considering pictures | sean justice > open journal

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

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:

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, se...

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.

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 sli...

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 ...

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.

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.

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 .

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.

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?

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, aperture...

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 wa...

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, conne...

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'...

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 terr...

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...

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. ...

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 a...