considering pictures | sean justice > open journal

Paraphrasing from the TED talk: Art can't change the world. Art has no power to change the world. Art can't do anything like that. Art is a neutral space, a place where nothing matters, a place where new ideas and new questions can be asked, a place where new thoughts and feelings can take root. And maybe they bring new ways of thinking...that change the world. If you've seen JR's work over the years, and perhaps especially if you haven't, you're going to love his TED talk:

Tree Project, Winter My gingko is asleep. Last month all the leaves turned, finally, and winter crept inside. We're connected; the cycle reaches through us. At first I wondered if, somehow, my small tree was somehow exempt from the gray hibernation settling on the neighborhood. In fact, I was worried that maybe keeping a gingko in the house had somehow ripped it from the seasonal fabric that it needed in order to survive. I didn't think it could be so, but week after week the small leaves remained green, long after all the trees outside had become bare. Now the transformation is complete, finally, or nearly so. That is, the gingko leaves never dropped, though winter's desiccation appears complete. I'm watching the snow melt outside and anticipating the first new buds of spring, which I know will emerge in about a month, and I'm hoping that this small tree is, in fact, asleep, merely, and that it will awake when the cycle turns through again. For more, se...

branch2011 , originally uploaded by seanjustice . I'm only averaging a moment a month to write and share pictures. That's not a great pace. Space has closed in around me and the grit of the term is under my feet. I know you know how that feels. This piece was almost a year in the making. I knew what I wanted but not how to see it, nor how to get it. There's an early still image posted on flickr at the very beginning, back in April 2010, but the long slog through technology and imagery and idea that finally brought me to this point is lost in the background. It looks best in a separate browser frame , where it'll play on a continuous loop. See it here: http://seanjustice.com/branch . Reactions so far have been mixed. Some people don't see it. Perhaps they're looking too hard. In the periphery you might feel the shift, or you might not. The piece (and the project as a whole) activates a way of paying attention, for me, and that's the underlying quest...

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,...

School's out for summer, and all that. But keep going with your photography. Keep making pictures and paying attention to the way the world looks and feels. I've thoroughly enjoyed working with all of you this term and hope to keep crossing paths. Please keep in touch! And please keep tuning in to these pages for occasional updates and thoughts about the learning process. As always, I'm grateful for your thoughts on it.

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 ...

In the morning at St George the sun skids into the terminal and skews the grid of the day, reminding us of our shadows and our momentary passing. An open letter to everyone who worked with me these last four months: Congratulations on finishing (and beginning) your study of photography! I know the learning curve can be stressful and perhaps even overwhelming at times. But you’re on the way now… In closing the year on our work together I’d like to briefly repeat something I’ve said several times, beginning from the first day we met: these are exciting times to be working in the visual arts. We’re entering an uncharted world of picture-making, and you are at the threshold of these new days. From my perspective, having watched these changes over these last twenty years, from the pre-digital, non-digital, what-is-digital??, into the current thrill-ride rollercoaster of new possibilities and challenges, it feels momentous and extraordinary. Last week at a holiday party with photographers an...

NYSAT this morning: Voice for the future of our city. Before: After: Before: After: Before: Before: After: After each whitewashing we posted a notice of our intent: From the Metropolitan Landscape Control Committee: The MLCC has recently become aware of the fact that NPA City Outdoor is operating over 500 illegal street level billboards in NYC, as well as many illegal wildposting locations. Despite private contracts, and other previous arrangements made between NPA City Outdoor and building owners, the above-mentioned advertising locations have been found to be illegal due to lack of permitting and failure to adhere to New York City zoning regulations. Under the Department of Buildings sign code § 26-256 these advertisements are subject to civil penalties and violations of up to $15,000. The Municipal Landscape Control Committee has organized the whitewashing of all NPA City Outdoor street level advertising locations until further structural removal can be implemented. The continued po...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...