There are no boring subjects, but there are definitely boring magnifications.
Category: Artmaking
QOTD: Kandinski
…lend your ears to music, open your eyes to paining, and… stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to "walk about" into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?
—Wassily Kandinsky, in On the Spiritual in Art, 1910
Photon Detector launches photography podcast
Most of the blog here was easy to publish because it was just links to exhibitions and news about equipment. Huge, tedious time suck, but not difficult.
The more interesting stuff was hard. Exploration, non-facts, obstacles… the actual art-as-verb parts. I never finished or published most of what I started writing about that. It’s hard and it never seems to come out quite right and the lexicon we have to talk about it feels clunky, inadequate, and annoying. I let the perfect become the enemy of the hopefully-better-than-nothing and didn’t do much with it.
I’m disinterested in expending more of my life being a human RSS filter for show & equipment news but the artmaking stuff is still compelling to me. I didn’t make perfectionist writing about this nebulous, messy shit work so I’ll flap my face-hole in front of a microphone instead. It won’t be perfect, but it’ll be something.
I’d like this to be a conversation. Comments, questions, thoughts, topic requests, whatever, please get in touch: nicolai at photon detector dot com.
Check out the Photon Detector podcast
Thanks to the just-launched Photograper Stories podcast for inspiring me to finally get off my ass and do it.
Steve Jobs on focus
Here’s something to think about when you have limited time for art:
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.
—Steve Jobs
A question of authorship
My wife and I were trying to take a picture of both of us together in a sort of co-MySpace fashion: I held the camera out in front of us and she pressed the button. It took a few tries before we got what we wanted, and when we did, we both credited me with it. Which, upon further reflection, really surprises me.
I’ve always considered the photographer or author of a picture the person who pressed the shutter button to make it. Sure, the line can blur a bit with commercial photography or motion pictures, where the final image is the result of large-scale collaboration between art directors, set designers, models, makeup artists, wardrobe consultants, grips, etc., but I don’t shoot like that, so it’s always been fairly clear-cut for me.
It seems that when you get down to actually making the exposure, there are two decisions to be made: where to put the camera, and when to press the button. There are certainly other decisions—lens, film, focus, shutter speed, aperture, etc.—but most or all of those have already been made, or are made for you by automation, before the button is pressed. (We had already selected a Polaroid SLR 680, which has a fixed lens, only takes one kind of film, is auto exposure-only, and we chose to use the auto focus.) Granted, the messed up shots before the keeper were messed up because I aimed the camera badly, not because she hit the shutter at the wrong time, but it seems strange that we both considered it "my" photograph instead of "ours", when we were each responsible for half of the decision-making.
Sally Mann videos
Check out this roundup of five Sally Mann videos at David Bram‘s blog.
Mystery roll surprise
I found an exposed roll of film in my freezer yesterday mixed in with my stash of unexposed 120 slide film. I’m 99% sure it’s stuff I shot for the Spacetime series I’ve been working on for a few years (that’s the only thing I shoot chromes for), but I have no idea when or where I shot it.
Looks like I’m going to get a little dose of what street photographer Garry Winogrand, who would let his film sit for a few years after he shot it so he’d have no memory of having made the pictures when he finally saw them, was after. I’ve always thought that was a good idea that must be a good and different experience, but I’ve never been patient enough to try.
It’s a small-scale surprise, to be sure, but I’m excited to see what’s there!
Dorothea Lange quote
To know ahead of time what you’re looking for means you’re then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting.
— Dorothea Lange (via Blurry Thinking)
Amnesiac view
I think it would be interesting to be dropped off someplace completely foreign (not knowing where I’m going ahead of time), shoot all day, have my memory of it wiped, and then look at what I shot. Kind of like Winogrand—who waited a few years before processing and printing his exposures so he’d have no distinct memory of making them—plus.
Learning from "significant failures"
Mike Johnston of The Online Photographer just posted a characteristically insightful piece on becoming a "successful" photographer. (I put that in quotes because he’s talking about more than one kind of success.)
The real gold is in the last section, How to know. The significant idea is this: "If you use the 1-2-3 method of editing, you might consider starting a new category: significant failures."
Read the rest, it’s short and worth it!