considering pictures | sean justice > open journal

If you're interested in the world behind commercial and editorial photography, A Photo Editor should be on your regular roll. Rob Haggert is the former Director of Photography of Men's Journal and Outside Magazine and he draws from a deep well of experience with the process and practice of commercial-editorial photography. His recent post about the portraits made by Nadev Kander of the Obama team that were published in the New York Times Magazine is an example of his perceptive and expansive insights. Plus, his posts generate a ton of conversation about the process of photography (browse the comments section of the Kander post to get the flavor of how other working photographers are reacting). This is great for all of us. Too often, especially recently, the whole process of creating the picture that is subsequently used (or abused) by various media and/or political interests -- that whole process is invisible, presumed to be somehow natural or automatic, and the intentions...

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 ...

Recent reports about harmonizing mosquitoes have intrigued me greatly. Get the scoop at Neurophilosophy , or listen to the story on NPR . In either place you can hear the sound that's generating the buzz: turns out that the annoying whine a mosquito makes is produced by the wings as they rub against themselves. Interesting. But the amazing part is that female mosquitoes can determine if the frequency of the whine from the male's wing-beats will harmonize with its own wing-beats, and the resulting harmonic tone generated by their respective whines appears to be a primary mating signal. In the YouTube link on the Neurophilosophy post and on the NPR report we humans can listen in on their duet. Incredibly, with careful observation, entomologists have recorded the third-tone of a mosquito's harmonic convergence. Musicians are trained, obviously, to recognize and respond to harmony. I'm not a musician, but I did play guitar in a band in college, and I clearly remember the f...

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 ...

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...

My thoughts are anchored to next week, the start of classes, the new term, so I'm doing something I try to never do. Namely, getting stuck in the future, not living the now. Sometimes it's inevitable because we've got to prep for whatever project we're getting ready for, but pictures don't come from the future, they come from the present. At the moment I'm not making pictures but handouts, and outlines and narrative descriptions, and writing lots of emails. This thing called teaching amazes me. How does it happen that something in my brain is transferred to your brain? What can I do when teaching photography to make it happen more efficiently, more substantially? After years of playing at this particular game I've turned the question around -- how do you learn photography? I love thinking about learning, the process, and the shape of knowledge. And over the years I've learned a lot about it. One thing I know now is that the handouts don't matter all...

I am so thrilled to get a note about Jan 's new pictures. We worked together in Photo One at the beginning of 2008 and it's clear that she is comfortably on her way at this point: engaged and amazed. She wrote: "I'm having a wonderful time with my photography." These pictures remind me of time and love, and the endurance of change. I like the delicate rough edges and the smooth glow. There's a three dimensional simplicity to the light, and a frank, unsentimental appraisal of the material in her framing. The objects are what they are, totally, but her willingness to stay engaged with them time after time, as they wilt and begin to disappear, speaks about something else. The pictures remind me of Blossfeldt 's cool rationalism crossed with Mapplethorpe 's dramatics, but pursued with an obsessiveness more akin to a need or longing to understand, to not let go. Ah, the humanity, right? The best part of teaching photography is this conversation that evol...

My wife and son dragged the tree up to the park yesterday and fed it to the choppers, thrilled to watch it spray out the other end in a mist of wood and wintery perfume. Mulch Fest NYC. We look forward to that post-Christmas march up the block every year. Even if you don't do Christmas, this is a ritual you can understand and fully enjoy just by watching and sniffing (that pine scent is wonderful, isn't it?). Dust to dust, or something like that, is part of our shared experience regardless of religion. Living in Brooklyn allows me to brush shoulders with every faith and flavor of doubt that's ever watched the winter sun grow shorter - or so it seems. My rabbi lives downstairs, my priest a few blocks from here, and my Wiccan friend across the street. Other neighbors decorate the Orthodox or Islamic calendars, but we all toast the fireworks on January 1, and then get together a few weeks later to enjoy Spring Festival. It's easy to exaggerate the ecumenicism (think: ...

Across the street they're almost finished with the wall. I've been watching the progress. The other day the light and the shadows and the workers chatting and laughing and shouting at each other suddenly brought to mind a passage from one of my favorite books of the last several years: David Lewis-Williams , The Mind in the Cave . Actually, the first thing that came to mind was Gregory Curtis ' The Cave Painters . Curtis speculates, in his book, about the place and purpose of pictures within culture, and he quotes from Lewis-Williams to his illustrate his meaning. As it happens, the idea from Lewis-Williams that resonates so strongly with Curtis also resonates with me, and has done so ever since I read The Mind in the Cave five years ago. Here it is: What is the meaning of the hand marks? Perhaps that's the wrong question. Instead, perhaps the question should be: what is the meaning of the paint? Whether you're familiar with the cave paintings in Western Europe or...

Browsing James Fallows ' post from China about the death of this father and his syblings' discovery of some never-before-seen pictures of his parents, led me to reminisce about those moments when the normal flow of life is unexpectedly punctuated by photographs. Last month, on the last day of Thursday's Photo One class at ICP, when we were supposed to be displaying and critiquing each others' final work, John brought out a sheaf of black and white photographs of his grandmother and grandfather on their wedding day in the 1930s. He'd discovered them in a trunk he'd rescued from his mother's apartment. From a faded manila envelope he withdrew delicate traces of his personal history to share with us. And gingerly spreading the thin curled paper, tentatively at first - not wanting to damage the fragile surfaces - we found ourselves unexpectedly immersed in memories that weren't our own. He wanted to know how to scan the pictures without damaging them, but...

I'm very busy now that business has collapsed. 2009 looks to be a banner year. I'm learning to use Flickr. I'm writing again. Might as well start something personal. Do you do projects? A lot of us focus on themed investigations, particular angles, purposeful journeys. We search for a subject, wrestle with it, and then network our access, our permissions, our intentions. And then we point the camera. We're expected to work this way -- curators, critics, editors, my two year old downstairs neighbor -- everyone wants to know: what are you working on these days? I want to focus on not-focusing. I'm tired of projects. I want a moment. This is crazy. I've got too much work to do. Lie down. Can you picture it? I like the afternoon sun in this corner. These are passing flowers.

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...

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 .

In the desert outside what has become Yuma, Arizona, people made a picture of God. They etched it into the surface of that hard bright land -- hands, feet, mouth, body, thin lines stretching wide and long across the emptiness, until the emptiness was filled. And day by day throughout the year God lay on that dry flatness and watched the people come and go, to the river, to the fields, hunting, dancing, telling stories, singing. Stepping across the line of God's foot a father would say something quiet to his son to mark their passage, and the son would respond in kind to his father. Once each year the people would gather to walk the body of God together, tracing the worn path from head to torso to foot, and then back, on the other side, to the head again. As they walked, perhaps, they cleared brush and small stones from the etching, restoring a short section erased by the summer winds, or in another place, a part of God's arm that had been washed away by the winter rain. ...

A former student wrote yesterday: "I am still struggling with critiquing my own work, just because nothing is ever really good enough, and I am still wondering as to what is a 'good image' that I took versus one that is not meaningful. With 'good', I mean: do my images ever really say anything or are they considered just snapshots of the moment? I am thoroughly confused..." This kind of confusion, it seems to me, is the point of learning photography. I usually begin a course with demonstrations and instruction in the basics of cameras and computer imaging. A short history of the camera and of photography follows immediately. And then the main point: long weeks of making pictures, showing them to each other, and talking about them. My hope is to shove the apparatus to the background and focus on the process of the making meaning, which emerges from the conversation. The camera and computer will become a massive distraction for the new photographer unless...

...make pictures. We do a lot of other stuff too. We wake up, get our coffee, take a shower, get the kids to school, go to work. We do stuff we want to do, stuff we don't want to do. We also do nothing, and think about doing nothing. And we do pictures. A lot of the stuff we do is driven by clearly defined motivations -- wake-up, eat, work, sleep -- and sometimes picture-making is too, but not always. I have to convince you to buy the stuff I sell: make a picture. I have to convince you to vote for my guy: make a picture. I have to convince myself I'm having a good time: make a picture. I have to convince you I love you. When I teach photography, the goal is to put away the camera and slow up, slow down, draw out the motivations that drive us to make pictures. What do we want from this thing that we do? My favorite day is when we put our pictures on the board, step back, take a breath, and talk about the journey.

Today, in digital photography, an artifact is non-pictorial interuption of pictorial information. When we discuss cameras and scanners, digital processing, post-processing, reproduction, display, we talk about our ability to minimize the effects of that technology, the apparatus itself, to make it disappear. In class, teaching digital photography, I define pixelization, banding, jpg jaggies, and noise, and then demonstrate how to remove these undesirable (non-pictorial) elements from the picture. These visual boogeymen, these artifacts, remind us of the interface, the intermediate device, the camera, the computer. And we don't want to remember. At the Roosevelt birthplace in Manhattan I joined a tour to explore the reconstructed Victorian brownstone that was created to remind us of the age that gave rise to the 26th American president. A decade or so after his death, in 1919, TDR's wife and family petitioned the US government to establish this memorial in the exact spot ...

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...

i wonder if a picture can describe experience? i want to believe in connection, in conversation. in this ad the decision was made to not retouch the "arab" girl, her skin. can you feel it? perhaps i'm particularly sensitive to the texture of skin, the touch of it. i teach retouching. i'm a photographer. i have bad skin. but why and how was this ad released like this? is it a mistake? is it a comment? is it a ploy, a meta-ploy, to get us talking about the ad itself (see the tag line). i work in advertising and i collect photos about photos and photos about ads, but this seems simultaneously too subtle and too crass. our white american girl with perfect skin is at high school, wondering about her doppelganger with bad skin cloistered behind curtained windows on the other side of the world. is this our new story? our new social network? can the bones of this new experience really be wrapped in the old skin of snap decisions about surface beauty and the dee...

7thAve_Brooklyn_02 , originally uploaded by seanjustice . i'm not sure photography as a word has much currency any more. i used to be a photographer and that made sense. but what does it mean today? thousands of photos per minute; billions. we're all taking photos; everybody is a photographer. i don't disagree. in fact, this how i begin every class i teach: we're here to explore and become more of the photographer you already are. but that means i don't teach something called photography; i encourage picture-making. if any single word can be applied to everyone, everywhere, then that word, necessarily, loses significance -- it doesn't mean anything because it means everything. what is photography? it's not what you think. who isn't a photographer?