considering pictures | sean justice > open journal

We're done for summer. Time for a break. I'm headed to Toronto tomorrow with the family. Got to clear the storm in front of the maelstrom coming. So here's the thing -- can a photograph touch? Can you make a photograph that touches? What do you feel when you see wet paint? I've got to scrape my fingers across the surface to check it out. I know it's cliché. But...this simple sign makes me touch. Can a photograph feel that way? This is what we talked about this summer in the China workshop and in the two introductory photo workshops back here at ICP. And, seriously, this is what I'm talking about in class this fall...so, if you're working with me, get ready for that conversation. I don't know if it's possible, really, but I want pictures that make me fly. Ah. Naive. Yes.

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.

June 28, 2010 Wow — perhaps? — I can't believe there's a sprout already. But here it is. I'm skeptical, however. It might not be a gingko. What is it supposed to look like? Picture from the Ginkgo Bilboa Pages I've been searching. This looks about right! And yes, now I think I've confirmed it. Here's a shot from another participant in the Tree Project: Ya-wen Chang. Ya-wen's photo of the gingko sprout. From the Tree Project. The Gingko Pages has lots of info on how to grow gingko trees from seeds. I'm sorry to say that I didn't follow any of these recommended germination methods. Yikes. I just put the seeds in the ground. But it's been so hot here lately that maybe nature is just doing what it has to do. I'm holding my breath! Hiroshi ~~ I hope it's going to work this time! I love the Tree Project ! Julie Walton Shaver kept a blog about her try at gingko too, complete with great photos and step by step instructions. Her...

Walking with Connor. We get to the top of the hill. Saturday. At home on Staten Island. Last week we worked on technology and a lot of different names of stuff. This week we'll do it some more. As always, we'll keep looking at pictures. And as I've said and will say again: right now is not the hardest part. Right now the tech of this stuff feels difficult (there are so any different buttons!), and learning what everything is called takes a lot of time (and it's tough to ask a question if we don't speak the same language!)... ...but soon you'll have crested this learning curve (you'll have memorized the buttons and the names of things), and then the truly difficult part of being a photographer will begin. That's right -- you have to keep taking pictures. Sometimes you have to force yourself, in fact. Even if you're not "in the mood" or if "there's nothing to photograph at home"...take your camera with you and just keep...

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...

Where do ideas come from? This is the question that takes a lifetime. You know how to use the camera; you're learning the computer; and printing just takes time and practice (lots of practice). The hard stuff is more diffuse than that, more difficult to touch: where do you point your camera? what do you want me to see? what are you learning? Here's where we fight with each other. Some of my best friends and most valued colleagues believe it's impossible to teach artists to be artists, that you can't teach curiosity. I don't want to agree: if that's true, then what have I been doing all this time? The model I've proposed in the classroom is pretty simple: pay attention and respond. That's the core, I think. The essays and the photo prompts are all directed at it. So are the emails back-and-forth and the walking tours and the invitations to post on flickr. Then we close the loop with conversations about the pictures and about the process itself. At root is...

798 Factory Area, Beijing So we've gotten the ball rolling and bouncing in a dozen ways all at the same time. Classes at NYU, ICP and Parsons are flying now, full speed. Learning photography often seems to require that you know something while simultaneously already knowing something else, in order to learn some other fairly critical fundamental. I'm familiar with the way it begins to feel overwhelming; it seems to be part of the process, though that doesn't make it easier. But I'd like to focus back on something that precedes all of that, at least in my mind. Namely the question: what are we doing when we work in photography? That is, what is the work? And what are you trying to learn? After mulling it over for a while, and after watching a lot of people surf the learning curve, I want to suggest that the pictures you're making are NOT the work. Or, at least, the pictures are not the entirety of the work. Here's the thing, I can "teach" you how to use...

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'...

Yesterday at ICP Bradly Treadaway and I talked about how we could improve our teaching. One of the topics we touched on was the idea of substance, specifically technology training, and we asked ourselves what should be included in our curriculum, and what might be unnecessarily clouding the issues. This morning I answered emails from more students wondering about classes for next term - what they should take in order to keep advancing towards becoming a photographer - and caught up on some photo blogs. One thread in particular, from APL , has caught my attention lately: it started when Haggart posted an email he'd received from a photo-school graduate who was having difficulty "making it" in the photo world. Nearly 200 replies later (I added my own thoughts today, in fact), the conversation is going strong. It's totally engaging, if you're interested in the business of photography and the education of photographers, and has touched on many of the concerns I hea...

I want to remember the first photograph. Not the first photograph ever, but the first photograph I ever made that made me feel like a photographer. One of the most challenging parts of my job as a teacher is to convince people to give up some of the self-emphasis and let the process evolve organically, intuitively, from a place beyond themselves. Sometimes the tools require so much practice and instruction that intuition—even the memory of intuition—becomes buried. It takes a long time to get comfortable with all these buttons. But that's the target for me: to return to finger-painting. That's when I suggest setting the camera on full-auto and going to a party or taking a walk. Maybe you remember riding a bicycle. The first time? Very scary. So off balance. If you don't have access to this memory personally, go to the park this spring and watch moms and dads getting their four-year-olds on two-wheelers. My point is, the equilibrium is learned. Keep practicing. Remember the ...

The process of bringing a project to completion is the hardest part. It's tough to let go. When I'm inside the work I feel alive, activated, engaged. The end stage is a separate death. When is enough, enough? These pictures are page-spreads from my book,"Swimming at the Center of the World," which is about my experiences working in China during 2005 and 2006. It's been a very long process thus far and I'm thrilled, actually, to say that the first draft is done, or almost done. So you see, at this point I'm not even close to finally finished. Right now I'm having trouble walking away from the end of the beginning. One of the conversations we have in class is about the moment when your work no longer belongs to you. After all the sweat and anguish - about subject, style, intention, edit, color, contrast, paper, print size, and ending finally with presentation - there comes a time when I have to step back and let it go. At that moment it belongs to the ...