up with other tree folk from Hiroshi Sunairi's Tree Project, too.

We want pictures

2010-09-30T10:08:00.001-04:00

We want pictures. We are saturated with this desire. The ad moguls want us to direct that passion towards their clients' commodities.

Once in a while, though, we find evidence of another kind of wanting.

Delivering some more of the endless paperwork that the educatioal beurocracy demands, I cross paths with a kindred soul, and stumble on a sign of the power of pictures. This way has recently been marked. I am not alone.

Out here, in here, through here, picture-makers travel together. This is the gut of what I hope we're doing together this term: photography is a way to pay attention to our lives, our desires.

We also want eggs, deviled eggs. At least, I do. Especially at a picnic on a warm day with friends and blankets and folding camp chairs, comfortable in the sun. With sangria, too. And cold white wine.

But, summer is over. It's rainy in New York. Time to get to work! See you in class.

Illusion of Perception

2010-09-02T12:12:00.001-04:00

Toronto 2010, from our recent vacation.

I've been thinking a lot about perception lately, as I always do at the start of the new term.

The puzzle comes back when I begin to map a course: how is it possible to picture a round world in a flat rectangle? The projection of one onto one feels miraculous and ordinary. That paradox is thrilling, intoxicating! I want to share it with you. But for you to see it, to do it, first I've got to make the process visible.

And yet I'm filled with doubt. How can I do that? That is, what will you (in class) perceive as I waltz through my material, the rant of my lecture, the pictures on screen, the assignments, and my reactions to your assignments?

And, how will I perceive that you're seeing anything? Even seeing that you're paying attention is difficult. (Although it's easy to see when you're falling asleep in class...sometimes.)

At the start of each new term it comes back to me that, really, the project of learning, and of teaching, revolves around and into the project of being aware of each other, of paying attention. And of knowing when to pay attention, and when not to.

One clue, for me, is to notice if you're sitting forward in your seat. (Although that's such an easy thing to do that perhaps it's not a great indicator after all.)

Beau Lotto asks a discomforting question: can you trust perception? Are you sure?

Yesterday I spent some time with my colleague and good friend at Columbia University Teachers College, Gao Jun, talking about the perception of time. How do we know past is past and future is future? How do we know we share a common present? And what role does photography play in creating or accentuating that knowledge?

And, what role does photography education play in supporting the illusion that any of this is even possible in the first place! (Are we educators merely enablers and collaborators in the service of a giant and paradoxical illusion?)

Yikes! What a spirited subject! And what a great chat!

...and essential to the project of photography education.

How do I 'teach' you to be an artist, a photographer, a designer? I don't have nearly enough time to even begin the conversation in our once a week meetings!

But after ruminating a bit (a long time, actually), I think maybe the path forward is to simply point out a path, of sorts — a path where the act of perception is consciously critiqued, embraced, and engaged.

What are you seeing? Can you bring in it, remap it, and project it back out?

Look at more of Beau Lotto's work at Lottolab. For more on the perception of color, see Olaf Elliason's Experiment. Both of these works owe a great deal to the color theory of Josef Albers and his book, Interaction of Color. For a fascinating short read about the way different cultures think about and perceive color, see Color Cognition from the New York Times.

Gao Jun, Floral Life 2010.3.7-2010.3.21

Time Slip

2010-08-25T08:50:00.001-04:00

If you remember this, you're with me. Ah, the smell of fixer in the morning.

Unexpectedly I find myself managing a darkroom at Columbia University Teachers College. As you might know, I began a doctorate in college art education last year, focusing on digital art education. This year, in addition to everything else, I'll be mixing chemistry and reminding people to agitate.

There's a lot I've forgotten, am surprised to remember... odors, textures, procedures. This week I'm scrubbing trays and rebuilding shelves. Next week I'll realign enlargers.

The lab is on the roof. From the front door I watch the sky and the texture of the slate as it changes with the light.

In a different life — more than twenty years ago — I taught photography in Tucson, Arizona, at Salpointe High School and Pima Community College. Stranded negatives were common. Here's a thing I've forgotten — the ephemeral materiality of the Tri-X negative strip; curled, translucent, shiny, thin (but not as thin as a computer file). This week I've dug them out of drawers and crevices, artifacts from an earlier way of picturing.

What's the purpose of educating ourselves? What does a so-called teacher do?

These questions fascinate me — as you know if you've worked with me in any of my various classes, no matter which institution. Here at TC I'm digging deeper. Up on the roof I'm waking up in a time slip and wondering where I am. This barely looks like today.

Here's a thought: which way does a camera point? To the past? To the future?

How about this, can we picture ourselves now? Standing, breathing, waking?

Touch

2010-08-14T21:30:00.000-04:00

We're done for summer. Time for a break. I'm headed to Toronto tomorrow with the family. Got to clear the storm in front of the maelstrom coming.

So here's the thing -- can a photograph touch? Can you make a photograph that touches?

What do you feel when you see wet paint? I've got to scrape my fingers across the surface to check it out. I know it's cliché. But...this simple sign makes me touch.

Can a photograph feel that way? This is what we talked about this summer in the China workshop and in the two introductory photo workshops back here at ICP. And, seriously, this is what I'm talking about in class this fall...so, if you're working with me, get ready for that conversation.

I don't know if it's possible, really, but I want pictures that make me fly. Ah. Naive. Yes.

Feet on the floor and looking

2010-08-02T23:41:00.000-04:00

I'm slowly mining through the several thousand photographs I collected during the Beijing project last month.

This one surfaces unexpectedly.

I remember the thick still air, and the steep, sweaty climb behind the Forbidden City. I remember the dusk and the dragonflies. I remember feeling annoyed that my dSLR battery had died earlier that afternoon because I'd forgotten to charge it the previous night.

I also remember the moment I looked up and saw the concentric circles of this structure from beneath the trees. I don't remember why I forgot about this picture until I found it again just now.

The camera doesn't make the picture; the brain does. And the world and the imagination meet in a slow dance of negotiation, each making due with the limitations and neuroses that the other brings.

This might be my favorite picture from the month.

To the Photo Two group from ICP last week -- thanks for the great work. Keep looking up and keep making pictures.

Homecoming surprise

2010-07-18T19:54:00.000-04:00

As you know, I'm not a whiz with trees. Two starts and two failures for me. The third time might be the charm?

In any case, I'm thrilled to see that my Ginkgo sprouts survived my absence. Thanks to Diana for looking after the watering in this New York City heat wave!

And thanks Hiroshi for giving me yet another chance!

See the keyword "Tree Project" for background posts, and Hiroshi's Hibaku site for the whole story.

Picturing Beijing

2010-07-17T21:40:00.000-04:00

This morning I saw the sun rise in Beijing, hazy and white.

Across the top of the world, from thirty-five thousand feet, in blazing sunlight, I stared at ice on the surface of the far north sea.

This evening, home on the porch with Diana, Staten Island, New York City, I watched the sun set on the western hills of New Jersey.

In my mind I see the hotel room I left this morning and watch again the growing brightness from the rising sun on the other side of the world.

In my mind the globe is whole, the map complete -- without flattening, without projection, without metaphor.

Somehow it feels like a miracle, though I don't believe in miracles. Instead I know that simple technology and fossil fuels are responsible. And yet, tonight, experience feels contiguous, and I feel lucky, rested, connected, human.

Tomorrow the jet-lag and discombobulation will catch up with me, and I'll have to rely on pictures once again. But tonight, Beijing and New York rest side by side.

Momentary presence of language

2010-07-13T12:02:00.002-04:00

On the weekend at the Summer Palace, morning, wandering. On Longevity Hill the quiet was deep and still, cicadas in the trees, dense and present. Near the lake the crowds pushed in, and tour guides with megaphones blaring. Amidst it all, water writing.

He turned and saw me photographing him, and handed me the brush. I'd always wanted to play that language.

In the crowds I heard the cicadas again and felt a private silence working through my shoulders and torso as I swept backwards trailing water, momentarily fluent in my private writing.

Day ten approaches; our workshop is ending tomorrow. I've learned so much more about Beijing, China, teaching, and cultural exploration. I'm so grateful for the excellent company of the group who joined me.

See more pix on flickr...added daily (almost), and please check in with the project blog.

Beijing noodle heaven

2010-07-10T07:39:00.000-04:00

Zha Zhiang Mien on a warm afternoon. Summer Palace majesty in the morning, still hot on my feet, and the silence of the mountain still humming in my heart. A short ride past the noisy gates and we arrive. This must be what heaven feels like.

I'm posting pictures as fast as possible on flickr (click on these pictures to connect to the collection). More to come. Sorry about the minimal captions. Lunch is long and dinner is longer. This isn't the time for sitting at the computer.

Please follow our workshop blog!

Breathing

2010-07-05T19:33:00.000-04:00

Yesterday at the Lama Temple, walking slowly in the heat, I held the camera to my belly and shot at slow shutter speeds, breathing quietly.

Wake up Beijing!

2010-07-01T18:35:00.000-04:00

4:30 am. Time to get up and start shaking off the jet-lag.

Breakfast downstairs starts at 6:00. I'm using the quiet fuzzy hours to enable the proxy server so I can keep posting.

In a bit, or so, I'll get together with Songzi, my friend, a script writer who works with foreign movie productions here in Beijing, to go over the plans for the coming weeks. She's helping me arrange transportation and other logistics for the workshop.

Then, off to Three Shadows to compare notes with Isabelle and say hi to Rong Rong and inri. Can't wait to get my feet on the ground.

The workshop blog is Beijing2010, as I noted in a earlier post. Please check it out and follow along.

Outside my smudged hotel window, the early morning sky looks promising. Bright sunrise reflects off the buildings in the distance and wispy clouds show the blue above.

Time now to get some breakfast and that first cup of Chinese coffee.

Time for Tea

2010-06-30T07:56:00.001-04:00

China Air to Beijing today.

Follow the workshop at Beijing2010.

The goal is to unfold something authentic about the experience — to get below the surface of the cliché that we think we know.

It can be simple, like learning how to drink free leaf green tea, or more complex, like learning how to navigate a world without an alphabet.

I want to learn how to picture a process that is subtle and multi-varied. Can a camera show us something we don't know how to see?

Gingko Sprout

2010-06-28T12:50:00.006-04:00

June 28, 2010

Wow — perhaps? — I can't believe there's a sprout already. But here it is. I'm skeptical, however. It might not be a gingko. What is it supposed to look like?

Picture from the Ginkgo Bilboa Pages

I've been searching. This looks about right!

And yes, now I think I've confirmed it. Here's a shot from another participant in the Tree Project: Ya-wen Chang.

Ya-wen's photo of the gingko sprout. From the Tree Project.

The Gingko Pages has lots of info on how to grow gingko trees from seeds. I'm sorry to say that I didn't follow any of these recommended germination methods. Yikes. I just put the seeds in the ground. But it's been so hot here lately that maybe nature is just doing what it has to do.

I'm holding my breath! Hiroshi ~~ I hope it's going to work this time! I love the Tree Project!

Julie Walton Shaver kept a blog about her try at gingko too, complete with great photos and step by step instructions. Her pictures further confirm that my sprout is indeed a gingko — but she's got an amazing mystery story to tell too! Thanks for the cautionary advice, Julie! And, if I try to grow a gingko again, I'm going to look more closely at your instructions and terrific illustrations here. Nice work! (Wish I had seen it sooner.)

Atmosphere Sensitivity

2010-06-26T10:19:00.000-04:00

Shoe store, NYC, June 2010

Waiting to see Toy Story 3 there's time for a quick browse in DSW with Diana. They have strange windows in that store.

Yesterday we chatted about impatience with the act of photography. The single-minded ego that simply points the camera will often make pictures that feel flat and one-dimensional.

But I want to work against the simple already-seen of our commodity world. I don't want to exacerbate the isolation and the loneliness that the rush and fuss for more stuff creates.

I don't know how to do that.

I'm working now on simply seeing, though seeing isn't simple.

On certain days I'm back to pointing the lens at the shared world. The world of stuff.

Radically, I want to question the value of being present to these atmospheric changes.

Is this something? Can we visualize a different kind of sensitivity? Can we do it with a camera?

Beijing next week

2010-06-23T21:50:00.000-04:00

Beijing Airport, China plate display
The Beijing photography workshop with the International Center of Photography and the Three Shadows Photography Center is about to start. I'll be in Beijing next week to get the final details put together.

There's still time to join us! We're going to explore the process of learning about culture with our pictures.

Learn more about the workshop at the ICP website, or ask me directly.

It's going to be a blast, an adventure, and a fantastic learning experience.

Come dance with us!

Ginko and Hope

2010-06-10T16:31:00.001-04:00

I'm up again. Third try. Hiroshi's ginko seeds are in the dirt this week.

A favorite project from this past year is Hiroshi Sunairi's Tree Project. I've documented two previous attempts at growing a seed from the hibaku trees in Hiroshima -- the trees that survived the atomic bomb. Unfortunately, both of those attempts ended badly (view those posts by clicking on the keyword "tree project").

But with Hiroshi's encouragement, I'm going for another attempt. This time I've planted ginko seeds.

There are many reasons why this project appeals to me so much. I like the idea of new life generating from the ashes of the bomb site. I also like the idea of nurturing and relationality that is inherent to participation. As well, especially with these seeds, I like the memories that resurface and reconnect me to my South Korean childhood—in the backyard grew a centuries' old ginko that, according to legend, the young emperor played beneath. (The legend, by the way, might have been invented by my parents, but it seemed plausible at the time—that tree was so obviously ancient....and TokSu Palace was just a few blocks from our front gate.)

Another reason Hiroshi's project appeals to me is because it brings the opportunity for an engaged meditation on the practice of photography. In my mind I see the photograph of the ginko that will be transplanted on the hill behind our house on Staten Island, some day. Next to it I see an image of the tree I played beneath as a child. Next to both of them, stretching to an infinity, I see a lineage of ginko evolution: new seeds, golden leaves, knurled roots, and spreading branches against the sky.

In class I've encouraged this line: an image is not a picture until you decide to make it one. By extension, a photograph is a particular kind of picture — one made from the image produced inside the camera obscurra.

These different definitions feel important to me, though in daily use, obviously, we mix them up all the time. Image/Picture/Photograph. Each word can mean the other. Usually we understand each other well enough...so why make the distinction?

For me, for my practice as an artist, as a photographer, I have to continually remind myself that what I do when I make a picture is an exercise of my willful imagination. There are no predetermined rules. No taken-for-granted absolutes. A picture is made when I decide to act. Pictures don't just happen.

Images, on the other hand, flit into existence without order, without being asked, unpredictably. Like a roiling current, like a rocket ship, like a roller coaster — my mind catches images constantly, and then releases them to fantasy. The rush of clarity and subsequent obscurity wakes me up and steals my breath, keeps me attentive, reminds me of loss.

Inevitably, this process of seeing and forgetting awakens desire to hold on to something, to make it real. That's when it's time to make a picture. To a greater or lesser extent, the desire for the picture results from the desire to forestall the passage of time.

Planting ginko seeds is the opposite. Instead of the futile egoism of trying to stop time, I'm engaged with a forward looking action that, I hope, will result in the reality of a tree. That's the difference — a kind of hope. Hope in the future blossoming of an action taken in the present.

My ginko tree presents a strong image, but it can't be pictured, yet. I hope it will be. The photographs I'm making now are driven by that hope.

For more on this line of thought about the differences between images and pictures, see WJT Mitchell's What Do Pictures Want?, a collection of essays on visual culture and the way behavior is influenced by pictures. As well, I've written about it previously in this post here.

Point - Object

2010-05-28T10:18:00.002-04:00

My point has been that photography is a way of pointing.

The language around photography and making photographs is varied and has multiple, folded, agendas. Compare, for example, the New York Times with BP press releases about the oil spill, or with any annual report from your favorite tech company. Who points at what? What is their goal? Who do they think is looking at what they're pointing at?

The use of a lens system to make pictures means pointing at objects, one way or another. The choice of which objects to point at is determined by context, by what you care about, by what you want me to care about. Sontag says that photographing is a way of collecting the world. Wrong, nearly. Photography (in so far as we think of photography as making pictures with lens-based technology) is a way of pointing to what you've collected of the world.

Your collection is different from mine, but I'm confident that you have a collection.

Let's think about how a lens coaxes us to think about a world of objects that can be collected. This is perhaps an emergent property of the object system itself, rather than of the world, though we often get the two mixed up.

That is, just as focus is an emergent property of the lens (i.e., the lens-less camera obscurra has no in- or out- of focus since refracted light throws a uniformly 'sharp' image against the wall of the shadow chamber), though we often think of it as a property of photography, or of cameras — the same might be true of how we behave in the world we share. I mean, we're obsessed with stuff, the stuff-ness, of our lives. We devote ourselves and our energies to collecting and hoarding shiny hard objects, or soft cuddly ones. Hardly anything else needs be said about it, I'm sure, because there's an excellent chance you're reading this on a fancy object you treasure more than the food you ate last night or will eat today.

What do you think — can we imagine a world outside of object obsession? Would we want to? These are inflammatory questions, at root.

On the surface, and the point of what I think I'm doing in the classroom, is this: can we use photography to picture the space between us and our objects, and between ourselves?

Can we point our lens at a relationship?

This is the challenge I put to you during class, though in different words — can you point your camera at the world in such a way that you tease me to see beyond the individual objects of the world, their ghostly traces, our mutual obsession, which I already know too well since I am, after all, embedded in the world with you? Rather, can you unfold for me what it's like to see? to feel? to know something that can't be known?

This is the goal I set myself, as well. I don't know how to do it. I do know, however, that I want something more from pictures, and from my life, than simply a collection of objects.

Out with the old

2010-05-22T11:53:00.000-04:00

School's out for summer, and all that. But keep going with your photography. Keep making pictures and paying attention to the way the world looks and feels.

I've thoroughly enjoyed working with all of you this term and hope to keep crossing paths. Please keep in touch! And please keep tuning in to these pages for occasional updates and thoughts about the learning process. As always, I'm grateful for your thoughts on it.

Feeling the frame

2010-04-25T14:26:00.000-04:00

After you've decided to make pictures you must decide how your body will frame the experience.

That is, where is the edge? The boundary? The horizon between what is in, and what is out? These choices matter, and photography it's the shape of your body that determines how your audience will see what you see.

In class we talk about what you want to look at, and about what you want me to know about it. These are the ultimate questions. But buried within them, preceding them, is a skill more primary: can you feel the frame?

In The Photographer's Eye, John Szarkowski writes

The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge—the line that separates in from out—and on the shapes that are created by it.

In this essay (read it here) Szarkowski is trying define the major differences between photographic picture-making and other kinds of picture-making, as he sees them. In one way or another you've most likely encountered his list (the thing itself, the detail, the frame, time, vantage point), because his views are so pervasive (that is, even if your photo one teachers didn't realize it, they were probably quoting Szarkowski's criteria).

But I want to focus on the process from a slightly different angle; namely, from the idea that pictures affect a response from the viewer based on the motion, or circulation, of our attention; which is determined by the frame; which, in turn, is determined by the body of the photographer.

If you worked with me in photo one you'll remember our conversation about visual dynamics, the circulating weather patterns of visual tension and release that guide us through the space of a picture. You might also remember how I tried hard to avoid something called "composition," with its connotations of rules and formulas (which I've written about before).

Instead, we focused on the idiosyncratic, emotional experience that pictures evoke in the real-time of their viewing, and I drew your attention to the fundamentals of paying attention, of feeling the weight and flow of concentration within that pictorial rectangle. This flow, this movement of focus, coaxes your viewer toward seeing what you see, and toward exploring what you think is important.

It might be worth re-centering on this issue — this skill — especially now that you've gained some fluency with the tools themselves (the cameras, the computers, the printers). To make a mark with your pictures you have to first define the boundaries of what you're seeing.

The picture starts with the frame. As you learn how to feel the frame, intuitively, sub-consciously, and instantaneously, your pictures begin to connect and provoke more powerfully. That is, your decisions to nudge right, drop lower, shuffle left, angle slightly down, are critical to your results; each of these discrete bodily movements becomes fused with the act and thought of photography, and your pictures launch a cascading emotional and intellectual response because of them.

Can you feel the frame?

Here's an exercise, a test: first, take a picture; then, bring the camera down from your face and close your eyes; finally, after taking a couple of breaths, bring the camera back up and take another picture, being careful to re-frame the scene as closely as possible to the first picture.

Now review each picture in sequence. How "still" is the jump? How closely do the frames match? The goal is for each frame to be identical, even though separated by several seconds. To do this successfully you must be able to "memorize" the smallest arrangements of geometry that define the edges of the picture, as well as the configuration of your own body.

When you can do this consistently, you'll have fluent and intuitive control of the weather patterns inside your pictures. You'll also have the control to choose between greater and lesser degrees of focus and purpose. Intention will be intentional, and you'll feel more able to respond to experience and inspiration.

All photos copyright Sean Justice. From the Nothing set. See more on my flickr page.

For more on John Szarkowski, and some of the photographs he made for himsself, see this exhibit review at Lensculture.

Freedom to be present...

2010-04-17T11:22:00.023-04:00

What do you want to look at? What do you want me to know about it?

These are the questions as we move toward photography projects. The goal of our work together is to make pictures that relate to our time together, that explore and expand from one another. Sometimes called a "series"...I prefer to think about "projects."

The difference might not be evident on the surface, but the distinction is about the idea of work itself, and pictures that emerge from work. I've written on this topic before, but it bears repeating.

The work you do is emotional, intellectual, spiritual, historical, even mathematical; it's the work of exploring and thinking; the work of breathing, of just making it through each day, each week.

You're working it because you chose to do so. Even if you don't think of it as a choice. The pictures that emerge from the work have been the focus of our seminar.

In other words, all the talk about computers and buttons, apertures and shutter speeds, pixel dimensions and color profiles, etc. and etc., has been to get us to the point where we can now ask, sincerely, why? Why make pictures? Why put yourself through this headache?

The answer is amazingly complex, and might take a lifetime to fully explore.

We're beginning with the act of pointing the lens, with the act of making the print, with the awareness of being present, being here. And with the conversation: what do you want me to feel? to know?

Last month I saw Greta Pratt's project Liberty at Natsha Egan's exhibit Road to Nowhere, in Houston.

Alice Chatman, Liberty © 2010 Greta Pratt
About the project, Greta Pratt writes:

I was first drawn to the wavers, as everyone is, by the unexpected sight of someone dancing on an urban street corner dressed as the Statue of Liberty. But after hearing their stories I became interested in them as individuals.

On her website you can see her exploring fundamental human stuff that we all feel and care about. You can see her working. And you can see the pictures that come from that work.

Here at the end of our term you're free to cut loose and make flat pictures that shift shapes and colors along a two-dimensional plane defined by simple edges. And that's a good place to start. But you're also free to dig deeper, to work the foundations, and make pictures that call us to be present, to be awake.

What have you noticed? What do you want to look at?

Good news bad news

2010-04-09T10:30:00.002-04:00

The photograph is dead; long live photography.

Sorry for the melodrama. I like to exaggerate, but this isn't an exaggeration: there's a lot of worry and chatter these days about what's happening to our sacred domain. In fact, the anxiety is so thick you can shoot it at 1/15th of a second and still catch it clearly.

Last week, the New York Times spelled it like this: For Photographers, the Image of a Shrinking Path. (Karen d'Silva, an industry guru, wrote in an email: "It's crazy how many people sent me this article. Very telling.")

Blogs everywhere record the hubbub, including this post by Shannon Fagan for Ellen Boughn a few weeks ago, a post that generated more than a hundred frantic replies.

And on the APA listserve conversation yesterday, a fellow member asked us if anyone, anywhere, had any good news to report.

I could go on and on in this vein (just one more: at the SPE national convention last month, an industry executive told a conference hall of university educators that we faced dire consequences — armageddon, I think he called it — if we closed up our wet darkrooms in favor of digital labs).

The bottom line fundamental is that the ground is changing in photographic practice. Yes, but this change, no matter how threatening it might seem, is an amazing opportunity for all of us.

This is the message we should focus on. But unfortunately, the optimism that this opportunity should be generating is getting crushed by the weight of anxiety. As an educator (I might add, as a passionate educator), this state of affairs troubles me. And as you know if you've worked with me, I have a lot to say about it!

I'll keep it brief, for now, but might I suggest a simple change of preposition?

From the perspective of my years in the commercial world (with strong corroboration from my journeys in the land of art), this is what I've learned: no one gets paid for taking a picture of anything. Rather, the focus is the purpose, the reason, on what the photograph is for.

This is crucial, and just might help turn attention away from the tools, techniques and structures of the industry, and put the focus back on the core of what we're doing. Why'd you get into photography in the first place?

Students at the beginning of this journey have no trouble answering that question: to tell a story, to share a point of view, to explore an emotion. It's later, as school starts to come to a close, and the looming reality of paying one's own rent starts to weigh more heavily — that's when our conversations begin to shift.

I wish I could stop this from happening (or, at least, to stop it from happening in such a negative way). But lately, alone, mostly, in the seminar room, it feels more and more impossible, especially with the yelping din seeping in from all around us.

So this is a plea — c'mon, folks, let's stop the whining and wake up. Pictures, lens-based pictures, are just as powerful as they ever have been. Yes, a lot of things have changed, and continue to change, but when have they ever not been changing?

For my commercial comrades, the threat appears to be a market turned sour and rebellious. For my partners in art, the troubles seem to have a similar genesis though with a different flavor of bitter. And for my students, for everyone's students, the purpose and promise of a photographic life feels up for grabs, and potentially pointless. Which is the true problem.

Let's get back to what we want our pictures to be remembered for. Our audiences aren't going to wait around for us. We might need to learn some new skills to continue reaching them, and re-tool our mindset to stay relevant, but if we let them get over the horizon while we keep complaining that they're leaving us, we'll truly lose our footing.

We have so many resources to help us make this transition. We've all got our blog rolls (mine is just off to the left, if a pointer is in order), and our favorite gallery guides. As well, I strongly recommend getting involved with your community photo center or non-profit — they're in every region of the country: En Foco, Houston Center for Photography, Light Work, Boston PRC, to name just a measly few (too many to list here!).

In class we talk about it all the time: we're each responsible for our own inspiration.

For a truly great fire-up and get-along-now point of view, check in with Brian Storm, or sign up for a mind-blowing out of town excursion with Salaam Garage. The tunes are changing but the song feels similar, and it remains.

And this morning on the APA conversation, folks are chatting about reasons to hope.

All photos © 2010 Sean Justice

Zoom with me to Beijing

2010-04-08T17:56:00.003-04:00

I'm thrilled to announce that a long term dream is beginning to take shape.

In collaboration with the International Center of Photography, here in New York, and the Three Shadows Photography Art Center, in Beijing, I'm leading a workshop in photography this summer in China.

From the ICP website:

Explore Chinese culture through your photography. Join Sean Justice for a behind-the-scenes, upclose and personal tour of Beijing, an urban powerhouse and city of many charms. Our host, the Three Shadows Photography Art Center, is a contemporary gallery and research institute devoted to photography as a fine art. We will visit Beijing's art districts, galleries, and studios, enjoy the city's cafés, bookstores, and art-related events, and attend guest lectures by Chinese artists and curators. All the while, we will be using our picture-making skills to engage what we are learning and seeing. The trip includes must-see city highlights and cultural outings to the Temple of Heaven, Summer Palace, Houhai Lake District, Olympic Village, and, of course, a stroll through the Forbidden City, the onceexclusive imperial residence and the heart of the empire for 500 years. We will walk through Tiananmen Square, built on the orders of Mao Zedong and perhaps the largest public plaza in the world. Our itinerary includes a day excursion to the 2,000-year-old Great Wall.

The workshop fee is $3000 and includes 10 nights' lodging, welcome and farewell dinners, entrance fees to sites, and internal transportation. The workshop is limited to 12 participants. The single supplement is $700. A nonrefundable $500 deposit is required upon registration. Full payment is due by May 15, 2010.

The dream goal is to establish a semi-permanent home for American-Chinese collaborations between photographers and artists.

For a long time Chinese artists have been focused on getting to know America; it's time now for American artists to start getting to know China — and the best way to do that is to go there and join the conversation. I'm absolutely convinced that you'll find the experience inspiring, provocative and life-changing.

I hope you'll zoom with me on this fabulous adventure.

For more on my work in China since 2005, please take a look at my book, Swimming at the Center of the World.

Lambrecht's Lichtenstein

2010-03-30T10:38:00.005-04:00

All photos copyright Laurie Lambrecht

A terrifically exciting component of any photo festival, aside from the portfolio reviews, is the range of exhibits you'll see. One of my favorites this year at Fotofest was Laurie Lambrecht's project, Inside Roy Lichtenstein's Studio, from her days as Lichtenstein's assistant.

Roy in Red Interior, 1992

Laurie worked in Lichtenstein's studio in the early 1990s, assisting in the daily routine, and occasionally making photographs. About the experience:

One of my greatest joys was that Roy appreciated the photos I was taking. He liked the way I used the elements from his work in my compositions. His work was so often art about art and my photos were reflecting, revisiting and honoring his art. I remember exactly the day I photographed "Roy in Yellow interior". It was a very pleasant morning in Southampton. He arrived in the studio a few minutes after me. After greeting each other he said " today would be a good day to photograph". Stepping on the step stool with paint brush in hand, he started to fine tune the nearly finished painting. As I was often fortunate to do, I quietly observed Lichtenstein at work with Hasselblad from across the studio.

As you know, I'm charged by pictures that reflect experience, and that create experience. Roy in Red Interior has it all. Standing there I felt lost inside it; the painter and the picture merged — scale shifted; time stopped; history overtook me: I felt a whisper as it rushed past.

About the work of inspiration, Laurie says:

As a creative person it was beyond inspirational to observe his ways as a model of discipline. To see how he organized his work space, cataloged his references, and budgeted his time was impressive. To observe his graciousness as he worked with people was remarkable. He had noticeable respect for the integrity of others. More than once Roy commented that success in one’s career had to do with being in the right place at the right time. He believed that many people had talent and worked hard but some had luck, too. I can't think of anyone who didn't want to collaborate with Lichtenstein!

Another aspect of Laurie's project that I find inspirational is this idea of collaboration. Lichtenstein is one of the 20th century's most important visual artists and Laurie helps us see why: he worked at it. Again and again we hear this story about the people we admire and respect — luck and temperament are critical ingredients, but so is the willingness to be disciplined, to endure, and to just keep working. (Sound familiar..."keep your camera with you"...?)

Laurie made these pictures in the early 1990s. Lichtenstein died in 1997. After all these years the project is finally seeing an audience. About this process of gestation Laurie has said that it took time for the project to become what it is today, partly because of a need for distance, and partly because of today's printing technology (pigment inks on rag papers), which allows her to see the pictures in way that feels consistent with her experience of paint and materials in Lichtenstein's studio.

Explosion, SLAM, 1991: Lambrecht after Lichtenstein

In so many ways, this project has it all. Look for Laurie's book with this work in the coming year. In the meantime, you can catch the exhibit at these locations:

Houston:
Bank of America Center
700 Louisiana St
Feb.22 through May 30th

San Francisco:
Cordon Potts Gallery
49 Geary St.
March 30 - May 15, 2010

Portland, Oregon:
Blue Sky Gallery
122 Northwest 8th Ave.
July, 2010

Griffin Museum of Photography
67 Shore Rd.
Winchester, MA
November 18 – January 10, 2011, Opening Nov 18

Victoria Munroe Fine Art
161 Newbury St.
Boston, MA
November, 2010

Learn more about Roy Lichtenstein at the foundation website, and here.

Learn more about Laurie Lambrecht's Lichtenstein project in this Lensculture article, and on her website (and be sure to check out her project Lake Trees).

Rain in the woods

2010-03-29T23:04:00.000-04:00

On the computer all day. Had to take a break late this afternoon. What does the rain look like?

These are regular woods up the hill from my house. I'm crouching in the wet mud and pointing my camera slightly up. In a month the leaves will be thick against the sky.

Show the pictures

2010-03-29T09:47:00.004-04:00

This month I went to Houston to show my portfolio at Fotofest. This is essential: show your pictures.

There are many different photo review events; I wrote about the fun at Photolucida last year (here). Previous to Photolucida I'd been to the review in Atlanta, and to several other reviews here in the New York area. Wherever you live, whatever photographic stage you're on, attending a photo review is a valuable goal.

The structure of each review is fairly similar: photographers register and pay a review fee; the organizers distribute a list of the curators, critics, and gallerists who will be attending; you research their biographies and decide whom you'd most like to see; a few days before the event your appointment schedule arrives. (Some of the smaller, one-day events don't distribute a list ahead of the event itself; rather, you sign up for appointments when you arrive at the venue.)

The day of the event (or days — Fotofest and Photolucida are multi-day events), you're in the queue with a hundred other photographers. In a large hotel ballroom there are rows of long tables set end to end. When the announcer calls the time you file in with your group, locate the appropriate table, and introduce yourself to the gallerist sitting there. You have 20-minutes to show your work. When time is called again, you stand up, gather your pictures, say thank-you, and then get out of the way — because the next photographer has arrived for the next appointment. This routine plays out perhaps four or five times each day — a speed date with pictures at the center of attention.

In the lobby, in between appointments, you chat and share pictures with a couple hundred photographers from all over the world. Some are mid-career with several books and major awards to their names; some are tenured professors; some are working steady on long-term projects; some are just starting new projects; some have worked the review circuit for years; and some are just out of school, having saved every penny in order to attend.

From each conversation you learn something new about what it means to dedicate yourself to making pictures. Often you'll hear something new about your own work, something that makes you realize, suddenly, why you've put so much time and sweat into it.

Most importantly, no matter where anyone is individually in terms of their photography career, you'll understand that everyone is in it together. The camaraderie is key. And, at the hotel bar later that evening, you'll laugh and make jokes with people from all segments of the photo world.

You're ready to show pictures when you have a cohesive body of work that wakes you up in the morning, that keeps you up at night. You're ready to go when you feel an obsession that interrupts your thoughts as you're trying to do something else.

If you're at that point, then a photo review event is a worthwhile goal. I'd suggest starting small and local; the large, multi-day events are more expensive and logistically challenging — that is, you'll get more from a Fotofest after you've done a couple rounds of the shorter reviews.

For more about photography festivals that happen around the world, see the Festival of Light website. Festivals in the United States that are worth setting your sights on include, but are not limited to: Fotofest, Photolucida, Atlanta Celebrates Photography, Photo LA, Photo New Orleans, New York Photo Festival. Many of these festivals have review events associated with them.

Both the Society for Photographic Education and the American Society of Media Photographers sponsor portfolio reviews for members — student memberships are available. A regional SPE or ASMP event might be a great way to get your feet wet.

And, for an ongoing and updated list of all things related to photo reviews and photo opportunities (contests, lectures, book signings, etc.), you have to make Mary Virginia Swanson's website a regular browser destination.

Montage of review conversations from Leslie K Brown

Spring up and out

2010-03-22T11:53:00.002-04:00

We're over the middle part now and it's time to start digging into something sustained. We're talking projects.

Every week I show you pictures from artists who have taken a stand, made a mark, looked carefully. And I ask you to simply drink in their pictures, to trust yourself, and to respond.

What do you want to look at? What do you want me to see?

Sometimes you answer that question by simply getting up, getting outside, breathing, and getting involved, taking pictures. And sometimes it's more quiet and internal. There's no right answer; it's your choice; it's your response.

But you must respond.

Even if you're not sure exactly how or why — pick up the camera and make a picture.

During the last snowfall a couple weeks ago (dare we hope it was the last?), I was drawn to this backyard basketball hoop across the street. It resonated for me, but I didn't know why. From my window I watched the snow fall through the night. And in the morning I started taking pictures. After some of the shoveling was done, this frame appeared.

Yesterday it snapped for me.

In Houston at Fotofest this past week I had a chance to catch up with Lisa Robinson, and I realized that her picture lingering in the back of mind had informed my experience from two weeks ago. It's plain and obvious to me now, but I didn't see it then.

Here's my point — if I'd insisted on understanding why that scene out my window resonated so strangely, I might not have taken the picture.

Among the many things you're learning, as you learn photography, is that the pictures inside you come from other pictures, as much as they come from the world. That doesn't make them less than yours.

In fact, if anything, it makes them more yours, more connected to you. That is, the pictures you make anchor you to your path; they chart your journey on the unique map of life. Your world is criss-crossed with physical memory and physical experience, and with physical pictures. The pictures you make honor those connections.

For me, in my new home on Staten Island (you might remember that I moved here less than a year ago), this picture marks a moment when past and future and present come together. I don't know if this picture will become part of the final portfolio (or, truthfully, if there will even be a final portfolio!), but it resonated at the time I made it, and resonates even more strongly now that I've discovered its underlying informant in Lisa's picture.

Find out more about Lisa's work on her website, and read more about her inspiration in this interview. In her pictures I see the work of paying attention, of noticing, of being quiet, of being strong, and of being present to a moment when the world seems suspended, temporarily.

Okay, and that's it for snow on my blog, for now, if the weather cooperates. Spring anyone?

Backyard pictures

2010-02-22T11:39:00.003-05:00

Walking with Connor. We get to the top of the hill. Saturday. At home on Staten Island.

Last week we worked on technology and a lot of different names of stuff. This week we'll do it some more. As always, we'll keep looking at pictures.

And as I've said and will say again: right now is not the hardest part. Right now the tech of this stuff feels difficult (there are so any different buttons!), and learning what everything is called takes a lot of time (and it's tough to ask a question if we don't speak the same language!)...

...but soon you'll have crested this learning curve (you'll have memorized the buttons and the names of things), and then the truly difficult part of being a photographer will begin.

That's right -- you have to keep taking pictures. Sometimes you have to force yourself, in fact. Even if you're not "in the mood" or if "there's nothing to photograph at home"...take your camera with you and just keep looking through that viewfinder, and make yourself trip the shutter.

Let go of that nagging need to be inspired and excited. Pay attention to the quiet in-between your breathing. There's no such thing as a good picture. Mark the moments one at a time. Give yourself a break and maybe don't try so hard.

You'll be okay. You're learning to trust yourself every time you look a little closer.

Shopping with Diana. We get out of the car. Staten Island.

Wild Callahan

2010-02-10T13:41:00.002-05:00

Walking in the winter with Diana and Brendan; I'm not going to not see the Callahan trees surrounding me. Automatic. Can't help it. I know it's cliche. Sorry about that.

But there's history here too. The contrast, the sequence, the rhythm, the simplicity. Those Callahan pictures from the 1950s resonate for me; they come to back to me from my earliest thoughts of pictures and photography.

Do an image google if you're not sure what I'm talking about.

And do you remember the conversation that's in the background, especially of the series of weeds in snow?

The story as I recall it is around Callahan's introduction to photography at a workshop in Detroit by Ansel Adams. Apparently there was a long discussion about how to expose properly for snow — how to keep the detail in the negative but not underexpose, how to compensate in the developing, how to print it just down enough to make it feel bright but not too bright.

Even if you've never done the wet process you know that bright scenes can cause such a headache.

Anyway, the story goes, after that long lecture Callahan returns with his famous results — weeds in snow — and flat empty space, white of the paper, featureless, blank. What was Ansel's reaction? I want to remember that he was amazed and proud: the student exceeds the vision and experience of the teacher by breaking the rules...this is what every teacher waits for.

But frankly I'm not sure what happened next. And I can't find the reference to that story. Maybe I'm dreaming it. Anyone?

Perhaps never mind for now. Visual echoes inspire me to keep making pictures, to keep paying attention. Can you feel the shape of the continuity? Get up, go outside, join the conversation.

Learn about Harry Callahan and be inspired too. Eastman House. Brown University. Wikipedia. Masters of Photography.

Chicago, 1950, copyright Harry Callahan, from George Eastman House (Still Image Archives)

Balanced and Neutral

2010-01-30T12:36:00.001-05:00

The question comes up: what is white balance?

Two responses:

First: White is the wrong word. "White balance" as a term of digital photography refers to the color feeling, color emotion, color balance in the photo.

But the "color" white is not a color, is it? In fact, using the word "white" gives the wrong idea. For example, if the photo has no white in it, does that mean the photo has no "white balance"? No it doesn't mean that.

Every picture can be described using the language of color, even monochrome, black&white pictures. I wish the camera and photo industry didn't use this word — "white balance" — to describe color, but it does (and there are historical reasons, but never mind that right now), so we have to work around the confusion.

Here's what I mean: when we discuss white balance we're talking about the overall color feel of the picture. Is it warm? That is, does the picture have an overall predominance of yellows, oranges and reds? Or, is it cool? Which would describe, for example, a predominance of blues and greens perhaps. Or is it mixed? Or is it neutral? And here's an intriguing and potentially confusing subtlety about pictorial color: even pictures composed of cool colors can have an overall neutral color balance. (More on this later, as we get more in-depth with color correction in the computer.)

Which brings me to point number two: altering, or adjusting, white balance.

Second: In digital photography it's insanely easy to change the color balance of your picture. The guiding principle, in my opinion, should be that the picture reflects your emotional intention.

Color carries emotion, and meaning, from the mind of the maker to the mind of the viewer. Color is a choice. It's a choice as you take the picture and it remains a choice as you make the print or prepare the picture for display on a screen.

At the time of capture, color is controlled by the "white balance" menu selector on your camera.

The best choice, in my opinion, is to set the image quality selector (which is not the same as the white balance selector, by the way) to RAW capture. If you do this — capture in RAW format — then you'll have the most flexibility after you download the picture to the computer.

Essentially, capturing in RAW means that you prefer to choose the color balance of the picture when you are sitting at the computer. (In other words, if you capture in RAW it makes no difference which option you choose in white balance, because you can shift it around in the computer.)

The second best choice — if you're not going to capture RAW (i.e., if your image quality selector is set to jpg, for example) — is to set the white balance selector to AUTO. This is the default position for most cameras. When you shoot with AUTO white balance the camera applies a general color balance based on a mathematical analysis of the color in the scene that you're shooting. In my experience the auto setting is almost always accurate and appropriate. And, if you decide later to shift the color in the computer, shooting in the auto setting gives you some flexibility.

The worst choice, by far, is to choose a specific white balance setting in the camera, such as "daylight" or "cloudy" or "tungsten." If you do this, the camera applies an overall color adjustment to the picture when you snap the shutter. But this adjustment is very difficult to change later because it's deeply embedded within the file. That wouldn't be a problem if you could know for certain that the camera's choice was correct and appropriate...but you can't. There's no way to accurately preview the results of the camera adjustment while you're shooting (the camera display screen isn't accurate enough), so there's no way to know if the emotional meaning of the photo reflects your intentions.

And that's the bottom line. You'll hear me say this again and again — making pictures is about making meaning. The stories you're going to tell with your photographs, the poems, the songs, the wonder of it, and the misery: it all resolves around the choices you make. Color is a powerful part of that constellation of choices. With experience you'll learn to pull and push the emotional connotations with subtlety and purpose; for now, though, start by learning to see the color and feel the emotion of your environment.

Some visual examples using the computer to alter white balance (the original capture was in RAW format, so there's lots of flexibility):

This version is "as shot," or auto.

This version has "daylight" color balance applied in the computer. It's very similar to the as shot version, because I took the picture in a neutral daylight environment. We'd say, in this case, that both the as shot and the daylight settings are fairly neutral with respect to each other.

This version has the "shade" setting. Compared to both versions above it is much warmer, i.e., more yellow. This color shift is immediately evident when the pictures are next to each other, but perhaps less noticeable when viewed independently.

"Tungsten" color balance was applied to this one.

The blue color correction is meant as an adjustment for pictures that have been taken inside under warm yellow lights — the blue, in that case, would cool off, or neutralize, the warmth of the indoor environment. In this case, however, the blue is obvious and overwhelming because the light at the time I took the picture was not yellow but was in fact already quite neutral, as you can see in the as shot version above.

This version is "black and white" with the "gray" setting — yes, black and white is a color balance.

In each case, the impact of the photograph has been altered by the choice of color balance. The connotations might have changed, or the visual flow and purpose might feel different from one to the other. There's no "correct" color balance; it's up to me to decide which works best in terms of my emotional intent.

As we work through the term there's a lot more to come on this topic, but I hope this gets the game started.

But remember, one last time...if you're shooting in RAW, it doesn't matter what white balance choice you make in the camera because you'll finalize the color in the computer.

Delete Not Note

2010-01-29T12:59:00.002-05:00

A note, a reminder: do not delete.

In class yesterday this idea caught some folks by surprise. I don't know what makes an idea resonate, or when.

Here it is again: do not delete pictures from your digital camera when you're taking pictures. Instead, after the pictures have been downloaded to the computer, reformat the card with the camera's "format" menu.

There are two reasons for this:

First, using the delete option on the camera can sometimes create disk index errors on the card itself, which can corrupt the card and make it unusable. I've seen this happen several times. Once the card became entirely unreadable and all the pictures on it were lost. Other times only a few pictures were lost. But every time a disk corruption occurs it's a mess and a headache. Not deleting in-camera can prevent it from happening.

(An aside that's related: be sure the camera is power-off when inserting or removing a camera card, as that can cause disk index corruption too.)

Second, why worry about deleting? If you fill up the card, put in another one. Certainly you have another camera card, right? (You should always carry a second card -- stop reading and go buy one right now if you don't already own one, in fact, buy two extra cards while you're at it).

The underlying point here is that digital space is cheap. Far cheaper than film ever was. Keeping that accidental frame doesn't cost anything.

In fact, don't delete it even after you've downloaded it onto the computer! Those "bad" pictures are records of moments when you were looking and thinking, even if you don't like them much at the instant they're made. And even the worst frames might have value later, but you'll never know when or if they might — unless you let them hang out in the back of hard drive waiting to be rediscovered.

This frame of my son on the beach in San Diego is yet another case in point, for me. I do this all the time. My Lightroom catalog of daily and family pictures has thousands (and thousands!) of pictures -- many of which are "accidents" or "mistakes."

Periodically, while I'm on the phone, or browsing the web, I let the catalog play through a random slide show. This frame popped up today and caught my eye in a new way, and made me stop. It resonated.

I have no idea if it will for you, or if I'll like it tomorrow, but for the moment it brings up memory and relationships that have gravity. I don't remember taking it. I don't remember if I felt it was an accident or a waste, but I'm glad I never deleted it.

Don't delete. Reformat the card after downloading (to maintain the disk index on the card).

But don't delete the random accidents from the computer even after downloading (to give memory and history a chance to resurface in the future).

Starting at the picture

2010-01-25T14:43:00.024-05:00

No matter where you are when you begin or get up to go again, whether this is your first class in photography or your fifteenth, whether you're continuing from last term or going back to school for the first time after a long break — we have to start at the picture itself.

What I mean is, learning photography begins with paying attention to pictures.

Did you see that picture?

A term-long assignment in my class is to keep a picture journal. It doesn't matter what camera you use, or if you use a camera at all. My own journal has pictures from websites and cell phone snaps of magazine pages.

The purpose is to pay attention to pictures that grab you, that inspire you; to mark the moments when pictures tweak you.

I love today's tools for this purpose. My favorite is Lightroom, but Bridge works fine too, as does any of the other picture management applications. The key is to have robust metadata fields that are easy to access.

Here's what you do: snapshot a picture that thrills or puzzles you, and download it to the folder that you've designated as your journal. Then, before too much time goes by, write a few words in the description field — where were you when you saw that picture? who were you with? what did it make you think about?

Similarly, when you're browsing the web, grab pictures that grab you and copy them into that folder. Then, copy the URL and anything else that feels relevant and paste it into the appropriate metadata field. I've got entire newspaper articles embedded in my jpgs! I don't know the limit, but some of my entries are several thousand words long!

Also, when I go to galleries or museums I snap the wall-text and add it too, along with notes and frames of the pictures that were on exhibit. In fact, I'll often email artists whose work I've just seen and, if they write back (which they almost always do!), I copy and paste their response into the metadata of the picture that I took at the gallery.

As you might know, these collections were once contained in file cabinets. In fact, my father had several of them stuffed with old post cards and random flyers picked up while traveling, museum announcements, barely legible letters, and coffee stained napkins from diners on the road. And while I love that physical anthropology of a lifetime, the texture and smell of it, it's bulky and heavy and difficult to move whenever I relocate (which is too frequent!).

Now, of course, computer files can't replicate the materiality of the artisanal collection, but in its favor, the digital journal is searchable and infinitely expandable. And visible: just set your display to randomized slideshow and you'll thrill to unexpected juxtapositions of your visual experience — it's a mash-up of your life.

As well, the digital journal remains at your fingertips as long as you continue to add textual details from your day.

So, in addition to actually collecting the pictures, the assignment is to spend an hour a week entering keywords in your journal.

After just a few weeks you'll begin reaping the benefit of your focused attention. Not only will your brain be primed for noticing pictures that you want to make for yourself, but you'll also have the a record of what mattered along the way.

This is an essential component to your arts education — this is what artists do, in fact, at root: we pay attention to the way the world feels. And we chart our history through our lives with the artifacts we encounter and leave behind.

Pictures matter. This is where we start.

Hibernation at an end

2010-01-19T10:39:00.004-05:00

Long walks in winter break the malaise and settle the soul. With my son the other week, sub-freezing, sun low, we talked about the coming year.

Classes begin this week. I'm looking forward to starting up again.

As you know (I think), education is my passion. Next to actually making pictures, it's what I think about the most.

Ken Robinson:

Children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise,...what the world will look like in five years time, and yet we're meant to be educating them for it.

What I find moving and of most immediacy is this conversation about how we learn what we learn. And the purpose of learning itself.

Working with you this spring I hope we'll scratch the surface on this topic. When we talk about photography — apertures, ISO, shutter speeds, cameras, papers, computers — I think, at root, we're also talking about paying attention to ourselves and to others, and exploring the way we learn. That's the context in which I want to begin this new year.

For me, the most interesting question isn't about which button to push, or which ink profile to use. Rather, it's about what learning is, and about how making pictures together charts our future.

To get started, I've compiled a short list of learning resources on the Courses page of my website. It's not meant to be exhaustive, but it's a place to begin.

End of a year of photography

2009-12-23T09:49:00.008-05:00

In the morning at St George the sun skids into the terminal and skews the grid of the day, reminding us of our shadows and our momentary passing.

An open letter to everyone who worked with me these last four months:

Congratulations on finishing (and beginning) your study of photography! I know the learning curve can be stressful and perhaps even overwhelming at times. But you’re on the way now…

In closing the year on our work together I’d like to briefly repeat something I’ve said several times, beginning from the first day we met: these are exciting times to be working in the visual arts. We’re entering an uncharted world of picture-making, and you are at the threshold of these new days.

From my perspective, having watched these changes over these last twenty years, from the pre-digital, non-digital, what-is-digital??, into the current thrill-ride rollercoaster of new possibilities and challenges, it feels momentous and extraordinary.

Last week at a holiday party with photographers and art directors we talked about these new challenges and opportunities from different and contradictory perspectives, but everyone agreed that this is the most exciting time we’ve ever seen in our industry. And we each talked about how lucky we are to be participating in it.

I suspect that, at this moment, actually, you’re too tired and busy with traveling and holiday stuff to feel much excitement…but soon enough you’ll be rested and ready to get going again. As I’ve said throughout the fall, the main thing is that you keep learning about how to learn.

‘Photography’ as a word and idea is changing (and it might not much resemble what you once thought it was), but picture-making remains a fundamental human activity, with incredible importance to our society and to our individual lives.

Until our paths cross again…keep walking the map of your life and watching for moments when the grid skews and becomes new. One more time: I want to encourage you to keep paying attention to the moments of your visual evolution, both the large and small; keep listening; keep watching; and keep making pictures.

From here on out, everything starts with simply doing it.

Thanks a great experience in 2009!

Alchemy of Autumn

2009-11-29T12:54:00.012-05:00

This is my favorite time of year. In class you're making pictures that couldn't have been predicted even a few short weeks ago. I'm enthralled by the process, this convergence, this transmutation of one thing into another thing, idea into material, image into body. I don't know how it happens, even as it unfolds right in front of me.

Last Sunday afternoon at the Brooklyn Central Library we heard Trio Solisti perform chamber music from several different eras. As always, the comfortable elegance of the Dweck Center was the perfect setting for a quiet reprieve from the rush of the end of the term. (I've written about the Library's concert program here, and I still recommend it strongly.)

The end of the afternoon brought Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. You've probably heard it before; I'd heard it many times but never knew what it was called.

(Click the 'play' button to hear the Promenade opening.)

The story behind this composition is that Mussorgsky was inspired to write it after looking at the drawings and watercolors of his good friend, Viktor Hartmann, who had recently died. The music unfolds in a series of vignettes that reflect Mussorgsky's experience of wandering from picture to picture, suggesting the flux of his attention as it swayed toward one point but then was dislodged and refocused someplace else.

Trio Solisti's arrangement was spectacular, and the synchronicity of hearing it this week was momentous.

From the first week we met I've rolled this thought around in class and threaded it through our conversations — how do pictures become themselves? Where do they come from? How do they emerge? How do they resolve?

Pictures from an Exhibition brings a new wrinkle and perhaps a new focus as well — from one medium into another, sound to picture, ink and pigment on paper transmuted into tone and rhythm, fiber vibrating against fiber and hammers hitting strings, echoing — the root is the experience, that sensory moment paused and contemplated and then put into action, amplified by thought and wonder, to become something else, something new.

Working together these past several months has accelerated a process of beginning, but just barely to get it started. I'm seeing so much new work and authentic picture-making starting to happen. I hope that you'll keep something of this experience alive in your day to day travels even as we say goodbye a few weeks from now. This is the best part of the work — watching it become itself.

For a little more on Mussorgsky, Viktor Hartmann and the experience of translation, check out this blog entry from Kathleen Benton.

The picture above was made the other night at Whitehall. Exiting the subway I was momentarily caught by the blue-fire broken pavement and the wet neon city. I was surprised and almost stepped right through it. But pausing at the top of the steps, rain in my face, my commute transformed to clarity and an ordinary moment converged with a momentary awareness. Elevated, my mood eased, I breathed deeper and watched myself walk into the terminal.

Picture for Penelope

2009-11-23T11:13:00.006-05:00

On the ferry, end of day, low light across the harbor: a woman steps up to snap a photo for Penelope.

Later, I'm sure, another sun will set on flickr, where Penelope will find it. Another sun among the millions.

Centuries past Galileo we prove him wrong — we're at the center, finally.

See Penelope Umbrico's take on it: a glimpse of agreement we barely understand.

Flower on a bagel

2009-11-11T07:13:00.003-05:00

With a photo project, the more you push into it, the more it starts to feel inevitable. That's when you let go a little and allow your intuition take some of the weight. That's when I switch on automatic pilot and start to feel a kind of lightness.

I've been noticing the flower pictures around me for years now, and have started to make notes and reportage pictures of those pictures more seriously. I feel it gathering gravity. In fact, my awareness feels tweaked and tense: I find myself pulled into environments that resonate...and I smack into flower pictures.

On Third Ave near 12th St I got a bagel after teaching. Toasted poppy seed with garlic herb cream cheese, and a side of Black-eyed Susans.

Speaking of asides--a friend called over the weekend to say that she's buried in flowers too. Her daughters bring home flowers made of clay, paper, papier-mache, in crayon and paint, made from pipe cleaners and Popsicle sticks, and pulled from the gardens of neighbors as they walk home from school. Her first grader declared that she's opening a flower shop with a friend.

What's your flower story?

Wild Zupco

2009-11-09T22:18:00.004-05:00

Check it out. I found another picture tonight. At TC my colleague Cathy slapped down large rolls for a demo, and before we could get to tearing and folding I saw what was actually happening...a wonderland of texture material and edge. Love it. Ion saw it first. I was in his world for a moment.

See his work on his website or at his gallery.

Nice.

Digging into projects

2009-11-02T07:06:00.013-05:00

Teachers College, Columbia, after Shannon Fagan

As we cross the half-way mark in the semester an old question appears again: what is a project in photography?

In class the topic seems part of school, an assignment on the syllabus. But the word we use — project — applies to many endeavors (working an election, painting a kitchen, helping a friend move) and isn't rooted in this institution. Instead, working with photographs is part of life, a motivation for further learning. This is what I hope you'll take away from our time together.

In our discussions I've asked you to think about what connects you to your life, what wakes you up in the morning. To begin, let your curiosity guide you — what do you want to know about? What do you want to learn about? There's no right or wrong answer to this question.

Shanghai dish, apple, on the windowsill

At root, though, is just that: a question. Whether your project is short-term (through the end of the semester) or follows a longer arc, there's got to be a need for something — What do you want to look at?

And from the opposite perspective — from the audience's point of view — the corollary: what do you want me to know?

A project that deserves and can sustain your attention will feel significant in both of these dimensions. You'll feel gravity and lightness simultaneously, and desire will snatch you out of bed before the alarm, keep you up at night, and prevent you from feeling tired in-between. You'll want to work.

Ok, but how do I find such a thing as this? — that's the question we bat around a lot.

I don't know the answer. What I do know, however, is that the key is in your experience: what are you reading? what are you watching? what did you talk about last night with your best friend? your spouse? your child?

Bryant Park, NYC, before teaching Photoshop

Here's a way into it, perhaps: pay attention to your wandering thoughts and be alert to moments of unknowing that evolve into moments of intensity. For example, you're talking with a friend, the conversation heightens, somebody pushes, someone else pulls, there's uncertainty, a misunderstanding, and suddenly you hear yourself saying something that you didn't know that you knew. Catch your breath and write that down. Mark it. That's the core of a project.

Mens Room, Beijing Airport

And here's another way into it: keep your camera with you and pay attention to any slight urge that calls for pictures throughout the day. Take those pictures. Make yourself slow down enough to make those exposures. Whatever, wherever, whenever — don't second guess, don't stop yourself. Then, in the evening, look from outside yourself and ask this question, as if you were asking it of a stranger: what do these pictures want me to know? What do they want to show me? Do this for a week, with honesty and focus, and you'll see something you didn't expect — a way of framing, a kind of light, a moment, a texture, a shape. Mark that down. It's a clue. And it might be significant because the picture-maker behind those pictures is you.

I've written on this topic before (here and here), and we talk about it all the time in random conversations — even though you might not have realized that's what we were talking about....

For an in-depth pictorial exploration with a photographer who can't stop asking questions, see Amy Eckert's menagerie of ever expanding projects. My favorite pictures are from Follies, but my favorite question is: "What color is the upholstery on a nuclear submarine?"

The other pictures linked on this post are from an evolving project called "flowerpictures," in which I'm asking, why are we surrounded everywhere with pictures of flowers?

First Street, Brooklyn, entry to our apartment

Space in color

2009-10-27T17:51:00.003-04:00

Out the door but not quite I'm drawn to an iridescent whisper from the corner.

Refraction reflecting my prismatic messenger. My god it's Iris. What color space is this?

Below, my friends at the DOT manage the signs of good counsel to insure we pass quietly and don't collide. These are the days of peace and tranquility. The sun wheels across the heavens and brightness reigns, momentarily. Inspired I breathe and take a photograph, and then leave for the ferry to Manhattan. In the basement at ICP we'll dream of rainbows refracting past our screens.

Silence for a Visual Moment

2009-10-25T17:47:00.007-04:00

NYSAT this morning: Voice for the future of our city.

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Before:

Before:

After:

After each whitewashing we posted a notice of our intent:

From the Metropolitan Landscape Control Committee:

The MLCC has recently become aware of the fact that NPA City Outdoor is operating over 500 illegal street level billboards in NYC, as well as many illegal wildposting locations. Despite private contracts, and other previous arrangements made between NPA City Outdoor and building owners, the above-mentioned advertising locations have been found to be illegal due to lack of permitting and failure to adhere to New York City zoning regulations. Under the Department of Buildings sign code § 26-256 these advertisements are subject to civil penalties and violations of up to $15,000. The Municipal Landscape Control Committee has organized the whitewashing of all NPA City Outdoor street level advertising locations until further structural removal can be implemented. The continued posting of advertising content at these locations will result in further legal action against NPA City Outdoor.

More photos are posted here.

I've written about this project before.

Today's New York Times had this to say.

Visual culture affects us. We are the sidewalks and the sidewalks are us. But in the arena of our public space we find ourselves assaulted. What is the meaning of 'public' when we have no remedy against this relentless barrage? The NYSAT project calls us to quiet action and deliberate protest. NPA Outdoor is clearly in violation of the public trust. It's time to bring some silence back; it doesn't have to be this way.

These empty whitewashed walls make a place for open imagination and a quiet escape, if only temporary. I'm happy I had a chance to participate this time around.

Follow the work of Jordan Seiler at Public Ad Campaign.

Invitation

2009-10-20T07:58:00.004-04:00

Please join me in a refreshing, free-form photo-share event. Sign up at the flickr group PhotoGroupFSJ to participate.

The idea is to have a casual and inspirational conversation about photography and learning photography. I'm launching this flickr space in the hope that students and teachers can keep an outer-classroom discussion percolating, share random photo favorites, and talk about the experience of being photographers today.

There aren't any restrictions! Anyone can join...teachers, students, student-teachers — after all, we're all embedded in the culture of the photo-world.

One goal of the group is to mix it up, swap places — we can learn from each other. For instance, I learn a ton by talking with friends, students, other teachers, and even with people who don't even consider themselves 'photographers.' (And vice versa: you learn more about what you do when you gear up to teach about it.)

I hope you'll come aboard for a while and share some thoughts, ask a question, suggest an answer, and post some pictures.

This is a favorite from last week. The fall season sun passes in a straight line across from my bathroom window. About an hour before sunset the light streams through the new shower curtain. It's a rainbow of brilliance that doesn't need a prism.

Where the Ideas Are

2009-10-17T09:42:00.005-04:00

Where do ideas come from? This is the question that takes a lifetime.

You know how to use the camera; you're learning the computer; and printing just takes time and practice (lots of practice). The hard stuff is more diffuse than that, more difficult to touch: where do you point your camera? what do you want me to see? what are you learning?

Here's where we fight with each other. Some of my best friends and most valued colleagues believe it's impossible to teach artists to be artists, that you can't teach curiosity. I don't want to agree: if that's true, then what have I been doing all this time?

The model I've proposed in the classroom is pretty simple: pay attention and respond. That's the core, I think. The essays and the photo prompts are all directed at it. So are the emails back-and-forth and the walking tours and the invitations to post on flickr. Then we close the loop with conversations about the pictures and about the process itself.

At root is this assertion: an artist touches the world with their mind, and responds so that others can touch it too. The foundation of this practice is paying attention. It needs a certain discipline and a willingness to jump in, but it's something you can learn how to do. Participation means joining the conversation, making something, just doing it. The necessary skills revolve around fearlessness and something like naivety, and an ability to ask questions ceaselessly, with wonder, with enthusiasm. My job as teacher is not to teach these things but to set the conditions for you to begin the process for yourself.

This is where the conversation about the genesis of ideas breaks down. Misunderstandings about learning and teaching have us talking sideways at each other. Teaching — in the sense of shoving stuff into your head — is impossible, always has been, has no place here. So we agree on that. But learning relies on something else, first on the act of opening up, and then in the act of reaching out. This behavior can be encouraged, though your response is outside of my control. You have to make your own decision. I can't teach it to you; you learn what you want to learn.

Where do ideas come from? From you when you look around and mark the moments of your opening.

How do you learn? There are many different ways: take a walk, ride a boat, read a book, talk to a friend. Play a riddle in your head. Sketch the outlines of a cloud. Take a photo in a puddle. This is what we're talking about. This is what I'm trying to show you.

These photos come from the daily set of wandering thoughts that happen day to day. The ferry project is feeling heavier to me, gaining substance, though it's just barely sprouted. See it here on flikr. I'm watching Manhatta again and re-reading Klein's No Logo and Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities. Ideas are like seeds in the empty lot next door, in the fridge, in the terracotta pot, and on my bagel.

Tree Project Re-Start

2009-10-13T21:54:00.005-04:00

Hiroshi gave me new seeds after my lovely persimmon went to sleep. (I'm still watering it, by the way, and keeping my fingers crossed that it will somehow come back to life; Hiroshi says nature is strong and unpredictable!)

These are planatus seeds. They are fluffy and spindly, hard and soft simultaneously.

The instructions are to mix the seeds with some soil, add some moisture, and then put them in a ziplock bag in the fridge. For two months. After that I'm supposed to dump the whole mixture into a small terracotta pot and keep it watered. And warm.

So that'll be December in New York. I hope it'll be warm enough in the sun-room. The heat just came on last night and right now the entire apartment feels like a sauna, so presumably we'll have warmth enough to grow with. I still feel like a failure with the persimmon, but I'm happy to get another chance.

The Planatus Orientalis, aka the Oriental Plane, is a fast growing deciduous flowering tree. If the roots take it looks like it might grow 20 to 30 cm in the first year! Look at Plants for a Future and the Wikipedia article for some more information and some great pictures.

Digital Where We Are

2009-10-11T10:54:00.005-04:00

I'd like to highlight a foundational part of the conversation. I've mentioned this in class several times, but I want to emphasize it again here, in writing: It's important to know where you are in the digital landscape when you use computers to make pictures.

In class I've talked about the three domains of computer imaging. A metaphor I've used is the three-legged stool. I've also referred to a map, or schematic, that describes three primary arenas within the world of computer-based picture making.

The three basic areas are Capture, Control, and Display. Here again are the basic distinctions in terms of purpose, hardware and software.

Capture

Snag the image using a camera or scanner (that's the hardware). They're everywhere in our lives: DSLRs, cell phones, snappy digi shooters, and all manner of scan-type (non-camera obscurra) devices. As well, as you know, there's no distinction anymore (or very little) between still and motion capture — each device is both simultaneously. On the software side of capture we can choose between many different options, but the most popular (in the classes I teach) is Adobe Camera Raw. (There are many others but sort of by convention, really, that's the one we use most often.) Purpose: when you're working in Capture mode, you're paying attention to posture and position in order to gather up the images you'll transform into pictures.

Control

At the computer (that's the hardware) you sort and manage the raw material harvested in the capture phase. Using software such as Lightroom, Bridge, Aperture, flickr, Snapfish (and there are many others, sometimes known as asset management applications), you pay attention to issues of content and framing as you sort and rate the effectiveness of individual frames or sequences. Along the way you're also entering and editing metadata names, dates, time code, and GPS locations so that details are clear and organized for future captioning and timeline construction. As well, in the sorting process, you're paying attention to copyright and ownership tag lines, and connecting individual frames and sequences with relevant URLs and voice recorded data from the field. All in all, in the Control phase of the process, you're engaging deeply with mental and visual sorting at a fairly intense and specific intellectual level.

Display

At the computer (again) you manipulate the data that has been captured and sorted (in the Control phase) to create the display (print, screen, billboard, projection, whatever) that your audience will see. Hardware in the Display arena varies depending on the specific goals of your project. A fairly robust imaging computer that's been calibrated to the appropriate standards is probably a necessity. In addition, you'll work with various printing devices that output on films, papers, fabrics, or other surfaces. Most likely, as well, you'll work with specialized technicians who have journeymen training on those devices, so your ability to communicate effectively about standards and parameters becomes especially important. Software: Photoshop is the most commonly known printing/display application. It's the heavy lifting tool of the industry, but not the only one around. In fact, depending on your project, Photoshop might be only one of a suite of applications that will include Flash, Illustrator, InDesign, Final Cut, and any number of other specialized display software. Purpose: in the Display phase of your project you're paying attention to perceptual issues as they relate to content. You're asking yourself about meaning and mood, emotion and form, and always gauging your own internal response against your expectations and larger purpose. Often (once you're fluent in the specific software and hardware) your work in the Display phase of the process will feel intuitive and automatic; your body and mind seem to merge into each other; and you find yourself at the end of long stretches of intense attention with prints or sequences that you can only barely remember having made.

For me, and for many artists I know, the truly pleasurable days come in either the capture or display phase of our work. Almost no one relishes the long computer hours that the control phase requires. Logging footage, editing metadata, and rating, sorting and managing digital files just isn't what we saw ourselves doing as picture makers. And yet, truly and fundamentally, it's all part of the process.

Why do I keep harping on this stuff? Because you've got to know where you are. Keeping your balance in this learning process is difficult already, getting confused about what you're trying to do at any given moment only makes it more difficult. Remember, the work isn't about the computer. The computer is a gateway to where you want to go. Don't get stuck in the muck of buttons and plastic. Push through it by reading the map carefully and paying attention to the specific task at hand.

Working the Work

2009-10-03T09:01:00.005-04:00

798 Factory Area, Beijing

So we've gotten the ball rolling and bouncing in a dozen ways all at the same time. Classes at NYU, ICP and Parsons are flying now, full speed.

Learning photography often seems to require that you know something while simultaneously already knowing something else, in order to learn some other fairly critical fundamental. I'm familiar with the way it begins to feel overwhelming; it seems to be part of the process, though that doesn't make it easier.

But I'd like to focus back on something that precedes all of that, at least in my mind. Namely the question: what are we doing when we work in photography?

That is, what is the work? And what are you trying to learn?

After mulling it over for a while, and after watching a lot of people surf the learning curve, I want to suggest that the pictures you're making are NOT the work. Or, at least, the pictures are not the entirety of the work.

Here's the thing, I can "teach" you how to use the camera in a few hours (you probably already know what I know about cameras, actually), and I can "teach" you how to use Photoshop in a few weeks (if you practice really hard), but I have no idea how to "teach" you to be a photographer, or an artist. That goal, that end result, is a different kind of learning, a different kind of work. And it's only partly about the pictures.

The best I can do, really, is walk with you on that road and talk about stuff that puzzles me. The work of an artist happens in the conversation between us, and in the resonances that linger in our minds.

The work is an interior thing fired by curiosity, and a desire to connect. The work is your effort to make your life intersect with your world, and your experience embody your ideas. The work is your struggle to attach your body to your feet and your brain.

The pictures you make are the residue of this work. They are the artifacts that get left behind. The work itself goes with you; it continues if you continue; it precedes and extends from the pictures, but it's not merely equivalent with the pictures.

Anyway, let's all try a little patience, a little gentleness. I really do believe the work we're doing is worthwhile and life-changing. I just don't think it begins and ends at the camera or at the computer. So, while we focus hard in class to speak with clarity and conviction, scribbling notes and grabbing answers, let's also try a little letting go. The work is happening, trust in that, though you might not see it in the pictures right away.

Diego Rivera, The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City, 1951 (National Museum of Murals and Mosaics)

I've been meditating on this picture lately, and on Rivera's work and time. Assignment: make a picture of yourself working.

Check out the conversation about this picture on the website of the National Museum of Murals and Mosaics! You can learn more about the mural and about Diego Rivera at the San Francisco Art Institute, and at the Diego Rivera website.

Report from Pingyao

2009-09-28T08:13:00.004-04:00

I'm thrilled to report that our visit to the Pingyao International Photography Festival was a huge success. The exhibit "Young Artists Emerging in America" was well received, and many conversations were begun around it. Thanks to all of you who participated — I'm truly honored by your good work.

A report of the exhibit has been posted on my flickr site, under the photo set titled PIP2009 Report. There are 193 photographs with captions, some of them extensive.

To view the report you can either dip in and out of the photostream as you like, or go to the flickr slideshow function and turn on "Show Info" to read the captions.

(Hint: for better viewing of both the pictures and the captions, go to Options and uncheck "embiggen," and check "always show title.")

For participating artists: if you'd like copies of any of the installation photographs, either download them directly from flickr or contact me for higher resolution files.

For everyone else: working in China over the past several years has been an incredible experience, and continues to inform my work as a teacher and artist here in the U.S. As you've heard me say again and again (especially if we've worked together), as artists we must take responsibility for our own inspiration, and learn how to keep ourselves growing from one day to the next. Getting outside your comfortable frame of reference is essential to this process. For me, China puts me outside myself in provocative and affirming ways. There are other methods, of course, but if the opportunity appears for you to explore and lose yourself China, I strongly recommend it.

Thanks must be showered on those who made it possible for us to participate in this event: to Zhang Guotian, the Chief Artistic Director of this year's festival, and to Amy Liu, the international coordinator; to Gerald Pryor, photo head at NYU's Steinhardt Deptartment of Art and Arts Professions, who encouraged and supported my proposals from the beginning; to Suzanne Nicholas, Associate Director of Education at ICP, and to Jim Ramer, MFA Director at Parsons, who helped get the exhibit off the ground in the early days — and who traveled to Pingyao with me to install and participate; to Ren Yue, doctoral candidate in photography at Renmin University, who helped coordinate my proposals and put out the call to our translators; to all the translators from around the world who participated via our Google wiki; and, of course, to the twenty-seven artists from NYU, ICP and Parsons who trusted me with their work and ideas.

For more on the exhibit catalog, or to purchase a copy directly from MagCloud, click here.

For a low-resolution preview gallery of the pictures in the exhibit Young Artists Emerging in America is available.

Terrible News

2009-09-26T07:57:00.003-04:00

I've arrived home to terrible news. After 12 days in China I didn't expect this. Over the summer I was away for 2 weeks at one point and my persimmon didn't look this bad. I'm very sad and disappointed. I have no idea what to do.

Hiroshi wrote:

If you water too much, the root can rot, so let's wait till the soil
dries and hopefully the sprout can recover. Nature is strong, so
let's see what will happen. Watering too much more than needed is
always not a good idea. I always make sure to touch the soil before
watering, so when it is completely dry, then I water. Sometimes, I
dig my finger to see if there is any moisture, if inside of the soil
is moist, then you do not need to water for couple of more days. Try
this.

I cross my fingers,
HS

Me too.

Back from Beijing

2009-09-24T19:25:00.005-04:00

I'm here. Back from Beijing and the Pingyao photography festival. I've got a ton of stuff to share and show, in the hopes that you'll make the trip for yourself next year.

More on all that later.

Right now it's been a long day and the weird mental in-between of jet travel is fuzzing up my brain.

Can you picture it? Photograph the moment that you're here.

See you in class....don't forget to send me the jpgs.

The top snap is from the new Beijing airport this morning (they haven't quite got all their signage worked out yet, but it's an amazing and beautiful structure); the second picture on the bottom is of Suzanne Nicholas, Associate Education Director at the International Center of Photography, who traveled with me to Pingyao -- we were at the Song Zhuang Artist Village visiting my friend Ma Yanling (here too) when she decided to snap a shot of her home and studio courtyard.

Starting and marking it

2009-09-12T07:00:00.000-04:00

Time to begin again. The moment won't remain but I'm marking it to be remembered later. It's too ephemeral to hold, but the experience is real and now.

Classes have begun and I'm thrilled to meet up with so many dreams and enthusiasms. I blathered on and on this week about paying attention to pictures in your life, about how we know what we know, about writing, about drawing, about computers...and there's more of all that to come.

The most important part, however, is just doing something. Do it -- take pictures. Please believe me, you can't see it til you start.

Maybe it's better to not think about it too much...just pick up the camera and take a walk. You're going to uncover something if you just get started.

After class a student asked if anything was off-limits as far as semester projects are concerned. I said no, not at all. She said, anything? I said, pausing now, well...as long as it doesn't get me fired or put in jail. She said, okay.

Should be an interesting fall. I'm really looking forward to working with all of you!

The pictures posted are from some random walking back and forth to class this week. Click towards Flickr to see what thoughts came up as I was walking.

Wild Abe

2009-09-12T06:00:00.001-04:00

In Chelsea with Diana and Connor, walking the Highline, reading and breathing.

In the deep shade of the park on 22nd and 10th, friends chatting, small kids running and swinging, this old Abelardo Morell photograph appeared in front of me. He must have left it. I'll give it back to him when I see him.

You've seen Morell's pictures in class if you've ever crossed paths with me. I find his way of working endlessly inspirational and intriguing. I had the great good fortune to cross paths with him (in person) back in April at Photolucida in Portland. We only chatted briefly but I laughed when I realized that the stuff I say about his work (stuff that I make up in class to illustrate ideas about light and material and the universe)is the same stuff he says when he talks about it. Some kind of synchronicity. Very fun.

Tree Project Update

2009-09-05T07:46:00.008-04:00

The persimmon sprout in my window is starting to unravel a long woody structure that has, until now, been curled and hidden beneath the leaves.

For quite a while I haven't understood this twisty structure, why it had no leaves, why it was so convoluted, but now its purpose is emerging: I think it's going to be the trunk of the persimmon tree. Even though the sprout barely reaches above the tiny terracotta lip, I can see a tree taking shape.

If you've been following Hiroshi Sunairi's Tree Project, either on his site or via my multiple posts about it (catch up by clicking the key word label "tree project"), then you'll applaud this development with me. If you're not up to speed yet, please take a look at Hiroshi's site to learn about this amazing, fun, and highly interactive project.

My own involvement has brought me forward and taken me backward: I'm stretching my concept of the uses and possibilities of photography and, at the same time, connecting deeply with my first memories of pictures.

The Tiger and the Persimmon is an ancient Korean folktale; it comes back to me from my childhood in South Korea. The pictures and text of this version are rooted at the core of my consciousness -- I vividly remember reading this book, and learning to wonder about knowing and the mysteries of not-knowing. Picking up Hiroshi's persimmon seed brought it immediately to mind, though I hadn't actually seen the book itself for years, because it had been buried in a box labeled "Sean's childhood stuff" and shoved in the storeroom. Then, unexpectedly last spring, we moved to Staten Island (as you know!), and the turmoil of packing and unpacking unearthed the book itself. At the beginning the connection between the book and Hiroshi's project was quite simplistic (via the word "persimmon"), but as the project continues to unfold I'm noticing deeper, more complicated, resonances.

The story goes like this:

A tiger leaves his mountainside den to find food for his family, but can't find anything suitable and, in general, has an exhausting and miserable time. He's about to give up - his feet are killing him! - but fears returning home empty-handed, disappointing his wife and kids.

Then he stumbles on a quiet village and sees children playing and laughing in the square. Obviously, a nice resolution for the tiger; not so nice, I guess, for the kids. But before the tiger can act, lunch is called and the kids disappear indoors. Disappointed and weary, the tiger slouches under a nearby porch to wait.

From inside the house he hears a small child crying. (Traditional Korean houses have very thin walls and paper windows, so sound carries easily.) The mother tries to quiet the child by saying that a vicious dog is outside and will eat him if he doesn't stop crying. The child keeps crying. The tiger looks nervously around for the vicious dog but doesn't see it, and nevertheless is quite impressed with the child's courage - not afraid of a vicious dog?

The mother then tells the child that a snake is coming. The tiger is further confused - he can't see a snake - and impressed.

And then the mother tells the child that a tiger is outside waiting for him. Hearing this, the tiger is relieved and happy -- because he can see himself, obviously -- and he's willing to oblige the mother. But as gets ready to burst in to the house and grab the child, the mother tries one last tactic:

This time the mother sounded desperate. "Oh, Chol Soo, stop that crying! There's a persimmon!" It was just as though someone had turned off the radio. All the crying, shrieking, and screaming stopped. Everything was as quiet as a Korean village is likely to be fright after lunch.

Sure enough, that gets the tiger's attention. And he's terrified.

"Yipes!" thought the tiger. "What a fierce beast a persimmon must be! I'd better get away from here and fast too. If a fierce dog, or a snake, or a hungry tiger can't frighten that child but a persimmon can make him keep quiet, then a persimmon must be the very fiercest of all beasts."

Ha! I'm laughing again as I'm typing this!

The convoluted knowns and unknowns of this story must have tickled my seven-year-old brain a million times, and still fascinate me today. Discovering -- or "recognizing" might be the better word -- these deep structural connections between my work as an adult and memories from childhood is surprising, fun, and deeply satisfying: moments of authentic integration are hard to come by.

And that it came together because of an invitation to plant a seed! Hilarious! What a loopy backspin this whole thing has turned out to be. My thanks, again, to Hiroshi for the opportunity.

Words of wisdom:

A very good way to frighten a tiger is to say PERSIMMON in a very loud voice.

I'd forgotten that part. But, you just never know when it might come in handy.

You can get an updated pdf version of the story (without pictures) here, and a quick Google of the title brings up this wonderfully illustrated new version by Janie Jaehyun Park. My childhood copy is a retelling by G.K. Ferrar, illustrated by Kim Young-Ju, published in 1968 by the Sahm-Bo Publishing Corp in Seoul.

Inventing pathways

2009-08-31T08:15:00.012-04:00

Clear Comfort, Alice Austen house and museum, Staten Island

At the edge of the harbor, up nearly against the Verrazano bridge, there's a memorial and small museum in the Victorian cottage where Alice Austen lived. Here's a photographer who really did it — from the age of 11 she dedicated her time and energy to making pictures of her life, her friends, and eventually, her city.

Alice and her sea captain uncle who gave her a camera at age 11

From A History of Women Photographers, by Naomi Rosenblum:

...in the late 1880s she took advantage of the newly opened ferry line across New York Bay to travel to lower Manhattan and work in the streets around the Battery, Park Row, and the Lower East Side - an area housing large numbers of European immigrants. ... her pictures are remarkable for their specificity, their compelling visual organization, and their overall sharp focus. Austen left no written record of her thoughts about photography, but one imagines that using a camera made it possible for her to confront aspects of American life that otherwise would have been entirely out-of-bounds for a woman...

Alice Austen, 1888, by her uncle, Captain Müller

In the restored house I'm breathing the air of memory and trying to understand the energy and ambition that drove Alice Austen toward the city with 50 pounds of camera gear in tow - glass plates, bellows, lenses, tripods (forget digital...this was before the days of film!).

Organ Grinder, 1896

The New York Public Library digital collection has a selection of Austen's work available as digital previews.

Newsboys, 1896

And you can learn more about her amazing life and work on the Alice Austen museum website.

I'm inspired by what Austen did. In her pictures, even without a written record, we see curiosity and a desire to connect, to pay attention to her life. She did the work and, without hardly any models to speak of, she invented her own path.

In learning photography this is perhaps the hardest thing of all: starting along your own path. We've got so many models to follow, so many ways of working, so much mobility and information, so many options for technology and display (so much less to carry!), that we get distracted, overwhelmed, and forget the basic foundations of what we're doing.

Being a photographer, being an artist, begins with paying attention to our lives, and then doing it: making the pictures, taking those first steps. You can't know the end at the beginning.

Path in the front of the Alice Austen house.

The Alice Austen House is owned by the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, operated by the Friends of Alice Austen House, Inc., and is a member of the Historic House Trust. The gallery museum exhibits contemporary and historical photography under the direction and curatorship of Paul Moakley.

Seeing Berger Suddenly

2009-08-26T22:18:00.007-04:00

from "On Visibility," in The Sense of Sight:

Look: White transparent curtains across the window.
Light coming from the right.
Shadows of folds, hanging folds, darker than clouds.
Suddenly sunlight.
The window frames now cast shadows across the curtains.
The shadows are convoluted following the folds: the window frames are straight and rectangular.

In Maine this summer with my father I wasn't thinking of Berger when I took this photograph. But I'm reading these essays again lately, and unearthing inspiration from folded memories. This is where ideas come from. Even after the fact of picturing it, understanding returns slowly: then suddenly I'm paying attention to some subtle movement across the creases of my brain and simply responding.

I want you to read this essay too. I'm wondering how you'll picture it.

Floating

2009-08-26T07:58:00.003-04:00

On the ferry everyone snaps the Statue as she slides past. So many people jam the rails the boat lists toward New Jersey. I've done this too. Now I watch the frenzy and think about the urge to hold tight to fleeting moments, as if we could. The weight of this-was-when around future dinner tables flickers through my mind, and I catch glimpses of iconic slivers captured by strangers before they lower their cameras.

New York City is crowded with tourists and kids coming to college. The grid is jammed. A couple on the corner hunches over their guidebook, oblivious to the stream of pedestrians that bumps and adjusts to pass them. These temporary eddies swirl through all our lives, unpredictable obstacles that might give us an excuse to pause and breathe. But the thrill of a new anxiety often keeps us snapping along in pursuit of yet another quickly manufactured future memory.

On the harbor the grid gives out to flat possibility. This is a fantasy, of course.

At the end of the day I'm dreaming the fundamentals of color and line, and wondering how experience and poetry might prompt for more authenticity. I'm floating at the intersection of day and night.

The skin of it

2009-08-22T10:51:00.009-04:00

It's the last week of August and I'm neck deep in the monitor, rewriting the syllabus, calculating dates, arranging guest speakers...and dreaming about Tucson and the Center for Creative Photography. Last week on vacation we stopped by to look at pictures in the flesh.

During class I'm going to talk a lot about the experience of photography, about paying attention, about getting your feet on the ground and breathing through the shutter release. In our internet lives we often forget about the materiality of what we do.

At the CCP there's a viewing room and a print study program that will wake you up and shake you from your doldrums. Far from the glow of yet another screen, Cass Fey, director of education, will get you face-to-face with the physical objects themselves. Of all the amazing resources at the CCP, looking at the pictures up close is the most luxurious, and it's open to anyone.

Last Monday we chuckled at Tress' Fish Tank Sonata and riddled the messages of Levinthal's Hitler Moves East. Cass and her assistant Tony had pulled a wide swath of work, from Southworth and Hawes daguerreotypes, Stieglitz gravures, Blossfeldt silver prints, and Ruth Thorne-Thomsen's mysterious pinhole prints. As well as too many others to list here.

As an example of what I mean by materiality, consider Judith Golden's self-portrait book Masks (1974-1982), a mixed-up blender of photographs, feathers, paper, thread and plastic. A flat-screen image of the object just cannot convey the experience of the work. As Tony flipped the pages, each turn accelerated our intuitive understanding of Golden's process and connection to her ideas. The artifact itself produced new pictures in-between the leaves, and the texture of the thread and feathers, the translucency of the plastic, and the color and shape of Judith's painted face coalesced to become so much more than the sum of each part. You can see some of these early collages here, but the three-dimensional object in the flesh created a fourth-dimensional unfolding of time and space. Extraordinary. Even my computer-game addicted teenagers caught their breath for a moment.

Judith Golden, Summer Changeover, 1976, photo/mixed media

In our digital age of distraction and peripheral attention disorder, I think it has to be said again and again: body and experience matter. The object is a logic of its own. We extend and unfold new knowledge with all our new tools, but we remain embodied, ancient structures with an internalized rationale that keeps surprising us. That is, the index is a construction.

From the CCP website:

The Center for Creative Photography holds more archives and individual works by 20th-century North American photographers than any other museum in the nation. These holdings include a research collection featuring the archives of over 50 photographers—Ansel Adams, Lola Alvarez Bravo, Richard Avedon, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, W. Eugene Smith, and Edward Weston among them. Archives include photographs, negatives, albums, work prints, manuscripts, audio-visual material, contact sheets, correspondence and memorabilia. CCP’s art collection totals more than 80,000 works by 2,000 photographers.

Off the grid

2009-08-07T09:05:00.008-04:00

The past month feels like a blur. Moving from Brooklyn to Staten Island erased a week, and teaching daily from 9 to 6 obliterated a couple more. Then six days in Maine, totally off the grid, removed me from the known world entirely. Today I'm working my way back onto the map.

Last week on the way to Maine with my sons I stopped at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. In the several years since I last visited the place has expanded and modernized, adding state of the art galleries and completing the installation of the Yin Yu Tang house, a merchant's family home from Southeast China that has been transported to Salem and reassembled brick by brick. By itself the Yin Yu Tang is worth a visit to Salem. Walking through the courtyard put me back in China, directly. It's an amazing achievement and feels like a significant cross-cultural collaboration.

The more immediate motivation for my our visit to PEM, however, was to see the work of my friend Joni Sternbach. Her tintypes of surfers from the beaches of Montauk and Southern California have just been published in Surfland.

At the museum the pictures have been mounted cleanly and with context. I especially liked the inclusion of historical tintypes from the museum's collection, and the detailed demonstrations about the process itself. Another detail that seemed right was the dark red of the gallery walls, though the effect seemed a bit overwhelming at first. As my eyes adjusted, though, the contrast ratio of the walls juxtaposed against the tintypes began to reveal the swirl and rhythm of the emulsion on the plates, which mirrored and emphasized the feel of the surf and the texture of the waves.

I've shown Joni's work in class often. The connection for me is the idea that form and process and content merge into a motion of gesture and meaning that can't be reduced to singular elements. Her choice of subject informs her choice of camera and technology, becoming a complete statement. Surf, speed, and modern athleticism join with slow process and focus to become a meditation about waiting and concentration. If you've watched surfers off the beach you know this: surfers wait and watch. Their sport is an act of long slowness punctuated by moments of brief intensity. This reflects the activity of photography itself. Joni's pictures bring to mind a careful and sustained act of attention, and draw me to thoughts about connections — land and sea, history and technology, surfers and photographer.

Mary Ellen, unique tintype by Joni Sternbach, 2005

Note: Joni teaches the tintype process at workshops in New York and elsewhere. Check her website for updates. If you've got the basics of your photographic process figured out I strongly recommend expanding your horizons a bit and learning how to make pictures with technologies that are new to you. The next chapter in your path towards photography often means a detour from what you already know.

The book pictured here is the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, made in 1647 by Willem Janzoon Blaeu, from the Peabody Essex Museum:

For much of the 17th Century, Amsterdam was the center of European cartography, with Blaeu's firm as its dominant enterprise. When he first published Theatrum in 1635, it was recognized as the finest atlas of its time. The decorative images ornamenting his maps provide fascinating insights into European perceptions of cultures encountered throughout the world.

Moving and Picturing It

2009-07-06T09:25:00.006-04:00

Yes, it's been a month-long absence. This photo tells the story to some extent. I've been moving boxes around. My back hurts.

Tonight at ICP we begin another round of learning how to move pixels around using Photoshop and other digital imaging tools. I don't know which kind of moving I prefer; my back hurts with both, though in different ways.

The mornings begin with water and the evenings end with it. After living in Brooklyn for what feels like a very long time (I first moved there in 1983), I'm now in Staten Island, the harbor borough, the forested borough, the quiet borough. From my porch I'm looking at roof tops and trees, and listening to birds. It's going to be an adjustment, but I think I like it already.

Let's get the pictures going again. There's lots of new stuff to pay attention to now.

In the earth

2009-06-09T18:13:00.009-04:00

Hiroshi wrote on his blog today that persimmon seeds are sprouting all over the place. The pictures are inspiring. Wonderful. I'm staring at my terracotta pot on the window sill and keeping my fingers crossed. Not green yet. Moist. Dark. Earth. Too moist?

There are many ways to be an artist. As we wrap up the year, prepping for the exhibit and career day, framing and printing and sequencing, with acid stress so deep that you want to scream or cry or kick something...I hope there's time for a breath, someplace, a pause. You don't have to have it figured out right now. You are a work in progress. We all are.

I'm writing this as much to myself as I am to you.

What can it mean to be a photographer today? An artist? A journalist? A writer? A teacher?

Let's try it this way: we're all photographers now. It's something we do. It's a way of knowing the world. Of knowing ourselves. Maybe, if we emphasize the conversation, we can understand both the “pictures” and the “tools” as parts of a larger social activity we call “photography.”

Hiroshi's tree project is teaching me a new way to participate. I have no idea where it goes from here. I hope to see green sprouts someday.

Wild Zoe

2009-06-08T07:10:00.006-04:00

Sometimes I see another photographer's work just sitting around, and as I walk past I grab it up and send it to them, just in case they want it back.

Zoe Strauss. You can read what I've written about her here.

Part of keeping yourself inspired is loosing yourself in other people's pictures, breathing for a beat, and then resurfacing into the shared world, changed, aware, ready to pay attention.

Looping open

2009-06-06T11:30:00.006-04:00

As you know, I like to talk about pictures and picture-making. In class I probably get sidetracked, actually, and spend too much time on tangents. But the fact is that learning the tools and technology just isn't enough. Pictures matter to us as a culture and as individuals. And learning how to talk about pictures, how to share our ideas and intentions, is crucial to becoming more complete photographers and artists.

This week I asked you to mark the moment that something we've done in class makes a difference in the way you make pictures. It's an essential part of the learning process because it begins to close the feedback loop. For example, in class we talk about something—exposure, saturation, cropping, whatever—and tomorrow you bring that idea into your body by adjusting your f-stop or shifting your frame. Recognizing that you've done so solidifies the learning and integrates idea with practice, or, closes the loop, so to speak.

Late in the evening on Thursday, as I was cleaning up the lab, I ran into Michelle, a student who worked with me learning Photoshop a couple of years ago. After a very cool moment of saying hello again, she told me that my song and dance about keeping a camera with you was finally making sense to her. This is the way it works again and again. The hard work of learning this stuff often begins with simple recipes that sound both too easy and impossible. In Michele's case, I guess, the desire to learn photography was actually impeded by not making time to take pictures. When she suddenly realized how my ranting in class ("take your camera with you!") made a difference to her photographic method, new options began to appear in front of her. (Anyway, that's how I interpret her comments!)

Here's another way it works for me: looking at your work over time brings up ideas and consistencies that can be built upon. These photographs of my dad (above) and of my son Connor (below) are from a long continuity of pictures. But I'm not consciously working on an integrated project, here. Rather I see these as belonging to a desire to pay attention to my life. In retrospect I see ideas that matter to me, and the pictures begin to speak to each other, even though I took them years ago. Going forward, perhaps, a project begins to take shape; and current thoughts about memory, continuity, expectations, might start to inform future pictures. In a sense it's like another kind of feedback loop beginning to spiral open....

Tree Project Start

2009-06-01T07:28:00.006-04:00

At the Horticultural Society of New York on Friday I picked up my persimmon seed. I wrote about Hiroshi Sunairi's Tree Project back in March (here), and now I'm ready to start. Today it's time for the next step:

Process 2: Planting the Seed

Please use unglazed ceramic pots (regular terra cotta ones) so the soil can breathe and dry naturally. In plastic pots, the soil takes much longer to dry and there is a chance that the young roots can rot if watered too much. Set the pot near a window with plenty of sun. When they haven't yet sprouted, it is important to keep the soild moist all the time. Once they sprout, water only when the soil dries out, otherwise the roots can get too wet and rot.

This is what Hiroshi writes on the instruction sheet that I picked up at the HSNY. I've re-typed it here to embed it in my nervous system. I've already learned something. As simple as that instruction is, I didn't know the difference between the plastic pots and the terra cota ones.

Actually, I'm not so great with plants and I'm a little anxious about not doing this right. It might be outrageous to say this, but the green stuff in my life has just been background noise, or salad. Don't get me wrong — I love the park and I really like walks in the woods — but I've rarely been able to keep a house plant alive for more than a few months. And I've just never put any thought or energy into gardening or growing. Planting and caring for a tree feels a bit over the top; I might be documenting a disaster in the making.

Frankly, this little persimmon seed terrifies me. And I'm so grateful to Hiroshi for pulling me outside of my comfort zone, getting me into this conversation.

Thanks also to the Horticultural Society of New York for helping Hiroshi make this amazing project possible. Their space on 37th Street is bright and green and wonderful. After Chris got the seed from the fridge, and after I'd taken a deep breath or two, I let myself get wrapped up in their amazing library of plant illustrations and the wonderful exhibit by Carol Bove and Janine Lariviere.

I have to say that as far as inspiration goes, I'm feeling it today from a different direction than usual, and that's pretty cool.

You Can Take It With You!

2009-05-21T08:10:00.021-04:00

All photographs ©2009 Erin Karp.

Erin, who's been working on her photography with me for two semesters now, wrote with a story that illustrates a core concept we've been discussing, namely: take your work with you everywhere!

At the cafe where she's dialing out the espresso, a customer offhandedly quips about work and busyness, and Erin replies something inconsequential about how the day is going, as one does, and then mentions that she's an aspiring photographer using the barrista gig to support the picture-making.

Erin writes:

We continued and he asks if I saw his collection of photos at ICP's museum recently. I say, "Oh! You're a photographer?" He says, "No, I'm a collector!" I say, "Wow, cool! Want to see my portfolio?" Haha. And so he looked at my photos and started to say, "Oh, these are pretty, but you've got to find a new way to depict the flowers since so many photographers shoot them." Valid point. Then I had to deal with tables, came back to this man (who was very genuinely evaluating my photos), and he says, "Actually, I completely retract what I just said! You do see things in a new way, you have an incredible eye...." He just went on. And then he asked for my card. !!!!

Fantastic. Who knows where the story goes from here. But one thing is absolutely for sure — if the work hadn't been there, the conversation wouldn't have even gotten started.

Here's the thing: you've already got so much time and money into this (cameras, lenses, computers, and the hours upon hours shooting and printing), let's jump to the next step: put the pictures in a binder or a box or make an iPhoto book (or any POD book for that matter), and keep them with you.

Start a conversation; you've got something to show.

Take Back the Street Picture: NYSAT

2009-05-18T18:32:00.015-04:00

Photographs © NYSAT-Municipal Landscape Control Committee

Pictures are part of our modern landscape, and help create it, too. New York City tourists know they're here because their experience matches their image of it — an image formed often and substantially by pictures.

Paraphrasing Sontag: our streets are thickened by billboards, animated signs, and advertisements adhered to every surface, an irresistible mental pollution to which we are addicted, and we crowd along the avenues in an image-addled stupor, feeling that our citizenship is more stable than it is.

So...wow, that feels kind of negative.

But as you've heard me say in class, the best way to recognize their influence on us is to imagine a day without them, entirely off the grid, no pictures of any kind. I know this strikes a nerve somehow because I see you smile as I say it.

My friend Jordan knows the power of pictures, especially the advertising pictures that assault us on the sidewalk. His epic struggle against the visual cacophony spools out at Public Ad Campaign, where he links to the marketing industry's brazen encroachment into the public sphere. His latest effort, the New York Street Advertising Takeover, was an equally brazen counter-offensive designed to (temporarily) take it back.

Jordan writes:

On April 25th approximately 30 participants whitewashed nearly 120 street-level billboards in broad daylight between the hours of 10:30am and 2:00pm.

At approximately 3:00pm nearly 50 artists and public individuals came back and used those blank canvases for the production of public messages instead of corporate messages.

Here's a video to plug you in:

Check the flickr page to see a couple hundred stills of the magnificent results.

2a, originally uploaded by NYSAT-Municipal Landscape Control Committee.

Outrageous! Hugely successful! Not that many arrests!

But equally outrageous is that every one of the billboards that were whitewashed were illegal, or at least, not permitted by New York City. What?!

This map shows illegal/unpermitted NPA City Outdoor locations located in Lower Manhattan. All the ads together cover approximately 29,450 square feet of our public environment.

A full report with pictures and videos is posted on an interactive Google map available here.

Here's what I love about this project: an ad-hoc community of civic saviors steps up with old-fashioned paint buckets and rollers to shut down an out-of-control brat who's been pissing on our sidewalk for far too long. The technology of the offense is backed by corporate money that sees our streets as open range, free and clear for harvesting. But the technology of the defense - elbow grease and the modern tools of citizen participation, spurred on by some amazing organizational gumption - can match it. And for at least a few hours — i.e., until NPA/City Outdoor Advertising could regroup and put their ads back up — a bit of visual sobriety returned.

Here's something else that makes me hopeful: Jordan is a young guy with an old sense of responsibility. As an artist living an aesthetics of connection (something I want in my own life), he's idealistic in an age that sees idealism as inefficient or, worse, irrelevant. But maybe not - perhaps we're turning a corner on this idea.

On his mission:

Public Ad Campaign acts on the assumption that public space and the public's interaction with that space is a vital component of our city's health. By visually altering and physically interacting with the public environment, residents become psychologically invested in their community.

Outdoor advertising is the primary obstacle to open public communications. By commodifying public space, outdoor advertising has monopolized the surfaces that shape our shared space. Private property laws protect the communications made by outdoor advertising while systematically preventing public usage of that space.

On the NYSAT project, I asked him about the logistics. He told me he used a rented Zip car to scout every block of Manhattan south of 30th street:

I approximated the size of each billboard because the posters they use are standardized in size. If I count 10 posters wide, the billboard is 20 ft wide. By doing this I could calculate the square footage — which was necessary because I had to have each whitewash team use a single 5 gallon bucket of paint. I wanted them to cover as much ad-space as possible without running out of paint, and not have much leftover. Since I knew the sizes of the ads and knew the bucket covered 1500 sq feet, I was able to break the map (of lower Manhattan) into 13 equal chunks (for 13 whitewash teams).

The ads are illegal because they are un-permited. Out-door advertising must get permits through the city. This company never bothered and no one paid attention. It was a loophole. They would tell you they are legal, but the DOB would tell you they are illegal. I was hoping we would talk about it in court, but they didn't want to, for obvious reasons.

When Jordan got in touch with me in March about NYSAT, I put some students in contact with him, but didn't act on it myself. Big mistake. I missed a monumental opportunity to engage something dear to me, namely, the visual health of the culture. This weekend he wrote again (with a link to the interactive Google map - awesome in itself), and I'm smiling like crazy.

C'mon photographers, and picture-makers of every kind, we've got to take what we do more seriously - it isn't just screwing around, even if it is a good time.

IMG_1208, originally uploaded by NYSAT-Municipal Landscape Control Committee.

Connecting the Learning Process

2009-05-14T08:06:00.024-04:00

photo by Becky Olstad

We're zooming through another session of intro and intermediate photography at the ICP and the avalanche of worry and frustration is beginning to feel overwhelming.

Apertures, shutter speeds, focus modes, flash ratios, bias controls, clipping indicators, framing options, not to mention working with the scene, feet on the ground, paying attention to light, texture, detail -- and how about actually talking to your subjects? Forgetaboutit. Lightroom? Photoshop? Printing? C'mon....

What are we learning when we learn photography? Let's back it up a bit and take a breath.

photo by Colleen Mullins

I recently reconnected with a friend from a previous orbit whom I haven't seen in a long time. Colleen Mullins directs the photography program at Art Institutes International Minnesota and we caught up with each other at the Photolucida reviews last month. Her story inspires me to keep inventing the process, to keep challenging the norms. At root she wants to inspire her students to think of photography as a way to engage deeply with a way of living, and she's invented a course to get the point across, The New Orleans Travel and Study Program, and co-teaches it with photo-journalist and fellow educator Becky Olstad.

In this course students study documentary tradition, the humanistic ideals, as well as sociological research methods that underlie the process of learning about something outside your own direct experience. Then, as part of the required course material, everyone goes to New Orleans together to explore and connect and make pictures. The photographs and stories that come from the experience are then available to news organizations and non-profits that need material to help them stay connected to their communities, to help us all keep connected to the continuing story of New Orleans post-Katrina. She's even prodding her students to get involved in the distribution mechanics by requiring them to maintain a website for licensing and tracking usage of their work: Nolastock.(Awesome site design by Chris Tetreault, Ai graduate of March 2009, by the way!)

Here's why I'm inspired: in addition to showing you about the apparatus and the tools and the history of the medium, Colleen and Becky wrap you in a particular way of engaging with a social context that is much larger. Their course teaches you how to learn about a community that is different from your own, and about how to document and share the experience, how to reflect on the expectations you had going into it, how to dig deeper and find the possibility of common ground, and how to construct a practice of doing all this in a sustainable way that can support the community itself.

photo by Ashley Miller

That is, in distinction from our fast-culture with quick expectations of fast-results, Colleen and Becky are modeling a way to make slower pictures that might become life-connections. In the process, they're visualizing a practice that digs into the foundations of concerned photography (think Eugene Smith's essay in Life about Maud Callan, for example, or his Minamata essay).

Okay, maybe I'm susceptible to a bleary nostalgia for an overly romanticized age. But sometimes I think that contemporary photojournalism and documentary practice is too much about parachuting into the crisis zone of the moment, collecting an assignment fee while making a bunch of fancy pictures that can be repurposed to the gallery world, and then scurrying away before actually touching the heart of the matter.

That is, not to get too cynical here — I know most of us, in our hearts, really do want to help change things for the better —I think it's partly about that.

But what intrigues me about Colleen and Becky's work is that they're searching for a way to use contemporary technology within the context of our particular culture to create a practice that is sustainable and connected to an idea of community; they're modeling that practice for students; and — perhaps most importantly — Colleen has somehow persuaded her institution to support the effort.

Back to my original question: what are we learning when we learn photography?

For me it keeps coming back to connecting and engaging with your life and with your community. There are a million ways to do this. And the opportunity for an expanded documentary practice (or social, humanistic, concerned documentary practice), might be one of the carrots that gets you up and going each morning — and it gets easier as you keep going. Yes, frankly, the start-up can be overwhelming because there's so much to learn about so many different things. All I can say is: you gotta keep going. Keep taking pictures; keep putting them on your computer, your blog, your flickr; and keep the conversation going. You can and will get over this initially vertical learning curve.

photo by Becky Olstad

I've written before on this blog about new forms of documentary practice (SalaamGarage) and about an artist extending the idea of committed participation in his long-term historical performance project (Hiroshi Sunairi's Tree Project). Both of these projects inspire me and might help you get through rough patches in the learning process.

For background on the idea "concerned photographer" see this bit about Cornell Capa, who coined the phrase and founded the ICP. In 2006 the Art Institute of Chicago presented the exhibit The Concerned Photographer and this page that links to organizations engaged in social change. The Aperture Foundation frequently highlights documentary practice in its books and exhibits, and there are hundreds of other links to explore if you google phrases like "humanistic photography" and "social documentary."

For a deeply engaging investigation of the documentary impulse and its cultural and moral implications, read Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others (review). And any fully nuanced discussion of this topic can't but help refer to Sontag's observations in On Photography — which, if you haven't yet read it, is one of the best ways I know to clear your mind of the clouds and cobwebs brought on by too much worrying about apertures and shutter speeds. (For an intriguing review from when that book was first published, check here.)

Highway rain No. 9

2009-05-04T20:29:00.007-04:00

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.

Aesthetics and its discontents

2009-05-02T10:33:00.004-04:00

This week in class we mulled over aesthetics. I don't like that word. Actually, I like the way it looks, especially the freaky kerning of the 'a' and the 'e' in some fonts. And I like the way it flutters from my mouth and ends in a crunch. But I definitely don't like the modern connotations of rules and judgment that crowd along beneath the surface every time we use it. I also don't like the way it's become a cliche for saying nothing at all when we talk about pictures.

Here's how it rolls for me, but we have to rewind a bit to get there:

As a concept with deep roots the word 'aesthetics' can be anchored in the Greek to mean 'perception.' But beginning a few hundred years ago and stretching to today it's evolved to stand at the apex of an entire system of thought that strives to separate what we do from who we are, how we make meaning from how we live meaningfully, and (most notoriously, to my mind), who can access the beautiful from those who dissect the desire for beauty.

It rankles me in several ways, and throws me into dizzy tangents, when what I really want to focus on is the picture-making process. In class and afterward my goal in bringing up the word itself is to neutralize and reinvigorate the concept of meaning based on perception, especially as it pertains to the apparatus of the camera and our contemporary drive for camera-pictures.

Feel the frame. This is the short-hand slang we use on set and with each other. If you point your camera at a chicken I will probably see a chicken. Same with your daughter's birthday cake. But when I want to unravel the subtler spaces between thought and action, between my experience and your connection with it, what should I do?

The difference between prescription and description is the difference between childhood and adulthood, between sixth grade and graduate school, and between what you thought you wanted to learn when you started this class and what I want to coax you toward. In other words, I'm not going to tell you what to do. I'm not going to give you rules of composition (another word I don't like: not even how it sounds).

Instead this week I tried to unfold some principles like balance, symmetry, and flow, and to suggest a starting point around visual dynamics and stasis. My hope is that this stream of thought will lead to exploration, experimentation, and play; and a rich conversation about meaning. If we can be patient and let ourselves learn from each other, that is.

For me, photography matters because pictures rooted in perception can sometimes activate feeling, which leads to experience and, ultimately, to meaning. This is what I want to show you.

If the ideas in this ramble tweak your interest, you might be game for Larry Shiner's most excellent The Invention of Art. If you're not an art history buff (and even if you are!) look instead to Zoe Strauss and her pictures that scrape beauty from the raw experience of walking across the face of the planet.

Feel the frame, Luke.

Sharing at Photolucida

2009-04-28T22:31:00.017-04:00

Almost three weeks without writing here....April has been the cruelest month. But with reasons enough for two months.

The picture below was taken last week at the public portfolio walk duringPhotolucida Festival, a four day extravaganza of portfolio sharing and networking that happens every other year in Portland, Oregon. For the past month I've been cloistered in my studio printing the portfolio I showed there. Then, for the past week, I was cloistered at the Benson Hotel in Portland with appointments all day and night with curators and gallerists and photographers, discussing and sharing pictures.

Exhilarating. Exhausting. A marathon of photography intensity. But now it's back to regular life, which means that there's less time to look at and talk about photographs, and that the focused drive that took us there in first place has to get in line again behind doing the dishes, helping the kids with homework, and preparing for teaching class (or for whatever day-job supports your work in photography).

Photolucida is an organization that supports photographers in many different ways. It's based in Portland, Oregon but has an international scope. The Photolucida Review is a four-day portfolio sharing event where photographers show their pictures to professionals in the field—curators, critics, gallerists, writers, and other photographers. It's part of the Festival of Light, a global organization that supports large, international events of this type. But there are many other (shorter) review events that happen on local and regional levels throughout the year. As you progress in taking and printing your photographs, and as you learn to understand your motivations and intentions, you might consider setting this goal for yourself—dedicate your energies to polishing a cohesive body of work and sign up for a one day (or one morning) review. The conversation and feedback you get will charge and challenge you, perhaps pushing you into an orbit that you never expected.

The first picture above was taken at an impromptu moment of portfolio sharing with Matthew Baum in the lobby of the Benson Hotel. As Matt opened his portfolio case we both noticed the sparkling sun-medallions refracting through the huge cut glass window panes behind us, and took a second to enjoy the spectacle before beginning to look at his photographs. The dancing sunspots reminded me immediately of the work of one of my favorite photographic influences, Abelardo Morrell, whom (in one of those magical synchronicities that these events can precipitate), I'd been able to meet and speak with just met a day earlier.

Rolling with the Rules

2009-04-06T07:21:00.004-04:00

At the ICP we roll on 10-week sessions, and the winter session has just ended. Which means we can catch our breath for a few days before the spring session begins.

In the photo one and two courses, as usual, the wave will swell fast and then spread out over the duration of the term, because there's so much to learn, so fast, at the start. And then once you've crested the top the challenge becomes just holding your balance and continuing to take pictures. In the full-time graduate programs, however, we've been working straight since September (or earlier) so the challenge is different. At this point the conversation is shifting to focus on what comes next, how to start a career in photography.

...how to start a career in photography.

That wave is so huge it makes me shudder. When we look at it I almost have to laugh because I have no idea what to say. Even spelling it out like this -- how to start a career in photography -- seems absurd, makes it overly simple and too doable. The fact is that there's no such thing as a career in photography, at least, not as that word is generally applied to other professions, like doctors or lawyers or bankers. There's a life in photography, certainly, but there really aren't any solid pathways that lead to it. Rather, it's something you have to make up as you go, inventing it and evolving it day by day and year by year. There just aren't any universal rules that will tell you how to roll.

That's not to say, however, that there aren't any rules at all. In fact, if anything, there are too many rules. And each nook and cranny within the universe of photographic practice has it's own local variations on those rules.

Now that you've learned the technology of photography, and something about the history and theory behind your practice, and now that you've built a foundation with your own pictures -- now's the time to start learning the rules that underlie your future as a photographer.

There are resources to get you started. If you're reading this blog you've already tapped into one of today's most powerful conduits for this type of information. My blog roll to the left lists some places to start, especially Mary Virginia Swanson's and Rob Haggert's blogs -- these are two of my favorites for keeping up with the conversation around the essential building blocks of career building, but there are hundreds of other blog resources where working photographers share insights about how their careers have evolved.

Additionally, join your local chapters of the national advocacy groups ASMP and APA: go to their meetings to get your conversation started. Then check in with your local nonprofits and support them, get on their mailings lists, enter their exhibits, go to their workshops -- every city has them! (If you're in the NYC tri-state area, of course, you're lucky in that regard because we have so many entry points to the conversation -- some of my favorites are En Foco, the Camera Club of New York, and, of course, the ICP.)

As well, on the national scene, I strongly suggest dropping in on the annual PhotoPlus seminars in NYC (every October), where you can pick up advice from people working in fields as diverse as editorial journalism, commercial advertising, fine art exhibiting and stock photography.

The point of all this talk, now, is to get you started thinking and acting on what you're going to do next. There aren't any sure-fire ways to make a life in photography, or to make a living by making photographs. But there are guides and resources. One thing you'll hear over and over, though, is that the work of building the photo-life is never finished -- this thing we do changes all the time, and our position relative to its moving wave changes too. I feel incredibly fortunate to have surfed it this long, but I know that what I've done up to now doesn't mean I'll make it through the coming swells. We're all rolling with it together, maybe on different parts of the wave, but definitely in it together.

Note to all: I'd love to hear about your favorite resources for career building in photography.

Stop Reading This and Back-up Your Photographs.

2009-03-23T22:16:00.004-04:00

Stop and back-up. Please. Right now, ask yourself: when was the last time I made a back-up of my photographs?

Every term, unfortunately, somebody loses a hard drive. This term it's happened twice. No matter how many times I make a scene, wave my arms, jump up and down, beg and plead, yell like a crazy person, nobody takes me seriously until it happens. And then it's too late, at least for somebody.

What do I have to do to make you take this seriously? Your hard drive is going to fail. Guaranteed. Hard drives fail. That's what they do. Hard drives do not keep working. They stop working.

My friend Tony thinks we should make movies of when it happens: the disbelief, the shock, the tears...and post them on Youtube. All those pictures of birthday parties, kids growing up, parents, friends, neighbors....all gone. Maybe it would help. I don't know.

I work with between 30 and 60 students each term, and the average lately has been one hard drive failure per term. The reasons vary but the devastation is the same. As you know if you've worked with me, my rule of thumb is three copies of anything that's important, in separate locations.

At the start of each term we talk about archiving, copying, multiple hard drives, and about not keeping photographs on the internal start-up drive. I feel like I talk about this too much, like a broken record. But as it turns out, this aspect of the process is the least figured-out of all, and the most difficult to teach.

Learning photography in the digital age is much the same as learning photography in earlier ages: the critical skills of seeing and thinking with cameras and lenses, the framing, lighting, exposing, the juggling of technology, logistics, environment and subjects, and then following through with the picture-making itself — all that is the same, pretty much.

But the organization and back-end technical know-how is different, especially in terms of what happens after the shoot. That's where computer skills become essential, and that's where the system breaks down. The only way around this pit fall is to dive into the process and start learning as much as you can about your computer system.

But before you do anything else, back-up your photographs on a second drive and put it someplace safe. It doesn't have to be overly difficult. At it's simplest, just buy another hard drive and copy your photos to it. Done.

For more on generic back-up procedures:
Bits from Bill
Tech Soup: Backing up your data
Digital Trends Reviews (10 Best Ways to Backup Data)

Here are some further resources on computers (specifically Macs) that might help you get up to speed:
Tekserve (Apple service and sales, and seminars, ideas, helpful in person too)
ScreenCasts (a subscription service with lots of online tutorials about Mac use)
MacFixIt (trouble shooting for Mac)
TUAW (Unofficial Apple weblog)

Thanks to Antonio Rosario for these Mac sites. If anyone has further suggestions on sources please send them along.

Anxiety and Success

2009-03-17T21:44:00.006-04:00

Today my thoughts are trending toward success and what it means to make photographs that matter.

I'm happy to say that another draft of the China book has been completed (the one I wrote about earlier). In this version, responding to ample criticism, I've opened up the pages and included more white space, more room for breathing. I'm hopeful that this project is getting closer to finished—because there's so much other work I want to do—but the process is long, and I can't put it down until it feels like it has the right weight.

Zoe Strauss wrote recently about the anxiety she feels when nearing the end stage of a project, in this case her annual and massive I-95 exhibition in Philadelphia. Her words resonate with me:

I am confident in myself, in my work, but I am occasionally beset with anxiety surrounding my work.

She makes photos that matter, and if she feels this way then I'm having trouble breathing!

My friend Allison is giving awards randomly for stuff she likes. Love it. There are days when an award feels pretty nice.

So, step up and pat yourself on the back, if that's what it takes. We owe it to each other to keep going. Keep making pictures, telling stories, connecting, engaging, making the world. We're in it together and it matters. It does.

The Gears of the Machine: Exposure and Histogram

2009-03-16T13:24:00.013-04:00

This weekend several students wrote to ask why their pictures are so dark.

Right on time! This is the point in the term when that question always surfaces. As soon as we start printing in earnest, the abstraction of camera exposure takes on a newly practical necessity. It seems that no matter how shutter speeds and f-stops are explained, the need for a correctly balanced exposure suddenly becomes urgent once the picture becomes physical as a paper object.

These days I'm primarily teaching with digital cameras, but the dynamic is similar when teaching film photography. Whether in a darkroom or in a computer lab, it's not until you give up trying to print an underexposed frame that you return to the basics of proper exposure. The tools different, of course, but in this basic fundamental they are remarkably similar: exposure is key, and underexposure is deadly.

Drilling yourself in the basics of exposure is a good way to start understanding the tools of photography. Whether you're using or film or a digital chip, there's just no substitute for memorizing the specifics of your equipment—i.e., the progression of shutter speeds and f-stops. Neither are there any sure-fire ways to leap-frog the learning curve as to how different environments require different exposure adjustments, except for experimenting and paying attention to the results. But, with digital cameras, we do at least have some in-camera exposure assistance that can help shorten the feedback loop: the histogram.

What is a histogram: The histogram is a graphic display of the brightness in your picture. The right side shows the bright pixels; the left side shows the shadows. The relative amount of pixels at any given brightness level is shown by the height of the stack, or mountain. In fact, I look at the histogram as a topographic map: how high are the mountains of bright pixels? How high are the mountains of dark pixels? Each histogram will be different because each picture is different.

How is the histogram created: Camera exposure determines the distribution of the mountains inside the histogram. The more light you give the chip, the more bright-side pixels you're going to see. The less light, the more dark-side pixels. But there is no "perfect" or "standard" histogram; the goal is to capture the correct amount of light for the picture you want to make.

How can the histogram be a guide to proper exposure: After you have taken a photograph, look at the histogram on the camera. Divide the histogram roughly in half. Compare the different mountains of pixels. Ask yourself: are there more bright pixels, or more dark pixels? Then ask yourself: is this a dark picture, or, is this a bright picture?

Next, look at the picture itself. Now ask yourself, does this picture "want" to be bright or dark? If your minds-eye sees a bright picture, but the histogram shows a majority of dark-side pixels, then you've got a problem: your photo is underexposed. Adjust the exposure and take the picture again.

So here's an example: after snapping this picture of the sail and sky (last summer!), I quickly looked at the histogram.

Noticing that the mountains of dark and bright pixels feel roughly similar to each other, I determined that the photo was roughly gray, overall. But in my mind, the picture should be bright! White sail, white clouds: my exposure must be wrong. I increased my exposure (by slowing the shutter or opening up the f-stop), and snapped the picture again.

The new exposure and its corresponding histogram (notice that the mountains of pixels have shifted to the right in the graph, indicating that the balance of shadow to highlight has changed):

With practice and patience you'll learn to evaluate the histogram in a matter of seconds. Until then, I recommend that you slow down your process and study the histogram carefully, asking yourself these simple questions: is the histogram weighted to the dark or bright side? Is the picture itself a dark or bright picture?

When you're comfortable with evaluating the histogram based on this rough division into two halves, then begin to distinguish finer divisions. Ask yourself about the deep shadows, mid-shadows, mid-brights, and bright highlights, and whether or not they roughly correspond to the picture in your minds-eye. There isn't any way to precisely correlate these different areas of the histogram with the actual picture on the camera display, but with practice you'll start to distinguish the broad tonal areas that correspond to deep shadows and bright highlights.

But what about the camera-back display screen? Don't be fooled! It's impossible to judge exposure based solely on the display screen on the back of the camera. Not only is the display not accurate, but—especially when shooting outside in bright light—it's very difficult to evaluate the range of highlights and shadows correctly. In fact, the only truly accurate way to judge exposure is by using the histogram.

Note: to use the histogram you must first learn how to view it on the back of your camera. All dSLRs and most snapshot point-and-shoot cameras will show the histogram, but each camera differs slightly in the way it is displayed. In my experience, on most cameras, the histogram can be viewed by cycling through the display menu on the back of the camera. Sometimes the histogram is shown as an overlay on top of the picture; sometimes it's shown to the side of the picture. Bottom-line: figure out from your camera manual how to view the histogram.

The follow up to this discussion of histograms and camera exposure is about how the histogram helps get a better print. And the answer is roughly the same—it begins with properly evaluating the highlights and shadows in your picture. On the computer, though, instead of changing camera exposure, the next step is to use the software tools to adjust the histogram so that the distribution of pixels approximates the brightness that your mind's-eye is seeing.

But remember, whether you're using Lightroom, Aperture, Adobe Camera Raw, iPhoto, or any of the multitude of other software options, saturated prints with bright highlights and deep shadows require that your initial camera exposure be as close to perfect as you can make it.

Roots of the Process

2009-03-13T07:40:00.005-04:00

Some interesting conversations evolved and continued this week. First, a student wrote to ask for clarification of a comment I made in class:

...but I was thinking about what you said last week in terms of not caring less if people like your pictures and that all that was important to you was to communicate something. Did I get that right? Can you explain that a bit more for me?

I responded that, yes, more important than whether or not someone personally “likes” any particular picture, is creating a photograph that communicates something that matters, or leaves a record, or visualizes a moment, or responds poetically to a frame of mind. I don’t know if it’s entirely possible to do this, however. But a good conversation about pictures can sometimes illuminate a path toward accomplishing that goal, as long as we don't get stuck on simplistic responses such as "I like it," or "I think it works."

Second, I was asked what I would do if given the chance to develop a brand-new college-level photography program. The question was posed in seriousness and a thoughtful response was expected (I wasn't playing one of those what-would-you-do-with-a-million-dollars games of twenty questions), because I was interviewing for a faculty position at a college here in New York.

After catching my breath, because I didn't expect such an foundational question, I realized that my answer would have to dovetail with what I'd written to my student earlier.

Basically, as you know if we've worked together (or if you've been reading this journal), for me, photography and picture-making is about responding and engaging with the world, our world, and about making that world anew in the process.

Teaching photography has to be about enabling you to participate in this activity in its entirety.

I see it as a call-and-response loop: make a picture, think about it, talk about it, make another picture. And so on. Photographic technology - cameras, lenses, computers, darkrooms - must be a secondary consideration.

That is, the goal is response-ability (getting you engaged in the process so that you can respond with photographs), so the course of action must be organized around that fundamental. Today we have picture-making devices everywhere, a true embarrassment of riches, but the photographic system only starts to function properly if the feedback-loop is taken seriously, nurtured over time, and allowed to take root.

So, in the interview, after collecting my thoughts for a split-second, I responded with something to the effect of wanting to build a photography program around the goal of in-depth engagement with process and pictures, and allowing decisions about technology and facilities to fall into place around that goal. But I'm pretty sure my words were garbled and my thoughts seemed scattered! Ha! That's the way a real conversation goes a lot of the time, which is totally cool—I just wish it hadn't happened in the middle of a job interview!

Anyway, as you know, there are many aspects to learning how to be a photographer—skills, tools, processes, etc.—but too often I find that the relationship between conversation about pictures and the actual creation of new pictures is sometimes overlooked or not even investigated. From my experience and practice of teaching photography, my take on it is that no matter which specific tools and technology you're using, you'll become a better photographer by participating more fully in the conversation.

Catching our breath together

2009-03-11T06:40:00.008-04:00

Hiroshi Sunari is giving trees to friends and artists who can engage a dream. About LEUR L'EXISTENCE * Tree Project, he says,

The trees that still live from the time of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima are called, Hibaku trees (A-bombed trees).

In 2009, tree doctor Riki Horiguchi gave me about 250-500 seeds of Round Leaf Holly, Persimmon, Chinaberry, Firmiana simplex, Japanese Hackberry, Jujube—trees that are the second or third generation of Hibaku Trees.

I am going to give these seeds to people who are interested in planting them. These seedlings will be exhibited at The Horticultural Society of New York in Dec 2009.

I'm amazed and comforted by Hiroshi's project. The idea is inspiring, literally, breath-giving. The spirit and the invitation are gently engaging, compelling, activating. The photographs are quiet, transparent, and honest.

When I say that photography is a conversation, a way of knowing, a way of paying attention, I'm talking about Hiroshi's project. Like the newly spreading green of small leaves on these seedlings, his pictures unfold generosity, and strength, and hope.

Walking in 2009

2009-03-07T12:04:00.003-05:00

I am walking with my son on a warm day in winter. The road is quiet, the park is closed to vehicles, and bicyclists, bladers, and runners pass occasionally on either side of us. The sun glistening from the asphalt makes the world seem wet. Something is in my eye. My son walks beyond. Looking up I realize he doesn't know I've stopped. I call to him and he turns to me.

On the road to find out

2009-03-05T09:11:00.004-05:00

Yesterday at ICP Bradly Treadaway and I talked about how we could improve our teaching. One of the topics we touched on was the idea of substance, specifically technology training, and we asked ourselves what should be included in our curriculum, and what might be unnecessarily clouding the issues.

This morning I answered emails from more students wondering about classes for next term - what they should take in order to keep advancing towards becoming a photographer - and caught up on some photo blogs. One thread in particular, from APL, has caught my attention lately: it started when Haggart posted an email he'd received from a photo-school graduate who was having difficulty "making it" in the photo world. Nearly 200 replies later (I added my own thoughts today, in fact), the conversation is going strong. It's totally engaging, if you're interested in the business of photography and the education of photographers, and has touched on many of the concerns I hear expressed in the classroom - namely, what do I have to do in order to work successfully in photography? If that question resonates with you, I strongly recommend browsing that thread.

Additionally, and you've heard me say this in class, the most important thing you can do to become more of the photographer you want to be is to keep taking pictures. That sounds insane! Of course! It's so obvious! But again and again I find that photographers, and especially people learning photography, forget this basic part of the process.

Learn photography by doing it. No matter what else is happening in the classroom, technology, aesthetics, history, business practices - whatever! - your picture-engine only starts when you're actually making pictures. In other words, "but I don't know what to photograph," or, "but I'm not inspired," or, "but nothing was interesting today," - or whatever you hear yourself saying when you rationalize why you didn't make any pictures today - this is the major stumbling block and the thing that takes the most effort to overcome. If you're not progressing in your photography, it's not because of business being down or the computer making you crazy, or because of any of the other million little things that rise up to block you: it's simply that you don't have the camera in your hands.

Here's something I learned when I was teaching introductory photojournalism and writing in the 1980s: when students reply to the prompt "write about something that happened today" with "but I don't know what to write about," request that they put their pen to the paper (or their hands to the keyboard) and begin writing the phrase "I don't know what to write." Sounds insane, yes? But amazingly, nobody can write that phrase more than a few times without kick-starting their brain into a more interesting cycle, which then becomes the subject of their writing. Writing becomes writing. The activity, the behavior, the process - becomes the content, the reason to engage.

Yes, you see where I'm going with this. Step away from the computer and pick up your camera and start making pictures. In a matter of seconds you'll forget that you don't have anything to photograph, because you'll be photographing. And you'll find yourself on the road to photography.

Drawing on Writing

2009-03-02T07:38:00.005-05:00

Wandering through the stacks at the Brooklyn Library the other week I happened on Arthur Danto's 1994 book, Embodied Meanings, a collection of his art criticism from The Nation.

As you know, I'm drawn to thinking about how and why pictures matter. I remember feeling intrigued by the title, but I don't exactly remember why I decided to check the book out--maybe there was an essay about some work from the 1980s that caught my attention. In any case, what sticks with me now, weeks after returning it to the library, is Danto's Introduction.

In fact, Danto's description of himself as a writer, his background, his intentions and process, his accidental beginning as an art critic, and his candid appraisal of how we come to understand the place and importance of pictures in the first place -- an art-critic's self-criticism -- was so illuminating, so engaging and revealing, that I think it's a must-read in itself.

He writes:

Let me say in conclusion that I get a lot more out of art, now that I am writing about it, than I ever did before. I think what is true of me must be true of everyone, that until one tries to write about it, the work of art remains a sort of aesthetic blur. Once, in the years when I was an artist, I evolved what I called a technique of analytical sightseeing, which meant drawing the sites I visited, seeing how they held together. Drawing a baroque church is far more elucidative than simply staring at it. The same is true about writing. I think in a way everyone might benefit from becoming a critic in his or her own right. After seeing the work, write about it.

This resonates deeply for me. Bringing an experience into my body through the process of writing about it solidifies the experience itself, makes it real, and creates a touchstone for feeling and thinking.

Something similar happens when I make photographs. Further, writing about photographs enhances my understanding of what draws me to photography in the first place.

But I don't draw much, though maybe I should. Something about the process of drawing, the act itself, the hand-brain connection...and here my thoughts are fuzzy. I'm remembering something I read recently that might relate, perhaps tangentially, but can't put my finger on it exactly—I'll have to get back to this...

But here's another thought, drawing from Danto: analytical photo-seeing, that is, drawing the photographs that catch our attention.

I'm always on the look-out for ways to illuminate the process, both technical and emotional, that leads to photographs that matter, that touch us. Teaching photography means I keep learning about it. Danto reminds me that drawing belongs in that conversation too.

Watching you from here

2009-02-23T07:15:00.007-05:00

My friend Maggie wrote to continue a conversation we'd started in 2008. She's the production muscle behind an organization that enables photographers and writers to engage with world events—SalaamGarage. She writes:

SalaamGarage is an organization started by my friend photographer Amanda Koster. SalaamGarage leads trips around the world that connect participants with international Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). Travelers commit to creating and sharing unique, independent media projects that raise awareness and cause positive change. The rest of the adventure is spent touring around the region, experiencing and exploring the culture and environment within an entirely new context.

Humanistic photography, the idea that a photograph can change the world, and that an impassioned observer can make a difference for the better, is one of the motivations that led me to become a photographer. The power of this idea runs deep in many of us, and yet few of us pursue it past an initial infatuation. Myself, for example: my early career as an editorial journalist segued into commercial magazine and advertising photography, and has evolved into teaching. And while teaching certainly rests on a bedrock of humanism, at least for me, it's not the same as digging into a story from outside yourself and bringing back pictures and words that compassionately unfold another person's experience. SalaamGarage holds out the hope that we might be able to dip ourselves back into the waters that nurtured our earliest fantasies about the power of this thing we call photography.

Coincidentally—in a rare convergence of the planets—my copy of Bookforum arrived on the same day as Maggie's email. My eyes were immediately drawn to the cover headline announcing William T Vollman's essay Seeing Eye to Eye, on the ethics of photography. Fresh from my meditation on whether or not I might scratch time out of my teaching to go with Maggie to India or Vietnam, I fell headlong into Vollman's exquisitely complex essay on Ariella Azoulay's The Civil Contract of Photography, in which he writes, "photography expresses and furthers the duty of all world citizens to help one another."

But can a picture really help? Really? This notion has been considered time and again, most famously perhaps by Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others, but no amount of theorizing can put the doubts, or the hopes, to rest. We want to believe that our sincerity can make a difference. Or at least, I do. But these are complex desires.

Vollman concludes his thoughts on Azoulay, and, by extension, his ruminations on the fundamental naivety that drives these desires:

I want to strive harder and more effectively to articulate the grievances I witness through my lens. The civil contract of photography may be, like the notion of human rights, a "necessary fiction," but for all that, it is noble, needful, and perhaps even practical, and I am grateful to Azoulay for expressing it.

The possibility and necessity of citizenship engages and troubles me. I want my work to matter. I want to participate in events that are larger than myself. Teaching you to engage with the tools and behaviors of photography is one way I'm doing that. But watching my sons enter the world has got me thinking that maybe I can do more. I have no idea what I'm talking about—I still have to pay the rent here in Brooklyn. But perhaps a burst of willful naivety, with a push from Maggie and SalaamGarage, can get me momentarily outside my own little orbit later this year.

I collected this picture by Benjie Sanders from the Arizona Daily Star in 1994 because I was flabbergast when it appeared: what a perfect way to illustrate the idea of participation and citizenship—a photograph of new Americans being photographed. Welcome to the world of photography, now you're part of it.

Possibility of Knowing

2009-02-21T16:48:00.005-05:00

Possibility of Knowing, originally uploaded by seanjustice.

My eye is drawn toward light. Knowledge pools briefly, spinning counter-clockwise. I am submerged. In the museum today I am wondering about the possibility of holding tightly, or of releasing. I should be answering emails but am drifting weightless through my time on earth.

These pictures are from the Brooklyn Museum. Unearthing the Truth: Eqypt's Pagan and Coptic Sculpture examines funerary motifs carved in stone as Egypt transitioned from Pagaism to Christianity to Islam between the 3rd and 6th Centuries. Revealing the uncertainty of the museological enterprise itself, the exhibition asks whether the artifacts in its own collection are real, or if they're 20th Century fakes.

Wandering home later, I'm wondering about the human enterprise of building knowledge, and about the desire to unearth certainty from facts in the ground. Crossing Prospect Park, watching kids on bicycles, I'm considering the possibility that transient affiliations—Pagan, Christian, Muslim—sometimes, briefly, become visible in stone.

Catching the light as it catches you

2009-02-19T07:39:00.003-05:00

Waiting for the start of the day on a recent shoot in Los Angeles, I watched the sun stream in.

Behind me were art directors, assistants, stylists, equipment guys unloading trucks, producers carrying coffee and coolers filled with water, and location managers making sure no one scratched anything.

In front of me was the empty reception counter and this orchid, and the reflecting sun.

During the shoot I never returned to this particular area, never made another photograph here, but this is the picture that sticks with me from the day.

One of the things that draws to me hardest to photography is this desire to pay attention to the light, to wake up to it, to notice it, and then to catch it as it catches me.

This race across the universe, this love dance with light rays, makes me feel alive.

Mission to Play

2009-02-17T08:11:00.006-05:00

I want to talk about play. Yesterday afternoon on our regular walk Diana and I passed the school yard at 321 where we used to spend warmer evenings with our sons. Today they're teenagers and play on their own, and we no longer while away hours watching them go up and down the slides.

Yesterday evening my younger son phoned from the subway platform to double-check his direction: "should I go toward Manhattan or Coney Island?" And feeling his dislocation in space brought me close to my dislocation in time. From the outer edge I'm watching him expand into wider circles of friends and confusion where I can't follow, but where I've been before.

The snow is gone today; it's bright and sunny and February-warm at 35 degrees. But I remember when we'd forge through white-out conditions, all booted and bundled, stiff with layers of thermal underwear, focused and intent on cutting the first sled-way on the big hill in the park. My friend Ed and I, grumpy about the stinging needles in our faces, would laugh begrudgingly and acknowledge that we should soak it up, enjoy the time now, because they wouldn't want us with them for all that much longer.

I hope my sons will continue to learn about play as a release from their work, their studies, their obligations. More, I hope they'll learn about play as a way of learning about life, both the hard and the easy. These days, for me, play is an unexpected moment to explore a frame of light falling on week-old roses, a conversation with my wife, a joke told by a neighbor, and the slightly woozy dizziness that comes with not knowing exactly what comes next.