considering pictures | sean justice > open journal

The photograph is dead; long live photography. Sorry for the melodrama. I like to exaggerate, but this isn't an exaggeration: there's a lot of worry and chatter these days about what's happening to our sacred domain. In fact, the anxiety is so thick you can shoot it at 1/15th of a second and still catch it clearly. Last week, the New York Times spelled it like this: For Photographers, the Image of a Shrinking Path . ( Karen d'Silva , an industry guru, wrote in an email: "It's crazy how many people sent me this article. Very telling.") Blogs everywhere record the hubbub, including this post by Shannon Fagan for Ellen Boughn a few weeks ago, a post that generated more than a hundred frantic replies. And on the APA listserve conversation yesterday, a fellow member asked us if anyone, anywhere, had any good news to report. I could go on and on in this vein (just one more: at the SPE national convention last month, an industry executive told a ...

I'm thrilled to announce that a long term dream is beginning to take shape. In collaboration with the International Center of Photography , here in New York, and the Three Shadows Photography Art Center , in Beijing, I'm leading a workshop in photography this summer in China. From the ICP website : Explore Chinese culture through your photography. Join Sean Justice for a behind-the-scenes, upclose and personal tour of Beijing, an urban powerhouse and city of many charms. Our host, the Three Shadows Photography Art Center, is a contemporary gallery and research institute devoted to photography as a fine art. We will visit Beijing's art districts, galleries, and studios, enjoy the city's cafés, bookstores, and art-related events, and attend guest lectures by Chinese artists and curators. All the while, we will be using our picture-making skills to engage what we are learning and seeing. The trip includes must-see city highlights and cultural outings to the Temple ...

This month I went to Houston to show my portfolio at Fotofest. This is essential: show your pictures. There are many different photo review events; I wrote about the fun at Photolucida last year ( here ). Previous to Photolucida I'd been to the review in Atlanta, and to several other reviews here in the New York area. Wherever you live, whatever photographic stage you're on, attending a photo review is a valuable goal. The structure of each review is fairly similar: photographers register and pay a review fee; the organizers distribute a list of the curators, critics, and gallerists who will be attending; you research their biographies and decide whom you'd most like to see; a few days before the event your appointment schedule arrives. (Some of the smaller, one-day events don't distribute a list ahead of the event itself; rather, you sign up for appointments when you arrive at the venue.) The day of the event (or days — Fotofest and Photolucida are multi-day ev...

In Chelsea with Diana and Connor, walking the Highline, reading and breathing. In the deep shade of the park on 22nd and 10th, friends chatting, small kids running and swinging, this old Abelardo Morell photograph appeared in front of me. He must have left it. I'll give it back to him when I see him. You've seen Morell's pictures in class if you've ever crossed paths with me. I find his way of working endlessly inspirational and intriguing. I had the great good fortune to cross paths with him (in person) back in April at Photolucida in Portland. We only chatted briefly but I laughed when I realized that the stuff I say about his work (stuff that I make up in class to illustrate ideas about light and material and the universe)is the same stuff he says when he talks about it. Some kind of synchronicity. Very fun.

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...

All photographs ©2009 Erin Karp. Erin, who's been working on her photography with me for two semesters now, wrote with a story that illustrates a core concept we've been discussing, namely: take your work with you everywhere! At the cafe where she's dialing out the espresso, a customer offhandedly quips about work and busyness, and Erin replies something inconsequential about how the day is going, as one does, and then mentions that she's an aspiring photographer using the barrista gig to support the picture-making. Erin writes: We continued and he asks if I saw his collection of photos at ICP's museum recently.  I say, "Oh! You're a photographer?"  He says, "No, I'm a collector!"  I say, "Wow, cool! Want to see my portfolio?" Haha.  And so he looked at my photos and started to say, "Oh, these are pretty, but you've got to find a new way to depict the flowers since so many photographers shoot them."  Valid point.  ...

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...

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...

At the ICP we roll on 10-week sessions, and the winter session has just ended. Which means we can catch our breath for a few days before the spring session begins. In the photo one and two courses, as usual, the wave will swell fast and then spread out over the duration of the term, because there's so much to learn, so fast, at the start. And then once you've crested the top the challenge becomes just holding your balance and continuing to take pictures. In the full-time graduate programs, however, we've been working straight since September (or earlier) so the challenge is different. At this point the conversation is shifting to focus on what comes next, how to start a career in photography. ...how to start a career in photography. That wave is so huge it makes me shudder. When we look at it I almost have to laugh because I have no idea what to say. Even spelling it out like this -- how to start a career in photography -- seems absurd, makes it overly simple and too doable...