what do you see like: 2012

oh nice. i am on pretty rocky ground w/pushing film, though i feel a lil safer w/b&w. i actually just googled the camera you mentioned, i know i was asking for tips a while ago, but i should really buy something little with a flash to carry around.

^^ great/confusing photo, btw; painted bgrnds in your pics at the gift that keeps on giving

btw the vivitar ultra wide & slim isn't made anymore and they go for stupid amounts of money on eBay, but these are supposed to be identiacal:

http://www.fourcornerstore.com/collections/superheadz-cameras/products/black-slim-devil

all the b&w stuff i posted last week i shot on a weird no-name knock-off i found on eBay. it has the same lens but it has a small flash in it-- i cant shoot daytime w/ it tho because the exposure is too long

"obvious is good" is meant mostly as an admonishment to myself btw. I have a habit of talking myself out of pictures with pretty upfront 'hooks' sometimes and it's good to be reminded that, yes, it's not a bad thing to actually shoot the big obvious thing in the scene, put it front and center, make it look nice, etc.
like sometimes there's a 'big thing' happening or present, and I can convince myself that the skillful thing to do is to take pictures of anything but that. which is just stupid. take the picture of the 'big thing'. too much second guessing and talking myself out of a picture because I'm worried someone else would take it.

http://i.imgur.com/W5gXy.jpg

whoa

warning: picture of a dead body

quite a picture to follow that post

yeah i didnt take that, i was posting it in response to your post, sorry.

fyi: http://www.petapixel.com/2011/03/29/debate-over-fabienne-cherisma-photo-rekindled-after-award-given/

my post leaves a lot of room for amendments and second guessing, and the situation in the picture initiates a lot of that. there are a lot of degrees of the 'big thing' or the obvious subject or the thing that everyone else if photographing, and they don't all need to be treated the same way. my anecdote refers more to the way that I'm trying to cut back on the critical impulse that actually prevents me from taking a picture because some spectacle seems just too clear and has to be resisted. I don't really think that any potential picture is so apparent that it shouldn't be taken; that's an issue for editing.

editing, judgement, whether or not it provokes a feeling of queesiness etc.

no i totally get what you meant and i already regret my cheap and tasteless post in reply

boy tbh I just don't understand the photojournalism world AT ALL. I know from all my reading that, like a good photographer, I should regard all kinds of pictures as part of the same grand effort (art photos, snapshots, news photos, technical photos, etc.) but honestly, it's the journalism ones that I just have no feeling for at all, almost always.

xpost
no! adversarial is good!

the problem i've been having lately isnt so much trying to "not take the obvious photo everyone else would take" but more "don't take the photo i've already taken 100 times with diminishing returns"

lately i've been leaving my camera in my bag thinking "fuck this i already have a million photos of people dancing in this same club"

maybe i just need a new life

that's like how I finally trained myself out of taking pictures of rooftops as I walked around. and other subjects I can't even remember right now where when I see them now I say to myself "no, you always take pictures of this and it NEVER looks good." finally sinking in though. too many pictures of shadows on the ground to count.
I've got a lot of nightlife photos too, but they sort of live in a different world (the social media world) than a lot of others. best thing that ever happened to me was just getting $3 developing.

lately i've been leaving my camera in my bag thinking "fuck this i already have a million photos of people dancing in this same club"

otm. also, a more recent feeling when out and about is "what extra can I bring to this? if I go on Flickr it will already have been covered in every way possible". Portraits are about the only thing left that don't make me feel that.

a more recent feeling when out and about is "what extra can I bring to this? if I go on Flickr it will already have been covered in every way possible"

hm, this is frustrating to me, i'm not sure i totally feel it anymore. i remember a time, probably after signing up for flickr & finding out that so much photo activity was going on, being just swamped by the sets of well-composed, correctly exposed photos people had shot, feeling that there was much less point to continuing to try to chronicle the world, because it was quantifiably being done elsewhere, and in a much glossier, more accessible way. but, i know i posted some emmet gowin interview in the other thread, in which he said one of the paradoxes of working post-robert-frank was that people had been stripped of the authority to go out and discover the world, to go and photograph as an exploration and a document; but had simultaneously been compelled to rely on locality, and their own world, and put aside grandiose documentary urges in favour of finding those truthful or well represented angles that existed in their day to day, cf gowin's beautiful portraits of his wife. & that is def what the argument is, to me, now; i mean there's still "i've taken this picture of the yellow gate next to the green hedge" more than once, but whenever i see a cluster of shots online that have some cumulative narrative - someone's life, someone's neighbourhood, someone's relationship (am referring p specifically to some things that have been in the famous people thread recently), i'm hugely encouraged by how powerful someone else's local detail can be, and so presumably how interesting the texture of my surroundings has the potential to be for someone distant to them. i know there's still 'other people have taken the bird-on-a-lamppost shot', which is true, & maybe i'm getting invested in sets, or gradually amassed context relieving the burden of individual shots being markedly individual. but i still think the point now is to do your own thing rather than to chip away at cataloguing, the way that's collectively being done as everyone puts their stuff online.

Portraits are about the only thing left that don't make me feel that.

yes, for sure, & having got the gesture of a friend or someone on the street is the clearest instance of having got something no-one quite can, or that you would have to have your camera on you to catch

boy tbh I just don't understand the photojournalism world AT ALL. I know from all my reading that, like a good photographer, I should regard all kinds of pictures as part of the same grand effort (art photos, snapshots, news photos, technical photos, etc.) but honestly, it's the journalism ones that I just have no feeling for at all, almost always.

― lou reed scott walker monks niagra (chinavision!), Monday, January 30, 2012 11:04 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

there was a book published in the 70s or early 80s, of journalistic photos taken out of context and just presented as if they were, uh, 'art' photos. can't remember the name of the book though!

Sounds a little like Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel's "Evidence" which I actually love:
http://www.americansuburbx.com/2009/10/theory-evidence-larry-sultan-and-mike.html

the pictures tend towards the technical and (duh) evidentiary, and are taken by sort of uninterested professionals, which is something I enjoy. Technical photographs I can get down with any day.

ah yes, that's the book I was thinking of

so as a VERY amateur photographer i've wanted to jump into these threads, and might someday, but as to this discussion, two of my best friends are photo journos who I know have a separation they do within their photography w/r/t "artistic" and "journalistic" work and I'd really like to introduce them to this thread but I've never hung out here. Would you guys be interested in that pov?

man I found a copy of it at the PS1 book fair and it was selling for like $1,500 or something like that. yowza.

xpost

most def! xp

clay: of course!
my issues with photojournalism are my own personal hang-ups, which is why I resort to weird half-assed language like saying I don't understand it or don't feel it or whatever.

there was a 2003/2004 reissue I think but even that run is sold out and copies going for hundreds xp

alright! I can't and won't claim to speak for them but I'll try to talk to those dudes about wading their feet in here. Both are amazing photographers (the best I've known) who I think would have a lot to say.

P.s. as a longtime lurker of ILP you guys are all really fucking good. I hope you know that.

god I'm just amazed and psyched to hear that ILP actually has lurkers!

i lurk like a madman and second clay on all points.

chinavision, i really like your stuff, and it has actually made me consider subjects i'm sure i would have continued to pass over.

awesome, thanks!
I'm mostly an ILP regular and a rest-of-ILX lurker (for more than a decade now!)

god I'm just amazed and psyched to hear that ILP actually has lurkers!

― lou reed scott walker monks niagra (chinavision!), Tuesday, January 31, 2012 8:16 AM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ha, ^^

there was a 2003/2004 reissue I think but even that run is sold out and copies going for hundreds xp

― dayo, Tuesday, 31 January 2012 14:09 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

wow, i had this from a university library here, i'm glad they buy this stuff. & yeah it's a great book, and makes for a fascinating evidence in the argument of what a photo is/how & why you look at it, etc

but had simultaneously been compelled to rely on locality, and their own world, and put aside grandiose documentary urges in favour of finding those truthful or well represented angles that existed in their day to day, cf gowin's beautiful portraits of his wife. & that is def what the argument is, to me, now; i mean there's still "i've taken this picture of the yellow gate next to the green hedge" more than once, but whenever i see a cluster of shots online that have some cumulative narrative - someone's life, someone's neighbourhood, someone's relationship (am referring p specifically to some things that have been in the famous people thread recently), i'm hugely encouraged by how powerful someone else's local detail can be, and so presumably how interesting the texture of my surroundings has the potential to be for someone distant to them.

Two things in play here - sense of place and personalization. If your work isn't personal, then no one's going to give a damn - if you're taking pictures of red tricycles consciously emulating Eggleston or hauling a view camera to Yellowstone to play Adams, the work is just going to be boring. If you're doing either because there's some deeper meaning or impulse to why you do so, then that will show. Combined with projects and plans (for display - book, show, etc.), personal work has a much better chance to be something valuable (to the photographer and maybe viewers).

Sense of place is in the same vein - not an all-encompassing view of a given city or w/e, but a view that encompasses what one person has seen and experienced.

hey so my new housemate that moved in yesterday is a photographer

i guess that means i don't need you guys anymore oh well ill look back fondly

you'll be back when you need to think baout things

i really want to talk more about portraiture. i think going back and getting into the early masters was really made me rethink what i thought photography was. nadar especially. just the way they work within such a limited set of parameters, the different notion of time at work. i feel like one of the reasons i'm hate paul sepuyas work so much is in how badly he misunderstands nadar. or maybe thats unfair and its just that i feel like that's what he's doing when nothing is further from his mind. but even this self portrait seems to be about the amorousness of the camera lens. just the sensuality of sfumato. light, flesh etc. this thought is not even half formed yet but its one i've been trying to have for a while.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Nadar-Self-Portrait.jpg

also my housemate just fixed the lens i thought was broken by putting it on the radiator.

I like your housemate.

housemate otm

she's okay, i'm not that enthused about her. she keeps finding reasons to tell me i'm a pussy.

i love her more with each post.

i just don't like violent movies.

haha aw

some of my favorites from a recent trip to myanmar:

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7155/6798766363_3db17d8e3b.jpg
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7168/6798707079_1444d3b3fe.jpg
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7022/6798596911_2d5f53510b.jpg
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7145/6798559837_35a7e2ac8b.jpg

more here: http://ihardlyknowher.com/45183294@N02

<3 'bout time you posted pics here!

http://ihardlyknowher.com/45183294@N02/big

go big or go home

Two things in play here - sense of place and personalization. If your work isn't personal, then no one's going to give a damn - if you're taking pictures of red tricycles consciously emulating Eggleston or hauling a view camera to Yellowstone to play Adams, the work is just going to be boring. If you're doing either because there's some deeper meaning or impulse to why you do so, then that will show. Combined with projects and plans (for display - book, show, etc.), personal work has a much better chance to be something valuable (to the photographer and maybe viewers).

Sense of place is in the same vein - not an all-encompassing view of a given city or w/e, but a view that encompasses what one person has seen and experienced.

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Tuesday, January 31, 2012 11:22 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah, I mean, the question that I think every photographer returns to, probably more than once or multiple times during their career (if not, you're doing it wrong) is why to photograph. why we fight. and maybe each time it becomes a little harder to answer. or maybe for some people, it becomes easier. like they like to take pictures of birds with big telephotos and that's what they'll do for the rest of their lives. idk.

there's two ideas that I bounce around when I think of this. the first is the idea of the visual diarist (or something like this), which has been used by photography critics for awhile now. the idea that a photographer's output is valuable in what milo is saying, a sense of place or personal importance. like, looking at a photographer's collected work, if you know how to read it, tells you what that photographer values, what is important, what she privileges. or at least that's what it should do. no idea what to think if all you've got access to is a ten thousand deep flickr stream. idk.

the other idea is one I picked up from a robert frank interview (I'll scan it soon, I promise!) - the idea of obsession. that a photographer is defined by her obsessions. that photographers are only interesting when they're obsessed. maybe that explains why we all have tropes and symbols we always seem to return to in our photographs. maybe that's why atget would photograph a certain area of paris three, four, five times, always returning. the idea of a return, not as a homecoming, but as a way to shock, to revitalize...

man they're great, rent, the second one kills
xp

... damn, looking at the link dayo put up; these are amazing!
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7149/6798775867_b3af004788_b.jpg