considering pictures | sean justice > open journal

Sunday Morning, Staten Island , originally uploaded by seanjustice . Starting a day of printing, but going slowly. Earlier this week it snowed again. More coming Tuesday, they say. The world is quiet and slow. The morning sun slips over the Eastern ridge and makes hard shadows of the trees and street signs. I'll stay inside today to print a new portfolio of the Breathing Pictures . Ironic, that is, because I've caught a cold and can only sniffle and sneeze my way through it. Distracted. This can be photography too. I like to start masking with the fun and funny Photoshop merge. It can be taken seriously but I prefer to feel the humor in it. This 'frame' feels loose and dreamy to me -- a lazy brush eases the transitions just a little bit, but without getting too uptight about it. I especially like the way the lens warp/distortion becomes so evident. The proof that indeed we are not living in a flat world. In other words: Surface matters.

If you remember this, you're with me. Ah, the smell of fixer in the morning. Unexpectedly I find myself managing a darkroom at Columbia University Teachers College. As you might know, I began a doctorate in college art education last year, focusing on digital art education. This year, in addition to everything else, I'll be mixing chemistry and reminding people to agitate. There's a lot I've forgotten, am surprised to remember... odors, textures, procedures. This week I'm scrubbing trays and rebuilding shelves. Next week I'll realign enlargers. The lab is on the roof. From the front door I watch the sky and the texture of the slate as it changes with the light. In a different life — more than twenty years ago — I taught photography in Tucson, Arizona, at Salpointe High School and Pima Community College. Stranded negatives were common. Here's a thing I've forgotten — the ephemeral materiality of the Tri-X negative strip; curled, translucent,...

I'm slowly mining through the several thousand photographs I collected during the Beijing project last month. This one surfaces unexpectedly. I remember the thick still air, and the steep, sweaty climb behind the Forbidden City. I remember the dusk and the dragonflies. I remember feeling annoyed that my dSLR battery had died earlier that afternoon because I'd forgotten to charge it the previous night. I also remember the moment I looked up and saw the concentric circles of this structure from beneath the trees. I don't remember why I forgot about this picture until I found it again just now. The camera doesn't make the picture; the brain does. And the world and the imagination meet in a slow dance of negotiation, each making due with the limitations and neuroses that the other brings. This might be my favorite picture from the month. To the Photo Two group from ICP last week -- thanks for the great work. Keep looking up and keep making pictures.

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...

Walking in the winter with Diana and Brendan; I'm not going to not see the Callahan trees surrounding me. Automatic. Can't help it. I know it's cliche. Sorry about that. But there's history here too. The contrast, the sequence, the rhythm, the simplicity. Those Callahan pictures from the 1950s resonate for me; they come to back to me from my earliest thoughts of pictures and photography. Do an image google if you're not sure what I'm talking about. And do you remember the conversation that's in the background, especially of the series of weeds in snow? The story as I recall it is around Callahan's introduction to photography at a workshop in Detroit by Ansel Adams. Apparently there was a long discussion about how to expose properly for snow — how to keep the detail in the negative but not underexpose, how to compensate in the developing, how to print it just down enough to make it feel bright but not too bright. Even if you've never done ...

The question comes up: what is white balance? Two responses: First: White is the wrong word. "White balance" as a term of digital photography refers to the color feeling, color emotion, color balance in the photo.

A note, a reminder: do not delete. In class yesterday this idea caught some folks by surprise. I don't know what makes an idea resonate, or when. Here it is again: do not delete pictures from your digital camera when you're taking pictures. Instead, after the pictures have been downloaded to the computer, reformat the card with the camera's "format" menu. There are two reasons for this:

I'd like to highlight a foundational part of the conversation. I've mentioned this in class several times, but I want to emphasize it again here, in writing: It's important to know where you are in the digital landscape when you use computers to make pictures. In class I've talked about the three domains of computer imaging. A metaphor I've used is the three-legged stool. I've also referred to a map, or schematic, that describes three primary arenas within the world of computer-based picture making. The three basic areas are Capture, Control, and Display. Here again are the basic distinctions in terms of purpose, hardware and software. Capture Snag the image using a camera or scanner (that's the hardware). They're everywhere in our lives: DSLRs, cell phones, snappy digi shooters, and all manner of scan-type (non-camera obscurra) devices. As well, as you know, there's no distinction anymore (or very little) between still and motion capture — each devi...

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...

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...

Some interesting conversations evolved and continued this week. First, a student wrote to ask for clarification of a comment I made in class: ...but I was thinking about what you said last week in terms of not caring less if people like your pictures and that all that was important to you was to communicate something. Did I get that right? Can you explain that a bit more for me? I responded that, yes, more important than whether or not someone personally “likes” any particular picture, is creating a photograph that communicates something that matters, or leaves a record, or visualizes a moment, or responds poetically to a frame of mind. I don’t know if it’s entirely possible to do this, however. But a good conversation about pictures can sometimes illuminate a path toward accomplishing that goal, as long as we don't get stuck on simplistic responses such as "I like it," or "I think it works." Second, I was asked what I would do if given the chance to develop a ...

I want to remember the first photograph. Not the first photograph ever, but the first photograph I ever made that made me feel like a photographer. One of the most challenging parts of my job as a teacher is to convince people to give up some of the self-emphasis and let the process evolve organically, intuitively, from a place beyond themselves. Sometimes the tools require so much practice and instruction that intuition—even the memory of intuition—becomes buried. It takes a long time to get comfortable with all these buttons. But that's the target for me: to return to finger-painting. That's when I suggest setting the camera on full-auto and going to a party or taking a walk. Maybe you remember riding a bicycle. The first time? Very scary. So off balance. If you don't have access to this memory personally, go to the park this spring and watch moms and dads getting their four-year-olds on two-wheelers. My point is, the equilibrium is learned. Keep practicing. Remember the ...

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...

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 ...