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.

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...

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 .

Where do ideas come from? This is the question that takes a lifetime. You know how to use the camera; you're learning the computer; and printing just takes time and practice (lots of practice). The hard stuff is more diffuse than that, more difficult to touch: where do you point your camera? what do you want me to see? what are you learning? Here's where we fight with each other. Some of my best friends and most valued colleagues believe it's impossible to teach artists to be artists, that you can't teach curiosity. I don't want to agree: if that's true, then what have I been doing all this time? The model I've proposed in the classroom is pretty simple: pay attention and respond. That's the core, I think. The essays and the photo prompts are all directed at it. So are the emails back-and-forth and the walking tours and the invitations to post on flickr. Then we close the loop with conversations about the pictures and about the process itself. At root is...

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.

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...