considering pictures | sean justice > open journal

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...

Yes, it's been a month-long absence. This photo tells the story to some extent. I've been moving boxes around. My back hurts. Tonight at ICP we begin another round of learning how to move pixels around using Photoshop and other digital imaging tools. I don't know which kind of moving I prefer; my back hurts with both, though in different ways. The mornings begin with water and the evenings end with it. After living in Brooklyn for what feels like a very long time (I first moved there in 1983), I'm now in Staten Island, the harbor borough, the forested borough, the quiet borough. From my porch I'm looking at roof tops and trees, and listening to birds. It's going to be an adjustment, but I think I like it already. Let's get the pictures going again. There's lots of new stuff to pay attention to now.

Hiroshi wrote on his blog today that persimmon seeds are sprouting all over the place. The pictures are inspiring. Wonderful. I'm staring at my terracotta pot on the window sill and keeping my fingers crossed. Not green yet. Moist. Dark. Earth. Too moist? There are many ways to be an artist. As we wrap up the year, prepping for the exhibit and career day, framing and printing and sequencing, with acid stress so deep that you want to scream or cry or kick something...I hope there's time for a breath, someplace, a pause. You don't have to have it figured out right now. You are a work in progress. We all are. I'm writing this as much to myself as I am to you. What can it mean to be a photographer today? An artist? A journalist? A writer? A teacher? Let's try it this way: we're all photographers now. It's something we do. It's a way of knowing the world. Of knowing ourselves. Maybe, if we emphasize the conversation, we can understand both the “pictures” an...

Sometimes I see another photographer's work just sitting around, and as I walk past I grab it up and send it to them, just in case they want it back. Zoe Strauss . You can read what I've written about her here . Part of keeping yourself inspired is loosing yourself in other people's pictures, breathing for a beat, and then resurfacing into the shared world, changed, aware, ready to pay attention.

As you know, I like to talk about pictures and picture-making. In class I probably get sidetracked, actually, and spend too much time on tangents. But the fact is that learning the tools and technology just isn't enough. Pictures matter to us as a culture and as individuals. And learning how to talk about pictures, how to share our ideas and intentions, is crucial to becoming more complete photographers and artists. This week I asked you to mark the moment that something we've done in class makes a difference in the way you make pictures. It's an essential part of the learning process because it begins to close the feedback loop. For example, in class we talk about something—exposure, saturation, cropping, whatever—and tomorrow you bring that idea into your body by adjusting your f-stop or shifting your frame. Recognizing that you've done so solidifies the learning and integrates idea with practice, or, closes the loop, so to speak. Late in the evening on Thursday, as I...

At the Horticultural Society of New York on Friday I picked up my persimmon seed. I wrote about Hiroshi Sunairi's Tree Project back in March ( here ), and now I'm ready to start. Today it's time for the next step: Process 2: Planting the Seed Please use unglazed ceramic pots (regular terra cotta ones) so the soil can breathe and dry naturally. In plastic pots, the soil takes much longer to dry and there is a chance that the young roots can rot if watered too much. Set the pot near a window with plenty of sun. When they haven't yet sprouted, it is important to keep the soild moist all the time. Once they sprout, water only when the soil dries out, otherwise the roots can get too wet and rot. This is what Hiroshi writes on the instruction sheet that I picked up at the HSNY. I've re-typed it here to embed it in my nervous system. I've already learned something. As simple as that instruction is, I didn't know the difference between the plastic pots and the terr...

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.  ...

Photographs © NYSAT-Municipal Landscape Control Committee Pictures are part of our modern landscape, and help create it, too. New York City tourists know they're here because their experience matches their image of it — an image formed often and substantially by pictures. Paraphrasing Sontag: our streets are thickened by billboards, animated signs, and advertisements adhered to every surface, an irresistible mental pollution to which we are addicted, and we crowd along the avenues in an image-addled stupor, feeling that our citizenship is more stable than it is. So...wow, that feels kind of negative. But as you've heard me say in class, the best way to recognize their influence on us is to imagine a day without them, entirely off the grid, no pictures of any kind. I know this strikes a nerve somehow because I see you smile as I say it. My friend Jordan knows the power of pictures, especially the advertising pictures that assault us on the sidewalk. His epic struggle against the...

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...

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...

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...

Stop and back-up. Please. Right now, ask yourself: when was the last time I made a back-up of my photographs? Every term, unfortunately, somebody loses a hard drive. This term it's happened twice. No matter how many times I make a scene, wave my arms, jump up and down, beg and plead, yell like a crazy person, nobody takes me seriously until it happens. And then it's too late, at least for somebody. What do I have to do to make you take this seriously? Your hard drive is going to fail. Guaranteed. Hard drives fail. That's what they do. Hard drives do not keep working. They stop working. My friend Tony thinks we should make movies of when it happens: the disbelief, the shock, the tears...and post them on Youtube. All those pictures of birthday parties, kids growing up, parents, friends, neighbors....all gone. Maybe it would help. I don't know. I work with between 30 and 60 students each term, and the average lately has been one hard drive failure per term. The reasons var...

Today my thoughts are trending toward success and what it means to make photographs that matter. I'm happy to say that another draft of the China book has been completed (the one I wrote about earlier ). In this version, responding to ample criticism, I've opened up the pages and included more white space, more room for breathing. I'm hopeful that this project is getting closer to finished—because there's so much other work I want to do—but the process is long, and I can't put it down until it feels like it has the right weight. Zoe Strauss wrote recently about the anxiety she feels when nearing the end stage of a project, in this case her annual and massive I-95 exhibition in Philadelphia. Her words resonate with me: I am confident in myself, in my work, but I am occasionally beset with anxiety surrounding my work. She makes photos that matter, and if she feels this way then I'm having trouble breathing! My friend Allison is giving awards randomly for stuff sh...

This weekend several students wrote to ask why their pictures are so dark. Right on time! This is the point in the term when that question always surfaces. As soon as we start printing in earnest, the abstraction of camera exposure takes on a newly practical necessity. It seems that no matter how shutter speeds and f-stops are explained, the need for a correctly balanced exposure suddenly becomes urgent once the picture becomes physical as a paper object. These days I'm primarily teaching with digital cameras, but the dynamic is similar when teaching film photography. Whether in a darkroom or in a computer lab, it's not until you give up trying to print an underexposed frame that you return to the basics of proper exposure. The tools different, of course, but in this basic fundamental they are remarkably similar: exposure is key, and underexposure is deadly. Drilling yourself in the basics of exposure is a good way to start understanding the tools of photography. Whether you...