considering pictures | sean justice > open journal

This is my favorite time of year. In class you're making pictures that couldn't have been predicted even a few short weeks ago. I'm enthralled by the process, this convergence, this transmutation of one thing into another thing, idea into material, image into body. I don't know how it happens, even as it unfolds right in front of me. Last Sunday afternoon at the Brooklyn Central Library we heard Trio Solisti perform chamber music from several different eras. As always, the comfortable elegance of the Dweck Center was the perfect setting for a quiet reprieve from the rush of the end of the term. (I've written about the Library's concert program here , and I still recommend it strongly.) The end of the afternoon brought Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition . You've probably heard it before; I'd heard it many times but never knew what it was called. (Click the 'play' button to hear the Promenade opening.) The story behind this comp...

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.

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...

I am walking with my son on a warm day in winter. The road is quiet, the park is closed to vehicles, and bicyclists, bladers, and runners pass occasionally on either side of us. The sun glistening from the asphalt makes the world seem wet. Something is in my eye. My son walks beyond. Looking up I realize he doesn't know I've stopped. I call to him and he turns to me.

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...