let us now catalogue famous people

i don't have any strong feelings about portraiture, but i guess that when a portrait evokes any kind of response from me, it's almost exclusively a reaction to the subject, and not the photo itself. like, a momentary ignorance of artifice, just str8 lookin at a dude, wondering what he's thinkin baout. which is also why portraiture can be sorta boring---it's static pictures of people just sitting there, being people.

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/tyler-hicks-a-decade-in-afghanistan/

worth it as much for the accompanying text as for the pictures

when a portrait evokes any kind of response from me, it's almost exclusively a reaction to the subject, and not the photo itself. like, a momentary ignorance of artifice, just str8 lookin at a dude, wondering what he's thinkin baout. which is also why portraiture can be sorta boring---it's static pictures of people just sitting there, being people.

this is interesting - i'm still not really arguing either way, like vehemently in favour of portraiture or anything, bc i haven't thought about it much since the above was posted, but i wonder if there's a big dividing line, here, between photography you like & photography you take - because i think if you take a portrait of a friend or some family or whatever and you really nail someone, totally get what they're like, encompass their essence/tendency towards gazing into the distance/whatever, then that's a huge achievement & can feel as successful as any photography (obviously, you can achieve the same in non-portraiture, capturing a gesture or even better a kinda significant moment between people or whatever). but then if you're dealing with portrait photography you've seen, of people you don't know, then you have a different standard - like 'wow that totally nails beckett, what a grizzly old intense dude' etc. i don't know. i say all this because, i think i have said this on here before, i have got way more into trying to capture things about people i know when taking photos than be part of a bigger effort focusing on like 'humans' or 'society' or w/e. maybe plax's stuff is the same?, idk, like it isn't that it is or isn't portraiture, but that it's dedicated to getting that str8-lookin-at-a-dude thing, which is especially powerful when you know them.

love the bike in this:

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/10/09/international/09cnd-afghan.2.large.jpg

oh there's no doubt that a personal connection to the subject of a portrait outside the picture itself strengthens and colors the way you look at that portrait.

portrait portrait portrait

sure, & it feels obvious to even say so. but just i wonder whether, if the chief thing you're trying to elicit with portraiture is that sense of understanding or curiosity or capture, maybe it's a harder thing to either objectively judge or feel the appropriate connection to as with non-portrait photography, & so it's something that's going to be most successful 'locally'. not really - bc i guess the great portrait photographers of famous dudes (inc HCB, right) are also capturing a thing, albeit perhaps based on what's known of them publicly - but kinda.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/arts/design/25hipsters.html

the writing here seems a little savage, but it's sorta interesting to me, esp in light of

There is a paradox in Levinstein’s approach that is shared by legions of greater and lesser street photographers: he was hunting for the poetry of real life, but what he shot was generally the sort of thing that street photographers generally shoot. Not the types of people or situations that you barely notice because they are so ordinary, but people who seem strange, marginal or ridiculous.

it's the kind of criticism that has me scurrying to my collection, acutely self-conscious. i think i'm doubly sensitive because lately i have been thinking unkind things about some of my IRL bros photo sensibilities and i'm like "check yrself dude"

Not the types of people or situations that you barely notice

tbf this is becoming pretty common in online street photography circles as well.

xp that's the diane arbus critique, isn't it? that since her, why even bother? I too am pretty self-conscious about that... it's a tough call for a line-judge, you're trying to decide if there's something more beyond the inherent 'weirdness' that is worth photographing, committing to the medium...

I guess personally like compositional "interestingness" as well as ordinary/offbeat subject matter

there is real skill in being able to make souffle out of an egg. it's hard. really the answer is to not even think about that, to just take the photo and decide later in the editing stage.

Boy I really would not worry too much about whether it is more representative of life to shoot "interesting" or "mundane" subjects. Either way you're doing a lot of editing before during and after taking the picture and either way it's a big fiction.
What annoys me about a lot of street photography (especially the current revival as seen on In-Public and all) is the reliance on cleverness and visual puns. I know I'm the guy who just posted the photo of the woman behind the plant, but still...

Like there's a wittiness arms race going on.

true, true xps to dayo but to you too chinavision, really

also thought it interesting that the "best" photo in that exhibit (the handball one) was compared v favorably to HCB, who is an interesting counterpoint to the arbus/weirdness thing. because HCB is so frequently mentioned in terms of timing and the decisive moment (like, it's obligatory), it's hard to dismiss something as being "too much like HCB" or retreading the same ground or what have you. the exceptional qualities of his most famous works aren't as deeply grounded in subject matter as arbus or eggleston, nor does he have a particular formal axe to grind. they're just, uh, moments.

i think this is what elevates merely good street photography to great---it can't just be that the subject is interesting, or that the picture is well-framed. there has to be a sense that, had the photographer been just a split second later, the photo could never have been made. and, of course, that there is no possible way to recreate it ~just so~. like for me personally i think i have like three photos where, looking back, i'm like "man i can't believe i timed that right"

I know I'm the guy who just posted the photo of the woman behind the plant, but still...

i love this photo btw!

either way it's a big fiction.

^^^u&k

Like there's a wittiness arms race going on.

― lou reed scott walker monks niagra (chinavision!), Thursday, October 6, 2011 12:51 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

oh yeah this totally bothers me too. really hate it that nick turpin has become the 'voice' of modern street photography based on a career of finding barber poles and waiting for someone to walk by who also happens to be wearing a striped shirt.

otoh if you look at some of the other dominant factions like HCSP they've also got this particular winograndian 'aesthetic' that gets pretty old after a while too.

I've been meaning to start a thread about the winogrand revival - maybe I'll do that later today

man i need to get myself to the library and do some learnin' because i probably haven't seen more than 3-4 of any of the ppl you guys talk about in these threads

http://www.in-public.com/NickTurpin

in-public is a 'collective' of street photographers

http://www.flickr.com/groups/onthestreet/

every once in a while a good photo gets in

I think I respond most strongly to the *look* of a picture, followed much later by subject matter. This is something that I like about Friedlander, who can seemingly take any urban or rural location and construct a tangle of wires, poles, branches, shadows etc. in a beautiful way that seems like it should be simple but I can never replicate no matter how hard I try. It's also what I like about Meyerowitz's color street photos: they simply look beautiful apart from the subject matter. The framing and timing are part of that of course. A lot of current street photography looks like it comes from people who are just not moved by those same concerns *at all*. And so when I see a funny/clever visual pun I think, hey that's funny/clever but I have no desire or need to look at that photo ever again.

This is now a big xpost

yeah - those pics are called one-liners and feel like the photographic equivalent of m&ms.

see i usually respond the same way, except, as noted above, with portraiture. xp

And I was going to call out the In-Public stuff earlier. That and the Hardcore Street Photography group of flickr are two things I deeply dislike these days. At least Nick Turpin seems like a friendly guy. The HCSP discourse is often ugly. Makes street photography seem like a sport in which you earn points by being tough enough to get in the subject's face the most. Like somehow they've actually turned it into a macho thing.

ew

The fact that it's called "Hardcore Street Photography" is just ugh.

btw guys ILP is like my favorite subboard these days

yeah the discussion on HCSP is kind of shameful but they do highlight interesting projects sometimes in the forum. that said,

http://vimeo.com/29361738

this guy, who is held in 'high esteem' by the group, comes off as REALLY bad in this video

I used to think he had some pretty good stuff - knowing how he gets them, by channeling the Big Swinging Dick mentality of a lawyer/i-banker, is ugh. bruce gilden blew the balloon up pretty tight on that - no need to go further.

as far as visual puns go - after elliott erwitt, why bother?

btw out of curiosity: do you guys own prints of anyone? seems like most reproductions of good photographs are either dumb posters are crazy expensive limited run duplications or w/e

(nb i don't actually know anything)

I buy photobooks - usually when they're mentioned on TOP. printing tech is really good these days. a university library or even a public library is good for getting copies of OOP books, but not always. I wish someone would scan winogrand's 1964 already.

...on TOP?

the online photographer

No prints here, other than the odd amateur photo from a Salvation Army. Don't even have any prints of my own pictures! :'(

But yeah I buy books.

generally if a book comes out on steidl you know it's 1.) from a good photographer and 2.) going to be printed really well

There were amazing books available at the PS1 Art Book Fair a weekend ago! (that were often hundreds if not thousands of dollars)

And Steidl had a table that was fun to browse.

I have a couple of prints from people I went to school with and online print exchanges. I can't afford to buy prints from galleries and would feel weird buying prints anyway.

Lots and lots of photography books. My local used book store had an enormous amount of remaindered Eugene Richards and Robert Frank books for a while so I own pretty much everything that's easily available from them.

i think the used book store down the street from me has a huge photo section but i'm kind of afraid to look because it would mean going broke

I know we are all loling at this but I actually think this is a pretty good example of fresh photography!

http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/scared-bros-at-a-haunted-house

I mean put it on an exhibition wall and claim that it challenges conceptions of 'masculinity' in our culture and boom

haa yeah i was actually thinking that it was p interesting

really the answer is to not even think about that, to just take the photo and decide later in the editing stage.

In case it hasn't been said yet, I just wanted to stand up and declare total bullshit on this. Bull. Fucking. Shit. You don't make souffle out of an egg. You make fluffy lift out of an egg white, and custard out of the yolk and milk and cream (the same thing you make ice cream out of), and then you bake, and baking involves so much more science than I know, I can't even extend the metaphor much farther than that even for my own purposes. Photography is still photography, and you can't turn a bad photograph into a good one in photoshop, and you can't shoot a thousand photos and try to pick the good one if all of them are bad photos. You have to be there, and then, and catch something. If you did, you did. If you didn't, you should have known better. And if you post all of the thousands of crap photos you take to Flickr, that doesn't make them good. It makes them worthy of consideration, but often on your own behalf more than anyone else's.

I love the haunted house link. These guys may not be scared, tho. They may just be doing some doo-wop.

http://s3-ak.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/web04/2011/10/6/11/enhanced-buzz-32041-1317916773-35.jpg

kenan I don't think you're understanding what I'm saying

i'm a bit of a broken record on this but i've kindof said a little bit in the past of how maybe i'm not that invested in the photographs I take in terms of "photography." that is i take photographs p diaristically or like a tourist. just photographs of my friends or like bins and flowers and bus shelters, I have a bad memory and its nice to have a way of remembering things (there are almost no photographs of me between the age of like 12 and 22 except of horrible harsh flash out with my friends photos and holiday snapshots posing with a building). This is why i feel like i go in and out of having anything to contribute to this board bc like schlump kindof suggest, the photographs i take are probably primarily interesting to me as portraits.

re: what people are saying itt though, its interesting that its so easy for me to now consider that so outside of what photography is supposed to do, post-HCB especially and the "decisive" moment, photography seems to be about the instantaneity of the camera's mechanisms one way or another. This seems to me in a lot of ways why people find it so easy to dismiss photo-editing. It is especially interesting considering the fact that early photography kindof had nothing to do with this, the subject posed frozen waiting for the image to form on the plate. I think of something like Nadar's photograph of his wife as being maybe more what i'm interested in though, the lingering moment, how the image is composed not in a way that's necessarily about detail or action but about the moment accumulating.

http://www.all-art.org/photography/fotography/nadar_photographers_wife1890.jpg

I think though that this is really about being in agreement in some way with what a lot of you are saying though, that street photography gets misunderstood by these dbs as a kind of sport. like going beyond capturing a moment and doing something like taking a moment fucking hostage. There's something about the way the camera barges in and in a way it doesn't really take a photograph of anything other than like the act of photographing something.

^ ahhh great great post, plax; i hope it was okay me mentioning you, btw, i really rly like the photos you've posted on here (both yr friends & those bleachy contrasty colour studies) & was totally identifying w/you & their approach rather than being, you know, AND OF COURSE ON THE OTHER HAND THERE ARE LAYMEN, CF PLAX (ICO), FOR WHOM---.

i remember a few years ago i had a borrowed digital camera & would use it to take photos of things i didn't want to expend film on, i guess, so the things that i was documenting rather than 'shooting' (cf 1 2 3 (crossposting #2 aspirationally to dirt bag style thread). & since then i've changed and am as into recording those things on film as i was capturing them in a throw-away way, because 'documentary' is personally v important - not as a task, but as a resource, & - and i guess this is contrary to kenan, above - i think time can change a shitty photo into an interesting photo, even if it's still not a "good photo", seeing it some short time after the fact or whatever, seeing it from a place where you aren't anymore or of a place you've never been etc - it feels reductive to think of us only receiving photos as composition or craft when by virtue of what the machine does there is so much else going on in any frame.

the counterpoint to a single moment or instance you make is really otm, too, & i think the kind of thing where you are maybe fleshing out a photo with personality and specific identifiable human feelings, sometimes - not necessarily gesture but presence. that photo is great, i'd never seen it.

(there are almost no photographs of me between the age of like 12 and 22 except of horrible harsh flash out with my friends photos and holiday snapshots posing with a building)

ditto to this although there are still no photos of me except ones i've taken of my reflection in car windows on sunny days, i guess there should be a 360 degree camera to include the author and rectify this