considering pictures | sean justice > open journal

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...

My wife and son dragged the tree up to the park yesterday and fed it to the choppers, thrilled to watch it spray out the other end in a mist of wood and wintery perfume. Mulch Fest NYC. We look forward to that post-Christmas march up the block every year. Even if you don't do Christmas, this is a ritual you can understand and fully enjoy just by watching and sniffing (that pine scent is wonderful, isn't it?). Dust to dust, or something like that, is part of our shared experience regardless of religion. Living in Brooklyn allows me to brush shoulders with every faith and flavor of doubt that's ever watched the winter sun grow shorter - or so it seems. My rabbi lives downstairs, my priest a few blocks from here, and my Wiccan friend across the street. Other neighbors decorate the Orthodox or Islamic calendars, but we all toast the fireworks on January 1, and then get together a few weeks later to enjoy Spring Festival. It's easy to exaggerate the ecumenicism (think: ...

Across the street they're almost finished with the wall. I've been watching the progress. The other day the light and the shadows and the workers chatting and laughing and shouting at each other suddenly brought to mind a passage from one of my favorite books of the last several years: David Lewis-Williams , The Mind in the Cave . Actually, the first thing that came to mind was Gregory Curtis ' The Cave Painters . Curtis speculates, in his book, about the place and purpose of pictures within culture, and he quotes from Lewis-Williams to his illustrate his meaning. As it happens, the idea from Lewis-Williams that resonates so strongly with Curtis also resonates with me, and has done so ever since I read The Mind in the Cave five years ago. Here it is: What is the meaning of the hand marks? Perhaps that's the wrong question. Instead, perhaps the question should be: what is the meaning of the paint? Whether you're familiar with the cave paintings in Western Europe or...

Browsing James Fallows ' post from China about the death of this father and his syblings' discovery of some never-before-seen pictures of his parents, led me to reminisce about those moments when the normal flow of life is unexpectedly punctuated by photographs. Last month, on the last day of Thursday's Photo One class at ICP, when we were supposed to be displaying and critiquing each others' final work, John brought out a sheaf of black and white photographs of his grandmother and grandfather on their wedding day in the 1930s. He'd discovered them in a trunk he'd rescued from his mother's apartment. From a faded manila envelope he withdrew delicate traces of his personal history to share with us. And gingerly spreading the thin curled paper, tentatively at first - not wanting to damage the fragile surfaces - we found ourselves unexpectedly immersed in memories that weren't our own. He wanted to know how to scan the pictures without damaging them, but...

I'm very busy now that business has collapsed. 2009 looks to be a banner year. I'm learning to use Flickr. I'm writing again. Might as well start something personal. Do you do projects? A lot of us focus on themed investigations, particular angles, purposeful journeys. We search for a subject, wrestle with it, and then network our access, our permissions, our intentions. And then we point the camera. We're expected to work this way -- curators, critics, editors, my two year old downstairs neighbor -- everyone wants to know: what are you working on these days? I want to focus on not-focusing. I'm tired of projects. I want a moment. This is crazy. I've got too much work to do. Lie down. Can you picture it? I like the afternoon sun in this corner. These are passing flowers.

Two words that overlap in popular conversation: image and picture. You hear them used interchangeably; most of the time, each means the other. But I'm impatient with casual synonyms. In my experience, sloppy speech yields sloppy thinking, and when a word takes on many different meanings, or when two different words gradually come to mean the same thing, ideas get hidden. In this case, conflating "image" with "picture" is actually erasing something important, denying us access to a concept that can help us clarify what we're doing, who we are. Here's a thought (suggested by Patrick Maynard, The Engine of Visualization ): let's use the word "image" when we're talking about the observed properties of light and mind, and "picture" when we talk about the human activity of making those observations physical, concrete. That is, the refractive and reflective properties of light described by Newton, and that Einstein used to measure...

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?