considering pictures | sean justice > open journal

Chrisler Building From Pongal Restaurant, by Luis Paris This photo was snapped by my colleague and former student, Luis Paris. Last week after class at ICP we went over to Jerry Vezzuso's opening at the Camera Club of New York , and then got a quick bite at Pongal . Along the way, walking from ICP to the CCNY, and then briskly from there all the way to Lex and 26th (a long chilly stroll!), we talked about photography and how one knows if the pictures are making sense, if they're working, if anyone likes them, and if it even matters -- or, more precisely, how it matters. At dinner Luis summed it up with a few thoughts about what he's looking for from the conversation whenever he's showing his work. From a critique I'm looking for two things: first, whether or not my pictures appear visually similar to other pictures that I might not know about, and, second, if there's an interpretation of my work that I don't want to have anything to do with. Thi...

We want pictures. We are saturated with this desire. The ad moguls want us to direct that passion towards their clients' commodities. Once in a while, though, we find evidence of another kind of wanting. Delivering some more of the endless paperwork that the educatioal beurocracy demands, I cross paths with a kindred soul, and stumble on a sign of the power of pictures. This way has recently been marked. I am not alone. Out here, in here, through here, picture-makers travel together. This is the gut of what I hope we're doing together this term: photography is a way to pay attention to our lives, our desires. We also want eggs, deviled eggs. At least, I do. Especially at a picnic on a warm day with friends and blankets and folding camp chairs, comfortable in the sun. With sangria, too. And cold white wine. But, summer is over. It's rainy in New York. Time to get to work! See you in class.

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.

  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?

My point has been that photography is a way of pointing. The language around photography and making photographs is varied and has multiple, folded, agendas. Compare, for example, the New York Times with BP press releases about the oil spill, or with any annual report from your favorite tech company. Who points at what? What is their goal? Who do they think is looking at what they're pointing at? The use of a lens system to make pictures means pointing at objects, one way or another. The choice of which objects to point at is determined by context, by what you care about, by what you want me to care about. Sontag says that photographing is a way of collecting the world. Wrong, nearly. Photography (in so far as we think of photography as making pictures with lens-based technology) is a way of pointing to what you've collected of the world. Your collection is different from mine, but I'm confident that you have a collection. Let's think about how a lens coaxes us...

After you've decided to make pictures you must decide how your body will frame the experience. That is, where is the edge? The boundary? The horizon between what is in, and what is out? These choices matter, and photography it's the shape of your body that determines how your audience will see what you see. In class we talk about what you want to look at, and about what you want me to know about it. These are the ultimate questions. But buried within them, preceding them, is a skill more primary: can you feel the frame? In The Photographer's Eye , John Szarkowski writes The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge—the line that separates in from out—and on the shapes that are created by it. In this essay ( read it here ) Szarkowski is trying define the major differences between photographic picture-making and other kinds of picture-making, as he sees them. In one way or another you've most lik...

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...

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...

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...

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...

This week in class we mulled over aesthetics. I don't like that word. Actually, I like the way it looks, especially the freaky kerning of the 'a' and the 'e' in some fonts. And I like the way it flutters from my mouth and ends in a crunch. But I definitely don't like the modern connotations of rules and judgment that crowd along beneath the surface every time we use it. I also don't like the way it's become a cliche for saying nothing at all when we talk about pictures. Here's how it rolls for me, but we have to rewind a bit to get there: As a concept with deep roots the word 'aesthetics' can be anchored in the Greek to mean 'perception.' But beginning a few hundred years ago and stretching to today it's evolved to stand at the apex of an entire system of thought that strives to separate what we do from who we are, how we make meaning from how we live meaningfully, and (most notoriously, to my mind), who can access the beautiful f...

Almost three weeks without writing here....April has been the cruelest month. But with reasons enough for two months. The picture below was taken last week at the public portfolio walk during Photolucida Festival , a four day extravaganza of portfolio sharing and networking that happens every other year in Portland, Oregon. For the past month I've been cloistered in my studio printing the portfolio I showed there. Then, for the past week, I was cloistered at the Benson Hotel in Portland with appointments all day and night with curators and gallerists and photographers, discussing and sharing pictures. Exhilarating. Exhausting. A marathon of photography intensity. But now it's back to regular life, which means that there's less time to look at and talk about photographs, and that the focused drive that took us there in first place has to get in line again behind doing the dishes, helping the kids with homework, and preparing for teaching class (or for whatever day-job suppor...

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. ...

Wandering through the stacks at the Brooklyn Library the other week I happened on Arthur Danto's 1994 book, Embodied Meanings, a collection of his art criticism from The Nation . As you know, I'm drawn to thinking about how and why pictures matter. I remember feeling intrigued by the title, but I don't exactly remember why I decided to check the book out--maybe there was an essay about some work from the 1980s that caught my attention. In any case, what sticks with me now, weeks after returning it to the library, is Danto's Introduction. In fact, Danto's description of himself as a writer, his background, his intentions and process, his accidental beginning as an art critic, and his candid appraisal of how we come to understand the place and importance of pictures in the first place -- an art-critic's self-criticism -- was so illuminating, so engaging and revealing, that I think it's a must-read in itself. He writes: Let me say in conclusion that I get a lo...

The new term has begun and we're deep into the third week of classes at both NYU and the International Center for Photography. As usual I'm dwelling on questions of learning and teaching. How do I help you become more of the photographer you already are? This is the question that keeps me up at night, that's for sure. One of the unspoken assumptions of photography is that the world is photographable. We start from here and move forward, as if making pictures in this way was not only desirable—our goal—but also doable. I'm not so sure anymore. It might be that we have to investigate this underlying assumption. What do we do when we make pictures with photography? What do we say about ourselves? About our world? About what we know, or want to know? What does the act of pointing a camera say about what we love, and what we want to forget? A student wrote to me in crisis: the computer, the arbitrary materiality of the apparatus, was confounding her, making her doubt her abi...

Two words that overlap in popular conversation: image and picture. You hear them used interchangeably; most of the time, each means the other. But I'm impatient with casual synonyms. In my experience, sloppy speech yields sloppy thinking, and when a word takes on many different meanings, or when two different words gradually come to mean the same thing, ideas get hidden. In this case, conflating "image" with "picture" is actually erasing something important, denying us access to a concept that can help us clarify what we're doing, who we are. Here's a thought (suggested by Patrick Maynard, The Engine of Visualization ): let's use the word "image" when we're talking about the observed properties of light and mind, and "picture" when we talk about the human activity of making those observations physical, concrete. That is, the refractive and reflective properties of light described by Newton, and that Einstein used to measure...