considering pictures | sean justice > open journal

© 2011 Doyeon Kim A question we keep coming back to: how do we balance skill-learning and skill-teaching within the multifaceted conversation about ideas, history, and practice that makes up art education? If you're studying photography, design, new media, or art in any of a dozen guises, this question is at the core of what you're doing — whether you explicitly ask it or not (because the folks who run your course have asked and answered it for you). And if you're teaching photography, design, etc., it's even more critical — because your answer affects, de facto , the lives of everyone who studies with you. There are several ways to divide this up, and many different rationales for arguing this side or that side, but the equation basically comes down to two options: either skill is more important than history and theory, or vice versa. And perhaps a third option — oops, almost forgot — skill, history, and theory might be equally important. Abandoned © 2011 Yar...

Wonder Horse, March 2010 Yikes. I've been away. Not in body but in spirit, and no time to post for far too long. Hasn't the year just galloped past? Not for me. This hobby horse appeared on my front stoop early in the year, randomly, and then one day disappeared. I remember wondering why and where it had come from. I also remember that seeing it each morning reminded me of whimsy, curiosity, and imagination. I'm remembering all this again, suddenly, because I've just rediscovered the picture. And more: in thinking about this past year, the thought occurs that Wonder Horse is a fairly accurate illustration of right now — a lot of motion but not much movement. That's the way 2010 feels to me here at the end. Picture-mining is the year-end ritual of sorting moments from the past twelve months. When we used film we'd do this by pulling out the proof sheets (not the edited prints) from the year and passing them around. Or the boxes of never-discarded sli...

Toronto 2010, from our recent vacation. I've been thinking a lot about perception lately, as I always do at the start of the new term. The puzzle comes back when I begin to map a course: how is it possible to picture a round world in a flat rectangle? The projection of one onto one feels miraculous and ordinary. That paradox is thrilling, intoxicating! I want to share it with you. But for you to see it, to do it, first I've got to make the process visible. And yet I'm filled with doubt. How can I do that? That is, what will you (in class) perceive as I waltz through my material, the rant of my lecture, the pictures on screen, the assignments, and my reactions to your assignments? And, how will I perceive that you're seeing anything? Even seeing that you're paying attention is difficult. (Although it's easy to see when you're falling asleep in class...sometimes.) At the start of each new term it comes back to me that, really, the project of learning...

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.

On the weekend at the Summer Palace, morning, wandering. On Longevity Hill the quiet was deep and still, cicadas in the trees, dense and present. Near the lake the crowds pushed in, and tour guides with megaphones blaring. Amidst it all, water writing. He turned and saw me photographing him, and handed me the brush. I'd always wanted to play that language. In the crowds I heard the cicadas again and felt a private silence working through my shoulders and torso as I swept backwards trailing water, momentarily fluent in my private writing. Day ten approaches; our workshop is ending tomorrow. I've learned so much more about Beijing, China, teaching, and cultural exploration. I'm so grateful for the excellent company of the group who joined me. See more pix on flickr ...added daily (almost), and please check in with the project blog .

4:30 am. Time to get up and start shaking off the jet-lag. Breakfast downstairs starts at 6:00. I'm using the quiet fuzzy hours to enable the proxy server so I can keep posting. In a bit, or so, I'll get together with Songzi, my friend, a script writer who works with foreign movie productions here in Beijing, to go over the plans for the coming weeks. She's helping me arrange transportation and other logistics for the workshop. Then, off to Three Shadows to compare notes with Isabelle and say hi to Rong Rong and inri. Can't wait to get my feet on the ground. The workshop blog is Beijing2010 , as I noted in a earlier post . Please check it out and follow along. Outside my smudged hotel window, the early morning sky looks promising. Bright sunrise reflects off the buildings in the distance and wispy clouds show the blue above. Time now to get some breakfast and that first cup of Chinese coffee.

China Air to Beijing today. Follow the workshop at Beijing2010 . The goal is to unfold something authentic about the experience — to get below the surface of the cliché that we think we know. It can be simple, like learning how to drink free leaf green tea, or more complex, like learning how to navigate a world without an alphabet. I want to learn how to picture a process that is subtle and multi-varied. Can a camera show us something we don't know how to see?

Beijing Airport, China plate display The Beijing photography workshop with the International Center of Photography and the Three Shadows Photography Center is about to start. I'll be in Beijing next week to get the final details put together. There's still time to join us ! We're going to explore the process of learning about culture with our pictures. Learn more about the workshop at the ICP website , or ask me directly. It's going to be a blast, an adventure, and a fantastic learning experience. Come dance with us!

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...

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.

After you've decided to make pictures you must decide how your body will frame the experience. That is, where is the edge? The boundary? The horizon between what is in, and what is out? These choices matter, and photography it's the shape of your body that determines how your audience will see what you see. In class we talk about what you want to look at, and about what you want me to know about it. These are the ultimate questions. But buried within them, preceding them, is a skill more primary: can you feel the frame? In The Photographer's Eye , John Szarkowski writes The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge—the line that separates in from out—and on the shapes that are created by it. In this essay ( read it here ) Szarkowski is trying define the major differences between photographic picture-making and other kinds of picture-making, as he sees them. In one way or another you've most lik...

What do you want to look at? What do you want me to know about it? These are the questions as we move toward photography projects. The goal of our work together is to make pictures that relate to our time together, that explore and expand from one another. Sometimes called a "series"...I prefer to think about "projects." The difference might not be evident on the surface, but the distinction is about the idea of work itself, and pictures that emerge from work. I've written on this topic before , but it bears repeating. The work you do is emotional, intellectual, spiritual, historical, even mathematical; it's the work of exploring and thinking; the work of breathing, of just making it through each day, each week. You're working it because you chose to do so. Even if you don't think of it as a choice. The pictures that emerge from the work have been the focus of our seminar. In other words, all the talk about computers and buttons, aperture...

I'm thrilled to announce that a long term dream is beginning to take shape. In collaboration with the International Center of Photography , here in New York, and the Three Shadows Photography Art Center , in Beijing, I'm leading a workshop in photography this summer in China. From the ICP website : Explore Chinese culture through your photography. Join Sean Justice for a behind-the-scenes, upclose and personal tour of Beijing, an urban powerhouse and city of many charms. Our host, the Three Shadows Photography Art Center, is a contemporary gallery and research institute devoted to photography as a fine art. We will visit Beijing's art districts, galleries, and studios, enjoy the city's cafés, bookstores, and art-related events, and attend guest lectures by Chinese artists and curators. All the while, we will be using our picture-making skills to engage what we are learning and seeing. The trip includes must-see city highlights and cultural outings to the Temple ...

Walking with Connor. We get to the top of the hill. Saturday. At home on Staten Island. Last week we worked on technology and a lot of different names of stuff. This week we'll do it some more. As always, we'll keep looking at pictures. And as I've said and will say again: right now is not the hardest part. Right now the tech of this stuff feels difficult (there are so any different buttons!), and learning what everything is called takes a lot of time (and it's tough to ask a question if we don't speak the same language!)... ...but soon you'll have crested this learning curve (you'll have memorized the buttons and the names of things), and then the truly difficult part of being a photographer will begin. That's right -- you have to keep taking pictures. Sometimes you have to force yourself, in fact. Even if you're not "in the mood" or if "there's nothing to photograph at home"...take your camera with you and just keep...

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.

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...

Please join me in a refreshing, free-form photo-share event. Sign up at the flickr group PhotoGroupFSJ to participate. The idea is to have a casual and inspirational conversation about photography and learning photography. I'm launching this flickr space in the hope that students and teachers can keep an outer-classroom discussion percolating, share random photo favorites, and talk about the experience of being photographers today. There aren't any restrictions! Anyone can join...teachers, students, student-teachers — after all, we're all embedded in the culture of the photo-world. One goal of the group is to mix it up, swap places — we can learn from each other. For instance, I learn a ton by talking with friends, students, other teachers, and even with people who don't even consider themselves 'photographers.' (And vice versa: you learn more about what you do when you gear up to teach about it.) I hope you'll come aboard for a while and share some thought...

798 Factory Area, Beijing So we've gotten the ball rolling and bouncing in a dozen ways all at the same time. Classes at NYU, ICP and Parsons are flying now, full speed. Learning photography often seems to require that you know something while simultaneously already knowing something else, in order to learn some other fairly critical fundamental. I'm familiar with the way it begins to feel overwhelming; it seems to be part of the process, though that doesn't make it easier. But I'd like to focus back on something that precedes all of that, at least in my mind. Namely the question: what are we doing when we work in photography? That is, what is the work? And what are you trying to learn? After mulling it over for a while, and after watching a lot of people surf the learning curve, I want to suggest that the pictures you're making are NOT the work. Or, at least, the pictures are not the entirety of the work. Here's the thing, I can "teach" you how to use...

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...