considering pictures | sean justice > open journal

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 deep...

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:

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...

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'...

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 stude...

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.

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...

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 ...

The power of the picture-maker that changes the world is that I can see again. Robert Ryman's work knocks me outside myself. Try it: sustain the focus to feel your neural patterns begin to resonate with a particular sympathy. Linger inside a poem and the rhythm of the subway molds towards that form. Stagger from the theatre and the street becomes a drama ripped from that stage. Dwell inside the painting and its warp will shape your walk in Florence, New York, Beijing. When the world refracts through another's words and pictures, at that moment, I know that I'm alive. This wild Ryman clarified me in Philadelphia while I was walking with Diana, talking about history, revolution, and neighborhood transitions. A recent short essay on Robert Ryman by Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker: Abstraction Problem .

pictures often sound for me. i hear the tone and contrast, the shape. sometimes i perform the score while teaching, playing pictures with gusto, with bravado. sometimes i don't. last sunday the BPL Chamber Players wowed us at the Brooklyn Central Library - part of their terrific series of afternoon music sessions: wonderfully soothing, invigorating. along with selections from Rossini and Dvorak, they gave us a composition from Corigliano, a contemporary, titled Snapshot Circa 1909, in which he interprets a photograph of his father at eight years old. in the snapshot there's a young boy standing in bright sun, a violin tucked into his chin. He's wearing a white shirt, black trousers narrowed at the ankles, his hair parted in the center, and next to him is a man, seated, in a black jacket and narrow necktie, with a large guitar in his lap. Corigliano writes that he mused about the thoughts and expectations of his young father as he prepared to play with his uncle on that su...