Not Close Enough

Give A Hand Grenade To A Baby

2010-04-12T10:42:00.007-04:00

This weekend I was reminded by my friend and photographer Josh Yospyn of Worn Magazine about what Norman Mailer had to say about Diane Arbus. Mailer said that "Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby." Arthur Lubow, in an article for the NYT writes that Mailer said that "after seeing how she had captured him, leaning back in a velvet armchair with his legs splayed cockily." I think Mailer was having a laugh. The most famous Arbus photo, "Child With Toy Hand Grenade, 1962", was shot the year before the Mailer portrait.

Norman Mailer at home, 1963. © Diane Arbus

Child with Toy Hand Grenade, 1962 © Diane Arbus

Vivian Maier

2009-10-13T10:44:00.005-04:00

Thanks to my friend Chris Chen of My Life As A Contact Sheet for sending out this link to the work of Vivian Maier, a street photographer, who worked in 1950's - 1970's. An auction in Chicago recently discovered 40,000 mostly medium format (6x6) negatives. Read all about it here.

© Vivian Maier
http://vivianmaier.blogspot.com/

Irving Penn

2009-10-07T16:39:00.006-04:00

Irving Penn, one of the most influential photographers of the century, died today. He was 92 years old. Read the NYT obit by photo critic and Corcoran College of Art and Design Photography Chair, Andy Grundberg.

Kate Moss 2008 © Irving Penn

Edward Burtynsky - Oil at the Corcoran

2009-10-01T10:18:00.009-04:00

Don't miss the Edward Burtynsky exhibit at Corcoran, opening Oct. 3rd to Dec 13. The accompanying book, Edward Burtynsky: Oil will be published by Steidl on Oct. 31, 2009. Also see the NYT blog In Focus slide show. Lens Culture has an interview with Burtynsky from 2006.

The image below is from Burtynsky's Shipbreaking series.

Manufacturing #17,
Deda Chicken Processing Plant, Dehui City, Jilin Province, 2005
© Edward Burtynsky

New York Photographs

2009-08-14T11:21:00.004-04:00

NYT story here:
Glitz and Grime: Photographs of Times Square

New York Photographs 42nd Street in 1997, by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, from “Glitz & Grime” at Yancey Richardson.

Lillian Bassman

2009-07-17T16:12:00.005-04:00

Lillian Bassman is a fashion photographer from NYC whose work from the 40s to the early ’60s was published in Harper’s Bazaar. From the NYT article called Femininity, Salvaged:

Five years ago, at 87, Ms. Bassman discovered the glories of Photoshop and so began a new chapter in digital photography. She works every day in her studio, toying and reconfiguring from about 11 in the morning until dinnertime, and claims a proud proficiency with her computer. It is a skill however that does not extend to the use of e-mail or Google. “I’m not interested,” she said, “in any of that.”

NYT slideshow

Lillian Bassman, Then and Now exhibition at Staley Wise in NYC.

The book, Lillian Bassman, from 1997 is out of print but a new book will be published in the fall.

© Lillian Bassman

© Lillian Bassman, 1951

Kodachrome Retired

2009-07-02T08:06:00.008-04:00

Kodak announced on June 22, 2009 that Kodachrome film will be retired after 74 years.
Read A Tribute to KODACHROME: A Photography Icon in Kodak's Blog A Thousand Words. Don't miss the Kodachrome slideshow.

Elsewhere, Forture magazine editors pick their favorite Kodachrome picks in the Kodachrome Gallery. Three of these photos by W.Eugene Smith, Robert Doisneau, and Jeff Jacobson are exceptional. For me, these all have what critic Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography called punctum. The punctum is subjective. A photo has that detail, that special quality, that something that grabs you by the throat or it does not.

From Fortune magazine.

W. Eugene Smith, renowned for his photo essays for Life magazine, notably "The Country Doctor," typically chronicled working-class American life. He also typically never worked in color, but Fortune persuaded him to do so. This private moment in the headquarters of Connecticut General Life Insurance in Hartford, Conn., did not make it into the September 1957 issue of the magazine, for which Smith shot photographs to accompany an article on the company's "dramatic new office building."

© W. Eugene Smith

Robert Doisneau, the celebrated French photographer and creator of the iconic 1950 photograph, "The Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville," was another photographer who rarely experimented with color.
Here Doisneau pictures a man reading in a lounge chair in Palm Springs, Calif., a photo that appeared in the magazine's February 1961 issue.

© Robert Doisneau

Fortune's editors chose this Jeff Jacobson photograph of a Shanghai billboard for their "2002: The Year in Pictures" photo gallery to symbolize the need to keep an "eye on China.""For centuries, China was Asia's sleeping dragon. Now fully awake, it is the region's most vibrant economy -- and most feared competitor," the photo's caption explained.

© Jeff Jacobson

William Eggleston at the Corcoran

2009-06-26T12:12:00.011-04:00

The William Eggleston exhibit at the Corcoran Museum opened on June 20th and is exceptional.

William Eggleston is from Memphis, TN. Many people have wondered if Eggleston's work is "Southern" or have asked him directly about the "meaning of the South". In an interview printed in Aperture by John Howell in 1999, in response to the "meaning of the South" query, Eggleston said "I don't know what they're looking for. I don't have any idea".

Howell continues to say that "Southern" always strikes Southerners as a condescending tag.

It's taken to mean "regional," as in local, anecdotal, folkloric and outrageously melodramatic - in other words, like those novels, films and plays full of enervated aristocrats, trampy women, and idiot men-children acting out in bizarre ways. It's as if solemn phrases about the drama of the decaying South soothe those puzzled by Eggleston's pictures ("What are they about?"), and those-mostly now in the past - outraged by the "banal" subject matter.

Eggleston gives his consistent philosophic answer: "You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one too," he adds, with a chuckle. He has said many times that the subjects of his pictures were simply an excuse to make photographs. "I want to make a picture that could stand on its own, regardless of what it was a picture of.

John Szarkowski isn't quite buying this. In the Introduction to the monograph William Eggleston's Guide, Szarkowski writes that the photos are about Eggleston's home, about his place.

...the pictures reproduced here are about the photographer's home, about his place, in both important meanings of that word. One might say about his identity.

If this is true, it does not mean that the pictures are not also simultaneously about photography, for the two issues are not supplementary but coextensive. Whatever else a photograph may be about, it is inevitably about photography, the container and the vehicle of all its meanings. Whatever a photographer's intuitions or intentions, they must be cut and shaped to fit the possibilities of his art. Thus if we see the pictures clearly as photographs, we will perhaps also see, or sense, something of their other, more private, willful, and anarchic meanings.

Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one's cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite. The world now contains more photographs than bricks, and they are, astonishingly, all different. Even the most servile of photographers has not yet managed to duplicate exactly an earlier work by a great and revered master.

Photos below are from the monograph William Eggleston's Guide
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1976, 2003

© William Eggleston

© William Eggleston

© William Eggleston

http://www.egglestontrust.com/

The Perfect Moment

2009-06-04T12:17:00.022-04:00

Twenty years ago, in the summer of 1989, the Corcoran cancelled its scheduled retrospective exhibition of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe called "Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment". The Institute of Contemporary Art hosted a two-day symposium Imperfect Moments: Mapplethorpe and Censorship Twenty Years Later. The original exhibit was organized by Janet Kardon from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. A must read is the Janet Kardon article from 1988. The show was partially financed by the National Endowment for the Arts. One of the reasons for the cancellation was the uproar over the Andres Serrano photograph "Piss Christ" which was also funded by the NEA and exhibited in North Carolina. See the link above for the advert for Andres Serrano's SHIT show last fall.

Sister Wendy, nun and art critic, in an 1998 article in Art in America, doesn't seem at all bothered by Serrano's Piss Christ. (sorry, someone broke my link to the article). The New York Times reviewed a 10-year Serrano retrospective at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in a 1995 article by Holland Cotter.

The Guardian.UK's Jonathan Jones, in an article from Sept. 2000, writes about the Mapplethorpe polaroid portrait of Patti Smith from 1974 shown below. He nails this one calling Patti Smith "black anger in the white light".

Patti Smith, 1974, Polaroid -©Robert Mapplethorpe

Patti Smith, 1979 - ©Robert Mapplethorpe

Piss Christ - ©Andres Serrano

Smile and Say No Photoshop

2009-05-28T07:58:00.013-04:00

I hope this is a trend. Photographer Peter Linbergh's non photoshopped covers for French Elle.

Read the NYT article, Smile and Say No Photoshop.

Also, in the excellent LENS blog, the Three Faces of Reese. Can you see the changes in Reese Witherspoon's chin, dimples and eye color?

The Originals - Robert Maxwell

2009-05-18T10:12:00.013-04:00

There is a beautiful full page portrait of the surfer Clay Marzo by photographer Robert Maxwell in Sundays, NYT's Style Magazine. Summer Travel 2009.

Clay Marzo Aqua Man
While the rest of us surf the Web, Clay Marzo hangs ten off some of the most spectacular beaches in the world. Tahiti, El Salvador, Micronesia, Spain, Bali — the world is Marzo’s tidal wave. ‘‘My favorite place to surf is Fiji,’’ he says. ‘‘There is a surfing island called Tavarua that is like paradise.’’ In search of the perfect break, he always comes prepared, typically taking four or five boards with him; he’d like to visit the coast of Western Australia next. Although Marzo has the developmental disorder known as Asperger’s syndrome, it’s never slowed him down: he got his start riding on the front of his father’s long board at the age of 1; now 19, he is one of the most lauded beach bums in the world. ‘‘I get most inspired by seeing photos of faraway breaks and sick, slablike waves.’’

Clay Marzo by Robert Maxwell

New York Times Style Magazine, May 17, 2009
More from Robert Maxwell's Originals Series

Wes Anderson - by Robert Maxwell

Gordon Parks - by Robert Maxwell

Michele Oka Doner, Artist by Robert Maxwell

The lone hunter in the Akira Kurosawa film ''Dersu Uzala'' inspired Michele Oka Doner to rethink her own clutter. ''That's when I began to want things to be more elemental,'' she says. Doner tossed the extraneous but kept a firm grip on all things functional -- and beautiful -- even in her well-known public art projects. The tiled floors she designed for Miami International Airport include celestial depictions of saltwater plants and invertebrate creatures; for the Herald Square subway stop in New York, she gold-tiled the walls to add ''radiance and reflectivity'' to a tedious commute. She's also conscious of beauty in the little things, from her sculptural jewelry (including a collection for Christofle) to her line of crystal objects for Steuben Glass.

Jeff Riedel - A Night On the Streets

2009-05-05T09:15:00.011-04:00

I just got the May 2009 issue of PDN, the Photo Annual 2009. One of the winners from the magazine/editorial category was Jeff Riedel for the New York Magazine story called A Night On the Streets. Kudos to New York Mag's photo director Jody Quon and photo editor Alex Pollack.

William Thompson 5:30 p.m., the Bronx © Jeff Riedel

Nancy Quinn, Midnight, the Bronx © Jeff Riedel

Lorraine Zier, 5 a.m., midtown © Jeff Riedel

Pulitzer for Damon Winter NYT

2009-04-20T16:20:00.007-04:00

Congrats to NYT photographer Damon Winter, who won the Pulitzer Prize today for feature photography, for his images of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign.

Check out the winning photos in the NYT slideshow A Vision of History.

Also, in the NYT multimedia presentation, Damon Winter recounts documenting the crowds, security and Senator Barack Obama on the campaign trail in 2008.

3-3-2008, San Antonio, TX, Damon Winter, NYT.

11-07-2008, Cinncinati, OH, Damon Winter, NYT

Pictures Generation

2009-04-20T07:53:00.012-04:00

The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984, exhibit opens at the Met on Tuesday. The Pictures Generation was a group show at Aritsts Space in NYC in 1977 that exhibited work from Robert Longo, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine and Troy Brauntuch. Other artists that were associated with the "Pictures Generation" school or movement were Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman.

Douglas Eklund in his essay from the Pictures Generation exhibit at the Met quotes semiotician Ronald Barthes and opines about why it's important for photographers to know their history.

Barthes infamously extended this concept to question the very possibility of originality and authenticity in his 1967 manifesto "The Death of the Author," in which he stated that any text (or image), rather than emitting a fixed meaning from a singular voice, was but a tissue of quotations that were themselves references to yet other texts, and so on.

The famous last line of Barthes' essay, that "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author," was a call to arms for the loosely knit group of artists working in photography, film, video, and performance that would become known as the "Pictures" generation...

Untitled Film Still #14, 1978 © Cindy Sherman

from Men In The Cities series, © Robert Longo

Tough and Beautiful

2009-04-16T11:59:00.006-04:00

Joel Meyerowitz and Garry Winogrand met in the early 1960's in New York City. Meyerowitz would go out and photograph with Winogrand, just about everyday, from 1962 to 1965 according to the book, Bystander: A History Of Street Photography. Meyerowitz talks about what makes an image "Tough".

"Tough" was a term we used to use a lot. Stark, spare, hard, demanding, tough: these were the values that we applied to the act of making photographs.

Tough meant the image was uncompromising. It was something made out of your guts, out of your instinct, and it was unwieldy in some way, not capable of being categorized by ordinary standards. So it was tough. It was tough to like, tough to see, tough to make, tough to draw meaning from. It wasn't what most photographs looked like. ... It was a type of picture that made you uncomfortable sometimes. You didn't quite understand it. It made you grind your teeth.

At the same time, though you knew it was beautiful, because tough also meant that - it meant beautiful too. ... The two words - "tough" and "beautiful" --became synonyms somehow. They were what street photography was all about.

Fifth Avenue and Fifty-second Street, NY, 1974 ⓒ Joel Meyerowitz

Two Problems

2009-04-15T13:19:00.012-04:00

"Every photographer has two problems: To find what to photograph, and to find how to photograph it. The way I see it, you find the what, nail it to the cross, and the how will take care of itself." ~ Garry Winogrand

It's difficult to talk about Street Photography without talking about Garry Winogrand. Winogrand would typically carry two Leica M4's with 28mm lens attached, loaded with Tri-X film and shoot copiously. He died in 1984 at age 56, leaving behind 2500 rolls of unprocessed film. Read the excellent essay by Frank Van Riper and another by Mason Resnick called Coffee and Workprints: A Workshop with Garry Winogrand.

One of my favorite images from Winogrand is below, from the book, Garry Winogrand: The Animals. The Getty museum has this to say about this photo.

Garry Winogrand confronted tough issues like racism with a sense of humor, as he did here by photographing this black man and white woman holding apes. The chimpanzees are dressed like children and resemble the human child standing behind the couple. The photographer's close vantage point, the crowd, the dramatic winter light-all add a sense of spectacle. Winogrand was not simply reacting to a strange moment, but probably also to racial tensions sweeping the country at the height of the Civil Rights movement. The year this picture was made, black actors won Academy Awards, and the U.S. Supreme Court overturned state laws banning interracial marriage. It is not clear whether this man and woman were actually a couple, but Winogrand must have known that their togetherness was as unsettling to some people as their circumstances were comical.

Garry Winogrand, 1967. Central Park Zoo

Garry Winogrand, 1952. Coney Island, NY

YouTube Video of Winogrand:
Interview Part 1
Interview Part 2

Out of Print Winogrand book, Winogrand 1964

So you wanna be a photo editor...

2009-04-08T15:36:00.009-04:00

The Magnum Photo blog has a photo editing competition called Your Magnum Edit. You browse through the Magnum archive and select 10-14 images that illustrate the following Oscar Wilde quote.

"A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction." - Oscar Wilde

Sign up on the Magnum site to use the lightbox and submit image numbers to the contest form. Submit your images by Friday, April 10th, 2009 at 12pm. I am curious to see what other people choose for their edit.

Below is an image from my edit from Bruce Davidson.

Subway, 1980
Copyright Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Shoot Your Idols

2009-04-06T12:10:00.017-04:00

On Saturday I met with a few photographer friends (Paul, Josh, Graeme, Praveen, Steve, Chris) to shoot the Cherry Blossom Parade (DCist Weekend Gallery) and see the Character Project Exhibit. After the exhibit, we had lunch and discussed a wide range of topics ranging from the influence of the French New Wave in film, to Ryan McGinley’s obsession with Moz, to what work we loved and loathed in the Character Project, to bad photo editing and visual literacy.

I was trying to remember this quote about music criticism that was attributed to Elvis Costello.

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's a really stupid thing to want to do."

- Elvis Costello, in an interview by Timothy White entitled "A Man out of Time Beats the Clock." Musician magazine No. 60 (October 1983), p. 52.

Is it the same for photography? Is writing about photography a really stupid thing to want to do? I don’t think so, hence this blog. Visual Literacy is the ability to understand and better appreciate visual images and being able to use visual imagery to communicate to others. Photographs need to be decoded and interpreted in order to be fully understood and appreciated. A good starting point for interpreting a photograph is by asking the following questions:

What is this photograph about? (what is obvious and what is implied)
Does the photograph work and why?

A photograph can communicate complex messages. They are not objective but reflect the photographer’s aesthetic.

The first photo is Iggy Pop, photographed by Eric Ogden for his series on Detroit musicians in the USA network's Character Project. The second portrait of Iggy is by Danny Clinch for a John Varvatos advert. Danny Clinch's portrait is sublime. It goes beyond the scores of cliched images of Iggy with his shirt off, to reveal a true rock and roll icon.

Eric Ogden, 2008 (As seen in the Character Project exhibit)

Danny Clinch, 2006, Iggy Pop, Central Park, NYC

Remembering Helen Levitt

2009-03-31T09:16:00.010-04:00

James Agee, author of the seminal documentary work, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families had this to say about Helen Levitt's work.

“At least a dozen of Helen Levitt’s photographs seem to me as beautiful, perceptive, satisfying, and enduring as any lyrical work that I know. In their general quality and coherence, moreover, the photographs as a whole body, as a book, seem to me to combine into a unified view of the world, an uninsistent but irrefutable manifesto of a way of seeing, and in a gently and wholly unpretentious way, a major poetic work.”

NYT article from March 30, 2009, Art and Design.
NPR's All Things Considered story from 2002.

James Agee's forward to A Way of Seeing from Masters of Photography (Thanks Paul S.)

Helen Levitt - New York, 1974 from the book,
Slide Show: The Color Photographs of Helen Levitt

Helen Levitt - NYC, 1940

More Helen Levitt Books

This is Not a Pipe

2009-03-30T07:50:00.019-04:00

Photography is the great democratic medium. Anyone can do it. You don't need artistic talent or training, you just need to know how to trip the shutter on your camera. Everyone seems to be taking pictures and these pictures show up in print and on local blogs, Facebook and Flickr. But all photographs are not created equal. Some photographs are more equal than others. What is it that makes a photograph compelling? In the book Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes, talks in depth about what makes a good photograph.

..all we can say is that the object [the photograph] speaks, it induces us, vaguely, to think. And further: even this risks being perceived as dangerous. At the limit, no meaning at all is safer: the editors of Life rejected Kertesz’s photographs when he arrived in the United States in 1937 because, they said, his images “spoke too much”; they made us reflect, suggested a meaning – a different meaning from the literal one. Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels or stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.

Photographs have both a denotation and a connotation. The denotation is the obvious, literal meaning. The connotation is the symbolic or metaphoric meaning. Below are images from
Andre Kertesz. Do these images "speak too much"?

Andre Kertesz, Martinique

Andre Kertesz - Satiric Dancer, 1926.

Andre Kertesz, by Sarah Greenough

Rene Magritte, 1928-29, The Treachery of Images

Let's Be Frank

2009-03-26T07:54:00.009-04:00

Robert Frank is in DC today for a lecture/conversation with with Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs, National Gallery of Art. A Conversation with Robert Frank at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, March 26, 2009 @ 3:30p.m.

In an interview with Art in America in 1996, Robert Frank talked about the photo below from The Americans.

I am still affected by that one photograph of the man on the hill in San Francisco, the way he looked back at me. I think that's why that's my favorite picture in the book. But it was, you know, forty years ago, a long time ago, a different time.

Robert Frank - from The Americans, San Francisco, 1956

The Americans first published in 1958 and 1959, changed the course of 20th-century photography. John Szarkowski, critic, author and curator at MOMA said that Robert Frank established a new iconography for contemporary America. Other books by Robert Frank include, Peru: Photographs and Paris.

The photograph below was one of the last still photographs Frank made before he devoted his creative energy to filmmaking in the early 1960s.

Fourth of July, Coney Island, 1958
Robert Frank (American, born Switzerland, 1924)

No Accounting for Taste

2009-03-25T09:26:00.015-04:00

About 60% of english words derive from Latin. The Latin proverb De gustibus non est disputandum loosely translated means "There is no accounting for taste" or "personal preferences are not debatable". A person's taste and their perceptions are distinctive. Everyone sees the world differently depending on their age, gender and culture. Any number of photographers can photograph the same thing and the photographs will be surprisingly dissimilar.

According to a recent study in published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, beauty affects men and women's brains differently, even though both men and women describe beauty as being "original, interesting and pleasant."

Alec Soth talks about gender differences in his artistic statement for Portraiture Now: Feature Photography at the National Portrait Gallery.

A critic once pointed out to me the different ways in which I photograph men and women. With men I seem to be poking fun, he said, whereas my depiction of women is more reverent. He makes a good point. Many of my best pictures of men are playful (a man in a flight suit holding model airplanes, a shirtless man with carrots in his ears). But the women I photograph look more like saints than clowns. As a man, I suppose, I identify more with my male subjects. In them, I see my own awkwardness and frailty. Women are always “the other.” In assembling this group of portraits of women, I’m aware that I’m treading on dangerous ground. When I was in college, I learned to be distrustful of men’s depictions of women. I remember seeing Garry Winogrand’s book Women are beautiful in the school library and being shocked that it hadn’t been defaced for its blatant objectification of women. But looking back, maybe I was too harsh. Whether one photographs men or women, it is always a form of objectification. Whatever you say about Winogrand, his depiction was honest. In putting together a collection of my best portraits of women, I’m trying to come to terms with how I honestly see and depict women. Are my pictures romanticized? Sexualized? Why do I see women in this way? For me, photography is as much about the way I respond to the subject as it is about the subject itself.

© Alec Soth, Ron from Fashion Magazine by Alec Soth (v. 3)

My Kid Can Take That Picture

2009-03-24T11:23:00.009-04:00

My friends Amy O and Brad stopped by this weekend to have a chat and catch up. At some point, while Amy O was obsessively playing a game on her phone, she was thumbing through the March/April issue of American Photo. She asked what was so great about the Leibovitz photo of Susan Sontag at Petra. Amy maintained that everyone takes that same photograph at Petra. I think that to fully understand a photograph, you have to consider the original context and the external context. Knowledge of the photographer, the subject and the circumstances enhance a viewer's understanding of the photograph. The external context is also important. How was the photograph presented? How and where a photo is seen affects it's meaning. In this case, the photo, published in an issue of American Photo about the work of Leibovitz, was one of many photographs in the issue from Leibovitz's long career. It is helpful to know the work of Leibovitz and Susan Sontag to establish the context. Sontag has written extensively on photography in her book, On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others and was Leibovitz' partner. On the surface, the photograph is a nice black and white image of a tourist at Petra, but underneath the surface, it's much more.

Annie Leibovitz - Susan Sontag at Petra, 1994

The Thing Itself

2009-03-24T08:33:00.010-04:00

In the book The Photographer's Eye, first published in 1966, John Szarkowski describes the photograph as "The Thing Itself".

The first thing that the photographer learned was that photography dealt with the actual; he had not only to accept this fact, but to treasure it; unless he did, photography would defeat him.
...
"But he learned also that the factuality of his pictures, no matter how convincing and unarguable, was a different thing than the reality itself. Much of the reality was filtered out in the static little black and white image, and some of it was exhibited with an unnatural clarity, an exaggerated importance. The subject and the picture were not the same thing, although they would afterwards seem so. It was the photographer's problem to see not simply the reality before him but the still invisible picture, and to make his choices in terms of the latter.
This was an artistic problem, not a scientific one..."

Photographs can distort reality. Sometimes we remember the photograph rather than the actual event. Memories are prone to distortion. Last week 60 Minutes reported on the flaws in eyewitness testimony. A woman was shown six photos, and told to pick the perpetrator. After studying the photos for five minutes, she picked an innocent man who was later falsely convicted and jailed. A person's schemas can distort memory. A schema is a mental model of an object or event that includes knowledge as well as beliefs and expectations. Memory is also distored by source amnesia, hindsight bias, the overconfidence effect, confabulation...the list goes on. Photographs can then distort memory.

Lee Friedlander, Untitled, 1962

From the Photographer's Eye

Photographing People

2009-03-23T22:38:00.001-04:00

Eugene Richards will be conducting the Photographing People workshop at the Look3 Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville, VA, June 6-11, 2009.

Richards famously quit Magnum twice and left the agency VII Photo Agency in February 2008.
Also appearing at this year's festival are Sylvia Plachy, Martin Parr and Gilles Peress. There are more workshops from Larry Fink, Nina Berman and James Nachtwey and David Alan Harvey.

Eugene Richards

Fred—just returned from prison—cries as he greets former girlfriend Rose. Eugene Richards included this photo in his 1987 book, Below the Line: Living Poor in America, which is out of print.

10,000 Hours

2009-03-23T21:49:00.001-04:00

You might have heard about Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers: The Story of Success. In the book Gladwell talks about the 10,000 hour rule. Basically, if you want to master something, you have to work at it, a lot. In the book, Gladwell quotes neurologist Daniel Levitin.

“In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years… No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.“

So, if you want to improve your photography, you have to shoot more. The more you shoot, the more ideas you will come up with and the better chance you'll have at creating a successful image. The image below was taken by photographer Brooke Williams and posted on Gladwell's web site.

Photo Editing 101

2009-03-23T21:16:00.003-04:00

Robert Frank shot 767 rolls of film for the 83 images in the book The Americans. That's 83 divided by 27612 or .003 percent. He spent one year editing his work. A good photographer learns to become a good editor. The Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 Rule or law of the vital few means that in any set of things (like a set of photos), a few (20 percent) are vital and many (80 percent) are considered trivial. The shorthand for the 80/20 rule is vital few / trivial many. Think of it as quality control for photographers. If you are looking for a good read, the classic book by Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values talks about the metaphysics of quality.

The Robert Frank exhibit is still at the National Gallery of Art until April 26, 2009. This is what the NGA says about The Americans.

First published in France in 1958 and in the United States in 1959, Robert Frank's The Americans is widely celebrated as the most important photography book since World War II. Including 83 photographs made largely in 1955 and 1956 while Frank (b. 1924) traveled around the United States, the book looked beneath the surface of American life to reveal a profound sense of alienation, angst, and loneliness. With these prophetic photographs, Frank redefined the icons of America, noting that cars, jukeboxes, gas stations, diners, and even the road itself were telling symbols of contemporary life. Frank's style—seemingly loose, casual compositions, with often rough, blurred, out-of-focus foregrounds and tilted horizons—was just as controversial and influential as his subject matter. The exhibition celebrates the 50th anniversary of the book's publication by presenting all 83 photographs from The Americans in the order established by the book, and by providing a detailed examination of the book's roots in Frank's earlier work, its construction, and its impact on his later art.

From Robert Frank's The Americans

Dedicated to all concerned photographers

2009-03-23T20:00:00.001-04:00

I first read about the conceptual photographer Les Krims in the book
Criticizing Photographs: An Introduction to Understanding Images. The author, OSU professor Terry Barrett writes about Les Krims's book, published in 1972 called Making chicken soup;: A book by Les Krims which pokes fun at concerned photographers. Barrett calls Krims's book elaborate sarcasm directed at concerned photographers, who, in Krims's view, do no more than serve up placebos to make us feel better about social issues, rather than changing them, much as moms serve chicken soup to cure colds. Krims is quite the provocateur. Lewis Hyde's book Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art talks about the mythical trickster. Below is a Les Krims photo from 1975. Brilliant mischief.

Les Krims,
Nude in Blackface Modeling for a Photography Workshop in a Motel Near the University of Missouri, 1975

If your photographs aren't good enough, you're not close enough

2009-03-23T19:25:00.001-04:00

Welcome to Not Close Enough, a blog about photography. It was Capa who said "If your photographs aren't good enough, you're not close enough". Capa was a founder of Magnum. The NYT has an article and slideshow about recovering the lost negatives of Robert Capa. The photo below caused quite a stir when someone said it was faked. Here's a PBS story about the allegation.

Robert Capa, The Falling Soldier