considering pictures | sean justice > open journal

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...

The past month feels like a blur. Moving from Brooklyn to Staten Island erased a week, and teaching daily from 9 to 6 obliterated a couple more. Then six days in Maine, totally off the grid, removed me from the known world entirely. Today I'm working my way back onto the map. Last week on the way to Maine with my sons I stopped at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. In the several years since I last visited the place has expanded and modernized, adding state of the art galleries and completing the installation of the Yin Yu Tang house, a merchant's family home from Southeast China that has been transported to Salem and reassembled brick by brick. By itself the Yin Yu Tang is worth a visit to Salem. Walking through the courtyard put me back in China, directly. It's an amazing achievement and feels like a significant cross-cultural collaboration. The more immediate motivation for my our visit to PEM, however, was to see the work of my friend Joni Sternbach . H...

Magda wrote to say that she's finally gotten a new computer, an updated copy of Lightroom, and a new lease on her photo life. I'm thrilled that she's thrilled, and can't wait to see the pictures. But what moves me to mention it is her reminder of some advice I gave last term: to take a class on the view camera. I try to help folks figure out what's next on their individual journey toward becoming more of the photographer they already are. In Magda's case it appeared that she was using her dSLR as if it wanted to be a slower, more ponderous machine. So I suggested she explore the view camera. With its bellows and tilt-swing focus plane, single sheet film loader, manual shutter, tripod, cable release, various other paraphernalia, I can imagine that the ground glass magic of a 4x5 would activate a useful cascade for her. For all of us, learning to operate the gears and knobs of a large format camera opens the factory doors to reveal the engine that makes photograph...