considering pictures | sean justice > open journal

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 quest...

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.

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.

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...

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...

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'...

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.