considering pictures | sean justice > open journal

The power of the picture-maker that changes the world is that I can see again. Robert Ryman's work knocks me outside myself. Try it: sustain the focus to feel your neural patterns begin to resonate with a particular sympathy. Linger inside a poem and the rhythm of the subway molds towards that form. Stagger from the theatre and the street becomes a drama ripped from that stage. Dwell inside the painting and its warp will shape your walk in Florence, New York, Beijing. When the world refracts through another's words and pictures, at that moment, I know that I'm alive. This wild Ryman clarified me in Philadelphia while I was walking with Diana, talking about history, revolution, and neighborhood transitions. A recent short essay on Robert Ryman by Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker: Abstraction Problem .

In the desert outside what has become Yuma, Arizona, people made a picture of God. They etched it into the surface of that hard bright land -- hands, feet, mouth, body, thin lines stretching wide and long across the emptiness, until the emptiness was filled. And day by day throughout the year God lay on that dry flatness and watched the people come and go, to the river, to the fields, hunting, dancing, telling stories, singing. Stepping across the line of God's foot a father would say something quiet to his son to mark their passage, and the son would respond in kind to his father. Once each year the people would gather to walk the body of God together, tracing the worn path from head to torso to foot, and then back, on the other side, to the head again. As they walked, perhaps, they cleared brush and small stones from the etching, restoring a short section erased by the summer winds, or in another place, a part of God's arm that had been washed away by the winter rain. ...

A former student wrote yesterday: "I am still struggling with critiquing my own work, just because nothing is ever really good enough, and I am still wondering as to what is a 'good image' that I took versus one that is not meaningful. With 'good', I mean: do my images ever really say anything or are they considered just snapshots of the moment? I am thoroughly confused..." This kind of confusion, it seems to me, is the point of learning photography. I usually begin a course with demonstrations and instruction in the basics of cameras and computer imaging. A short history of the camera and of photography follows immediately. And then the main point: long weeks of making pictures, showing them to each other, and talking about them. My hope is to shove the apparatus to the background and focus on the process of the making meaning, which emerges from the conversation. The camera and computer will become a massive distraction for the new photographer unless...

...make pictures. We do a lot of other stuff too. We wake up, get our coffee, take a shower, get the kids to school, go to work. We do stuff we want to do, stuff we don't want to do. We also do nothing, and think about doing nothing. And we do pictures. A lot of the stuff we do is driven by clearly defined motivations -- wake-up, eat, work, sleep -- and sometimes picture-making is too, but not always. I have to convince you to buy the stuff I sell: make a picture. I have to convince you to vote for my guy: make a picture. I have to convince myself I'm having a good time: make a picture. I have to convince you I love you. When I teach photography, the goal is to put away the camera and slow up, slow down, draw out the motivations that drive us to make pictures. What do we want from this thing that we do? My favorite day is when we put our pictures on the board, step back, take a breath, and talk about the journey.

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 ...

pictures often sound for me. i hear the tone and contrast, the shape. sometimes i perform the score while teaching, playing pictures with gusto, with bravado. sometimes i don't. last sunday the BPL Chamber Players wowed us at the Brooklyn Central Library - part of their terrific series of afternoon music sessions: wonderfully soothing, invigorating. along with selections from Rossini and Dvorak, they gave us a composition from Corigliano, a contemporary, titled Snapshot Circa 1909, in which he interprets a photograph of his father at eight years old. in the snapshot there's a young boy standing in bright sun, a violin tucked into his chin. He's wearing a white shirt, black trousers narrowed at the ankles, his hair parted in the center, and next to him is a man, seated, in a black jacket and narrow necktie, with a large guitar in his lap. Corigliano writes that he mused about the thoughts and expectations of his young father as he prepared to play with his uncle on that su...

i wonder if a picture can describe experience? i want to believe in connection, in conversation. in this ad the decision was made to not retouch the "arab" girl, her skin. can you feel it? perhaps i'm particularly sensitive to the texture of skin, the touch of it. i teach retouching. i'm a photographer. i have bad skin. but why and how was this ad released like this? is it a mistake? is it a comment? is it a ploy, a meta-ploy, to get us talking about the ad itself (see the tag line). i work in advertising and i collect photos about photos and photos about ads, but this seems simultaneously too subtle and too crass. our white american girl with perfect skin is at high school, wondering about her doppelganger with bad skin cloistered behind curtained windows on the other side of the world. is this our new story? our new social network? can the bones of this new experience really be wrapped in the old skin of snap decisions about surface beauty and the dee...

7thAve_Brooklyn_02 , originally uploaded by seanjustice . i'm not sure photography as a word has much currency any more. i used to be a photographer and that made sense. but what does it mean today? thousands of photos per minute; billions. we're all taking photos; everybody is a photographer. i don't disagree. in fact, this how i begin every class i teach: we're here to explore and become more of the photographer you already are. but that means i don't teach something called photography; i encourage picture-making. if any single word can be applied to everyone, everywhere, then that word, necessarily, loses significance -- it doesn't mean anything because it means everything. what is photography? it's not what you think. who isn't a photographer?

i'm thinking about surfaces. is that a picture? the nothing below the something above the flat of it. a question lifts above and hovers. is that a picture? if i walk up to you and breathe will you recoil, sink beneath, or respond. i see a surface and touch nothing, lines. skin. i want to make a picture so i need to surface.

what oh what am i to do, when i bite the fruit and it tastes like poo, it's not that it's completely new, but you wouldn't like it if it happened to you. and that's only on the week days. on Saturday the question becomes more ambiguous: what does an artist do? and if it isn't, is he/she? who decides? can you taste it?

this is bobby's cat. i don't know why he doesn't like me.

on a flat world i can walk with you for a long time. we're going to need shoes and it'd be good to know how to fix them once in a while. we'll be aliens together. let's chat about it. who's the other? walking resonates. superflat.

in my dream i'm dreaming that i'm taking notes about a dream. mirror phase. no one in the boardroom notices because they're too busy listening to my blah blah. take it down. mimo. this feels like a memory. something is dripping. phase. in my dream i'm interpolating. does more of me mean less of you? it bites again. remorse. i wish i wish. the record wipes it clean and i'm waking in a world of surface disturbances. why does loss and laughter sample the same? here's the fantasy.

this lake sits in a basin carved by glaciers. on a clear day i can follow the round granite against the sky and feel the weight of more than a mile of ice. today that ancient surface is eroded and smothered with weeds and trees. no trace remains of that clean surface scoured smooth 10,000 years ago. that surface isn't smooth now. that surface isn't visible anymore. there's a new surface now. ripples of wind skip across it. pre-phase ice rolls around the basin and we row across it, swim under it, delightful in the rain and clouds. Mt Rushmore is being restored today on the news. if the ice comes and scours the surface clean again, what pictures will we make?

i'm whispering: what is a picture. i'm not all that interested in buttons, but i will i promise help you find the right ones. my heart strays toward conversation and my feet toward history. is a picture a technology? or is a picture the motivation toward technology? or something else. can you feel it. open. on the job last week one of the big whigs waltzed on set and announced that all buttons had been removed from all pillows because people can choke to death on buttons. liability. we'll have none of that. we had to reshoot. this is new: buttons can kill. so, can we imagine a world without buttons? do we want to? what does an artist do? i'll show you the buttons you need and point out the pathway towards the buttons you want. can we also linger among the pictures for a bit as we go?

on a warm day soho sticking to my shirt i want to get this conversation started. i don't know if it can work. can we whisper can we sneer can we talk? i want to hear you. on a warm day i remember thinking yesterday, what is a picture? in the space between this breath and the next i wonder can you hear me?

lane Originally uploaded by seanjustice . patterns overlay. a trail becomes a path becomes a lane becomes a road becomes a street becomes a boulevard becomes a right of way becomes a superhighway. can you walk across? earlier this evening i watched my sons play Yugioh, a complicated card game with a varied deck of monsters and heros with scaleable positions of defense and attack. each player draws from a private deck, in turn, and lays down a card, face up, face down, side-ways, vertical. each card affects other cards according to an arcane calculus of cause-effect. certain cards allow the player to scramble the deck of the opposing player, or steal cards from him. each turn has a numerical consequence, plus or minus points, which are calculated on the fly, without notes, by negotiation. 2400 points, 1000 points, minus 2450 points, plus 500 points, you lose. you win. is this a technology? what efficiency is enhanced? what work is accomplished? is this not a technology? is ...

we're talking about pipes and we're having fun though everyone thinks i might be a psycho nut

hosed Originally uploaded by seanjustice . the image, the lens, the shadow. am i mistaken am i lost am i wandering i am wandering. this is fun.

princest_21 Originally uploaded by seanjustice . we walked out together. what are we going to do this time around. welcome back.