considering pictures | sean justice > open journal

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...

With a photo project, the more you push into it, the more it starts to feel inevitable. That's when you let go a little and allow your intuition take some of the weight. That's when I switch on automatic pilot and start to feel a kind of lightness. I've been noticing the flower pictures around me for years now, and have started to make notes and reportage pictures of those pictures more seriously. I feel it gathering gravity. In fact, my awareness feels tweaked and tense: I find myself pulled into environments that resonate...and I smack into flower pictures. On Third Ave near 12th St I got a bagel after teaching. Toasted poppy seed with garlic herb cream cheese, and a side of Black-eyed Susans. Speaking of asides--a friend called over the weekend to say that she's buried in flowers too. Her daughters bring home flowers made of clay, paper, papier-mache, in crayon and paint, made from pipe cleaners and Popsicle sticks, and pulled from the gardens of neighbors as they wa...

I want to talk about play. Yesterday afternoon on our regular walk Diana and I passed the school yard at 321 where we used to spend warmer evenings with our sons. Today they're teenagers and play on their own, and we no longer while away hours watching them go up and down the slides. Yesterday evening my younger son phoned from the subway platform to double-check his direction: "should I go toward Manhattan or Coney Island?" And feeling his dislocation in space brought me close to my dislocation in time. From the outer edge I'm watching him expand into wider circles of friends and confusion where I can't follow, but where I've been before. The snow is gone today; it's bright and sunny and February-warm at 35 degrees. But I remember when we'd forge through white-out conditions, all booted and bundled, stiff with layers of thermal underwear, focused and intent on cutting the first sled-way on the big hill in the park. My friend Ed and I, grumpy about 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...

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...