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,...

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.

  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?

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.

A former student wrote yesterday: "I am still struggling with critiquing my own work, just because nothing is ever really good enough, and I am still wondering as to what is a 'good image' that I took versus one that is not meaningful. With 'good', I mean: do my images ever really say anything or are they considered just snapshots of the moment? I am thoroughly confused..." This kind of confusion, it seems to me, is the point of learning photography. I usually begin a course with demonstrations and instruction in the basics of cameras and computer imaging. A short history of the camera and of photography follows immediately. And then the main point: long weeks of making pictures, showing them to each other, and talking about them. My hope is to shove the apparatus to the background and focus on the process of the making meaning, which emerges from the conversation. The camera and computer will become a massive distraction for the new photographer unless...