Dektol in the Sandbox: I <3 Photography

posting this again

http://www.shanelavalette.com/images/journal/egglestonandlynch.jpg

oh hey btw

did you ever get to your copy of for now, btw? everytime i see things from it online i get closer to buying it, & i am not a buy-photo-books kinda guy, really

xp lol yes
actually trying to find a couple of others from i think an essay i read a while ago by a friend of his, w/some candid shots of him hanging out/shooting on a porch, on the street, &c, hm.

yeah I have for now at home, haven't looked at it, along with a billion other books. I think all my discretionary spending goes towards booze and photography stuff. will look at over break

ha, okay. i have a couple eggleston books which i guess i don't just pick up & look through often enough, so maybe it's that that is dissuading me. spending on photography stuff = p good plan i think. going places is the most meritous thing i can think to do with money & that's a good fit w/taking photos also.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lbgmzbdigt1qbiq3oo1_500.jpg

^ the southern gentleman ferris bueller

I assume Eggleston is drunk 90% of the time. That's probably completely unfair, but it feels right. I saw the documentary (William Eggleston in the Real World) a few years ago, but he's so spacy and evasive I don't think I got anything about his work from it. Pretty sure all of it is online via Youtube.

I've never seen my favorite photograph online - it's from Eugene Richards's 'Americans We' book, a homeless man holding his dog to his chest like it's the last good thing on Earth.
http://i1118.photobucket.com/albums/k607/milosz999/photo.jpg

I got lucky and found a cache of Richards's early books at a used store. Dorchester Days, Americans We & Cocaine True Cocaine Blue are amazing

aw milo - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2065292/Loyal-end-Chinese-dog-refuses-budge-late-master-s-graveside-seven-days-food.html

I saw the documentary (William Eggleston in the Real World) a few years ago, but he's so spacy and evasive I don't think I got anything about his work from it. Pretty sure all of it is online via Youtube.

yeah this is the one I saw I think. he has a very calm way of photographing - so peaceful, taken by the moment.

There's nothing like watching great photographers photograph to get you in the mood. Eggleston's causal ease, Garry Winogrand's uptight camera-clutching and motormouth, etc. Love the way that Eggleston is so smooth, while others do the sort of lurch-and-lunge thing that we're used to seeing in a crowd.
Hitting that shutter always feels so good!

theriobook.com

David Alan Harvey set up a blog documenting his most recent trip to Rio for his new book project. $1.99 for access to all the posts he's made - I'm about halfway through and it's pretty interesting.
Less documentary on shooting, more behind the scenes of No Reservations - DAH is at a party! - since you're seeing photos from him while shooting, rather than other people following him.

he responds to a lot of the comments on each post, which might be more informative, I'm mostly just looking at the pictures and reading his posts now.

As ever, I got nothing goin' on except kids' parties, work parties and the ever-present commute. So, a couple from the last category then...

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7034/6530682523_1171a5a8f5_z.jpg

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7164/6530681013_c5a55efb03_z.jpg

http://www.americansuburbx.com/2010/10/william-eggleston-afterward-from.html

i can't exactly tell but i'm just going to assume that WE hates the way i look at photos

http://www.peterturnley.com/workshops.html

Thinking of signing up for his New York workshop in June. Would get ungodly expensive w/ a place to stay and food, but I've heard that he's a great teacher and will really help you in figuring out how to shape up and present a portfolio. Plus the NY one comes with a M9 for the week, I guess? Rental fee on that's $500 by itself.

william eggleston otm xp

ha, you're just saying that because you've reached the next-level/zen/asshole stage of I CANNOT SEE THE PHOTO ONLY THE GRAIN, even while you're sat there disinterestedly leaving fingerprint oils on HCB prints

lol "I am at war with the obvious" is one of the great all-time photography quotes

the disdain for the snapshop, the war with the obvious

In this case, the obvious has won:

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7171/6527392319_3a91caaf9e_z.jpg

idk isnt that more compositionally degas-french curves: all hollow centre and peripheral action. kindof the opposite of the "obvious" snapshot that eggleston is talking about

Mostly just joking that the clashing animal prints are so wild as to be "obvious."
As in, obviously I had to take that picture.

like i feel like a big part of how eggleston's photos want to be thought of is terms of touching the edges, touching their margins.. these vectors that locate the image in terms of how something is cropped or pushes out of the frame. at least thats how i thought it was being read by szarkowski in those essays/interviews a lot of you were loving this summer.

yeah i get you but i think the "obvious" as its being talked about here might be a little sneakier than it appears

I really didn't intend to comment in a meaningful way on the phrase. Just to frame my picture-posting as a joke. So people would look at my picture. I'm not a big critical thinker when it comes to photography.

i really like your photos guy

Now that's a level of discourse I can engage in.

I mean, I don't want to be dismissive of attempts to take the discussion further, but I usually run out of things to add beyond a certain point. When photographs don't "work" for me there's just about nothing I can think of to say about them. It's like there's really just nothing there. And when I love love love them, it takes some effort to be able to step back and "think" about them. Mostly my brain is a catalog of styles and trends I dislike and ways I can avoid them. And anxiety about the quality of my own pictures. Which I think is good! I like that level of stress. But when a convo about approaches to picture-taking starts to swell, I don't know how to engage. This is why you'll notice that I'm usually either blatantly self-promotional or pretty much straight technical.

Yikes. Sorry that was lame about "my brain is a catalog" of whatever. I just mean that my thinking is really rudimentary.

Eggleston kind of responsible for making the not-obvious obvious, too. Flickr is littered with people trying to be WE.

I ran into the 'nothing to say' a lot in crits in photo classes (even more than design or other fine art) - there was just nothing there to comment on, other than 'man, I can't believe you're showing us naked self-portraits. Again.' And that would have been dick-ish.

And when I love love love them, it takes some effort to be able to step back and "think" about them.

i like this & it pretty much fits with some of my skewed priorities w/photomaking, because you can read it just as a photo being this coalescence of a bunch of stuff - not just grain but where a thing was and how you're getting insight into that & the colour or the tone & the weird sense evoked by the angle or alignment &c&c&c. i mean i don't think that's not being able to think about it for me but at least it not being reducible to too much "that's how it was done/why it was appealing" deconstruction, because there's so much going on anyway

Mostly my brain is a catalog of styles and trends I dislike and ways I can avoid them

ha & i love this, re: just most everything, not just photography, it is refining an idea by reducing the options & learning from visible failure, defining photography in relation to what it shouldn't be.

the great thing about photography is that it's so hard to talk intelligently about photography that you don't have to

all the winograndian talk about tensions and energies and questions in photographs, and how they're never answered, is largely true, I think, which is why talking about photos is pretty boring to me because you return to the same old statements about how the picture is a puzzle and doesn't divulge its secrets etc. etc.

it's interesting to me because I used to be a huge winogrand stan but I've retreated to 'classicism' in making frank my lodestar, probably because careful thinking can make his photos 'emblematic' of the time period, if you choose to make them speak that way... it's ironic cause frank was explicitly disavowing the life magazine 'photoessay' when he was doing those pictures... but set against what comes later, they're appreciated precisely for their storytelling quality

I mean dig deep enough into the story around 'the americans' and you'll find that frank was probably being a little disingenuous - there were clear principles motivating his organizing of the book, the division into 4 sections separated by an american flag... idk

<3 my ILP dudes

btw milo i am interested in your experiences of studying & concentrating on photography, with others, etc. like i've never studied it (which with anything else would give me the luxury of flexing the i'm self taught line, which somehow doesn't seem totally as appropriate w/my shaky-ass photz), & to have talked stuff through with others & presumably having to demonstrate progress & like intention must be interesting. or w/the street photography workshop thing, it's interesting to me that that's taught, presumably being more about approach than the strictly technical stuff.

talking about photos is pretty boring to me because you return to the same old statements about how the picture is a puzzle and doesn't divulge its secrets etc. etc.

disappointed to hear my original critical thinking lumped under "same old statements about how the picture is a puzzle" but okay

I mean, there's that winogrand video where he points out that no picture tells a story by itself, and that's true - you don't know if the guy in the picture is taking the hat off the girl or putting it on. and the way we look at images that's probably true.

idk I find myself trending more towards seeking out the context behind pictures. despite being a rabid new critic literary type 'the text is its own world, self-sufficient' etc. which is prob more true for books than for photographs.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the neat thing about photographs is that you don't have to talk about them. you can just look at them and contemplate the sublime, like schopenhauer would have you do. looking at photograph feeds the soul. for me looking at good photographs is like breathing in really fresh, clean, cold air - invigorating, bracing. that's the metaphor i always seem to return to in my head.

lol schlump I didn't mean to implicate you in anything! these are just thoughts that I've been fomenting on

lol kidding, i just read it back & realised that my sarcasm wasn't as pronounced as i'd hoped

i am p tempted by the errol morris book on photos that just came out re: some of the above regarding context

to bring some of the above full circle - the sensation of just looking at photos, the crazy alchemy of william eggleston - i remember catching the eggleston exhibition at the whitney & feeling like i'd had an eye test or something, it had been so strong just to see his colours. also re: this entirely irrelevantly, i just got a poster for this exhibition like three years belatedly & am so psyched about it because it is going to be on my walls forever & i'd been heartbroken that they weren't available at the time

(http://s.ecrater.com/stores/60130/4937349e65951_60130b.jpg)

fuck the haters, looking at WE photos is like looking at the sun

btw milo i am interested in your experiences of studying & concentrating on photography, with others, etc. like i've never studied it (which with anything else would give me the luxury of flexing the i'm self taught line, which somehow doesn't seem totally as appropriate w/my shaky-ass photz), & to have talked stuff through with others & presumably having to demonstrate progress & like intention must be interesting.

For my part, I didn't realize what I was doing at the time, there's a clear line running through my (absolutely, ungodly terrible, no one should have to see their negatives from that age) work that's about loneliness, class and suburban anonymity. Which aren't exactly the most exciting ideas in themselves, but make sense given my political bent at the time. I didn't have the language to express it, so I took a bit of 'be more conceptual' flak. Which made what I did do less personal, because I was thinking out the project instead of just getting my mind out of the way.

Ultimately, I think (some) university photo programs might suffer from not having narrow enough focus - not from making students take classes in the other arts, but in having to spend 60 credit hours on biology and calculus and stuff. It's hard to really focus as much as you might need to in order to make breakthroughs. Today, at 30 and thinking of finishing that degree, I think I'd get a lot more out of it, because I'm much clearer in direction and less influenced by outside forces. And wouldn't be distracted by all the 19-year old art school girls because damn that's creepy.

there's a really good book on The Americans that shows many (or maybe it's all) of his contact sheets and how different printings have used different crops and printing styles and how that influences what you take away from the individual images and the project as a whole

One big takeaway for me from The Americans - Frank shot 500-700 rolls in a single year. You need to be profligate to really figure things out, and for the perfect accidents to appear.

I have that book!

I mean yeah the stories of all the greats touch on how many rolls they shot - there was a rumor that HCB would shoot a roll before breakfast, winogrand would shoot at least 3 rolls a day, etc.

and of course it's a great takeaway in the age of digital that though they shot so much, their publish work amounts to maybe .01% of their total shooting (I've harped on this before)

here was a rumor that HCB would shoot a roll before breakfast

ha, i think this is as useful in illuminating the differences between these guys just in habits/ambitions for what might be accomplished pre-breakfast, as much as photographic habits, etc

thanks for the breakdown, Milo, that's really interesting - I'm impressed that you're able to think about, even then, your concerns so clearly - like it's obviously "the stuff you're drawn to photograph" but being able to be critical & thoughtful about it is cool.

500 - 700 rolls in a year sounds like a lot but i think if i was in new places, let alone ~as a photographer~ i would be doing that easy; just shooting details of a new city can be pretty engrossing, though of course it's maybe more impressive w/frank that he was shooting life rather than quirky street signs or w/e

It also helps to have a Guggenheim fellowship to pay for the film and all the associated costs.

Digital is obv. freeing in that regard, as a sunk cost (nothing niggling at the back of your mind saying 'well, you know that shot was bullshit and cost about $.35') but totally requires much harsher personal editing (I've been meaning to go through my LR archive and delete obvious crap, but that could take some time) and discipline in making yourself print (in some form, any form). I've been enjoying shooting my M4/35, but I do keep looking at it and going "is this special in any way relative to digital?" I've got a couple more rolls of Portra 400 to use up at Christmas, but after that the return to 35mm film experiment is going traditional B&W only. PITA to scan, but I've got ~50 rolls of Tri-X, Neopan 400 and HP5. Going to make myself try to treat it more like I do digital, free-er to experiment.
At least w/ trad B&W I can tell myself that future generations might find my negatives and spend some time asking why the fuck anyone gave a damn about the stuff I'm shooting. I shall be remembered.

I read the HCSP street photography image critique thread on Flickr and it's pretty lolsy, from the range of images posted and reactions (so many wannabe Szarkowskis! and people who would get drummed out of a class critique for being dicks!) to their idea that getting into the HCSP pool is a major, major accomplishment worth arguing over.

guggenheims are like 40k a year? not that much...

film costs money yeah but I've already placed it in the category of necessary things like food and beer. I cut back in other areas of my life obv

HCSP is very lolsy, they're part of the reason why I started to move away from winogrand I think

Ha, for years I've been confusing the Guggenheim ($40k) and MacArthur ($500k) grants.

itt we are blasé about $40k