considering pictures | sean justice > open journal

We're done for summer. Time for a break. I'm headed to Toronto tomorrow with the family. Got to clear the storm in front of the maelstrom coming. So here's the thing -- can a photograph touch? Can you make a photograph that touches? What do you feel when you see wet paint? I've got to scrape my fingers across the surface to check it out. I know it's cliché. But...this simple sign makes me touch. Can a photograph feel that way? This is what we talked about this summer in the China workshop and in the two introductory photo workshops back here at ICP. And, seriously, this is what I'm talking about in class this fall...so, if you're working with me, get ready for that conversation. I don't know if it's possible, really, but I want pictures that make me fly. Ah. Naive. Yes.

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.

Check it out. I found another picture tonight. At TC my colleague Cathy slapped down large rolls for a demo, and before we could get to tearing and folding I saw what was actually happening...a wonderland of texture material and edge. Love it. Ion saw it first. I was in his world for a moment. See his work on his website or at his gallery . Nice.

The persimmon sprout in my window is starting to unravel a long woody structure that has, until now, been curled and hidden beneath the leaves. For quite a while I haven't understood this twisty structure, why it had no leaves, why it was so convoluted, but now its purpose is emerging: I think it's going to be the trunk of the persimmon tree. Even though the sprout barely reaches above the tiny terracotta lip, I can see a tree taking shape. If you've been following Hiroshi Sunairi's Tree Project , either on his site or via my multiple posts about it (catch up by clicking the key word label "tree project"), then you'll applaud this development with me. If you're not up to speed yet, please take a look at Hiroshi's site to learn about this amazing, fun, and highly interactive project. My own involvement has brought me forward and taken me backward: I'm stretching my concept of the uses and possibilities of photography and, at the same time, conne...

from "On Visibility," in The Sense of Sight: Look: White transparent curtains across the window. Light coming from the right. Shadows of folds, hanging folds, darker than clouds. Suddenly sunlight. The window frames now cast shadows across the curtains. The shadows are convoluted following the folds: the window frames are straight and rectangular. In Maine this summer with my father I wasn't thinking of Berger when I took this photograph. But I'm reading these essays again lately, and unearthing inspiration from folded memories. This is where ideas come from. Even after the fact of picturing it, understanding returns slowly: then suddenly I'm paying attention to some subtle movement across the creases of my brain and simply responding. I want you to read this essay too. I'm wondering how you'll picture it.

On the ferry everyone snaps the Statue as she slides past. So many people jam the rails the boat lists toward New Jersey. I've done this too. Now I watch the frenzy and think about the urge to hold tight to fleeting moments, as if we could. The weight of this-was-when around future dinner tables flickers through my mind, and I catch glimpses of iconic slivers captured by strangers before they lower their cameras. New York City is crowded with tourists and kids coming to college. The grid is jammed. A couple on the corner hunches over their guidebook, oblivious to the stream of pedestrians that bumps and adjusts to pass them. These temporary eddies swirl through all our lives, unpredictable obstacles that might give us an excuse to pause and breathe. But the thrill of a new anxiety often keeps us snapping along in pursuit of yet another quickly manufactured future memory. On the harbor the grid gives out to flat possibility. This is a fantasy, of course. At the end of the day I'...

Today, in digital photography, an artifact is non-pictorial interuption of pictorial information. When we discuss cameras and scanners, digital processing, post-processing, reproduction, display, we talk about our ability to minimize the effects of that technology, the apparatus itself, to make it disappear. In class, teaching digital photography, I define pixelization, banding, jpg jaggies, and noise, and then demonstrate how to remove these undesirable (non-pictorial) elements from the picture. These visual boogeymen, these artifacts, remind us of the interface, the intermediate device, the camera, the computer. And we don't want to remember. At the Roosevelt birthplace in Manhattan I joined a tour to explore the reconstructed Victorian brownstone that was created to remind us of the age that gave rise to the 26th American president. A decade or so after his death, in 1919, TDR's wife and family petitioned the US government to establish this memorial in the exact spot ...