considering pictures | sean justice > open journal

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,...

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...

My cousin John and his wife Elisa went sightseeing and wine tasting in California over the holidays, and sent snapshots via Snapfish to keep us up to date. This is what we all do ~ connect with each other through pictures. Love it. Though it's more fun in person, I'm thrilled with the technology that lets us share the experience. Outside of the tech, or perhaps dovetailing with it, is the way the camera works in conjunction with our own bodies. I'm fascinated with the changing posture of photography. The earliest box cameras used by Victorian era shutter bugs to photograph their world (camera held waist level while the neck is craned downward to peer through a cloudy viewfinder) evolved into the Instamatic of last century (camera held up to the eye, neck and back straight), which has given way to today's snappy digitals with live preview, and cell phone cameras (camera held out at arms length or over the head, neck straight and head tilted up slightly to eye the screen ...

Today, in digital photography, an artifact is non-pictorial interuption of pictorial information. When we discuss cameras and scanners, digital processing, post-processing, reproduction, display, we talk about our ability to minimize the effects of that technology, the apparatus itself, to make it disappear. In class, teaching digital photography, I define pixelization, banding, jpg jaggies, and noise, and then demonstrate how to remove these undesirable (non-pictorial) elements from the picture. These visual boogeymen, these artifacts, remind us of the interface, the intermediate device, the camera, the computer. And we don't want to remember. At the Roosevelt birthplace in Manhattan I joined a tour to explore the reconstructed Victorian brownstone that was created to remind us of the age that gave rise to the 26th American president. A decade or so after his death, in 1919, TDR's wife and family petitioned the US government to establish this memorial in the exact spot ...