March 26, 2009
Doorbell, California
One of the things that photography allows you to do is discover details from events and objects that you stuck onto a negative or a harddrive somewhere and haven’t thought about for a while. Once you open up the negative onto a print or pop your file into photoshop you have a second chance to see a scene for the first time.
The doorbell belongs, or rather belonged to my grandfather. I took this picture shortly after his death last year as we were staying at his house for the funeral. Before everything was put into boxes I went through the house and took pictures of details that I remembered. Paintings. Lamps. Radios. The television. I should have taken a shot of the scotch bottles he always kept on top of the refrigerator.
After scanning this negative I got a closer look at the doorbell and noticed that there was a seal (you’ll have to click on the image to see it larger) which read in part, “live better electrically”.
I found this an especially apt sentiment for a chemical engineer who was born in 1915 and did see his profession change the world. When he was 18 and on his second year at UCLA the Tennessee Valley Authority was formed to economically develop a (still) impoverished area of the country.
My grandfather did believe this was the best of all possible worlds and had a great deal of faith in people. I’m not sure if he ever noticed the seal, who ever bothers to look at their own doorbell after all but I think he would have seen himself as part of that milieu which would have written things like that.
I come from a far more cynical time even as I continue to see technology cause radical economic and cultural change. Perhaps its my own jaded nature but I tend to see innovation driven largely by profit rather than any real desire to improve the world. Its difficult to assign any ethical motivation to a drug company that refuses to reduce the price of HIV medication for the third world until India threatens to reverse engineer their patented medications and release their own generic versions.
I was surprised that such a small and previously missed detail would have given me pause. I’m planning on going through the rest of my negatives and pulling out further objects. I don’t have any photos of my grandfather that I took myself. All I can do is show you fragments and talk about them. The fragments don’t speak for themselves but they speak to me and I hope I can tell you what they say to me.
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March 17, 2009
Street Art blog Wooster Collective posted some brief thoughts on galleries cutting prices on the work of the artists they represent.
There are a number of interesting responses on their facebook profile but what this brought to mind was those damn tulips that always get dragged out of the 17th century every time a commodity market gets hyper inflated. I know that everyone wants to talk about the Tulip Craze every time you see a market start to collapse but I think there isn’t any other readily available model for a commodity which is traded but lacks intrinsic value. You can’t eat art, build a shelter with it, or melt it down (unless you’re Damian Hirsh) to extra valuable materials from it. Its a very strange commodity which like “Brand Awareness” has a value but there’s “nothing” behind it except for a willingness of a culture to agree that it does have value. Brands cause things to happen but they don’t do anything on their own. Yet they enjoy strong legal protection in the form of trademarks because they do have that economic power.
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March 16, 2009
New Rochelle is featured in a NY Times article as helping its local landowners solve an issue of empty commercial real estate by using state business improvement district funds to create studio space for working artists. The program is administered through the NY Main Street program which has provided funds for 130 communities in NY State to assist them in renovating deteriorated downtown areas.
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March 14, 2009
One of the things you tell beginning photographers is to “always have a camera on you”. This is especially important for city dwellers as you never know what strange, wonderful, horrible thing will come walking down the street by itself or enmasse and you will kick yourself if you can’t take a picture.
Dancers, Union Square NYC 2008
I’ve gotten into the habit of wearing a small messenger bag whenever I go out. I’m very fond of my Timbuk2 bag and its taking on a nice patina from the air pollution, grime, and whatever passes as precipitation in this city. Known disparingly as the “man purse” in some circles it has become an essential component of the NYC uniform. Most people take public transportation and carrying a novel with you ensures that you can retreat into some small semblence of privacy by sticking your nose in a book.
After stuffing your reading material, pens, cell phone, breath mints, snack, or laptop into one’s messenger bag there’s a limited amount of room for a camera. Most people would find no trouble in shoving a compact digital into their bag but we’re too good for that shit now aren’t we? We need a camera that’s compact, sturdy enough to stand being jostled constantly, and takes a equally compact, fast lens.
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March 14, 2009
Frozen Lake, Prospect Park Brooklyn
Another date to mark on your calendars is the first of May better known as May Day, Transcontinental Up With Bolsheviks Day, So That’s What They Do For Fun in North Korea Day, Beltaine, Let’s All Go Naked And Lay In A Great Big Pile Day, and now International Commie Camera Day for people who like the strong snort of masochism with their photography.
On May 1, grab your camera which should have been manufacturered in a communist nation (which includes the Chinese made Seagull) and go out and put a couple of rolls through it. Share. And Enjoy.
Let the world know that a complete lack of quality control in manufacturing is not enough to keep you from self-expression. Or that you’re just a really cheap bastard.
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March 13, 2009
From Lens Culture: Online printing company blurb.com has a photo book competition with a top prize of $25k.
The content has three catagories, fine art, editorial, and commercial with a $35 entry fee (entry fees are pretty common… these things don’t pay for themselves now do they?). The deadline is July 16 which is well after the closing date for SoFoBoMo so if you have a great idea and want to keep rolling, you have a place to enter your work.
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March 13, 2009
The New York Times has a video opinion piece on the ethics of retouching of photographs. The piece is focused on the use of retouching of models rather than for journalistic photos which is an entirely different topic which deserves its own space.
As you most likely know the images which appear in most magazines are retouched, sometimes dramatically. Professional retouchers such as Brian Dilg can do some rather extraordinary alterations to photographs. If you visit his portfolio and read his notes on each of his example images there is a high level of awareness of what the process of retouching involves. I doubt that any professional retoucher is not aware of the social and psychological affects of their work have on the general public.
As much as we’ve read about the plague of eating disorders and related body image issues in children, teenagers, and adults perhaps a more telling indication of how deeply retouching affects our perceptions is the incredibly vicious articles which typically accompany photos of celebrities without makeup. Why would people be so aggressive regarding the appearance of celebrities if they didn’t have their expectations dashed by the reality that Madonna is a very fit but still very much middle aged woman?
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March 5, 2009
Today a coworker was showing me some financial charts and he brought up a company that trades in gold to show me how the price of gold had been relatively stable for a long time before spiking dramatically since 2006. Monday I had gone to Calumet where I was surprised to see that Ilford RC paper was now selling for $61 per 100 sheets of 8×10. The last time I purchased a box of RC paper I paid about $40 for 100 sheets (about 2 years ago). So I asked him if he could show me some graphs for silver and as expected silver has been experiencing the same spike in price.
Silver Prices over 10 years (generated from Monex.com)
So it would seem that until market volatility calms silver based photographers can expect increased prices on film and paper. If people are investing in precious metals to avoid stocks the cost of the silver will continue to climb due to increased demand. I’ve actually switched from shooting Kodak Tri-X to Fuji Neopan as its currently a full dollar cheaper for roll of 120 and earlier last year the price gap was even larger. Fuji increased the price of its products last year due to materials cost as well as increased expenses in transportation due to the price of oil.
One suggestion I can make for people shooting 35mm is to get a good bulk loader and buy your film in 100′ increments. I get about 16-18 rolls per 100′ and as Tri-X sells for $3.99 per 36 shot roll and 100′ sells for $48 you can get around a 35% savings. If you buy a couple of rolls of 100′ at a time you can fix your film prices which are not likely to go down for some time.
Sadly I don’t think there’s a way to bulk load 120 film which is what I primarily shoot these days.
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March 2, 2009
I had my first “official” editorial shoot a few days ago.
One of my goals for this year was to get into doing portraiture. I finally have a portable kit (sorta… my main camera is a mamiya RB67 which makes a Hasselblad look like a child’s toy) and I was running out of excuses not to do it. When a woman I’ve known for a while needed new publicity photos I jumped on the opportunity.
Lux Alptraum with the NJoy "Eleven"
Naturally when working with strobes outside of a studio the modeling lights are often too dim against the ambient light to give you a good idea of what’s going to happen when you pop the lights. If you’re going to use film for a shoot, what you get on that negative is god’s little mystery until you pour out the fixer and pull the film off the reel. Until you’ve had years of experience and can clearly visualize what the results are going to be you’d like to take a little peek under the curtain and make sure what you’d like to get is in fact what’s going to show up on the negative.
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March 1, 2009
Solo Photo Book Month, the photographic version of Novel Writing Month, has kicked open the door for the 2009 season.
The idea is to pick a project and then you have 30 days to shoot, edit, and soft-publish a book which will be loaded onto the website. The project and all its photography and layout tasks must be done within that 30 day period. Rather than having an set date its just any 30 days starting during the month of May. The book needs to be at least 35 photographs but is otherwise up to each individual as to how they’re going to get those photos and what is meant by book but you should at least have a PDF together.
I tried participating but due to Things Happening was unable to complete my project. I choose to do panoramic B&W images of the NYC subway using my Horizon Perfekt. I have a couple of rolls of film but I never got things together in time. This year’s project might be the subway panoramic but I’m also kicking around a few other ideas. I’d like to do portraits but that requires other people which doesn’t always work on a tight time frame.
I’m thinking about taking photos around the 5 places I’ve lived in NYC. Having a record of the neighborhoods as they exist in 2009 as opposed to how they exist in my memory would be a nice way to exploring how things change so rapidly in this city. I’ve lived on the upper east side, the west village, the upper west side, harlem, greenpoint, williamsburg, and now crown heights over the past 11 years with stays ranging from 1 week to 4 years in a variety of situations.
I’d strongly encourage others to try. I’ve seen other people turn a simple idea for a project into excellent books that get published for reals (Kyle Cassidy did not do his Armed America project for SoPhBoMo but it started with an idea and went from there).
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