photo-breezing

wow I forgot that I wrote that last night! this summer is doing weird things to me.
I'm not as down on my current shooting as all that, but I would love to have the money to afford a trip abroad! and I *am* tired of a lot of the passing-strangers-in-the-streets photos. but I think my recent increased pickiness has been good, and I've been thinking less and less about my photos' online lives and more about what *else* I can do with them.
man, I listened to some great music and had a blast last night, and over the course of the day I've been remembering a few other things I did as well (nothing bad).

I suppose I'm not totally sure if the slides I'm scanning are really really supposed to be for public consumption, but I've been telling myself that's why I'm only putting low res versions on this site only, and then only ones that show landscapes or strangers. no relatives or acquaintances.

and I get the same feeling about initial photographs in a given city as you, schlump. I've learned the reliable patterns too well. but on the other hand I think I've gotten better as a photographer when I really muster the effort. I think that's part of the problem: I know that I've become better, so I don't work as hard. some early successes are the result of me pushing in new and uncomfortable ways.

i started thinking about other stuff to do with photographs, lately. once in awhile i am on somebody's blog & there is for sale their $3 printed & folded one-sheet pamphlet collecting not-necessarily-totally-showstopping b&ws, & it feels kinda appealing, the smallness of uniting & finalising some photographs you took, like the old editions of four of photographs or even records. i feel like maybe there should be some kind of healthy, complaisant counterpart to shooting & editing which even gently tries to engage, some, or to propogate one's photos (i was just reading this rad khaela maricich piece about the lines between art & audience) somewhat. for me at the moment this is just website stuff but i'm sure i could be doing cool inventive things with my photos. printing them onto mugs.

in other photo breezings i am still so into reading szarkowski atm. i'm reading his essay on winogrand from the big book. very curious to see some of the later work realised; sorta almost disgusted by some of the contact sheets excerpted, which i think reflect drives in which he's shooting & winding & shooting & winding non-stop (leaving a third of a million LA-era exposures unseen, apparently), but some of the late stuff is really democratic & interesting. also his grain still just makes me swoon. szark referred to the expressive ugly gray scale of '60s art movies as influential on those guys.

It was the Crystal Palace Overground Festival last weekend; two years ago I was one of the official photographers - stumbling around with my hired lens, trying and failing to find parents to sign waiver forms when I found I'd snapped an unidentified kid in one of my crowd shots, generally making a bad job of it, etc.

This year I noticed a LOT of L-glass around, like our little local-bands-foods'n'craft in the park thing had become a big deal and pros were documenting it in glorious detail. Most interesting to me was the guy with an Auto Graflex 5x7 with Pentac lens (he was also shooting with a 5D2 and a Hasselblad) - gorgeous stuff...

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3774/9175102820_cc05a55896_z.jpg

http://uploads8.wikipaintings.org/images/balthus/th%C3%A9r%C3%A8se-1938.jpg

http://uploads7.wikipaintings.org/images/balthus/the-white-skirt-1937.jpg

http://a397.idata.over-blog.com/550x442/4/50/71/33/oeuvres-contemporaines/balthus.jpg

http://uploads2.wikipaintings.org/images/balthus/the-cherry-tree.jpg

i have chromes from the library; it is just unreal,

http://www.duncanwhyte.com/Images/Layout_Production/Eggleston_Chromes/pages/Eggleston_Chromes_1_Fin_Page_13.jpg

http://www.pacemacgill.com/gfx/images/rf/robert_frank_730.jpg

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-tU1axBJcRjw/UebKYZky29I/AAAAAAAABks/aOFQUhtRDNQ/s0/jf.png

grumpy breezing
one time when gawker had one of their general calls for new writers, I semi-drunkenly sent a letter that instead said that they should have a new heavier photography thing going on, and that I'd be into working something like that. I never expected a response (it wasn't convincingly written) and didn't get one, but man, within a few months (maybe a little longer I guess) they unveiled that dodge and burn page, and let me tell you, it suuuuuucks.
if you like boring pictures of things that ought to be interesting it's cool though I guess. ymmv I guess but I don't get it.

I guess

do any of you like hedi slimane's stuff? http://hedislimane.com

i'm not a photogapher; i'm into it

also, if you know of anyone else who does shit sorta like his, i'd be interested in checking it out!

http://24.media.tumblr.com/63e201e46e7617b00e121a1b90b8114f/tumblr_mrwj2uFz8F1snq421o1_500.jpg

i feel not very interested in focus anymore. even focusing my eyes.

http://ruinista.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/blurry-street-1.jpg?w=720&h=480
(hong-an tran)

huh. lots of nice photos there.

home along, drinking nothing but vermouth (blanc) and scanning. catching up on summer. the weather has cooled down, I'm getting a breeze in the place, and am in a techno zone at the moment.

my girlfriend just texted me with a vague fuzzy picture to prove that antony from antony and the johnsons is at the restaurant she's at.

this is breezing.

she is good I think. she came up before somewhere? I think maybe Michael knows her a lil. she does a lot of things I generally think of myself as immune to nicely. peaceful modern landscapes. shallow focus restaurant-table photos that make me think about qualities of lens glass.

I am scanning spring too. may second right now. I just finished the first roll cluttered with pictures of the sky. I was kinda bummed out last week & walking along this one long road in Montreal with an uncluttered horizon & watching the gradient slowly change, I feel like photographing the sky is simultaneously totally useless, & impotent, & then also kinda beautiful, to be moved to just sloppily document something so blunt & obvious & huge, in spite of its bluntness, obviousness, hugeness. I know my spring photos are just going to be pictures of the sky & flowers. like that Emmet Gowin interview where he talks about some photographer he liked who thought his late work of skies was his best stuff. I like ageing into unavoidable cliche.

hey btw, have you ever seen any Nathaniel Dorsky films, China? ccing dayo here, some are playing at NYFF & they are precious photographic research ime, like he owns his own wavelength.

not aware of dorsky, but looking up now. looks like he got a really nice NYT writeup.
could it be steichen who's sky photographs we're thinking of?

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/49.55.29

they're some of my favorites, although I don't think they come of as well online. in a book or on a wall though they are really great. I've got a big stieglitz book in which that series (equivalents) is printed pretty small on the page, and pretty low contrast.

http://sandrakontos.wordpress.com/2012/12/14/alfred-stieglitz-equivalents/

whose not "who's"

I need to learn to proofread before posting.

cheap film in candlelight

http://altairnouveau.com/631-19.jpg

just realized that's the lawn mower above is a paul graham

proofreading again

hey guys. i don't have much to breeze about right now, but i'm sitting on a commuter train for the next hour or so drinking beer.

i have a technical question/problem i've been meaning to ask you guys about but i'll wait till i'm back on a real computer and can upload some scans.

for now i'll share this girl's flickr i came across today while looking for photos from a show that happened at my old apartment 10 years ago this month. (apparently she lived in the same apartment years later).

kind of ho-hum subject matter but she really has a wonderful eye and i want to know more about what she shoots with

oops use this for the 2nd link http://m.flickr.com/#/photos/skylookslikearoad/6866627636/

i kinda don't wanna go over the top in describing Dorsky, here, for fear of hyperbole or else overloading the expectations one could arrive at a screening with, but: i saw his film hours for jerome, recently, & it's a new favourite film, something i didn't know existed. he has been around for a long time, supremely attuned to the stocks he's working with, & i think a kind of longstanding ghettoisation of what i understood by experimental film meant i'd never really got into him. his stuff is only ever screened, not available online (even clips! no nothing!), & just i would endorse checking him at some point - nyc an easier place to intermittently catch something than most - because he's both expert & dedicated to something that i think anyone walking around with a camera is dedicated to. this is my way of elevating myself to peer-status by virtue of taking blurry pictures of flowers, sometimes. (i'm on my phone right now so had limited success finding out what was playing at nyff, but i think at the very least there's some event in which he's screening unscreened footage as part of wavelengths)

& those steiglitz photos do look good. i take back all the mean things emmet gowin thought about them. i'm reading (/staring at the plates of) a book aperture just re-released right now called the edge of vision, dedicated to the various stages of abstraction in photography (which kinda almost has just got increasingly less abstract in some ways, given the sorta image denigration, non-reprsentative chemicals & romantic structure of everything early), & those steiglitz photos fit in. the cyanotopes throughout are killing me. i like the way that i understand photography (like a bunch of other stuff) so much better working backwards. i only just kinda got imogen cunningham. it takes me a long time sometimes.

cheap film v nice. it lazily just makes me think of gerard richter & sonic youth.

squinting at small phone thumbnails but otm about her eye, they're nice

man there is something so devastating about seeing photos of spring, & feeling alive with the possibilities afforded by copious light, i september. I guess at least that low autumnal sun is comin.

get ready to shoot dark pictures. underexpose. get down with it.

I ebayed a video camera and am watching old videos from the early 90s-mid 2000s so I'm getting a bit lost this eve /breezin

for real scanning has kinda limited my comfort w underexposure; I mean obviously I am doing it all the time anyway, doing it more often than not, but when I think of it as a strategy I just see visions of some accidentally solarised picture of one of my friends from which all the technology in the world can not coax a blue channel

really good article atm somewhere on the Atlantic site about XFR STN at the new museum & the work it's doing transferring old video before it's lost to technological incompatibility. are you talking video-video? I am fooling around with a friend's digital camera trying to get it to work, I would love to be able to shoot video somehow rn

( http://theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2013/07/new-museums-vast-beautiful-and-insane-digitization-project/67567/ )

I'm talking video video I think except that most of the stuff I've been playing back so far has been in the weird format of digital 8 (digital video on a hi-8 tape). I have older hi-8 stuff but I haven't tried playing it yet on this camera to see how it looks or whether it works.

kind of ho-hum subject matter but she really has a wonderful eye and i want to know more about what she shoots with

― ᶓ͠סּᴥ͠סּᶔ ᶓͼ᷆ₓͼ᷇ᶔ (gr8080), Friday, September 13, 2013 9:51 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

looks like a DSLR / other big sensor digital, maybe some light lightroom/PS manip

i feel not very interested in focus anymore. even focusing my eyes.

― szarkasm (schlump), Saturday, September 7, 2013 4:01 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark

feelin this, took this on the same trip as the others in the wdysl thread recently:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9627011/pphotos/m15.jpg

think it was cv and you who mentioned being into photos with a sharp background and something completely OOF in the foreground. it just hit me that technically, it's the exact opposite shot of the 'sharpness big aperture' shot that newtime camera folks love. the sharp background out to infinity, however, is never seen as a mark of technical competence. i dunno, for obvious reasons. but OOF things that don't erase themselves into abstraction, are a thing, yes

shallow focus restaurant-table photos that make me think about qualities of lens glass.

schlump you are the photo whisperer today

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9627011/pphotos/m16.jpg

(nb i think this was taken by another ilxor)

eggleston took a lot of sky photos at some point.

saw the chromatics last night and was kind of disappointed that the show didn't look like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0mxXrHowHQ

but instead were just guys and gals in hyperreal RealVision

xp to myself: the older pics on her flickr are definitely film, dunno what they're shot with, looks like drugstore scans tho

(Hong-An Tran)
she is good I think. she came up before somewhere? I think maybe Michael knows her a lil.

Yeah, she's a (mostly online) pal. We met years ago in South London and again last year in NYC. I really like her work. She's recently got herself a Pentax 67 II, so she's shooting a lot more medium format of late.

yeah, i feel like maybe slightly-outta-focus phots would exist more easily seen very large, because it is maybe hard to see them on the page without the kinda learned, technological reflex of it's out of focus, this being a failing. i have recklessly spun the focus wheel over the past few months & am waiting to see what it came out like.

re: eggleston sky photos:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51wnnNGXhDL.jpg_SX350_BO1,138,138,138_SH30_BO0,100,100,100_PA7,5,5,10_.jpg

seeing his occasional lilac-suffused sky photos is always intoxicating to me. it is funny you mentioning Newtime Photo trends, because sometimes i feel like i am having to work back toward some of those things, having kinda binged on & exhausted them early on. like whenever i see some kinda Ed Ruscha nighttime convenience store shot, or a Meyerowitz New-England-light shot, i have to remember that long exposures are an actual constitutive technique of photography, & not just One Neat Trick for outsmarting the stars & revealing their secret motion while vacationing somewhere cloudless.

i think if i was going to see the Chromatics i would be really worried they would be all too human. Ruth's voice not being like whispering in my ear definitely sounds like some kind of jeopardy.

how is the video goin, cv? i had a big plan to start a cellphone video thread a while ago that i never pulled the trigger on. i have shot a lot of stray video i like & which feels entwined with shooting stills, to me

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

& Michael did we see your nyc shots, y/n. i find it hard to go there & not just fall into stars-&-stripes documentation.

Not sure if I posted anything from NYC 2012 or not... Here's some...

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7224/7373160904_f92ac454ec_z.jpg

http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5345/7187924709_f0bfae2467_z.jpg

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7105/7187953337_0e493f7b53_z.jpg

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8156/7577536308_a1aa1221b5_z.jpg

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7219/7187942963_9c2f6f61e3_z.jpg

all I've been doing so far with the video is getting a bit buzzed and watching it. lots of road trip footage, lots of friends horsing around, attempts at filmmaking, special effects experiments. and just tons of shots out car windows. more of that than anything else. I don't really know what to do with much of it, but there's some entertaining stuff there.

speaking of cellphone videos, I think I've benefited over the last year from remembering to pull out the phone a bit more often and I've got stuff that I'd be up for putting online. I like that thing you posted, and that's often the most meaningful kind of video to me: a bit bumpy, on-the-go, but with a strong sense of the air.

maybe I'll start a youtube channel when I've got a little more time.

ha, i can imagine all video shot 2003 - 2010 just being fried by Special Effects Experiments. car window shots sound great! i am resisting the temptation to post some of my cool Train Journey Window footage here but it is totally alluring to me. i was cruising the website of the photographer Grady posted a few days ago & saw some video she made, which i have a couple of things kinda in the same ballpark as; crushing together cellphone footage & just paring things down until you have the spare frenetic moments bouncing off each other fluidly. i all seriously don't approve of there being music on top but it is satisfying to do, to me, to learn how to edit as much as for anything else, as much as for giving it a home. diarism is such a strong pull to me, &, like what you said about remembering to shoot stuff with a phone or whatever, it is pretty powerful to momentarily inhabit somebody else's historic very slight moment through that kind of footage or film.

some breezing:

- watching the Francesca Woodman documentary
- sometimes I go to the library & look through her books, her work is arresting, weirdly it is often the lightest/cartooniest stuff I find heavy
- & my camera is fucking up, just in small ways but several small ways simultaneously. I have never been a gear person & I wondered, before I just picked up another olympus, whether anybody had other-brand recommendations for something in the same ballpark. I'd be trying to get a kinda lateral equivalent of the OM-1, <$100, &'d be trying to pick up a 35mm lens or something similar. go-w-what-u-know is my reflex here but if anyone was particularly effusive about some canon SLR or w/e I would be receptive

http://instagram.com/p/eZtmo6GGXN/

i love that dude to death but every time he gets on instagram it's like 30 pictures in a row

take away his camera

it's missy elliott on twitter all over again

these are the nathaniel dorsky nyff programs that i was endorsing btw:

http://nathanieldorsky.net/post/61132469758/kodachrome-dailies-from-the-time-of-song-and
http://nathanieldorsky.net/post/60005803288/song-and-spring-will-play-twice-at-the-new-york

http://25.media.tumblr.com/0fcf25247cdc249c1b23802f336e7d83/tumblr_mt2x8hZ3Uu1s6z4s9o1_1280.jpg