photo-breezing

i definitely don't have the techniques down. it's okay for filling the gaps of shit that i didn't get develop-and-scanned as a combo. and i never shot on good slide film or anything like that. but i'm sure i'm not really doing it "right."

oddly, for me, the bad scanning/ color correction makes those images somehow more resonant
the fact that the room looks like, just, a banal conference room, with bad lighting (as opposed to a beautifully-illuminated tv/movie set)
there’s like intimacy to them too, feel like taken with an unobtrusive rangefinder rather than big dslr
so strange to see relatively contemporary white house images with grain

i agree with drash, dick cheney looks VERY handsome

^lol

btw my reaction upthread to moma 'new photography' thing was a bit kneejerk
setting aside issue of artist selection,
am interested in those themes, seeing art in person i’d prob find it interesting
(though think, like, in multiple threads on ilx you’d prob find better play on & insight into those themes)
(& not huge fan of photography qua illustration of themes or theses anyway)

also kinda have bad leftover reaction to recent trend of after photography/ is photograph over/ end of photography/ post-photography thinkpieces, conferences, exhibitions (& assimilated this to that)

like, art-curatorial preference for overtly ‘conceptual’ photography, 'photo-based art' or 'post-photography', is understandable (because it seems more like ART obv, lends itself more easily to contemporary theoretical discourse), but it kinda bothers/bores me too
(even though i really do like a lot of stuff that fits these categories)

guess what bothers me is not these genres of photo-art, theoretical discussion of or curatorial focus on them, but what seem like curatorial manifestos against (for lack of better qualifier guess i'll say 'documentary' but that's such a pathetically limiting term) photography as irrelevant/ reactionary/ not-art
lol i'm 'old'

(lol, but he does look handsome; imo film makes everyone look better :) )

9/11 photos are beautiful & haunting, i wouldn't change a thing w/ them

agree

looking through whole set is fascinating: https://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/sets/72157656213196901

want to unpack, respond to schlump’s joke/zing & my attempt at joke back; maybe something worth disentangling here re complicated experience of looking at/ talking about these images (or images like these) as ‘photography’

(also relates in some way to quiddity of ‘documentary’ photography)

interpret joke to mean: there’s something funny (or worse) about aestheticizing these images, regarding or reading them through aesthetic categories (‘beautiful’ image, quality of film, grain—> ‘handsome’ cheney)

critic (not schlump but rhetorical construct) may argue that ‘aesthetic’ response somehow falsifies, masks, ignores (import of) content; that appropriate response/ interpretation/ critique shd not be aesthetic but political (if not political critique, at least some political or politically-informed feeling, e.g. of antipathy)

to start i’d say, my experience/response (e.g. what i find ‘resonant’) is not merely aesthetic, nor can aesthetic strand be abstracted from whole complex of feelings/thoughts, including political & historical & existential

there’s plenty of material here for explicitly political readings of various kinds, if that's what one is looking for, but mostly, probably, not v interesting ones. don’t see these images as providing ‘new’ evidence to prove or disprove a viewer’s already adopted political narratives & characterizations. viewer’s (political) judgment of these figures is already formed in advance: insofar as one is supposed to feel certain way about them, looking at (reading) images then is just exercise in corroboration.

what i find fascinating/ resonant/ haunting is more difficult to pin down & express. will try to later.

http://i.imgur.com/8eOwmW9.jpg

IH

omg

that's great. obvious horror movie poster potential with the right crop.

frank's editor laura israel made a film, don't blink: robert frank, playing at nyff, wow

i guess i feel like my photos are better than every other dumb photographer's photos, but that everyone who is just taking photos's photos are better than my photos

i'm very very very in love with by311.tumblr.com

^ have that "just taking photo's photos' vibe to it

i also totally recognize it's because it's presenting an environment that's very familiar and yet strange to me due to my living in china and strikes me in a way idk very good photos of istanbul or the continent don't

it's weird but i could spend hours scrolling through photos like those

great tumblr
"just taking photo's photos' vibe
think i know what u mean
un-tendentious, democratic (in eggleston's sense), unmannered
yet obv (to me) v sophisticated eye

street scenes great ofc
but also really like occasional closer, intimate, quiet photos of interiors, still lifes, etc

https://scontent-lax3-1.cdninstagram.com/hphotos-xfa1/t51.2885-15/e35/11375261_1107788405915697_1535693033_n.jpg

wow
so much going on in this photo (especially given-- but not only bc of-- who took it)
the pitch-black interior, nocturnal, of sumptuous leather, reflecting gleams of daylight; array of cut crystal glasses awaiting liquids;
framing (from perspective of dark car's passenger) cloudy blue skies & RAINBOW
it's lynchian (mullholland drive comes to mind), egglestonian--
but no, forget comparisons, this is its own unique thing <3

woah by311.tumblr.com btw

it's presenting an environment that's very familiar and yet strange to me -- the fact that there are no identifiable landmarks, kind of puzzle, where is it? somewhere in the north obv but its anonymity? is appealing (actually, it's changchun, i think) -- all those textures and angles in heaps -- i love it

you kinda wonder what friedlander would do if unleashed in china but i think this blog is that

http://i.imgur.com/vrte9W8.jpg

no frame of reference here

as much as i love the pictures, they also unsettle me because i've taken a thousand pictures in third tier chinese cities and these are probably the ones i wouldn't take and not the way i would have taken them but they capture exactly what i would have liked to capture.

dayo do u knw anything about him(?)? http://c--x.tumblr.com/ texttumblr kinda heavy. i love these pictures.

https://steidl.de/assets/images/-UTQ3ZSWcJS+kcEk4W2RlJsJYaBCDXzH2Im02ztv2BkDNVpnln7b7q7qqUAfyTQeD5WNLZSDk918=/william-eggleston-the-democratic-forest-9.jpg.jpg
https://steidl.de/assets/images/-UTQ3ZS2dISzychs4BmBsfHQgD3RQ36ozB7zTguaDclKdZuPxr5G1RK7t+edLALLPRkxesWvE0zY=/william-eggleston-the-democratic-forest-08.jpg.jpg

https://steidl.de/Books/The-Democratic-Forest-2337475153.html

<3
(-
<3

http://i.imgur.com/6sLfgYm.jpg

IH

beautiful

wow ^^
actual classic

hey so
i am trying to trace an article i feel like i read here but must be misremembering some element of. it was about a new, ICP-esque photo museum opening in iirc japan. but i can't find it (i thought it was on lens) so maybe at least the japan part is wrong. does this ring any bells

http://internethistory.tumblr.com/image/135007771713

http://i.imgur.com/R62tkru.jpg

two scotch eggs at the edge of forever

like one of those sci-fi scenes when we cut to a beguiling landscape shot of a planet with multiple moons

little known fact that tatooine's twin moons were in fact reflected scotch eggs

long dvd featurette showing hairy man gingerly assembling scotch egg diorama in prop-strewn basement, slowly flooding scene with dry ice, taking occasional small bites while preserving eggs' full moon shape when viewed from the front

humming the weird ruminative star wars theme motif

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

that little glitchy black dot in the middle

transit of Venus imo

my guess is its the annoying automatic red-eye correction that drugstore scanners add to files when they give you a CD-R with your negs

I'm more concerned that the world through the front windscreen is mirrored.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/magazine/a-too-perfect-picture.html

http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzAxOTY5NzI1Nw==&mid=2649953157&idx=1&sn=c6fbda98ecc253f1b0287e7bedfddac3&scene=2&srcid=04165oojVHc8JIekOEy7mEOd#rd

so rad to look through these thinking 'this is a modern thing' while not being able to say 'this is a modern thing i can neatly slot into a category of trite contemporary tropes'. really lovely & hey i forgot abt this site

i like that the encouraged background music is shoegaze

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/magazine/the-digital-afterlife-of-lost-family-photos.html?smid=tw-nytmag&smtyp=cur

Thought-provoking. I've been working on some family photos, all taken by the no-longer-living. There are certain related, if less super-thorny, questions about privacy and how people choose to define and represent their own lives. Right now I'm dealing with a (woefully incomplete) binder of negatives my mother compiled in the 1970s, before I was born. Did most of these never get printed because they were crummy exposures, because she didn't like them, or because they just didn't have time to futz around with the darkroom stuff after my brother got born?

There's also an amazing letter, in a different box, where she describes to her sister her first, partially botched, experience with loading film onto a reel, with her and my dad seated on the edge of the tub in a blacked-out bathroom, with the closed toilet for a shelf. Just like my first reels thirty years later, she ended up with some frames touching each other, big blobby undeveloped areas. My delight in recognizing this moment as a crummy little stressful incident that my mother and I both experienced in our respective youths is commingled with my wanting the negatives to all be just fine and perfectly preserved. Nothing so heavy as what this article is dealing with, but interesting to think about. Meanwhile I just wish I knew what had become of all my grandmother's slides...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK19vsJCMBM

http://i.imgur.com/nGS20jQ.jpg

need 2 cop

http://shihlun.tumblr.com/post/146626203984/hsieh-chun-te-1968-69

wd love to see-
http://imaonline.jp/exhibition/sentimental-journey-the-complete-contactsheets.html

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/04/magazine/where-have-you-gone-robert-frank.html?pagewanted=all

this '90s frank profe rly on a part w/ beloved leiter interviews in chronicling Peak Grouch
so juicy

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/loneliness-belongs-to-the-photographer?mbid=rss

https://www.instagram.com/p/BIF0P00jGfA/