- Film 87
- Books 80
- Essay 68
- Neurography 19
- Darkroom 18
- Software 16
- Zeiss 12
- Contax 12
- Leica 11
- Sketchbook 11
- AATS24 11
- Tri-X 9
- Sonoma 9
- Ilford 8
- Featured 8
- Canon 7
- Fujifilm 7
- Lumix 6
- Liquidity 5
- Flash 4
- Review 4
- ArtTrails24 4
- Neopan 2
- Nikon 2
- margodavis 1
- Movies 1
Film
Seeing the Sea
Summer, and that means Tri-X, to see what can be seen.
Trees the Season
A holiday sketchbook from 2005.
DIY Guides: Film, Sensor, and Print Aspect Ratios
I made a small tool to generate this little pair of charts comparing print and aspect ratios because I simply couldn’t find one laid out this way: all centered to show the letterboxing for one axis or the other. The charts I could find invariably radiated out from the corner, which is less useful (to me) when preparing prints from existing images where the aspects don’t match.
While these charts include only the frame shapes I typically use, it’s easy to regenerate any variant you like – other sizes such as 16:9 or A4 paper are already defined in the tool: this Colab notebook. Alter as you see fit, run the notebook, and a new chart will appear in roughly a second or two.
Flying: Film Scans w/Leica Monochrom
In the spirit of the previous post about impatient film photography, I tried using a “proper” digital camera and macro lens to scan these negatives, rather than a phone. Shot them right through the PrintFile page, still in their sleeves – on very close inspection you can see occasional tiny bubbles and reflections from the transparent sheet.
Even with that interference, the results lets the snappiness of the original lens shine through: the Zeiss 50mm Planar ZM, a close cousin to the Zeiss 45mm Planar that I’ve been so happy with on the Contax G.
The setup:
Tri-X, My New Favorite Color Film
The shot above was made with a B&W-only camera. The lower version: a one-click reimagining via Adobe’s latest “Neural Colorize” filter.
It’s impressive how the software can add color to the file. Yet:
What does color really add to the photo?
Ongoing Directions: Yashica 124G
This $150 Yashica has been with me since high school – hokey meter, questionable low speeds, flare and all. I’ve scrounged-up most of the original accesories, one at a time. I even have the user manual, which contains banal sample holiday snapshots, maybe made at Marine World. Only years later did I recognize the byline on those photos: Weegee. Wait, Weegee?
Truthfully, away from strong light directly into the lens and above ƒ/5.6, it’s hard to imagine wanting to replace this camera with anything fancier. Just be careful about the direction: don’t point it into the sun. Or a flash bulb, Weeg.
Apparently all of these more-recent celebrity portraits were also made with the same model Yashica.
Film Photography for the Impatient
I’m not going to pay $2000 for a drying cabinet but $23 for a 9x12” USB-powered LED light panel seems okay. I’ve gotten into the habit of connecting it to a spare phone battery: I can then use it as handheld light source to preview wet negatives fresh out of the wash. Snap a view from my phone and flip it in Snapseed and boom, super-trashy, super-quick, scans.
Normally these would be for my personal quick-check, or on occasion a text message. This morning’s a bit different if only due to my excitement: there’s a little carnival set up in the fairgrounds parking lot, the first open public gathering I’ve seen in our town since March of last year.
Can’t wait to post a couple of snaps:
Quick and Light: Fuji’s Little Strobe
Unexpected but true department: a Fuji dedicated flash is my favorite for non-dedicated Leica hot shoes.
(For dedicated shoes, too)
The Leak
Light leak. You can barely see it here, up the middle of the frame. Of all the rolls I’ve run through my old CL thus far, only this one roll shows a leak. Later or earlier: nada.
On this roll, the leak’s spaced between multiple frames: three apart, then six, then eight… and each time, from early frames to later, it moves to a different location, each becoming smaller for the higher-numbered photos.
My guess: a pinhole-sized burst of light got into the film takeup chamber, late in the roll. Maybe from the frame counter. The dot of light scattered down an angle into concentric, more-tightly-wound, parts of the film.
And maybe this was just for a brief moment – most frames, no problem. Later rolls: great. Either way, annoying. A cost for using this little 50-year-old box.
Hard Road: Gibson, Lyon, Tri-X, HP5
Party like it’s 1979:
Found this formula from Ralph Gibson in the Lustrum Press book Darkroom:
Super Presto
I still have about 20 rolls of Neopan 1600 Super Presto – that is, two or three old handrolls and an unopened 30-meter spool, purchased in Japan back when such things existed.
Rodinal 1+50, 13 minutes. The chunkiness is still there, though for this roll I’ve learned to rate it at closer to ISO 200 than its long-gone 1600 box speed.

I don’t recall Fujifilm’s film base being as physically ornery as it is now. Curls and bows, resists flattening, sharp enough to cut the negative sleeves, flying and spinning out of the negative carrier. Comparing it to a roll of modern HP5, which lays flat and still as the grave.
kbImport: A Photo/Audio/Video Filing System
Sometimes, you just have to do it yourself.
Oslo Calling
Local Improvements
Child Portraitists
This post has been lingering half-written for months, I was reminded of it this morning, as I came across this post from Suzanne Revy, and prodded with the notion that in fact this little rant has been curdling in my mind for my, much longer.
Suzanne is one of an undeclared informal group, the APUG B&W Child Portrait Society, a club that includes photographers like Cheryl Jacobs in the U.S., Nicole Boenig-McGrade in Australia, & Heli Huhtala in Finland.
In all these cases we see similar sorts of classic iconography being used to similar means: to reveal, or seem to reveal, a private world in which children are fully involved and which adults can only glimpse. Even then, the contents of that private world remains hidden – only its existence is shown, and the rest is hidden through deep shadows and restrictive or soft focus (or even, as in Cheryl’s current title-webpage image, both shadows and soft focus combined with a wire mesh screen between the child and the photographer).
The Paradox of Western Landscape
Lenswork #69 arrived today, and as is so often the case, the cover was a photo of rocks — contrasty, windswept, Western rocks. Vasquez, Indian Head, Merrick Butte. The locations we’ve all had burned into our psyches as standard backdrops for John Ford and Tom Mix.
While these locations are dramatic in and of themselves, it’s hard not to compare each new photo of them with the work of Carleton Watkins et al – people who photographed these places (& on a grand scale) because the western landscape was unknown.
Today’s shooters photograph with the opposite intent: the same locations precisely because they’re well-known. When did this shift occur? The Kodak Brownie? Timothy O’Sullivan?
ChartThrob: A Tool for Printing Digital Negatives
Updated May 2022
In 2006, at a Pacific At League meeting, I met platinum printer Thomas Howard, and saw how he was using charts to hand-profile his process to make large-format digital negatives for any alternative-process contact prints.
I figured this expensive (sometimes >$20/print in materials) and labor-intensive process could be automated, so: I automated it.The result is a tool called ChartThrob, which runs right inside Adobe Photoshop. It’s available for public, free-for-everyone abuse.
Big Negativity
Part of my weekend was spent scanning the 645 negatives shown here (and the rest of the 220 roll — these are frames 17-20) — somehow they’d fallen through the cracks in my workflow. I found the processed roll sitting in a box atop my monitor, where it had probably been resting since March. Oops.
The Right Tool
Soonmin Bae is a Ph.D. student at MIT and this week she published a new Siggraph Paper: “Two-Scale Tone Management for Photographic Look.”
Dag
…at least that’s what the kids would have you believe. This one’s digital of course and made quickly based on looking at a scan of a real (modern) dag (by Mike Robinson), trying to suss-out some appropriate curves and such entirely by eye. Not perfect, but learn by doing.
Memory Pool
Six rolls Tri-X, two rolls Acros, rolls Neopan 1600 in Fomadon F09 (Rodinal formula) 1+40, then two rolls of Neopan 1600 stand-developed in F09 1+80 for an hour.
Obviously this shot isn’t mine, but I’ve decided to start including some shots that I’ve felt strongly about, shots that I think have had a direct personal effect. Unlike Roland Barthes I don’t think first of family photos. Neither is it some list of “my favorites” or “greatest” shots. They’re just shots that changed the way I thought about pictures and picture-making.
mai
I realized as I was heading into Oslo that my meeting might be bumped by a local holiday — my dad would probably scold me for being a bad Norwegian, the 17th of May is the holiday, it’s christmas and thanksgiving and the fourth of july. The whole city was shut down, busses not running, taxis allowed to charge exorbitant fees legally (otherwise the drivers would stay home for the holiday), and as far as I could tell everyone in southern Norway below the age of 20 or above the age of 40 (and most of those in between too) crammed into a dozen blocks or so of central Oslo.
Flying Light
Another cycle of airplanes, heading on a circuit ‘round Scandinavia for most of the week. I’m letting Reb take the Canon for her own trip to New Jersey, and I’ll be carrying just the LX1 and the Bronica.
I’ve hardly touched the Bronica for the last couple of months — mostly just too busy! Hardly any processing or scanning has gone on since January, shame on me (even as I’ve been shooting film, buying developer and bulk rolls, etc).
Funny, I’ve never posted many impressions about the Bronica — George Masters has, but he missed one crucial flaw: the meter is not TTL and it’s entirely possible to shoot a whole roll of 220 film without ever realizing that the lens cap is still on. Not that I would know anything about that…..
Still, a lovely camera. I just got back the color negs from February’s dogsledding extravaganzo, and hope to have a few up on the web some time soon.
More New
Do you know why digital wins over film when shooting color? Because there are no decent C-41 labs within a thirty-minute drive of here. Which means at best I have to drive 30 minutes to Keeble’s, 30 minutes back, then repeat the process to pick up the negs hours later. Or at worst bring it to anywhere local and then spend a good deal more than those two wasted hours trying to spot-out all the crap and scratches they leave on my negatives (or even crease marks, as I recently experienced when a roll marked “process only” was dutifully folded-up into a wad and stamped flat in an envelope by one local lab guy).
These last few frames from Saturday night were completely mis-treated by a guy who was standing there listening while I discussed with his manager how I wanted the negs handled. In fact I asked him some extra questions about handling rollfilm negatives. When I returned and found the negs mis-cut and with bits of dirt scratching against them inside the “clean” enveleope? He shrugged and walked off…
Nice.
$4.79 please.
Snooze
Ran over last night to the Palo Alto Art Center for their annual Fall program, which consisted of sculpture and photography. I’d listed the Photography portion on Upcoming but it was really Edward Eberle’s porcelains that impressed me the most.
Billy-Jacked: Mortensen’s Stand Method
A couple of years or so back I was browsing at a San Francisco bookstore and came across a book called “Projection Control” by William Mortensen, whom I’d only heard of as an antagonist to the old f/64 group of the 1930’s. His pictures seemed oddly contemporary, however – so I read further and found that he was an advocate of what we might think of as a ridiculous method: he developed his film not for minutes but for hours.
Big Time
Tomorrow starts the 2005 Pacific Art League Annual Photo Exhibition and the photo above (actually a small crop from a much larger photo) will not be on display. One very much like it, however, is…
Shazam
Three 35mm rolls of Neopan 1600, three rolls of HP5+, all in Xtol 1+1.
As the saying goes, you’re never quite so fully aware as in the first second after the hammer comes down on your thumb.
Natural Colors Part 2
While I was typing Pt I (without even thinking that it would become Pt I), part of the paradox vexing me was there on the desk, staring intently from the cover of the January PDN in the form of Jude Law, shot in classicly-crisp B&W by David Bailey, with the tag: “The Legends Issue.” So here we have Jude Law, promoting Alfie and dressed-up in 60’s Saville Row. Knockout pic, but — part of The Problem of B&W Nostalgia, right?
PMD2
Two rolls HP5, one roll Acros.
This week’s reschedule of Photography Made Difficult was smaller — just David Lee, Rebecca, and myself, alongside the larger regular group of folks from South Bay Bloggers (including Courtney and, later in the evening, myself). A couple of members have said Wednesdays are bad so I’ve shifted the schedule to Fridays starting in April.
Collisions
Funny how ideas can collide, if you’re in the right frame of mind to be aware of them. Our brains are such coincidence machines. That’s how I felt when, only hours after posting the previous entry, I discovered the work of the Swiss/Italian/German/Japanese (!) artist Mario A.
R3
One roll TX400-120, Rodinal 1::50 13 mins.
On Friday afternoon I received my newest toy, a Rolleinar 3, a big $6 ebay purchase and much cleaner than my Rolleinar 2. How could I resist? So I sat Courtney down in the late Saturday light, scattered by tree branches and the wavy clear plastic above the back door deck.
instant
Too Hyper
The Fine Print
It’s always in the details. This weekend finds me printing and reprinting comparison pix, looking at differences between methods: between digital and medium format film cameras, and between different ways to print their results.
Since the beginning of the year I’ve found myself increasingly dissatisfied with prints smaller than 8×10”, printing 11×14 and preferably larger. The Epson will deliver a predictable solid 12x18 from 35mm format digi, or 12x12 from a MF negative. And even that seems small a lot of the time…
Heap
Sometimes journal entries gestate for a bit, maybe they just ferment. Or rot. This one’s been in the mulch for three weeks, even as other entries came and went. Maybe it could be several different posts. This is what I have tonight, rambling and ranting.
Famous
A new surprise among library books: Famous Photographers Course, in three oversized volumes.
Yes, it was published by “Famous Photographers School,” which apparently is now completely defunct after being absorbed a while back by Al Dorne’s Famous Artists School (which doesn’t offer anything about photography at this point, AFAIK). These books were published back in 1964.
What attracted me to them initial was the list of “faculty” instructors, including Bert Stern, Richard Avedon, Alfred Eisenstadt, Irving Penn, Philippe Halsman…
Fastest Thumb in the West: The Story of the Contax Kid
AF, MF, VF, SAF.
After having to answer this over and over again, and by request, I’m making a permanent entry here on the subject of fast accurate focusing with the Contax G2. The next time a purist Leica collector starts up about “slow AF” (this from a guy with no AF), I’ll at least be able to lean back and type this URL to them with a smooth, authoritative air.
So here goes:
PMD1
We had the first session of Photography Made Difficult at Coffee Society tonight — it was a bit noisy and certainly crowded but quieter than the “Open Mic Night” over at Barefoot. The PMD group was small as expected: myself, Allan Chen, Pieris, and David Lee. Which was good — more than one or two additions and it would have been all the tougher to talk to everyone. And everyone brought prints!
Supply Chain
It seems like Ilford is back from the edge of the dissolution abyss, at least for now. Despite all the anxiety over the “death of film,” it seems to me that it won’t be film that will dry up. It’ll be other parts of the expendables supply chain that will first disappear and make life difficult.
In my own experience, the most problematic supply item has been acquiring decent negative sleeves. And right this moment, I’m completely tapped out.
Another Slippery Slope
Six rolls of 35mm Tri-X, Xtol 1+1.
I have to admit that I’d been stalling on processing these rolls, dreading them just a little bit. I’ve grown spoiled by the ease and clarity of digital, and by the tonalities of larger negatives. But I went ahead and ran them and started to slide them into the scanner.
What had I been I thinking? The negs are exactly what I could have hoped for — well-toned, sharp, snappy, clean. Chalk my anxiety up to an infinite fickleness and an easily-suggestible nature.
Xmas Gifts
Four 220 rolls of TXP, two 120 rolls of Neopan 400, two 120 rolls of TX400 (sometimes you use what yuou can find, on the road…). All in Xtol 1+1.
As Courtney has wisely reminded me so often, the best gifts are the unexpected ones that you realize really ought to have been on your wish list (though the couple of gifts I received from my wish list are most treasured too). I’d place as a close second the gifts you give to yourself to share. Thus the best gifts of the season have been the trip to see our family in Minnesota, and as a happy side-effect, a chance to make pictures of my parents and brother’s family in their own homes (note to my sister, who lives nearby in Oakland: you’re next!).
Tone by the Ton
In preparation for the holidays I’ve been printing. It started with a few small prints, then I selected some wintery shots for printing at 12”x18”, to be on the walls during the holidays and an upcoming holiday party. Then opened the cabinet to find some old prints, and.. at least five shopping trips for frames later, I’m still left with far more prints than frames, and even then more frames than wall space on which to hang them.
Ape Hug
When I first started this journal, I did a fair amount of searching for blogs and photoblogs that were involved with wet-darkroom photography, using searches on google amd photoblogs.org for matches to things like darkroom or film rangefinder. But while there were lots of matches for search terms, as often as not the first post on the found blog would said something like “I’ve sold off my film-based rangerfinders and darkroom equipment to pay for a D100 so I can post blog pictures every single day…”
So there were very few analog sites (and mostly of the nostalgic variety), though with some high-profile exceptions like Todd Gross’s Quarlo. In the past couple of years they’ve multiplied, though still not in great numbers. Here are a few found this week, owned by APUG members (what’s wrong with this picture?), a list based on this thread:
Ad Libris, X-tol
Stopped by the city library to quickly look for a book (Wright Morris’s Time Pieces, for the sake of a single reference for an article on PhotoPermit), stepped into the “Friends of the Library” store and walked out with a spotlessly mint copy of the Lustrum/Ralph Gibson SX-70 Art, hard to find and currently listing used on Amazon at $75. Heh. My expense: one crumpled U.S. dollar.
saturated
On a busy day, it’s not uncommon for me to shoot two or three hundred photos. I used to gauge this as a “six roll day” and now think of it usually as a “half gig day” for the amount of space used by digi-cam JPEGs.
Unless I shoot RAW, or use the high-quality JPEG settings. A six-roll day of RAW files is a “gig and a half day,” though to tell the truth I’ve never had one — for all their dynamic-range merits, RAW files are significantly slower to use on my camera, so most of the time I stick to JPEGs. As a bonus, a half-gig’s worth of pics will all fit onto a single CD.
Wireless
So it’s gone, bubbled-wrapped and brown papered, stamped and mailed on its way back to Canon. As ever with mechanical widgets, it’s the cheapest parts that break — 2-cent battery clips and a 5-cent button cap. Just the same it’s under warranty, and off it goes. No DSLR. So at least for a while it’s no CF cards, no chargers, no PCMCIA slots, no USB or burning CDs or connector cables — at least not when it comes to making pictures. I put them all away in a big bag at the back of the cabinet.
The Contax 35mm as ever is solid and quick and surprisingly light after carrying around the 300D for a while (probably 1/3 the weight of the Canon w/lens). What have I been doing with this bulky digicam? Heck, I can carry the G and all three lenses, ten rolls of film, toss-in the RTS for good measure and the bag still feels shockingly light. What was I thinking, dragging around that digital brick?
Tokyo Motion Blur
Four airports in the past five days — a busy trip. Currently Sunday morning (I think) in Tokyo.
Distant Relations
It’s only natural to make a lot of photos when travelling. This past trip has seen me chewing through two to four hundred shots a day. More on some days. Let’s see, that’s something like 3000 shots or around 85 rolls, about six or seven rolls per day. Surprising to me, it’s not a lot more than I might have shot without the digital camera (the Contax only got used for about four rolls, total — though it’s a joy to handle compared to the lunking Canon).
Formats
Three rolls TMax 100, Rodinal 1+50 8 mins; three rolls Tri-X @ ISO 250, Rodinal 1+25 11 mins…
Sooner or later I will figure out how to make a photo that looks like over-exposed and over-developed Tri-X in Rodinal. And then hopefully I’ll be able to shoot it with something as lightweight as the old Canon G-III (f/11 @ 1/500… you won’t find a better camera or lens, and certainly not one within an order of magnitude of the price. And even then, it’s grained-out Tri-X fer Pete’s sake — you HEGR-heads really think you’re going to tell the difference between 130lpmm and 135lpmm on Tri-X?). Until then I guess I’m stuck keeping the film cameras around, eh?
My trick in printing this on the computer has been to use Vuescan with auto-levels set to their far extremes, store a 16-bit file, and then do the final contrast-range adjustments in Photoshop before downgrading to 8-bit. I’ve just had to accept that I can’t get my head around Vuewscan’s whitepoint/blackpoint adjustments enough to get predictable quick results. I’d rather burn the disk space for 18MB-per-frame scans and then do the work with a tool I feel I can control.
Me and My Camera, 2004
Three rolls of Tri-X, Rodinal 1+25; three rolls of Tri-X, Rodinal 1+50; six rolls of TMax-100, Rodinal 1+50. You can rinse and rinse and rinse and still that pink stuff never seems to come completely out of TMX.
Why I started this blog
On the BotzBlog link page, in the blog roll, you’ll find the Three C’s: Conscientious, Consumptive, and Coincidences; run by Joerg Colberg, James Luckett, and the slightly reclusive Robert Mirani respectively. They are the leaders in a form (also followed by some sites like Luis Forrolas’s flux+mutability) that presents an alternative to sites about photo equipment — they are sites about Other People’s Pictures. All of these sites have great photos — I mean great — every single day. Because they’re OPP.
The Devil You Know
I’m hardly the only one struggling with the hidden expenses and travails of digital. Read this recent Digital Manifesto from Editorial Photographers. The very group whom camera companies love to promote as users of their top digital equipment are, in fact, getting powerfully squeezed as a result of that equipment. Or at least by people’s attitudes about it.
There are a number of factors in play here, regarding the relationship of fee structures and technology. There’s plenty of polarization in camps, plenty of confusion, and (as EP members have discovered) plenty of opportunity for abuse. Perhaps not surprisingly, these occurences are not new to other fields that have been diffused with digital technology.
As Paul Strassman has become famous in Information Technology circles for pointing out, digital technology alone does not make anyone more profitable or more productive. On balance, it may even be hard to economically justify the existence of the entire computer industry, in broad terms of enhancing the overall economy. His 1997 book, The Squandered Computer, brought many of these issues into sharp focus, though its message was (at the time) drowned-out by the dot-com boom (even as his message presaged the later dot-com crash).
Strassman (and other economists) asked: what’s the Return On Investment (ROI)? Where’s the beef? As Nobel winner Robert Solow observed: “We see computers everywhere but not in the productivity statistics.”
The Message
Emese asks: “Is photoblogging good for photography?” Though it’s not clear if she means her photography or the general world of all photography (or more likely, some particular slice of it, like advertising photography).
Here on PhotoRant, Dirk asks: Is the chef with three Michelin stars getting upset about people cooking their daily meals?
So Much Confusion
(This entry has nothing to do with John Matturi.)
As a followup to the lens hack of a few days ago, for laughs I thought I’d poke the Canon sensor into David Eubank’s PCam as a custom film format, to give myself some extra guidance on demand about technical details like Depth of Field. 22.7mm×15.1 mm, 3072×2048 pixels… so what should I choose as a Circle of Confusion size?
Fixer Fingers
Three rolls of Tri-X, X-tol 1+1 for 9 minutes.
Amazingly, I still have a film backlog from November — the three rolls now hanging are from a trip to Speaker’s Corner and a following visit to Copenhagen. Glancing at the negs it seems clear to me that I still have quite a ways to go with the DSLR before I’m as comfortable using it as I’ve grown to be with the Contax.
I’ve decided my next system expansion will be to hybridize slightly — to take the advice of Sean Reid and, for about the price of the Canon 28mm ƒ/1.8, get the Contax 28mm ƒ/2.8 and an EOS adapter (Better sell the rest of that older Canon gear, huh).
There’s just comething about the Zeiss lenses, whether its the design or the coating I’m unsure, but it’s there — I could see it just glancing at the first roll of negs when I bought my Contax. They were visibly different from Canon negs, even before they were printed. Sharp? Snappy? Sure. But it’s more than the photodo measurements, even as high as those are. Even Canon’s own lens designers have said it: “Sometimes what the eye perceives is slightly different from what is expected, even if all the measurements meet the proper values. We’ve experienced the fact that the perceptions of an expert surpass the precision of measuring instruments.”
Persistence
Finally replaced the battery for my G1 yesterday morning — once again able to run more than three or four shots before it poops out. Ran a couple of hundred frames through it since then.
Picking through the World Press Photo 2002 book, I realized: despite a ton of assurances that journalism has gone digital in a deep deep way, you might not know it looking at this “best-of-the-best” collection. What I was surprised at was the persistence, if not of film itself (hard to say for professional gear these days, really), but of Black and White Photography.
Stinky Fingers, 2003
Six rolls of Delta 400 @ ISO 800, Xtol 1+1 15:30. Three rolls of TMax 100, Xtol 1+1 9:30. One roll Fortepan 400, Rodinal 1+25 7:30. One roll Acros, Rodinal 1+25 7 minutes. Everything at 20°C, everything spot on. Rodinal and Acros — snappy! Funny that I couldn’t find a recommended time until I checked with fujifilm.de…
After running a bit of Rodinal a few days ago, I’m all enamoured with it again, after a long hiatus. The Acros was particularly impressive for the short range and high contrast that the combination delivers, but the TriX had a look that’s also hard for any other combo to beat — even with digital hackery.
Quotations from Today’s Emails
Such a literate bunch today – quite a lot fo quoting back and forth, incuding these.
Also, Street Photography Googlism is Link Number One
To get on with things:
To photograph is to hold one’s breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It’s at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.
Photography has not changed since its origin except in its technical aspects, which for me are not important.
cling
Three rolls TMax 100, Xtol 1+1, 9:30 @ 20°C.
This one was shot early on the 10th of September, as we struggled to get ourselves functional before heading to Narita for our long return from Tokyo. About a week later I processed the roll, and the very next night, I ran across a similar shot by Japanese Photoblogger Samourai. Given the time of the post he may have shot his at the very same time, over in Nagoya (I have one even more like his, but I like this one better).
I suppose I could write-up a little diatribe about how everything that can be shot has been shot, and yet how nothing is ever really the same as any other shot, both before and after the moments of exposure. Yeah. I think I’ll just leave it as a little shout-out across the Pacific, yo.
Catalyst
Three rolls Neopan Super Presto 1600, Xtol 1+1, 7:30. This photo from the same roll of Rodinal’d Tri-X as the previous shot; made perhaps 20 minutes after that portrait.
A few years ago most of the Japanese anime production business leapt into the digital age. Gone were the inks, gone were the cel painters. Had the quality and cost ratios finally reached the magic level where producers were ready to embrace the future?
Retrouvé
Three rolls of TMax 100 and another roll of Tri-X, Rodinal 1+25. TMax from around 6 minutes, the Tri-X for seven. Out of Rodinal, and out of fast film. Out of negative sleeve pages. Will have to sit tight until the next B&H box appears.
I observed here a while back that when I first started using my Canons, I used to use my 85mm almost exclusively. In recent years, I’ve switched to the wide end and use the 90mm Zeiss very little, stressing the 28mm and 45mm. I’ve been trying to understand/deconstruct what in my own tastes had changed.
Today I shot the latest in a few rolls I’ve been making completely using the 85mm. The experience was magical.
With the rangefinder, the 90mm feels like a real tele, and it’s difficult to use at wide apertures or close (or both). The depth of field can be less than a centimeter, and without much preview.
With the SLR, the 85mm is made for close, tight work. It handles like the 45mm on the Contax. The comfort zone is a quarter-step back but the result still feels intimate without being pushy. Combined with the crispness of Tri-X in Rodinal, it’s a thing of beauty.
Leaks of Varying Types
Three rolls of Delta 400, 15:30 in Xtol 1+1 for ISO 800. One roll of new Tri-X TX400 in Rodinal 1+25, 7 mins. All @ 20C.
You’ve got dust leaks on the CCD, you’ve got wet leaks on the darkroom floor. My friend Joel was knocked flat on his back one morning when ammonia leaked through an aluminum pipe in our movie-film-processor, creating a dizzying gas leak.
Tonjoubi Omedetou
Three rolls of Delta 400, 15:30 Xtol 1+1 for ISO 800. Two rolls of E-6 back from Calypso, one the new Velvia 100F (bought to try as an alternative to Ektachrome 100G). The slides look luscious but as in the past my scanner has a hard time getting detail from the shadows… though it’s in there!
The APUG turned one year old on the seventh of September — this past Sunday. To commemorate, members were to each shoot something that day and post to a shared community gallery, a little “Day in the Life” approach. While I haven’t processed or scanned everything I shot that day, I sent along the frame at right, from the first Sept 7th roll to be finished.
For the analog purist police, here’s the shot data: Shot at close range on TMax 100, Contax G2, 28mm, AE f/5.6 at around 1 in the afternoon Tokyo time.
Numbers Game
Three rolls TMX, 9.5 mins Xtol 1+1 @ 20C. That leaves 42 rolls of black & white unprocessed, and a color lab backlog of an additional 18 rolls — I’m guessing almost 2000 frames shot over the past couple of weeks.
Big bursts like this seem to make a compelling argument for digital. As I type this I can look over C’s shoulder and see her downloading color frame after color frame from her Elph. Fast and (once the gear is paid for) free.
No tips for cabbies
Just a couple of rolls yesterday broke out the mini tripod and forced myself to go through a roll of TMX, indoors, on a rainy day. Mostly two-second exposures. I'm just about out of the faster films, but have hardly shot any of the sackfull of TMX that I'd anticipated using most-often.
The Right Way
(Somewhere near Bolinas with a $35 Canonet)
Mechanical rangefinders are small, lightweight, discreet, and tend to have good optics. That doesn’t stop some of us from using them on subjects that don’t benefit much from those attributes — say, a fog-shrouded forest road (though having no mirror slap can be helpful for a 1/4 second handheld exposure).
Add professional Leica durability to the equation and Jason P. Howe has definitely figured out the right way to use a rangefinder. In his case, to cover the apparently-endless military and paramilitary violence in Colombia.
It’s a situation made for this sort of work — no generators, no sat phones and laptops, just a guy with lightweight sturdy mechanical equipment, no batteries, but pockets full of black and white film that can withstand the hot and damp environment. Compare his setup to the giant rucksacks full of gear carried by the Humvee-embedded journalists during the Iraq invasion. The immediacy and grit of Howe’s photos make the crisp, colorful Iraqi shots, while illustrative of American military power, seem like so much sport shooting.
Howe deals with both sides of the conflict, the government AUC and the FARC (which while labelled as a terrorist organization by the Bush administration, still manages to have their own slick and public web site). Among all countries in the western hemisphere, only Cuba is more oppresive to journalists, according the Reporters Sans Frontières — here’s a telling example.
85%
Three rolls of TMax 100, Xtol 1+1, 9:30. Unprocessed backlog is down to a roll of Ektachrome (off to the lab) and a single 120-sized roll of Delta.
Whacked monitors are a curse. Worse yet is trying to match them. My Eizo’s and Sony are all set to the same gamma, the same white point, but the Sony consistently displays more detail in the shadow values. The Eizos are black or nearly so for the bottom 10%, and the Sony handles the range nicely.
Computers, Cameras, Colors, & Caravaggism
Okay, so if I’m so hot on digital imaging, why do I still lunk-around a film-based camera? What? No color?
I get asked this regularly by people in the offline world. It’s usually a lead-in to a recommendation that I buy a digital camera, often tied to a specific recommendation to get one just like theirs, which they recently purchased and like a lot. They’re usually surprised when I say that I spent almost a year toting around a digital camera all day most every day, that I have a digital photo enthusiast site, and that after that experience I dug-out the old 1950’s style gear, expanded my 35mm equipment, and have been quite pleased with the results of that choice. I still use the digicam at times, but mostly it stays home. I waver at moments, but usually have no desire to grab at the latest generation of DSLRs.
How can this jibe with my day-to-day work, daily pushing the envelope of useful computer imaging tools for games and movies? How can I be supervising imagery on films like Final Fantasy and simultaneously be such a Luddite (partial quick answer: I’m not a Luddite)?
I ask myself this regularly, and have decided that it’s all about the “C” word.
Black
…and a little white.
I’ve read it a couple of times in the past, but today I re-read this interview with Ralph Gibson.
"But anyway, the big emphasis in digital photography is how many more million pixels this new model has than the competitor's model. It's about resolution, resolution, resolution, as though that were going to provide us with a picture that harbored more content, more emotional power. Well in fact. It's very good for a certain kind of graphic thing in color but I don't necessarily do that kind of photograph."
Sounds much like what I wrote about computers a couple of days ago — and Gibson is a big fan of digital, at least on the printing end of preduction. Surely his comments were a subconscious influence on my thinking.
At one time, I used a Canon 85mm lens for nearly everything. Now it (and my Zeiss 90mm) sit at the bottom of the bag, largely unused. Tried forcing myself to use the 90 today — if only, as Duchamp said, “to avoid conforming to my own taste.”
We Are All Dust… Some More Than Others
Six rolls TMax 100, 9.5 mins Xtol 1+1 @ 20C.
I’ve decided to start filtering all the water, not just for chemicals but for final washing as well. Today I replaced the whole lot of chemistry, and drip-dripped multiple gallons of water through coffee filters held in my fingers. Hopefully this high-tech approach will help eliminate some of the last, nagging dust problems.
Spent the past four days on vacation in a group of nine, in L.A., usually too busy to take wandering photos. Still, I came back with eleven rolls and a few dozen digital shots (sad to say, the digitals were as ever a disappointment… even though I was quite enthused as I was making them). Just a couple of those rolls in today’s batches, but after a quick viewing I’m feeling positive about the negatives, still drying in the shower.
Disneyland and Universal Studios… if the TV has taken the place of the family shrine, then these sites are the religious pilgrimages of our day, the lands of the gods where we can pose with Mickey and SpiderMan, the untouchable and fictional made (at least momentarily) flesh.
Of course, when the real gods appeared at Disneyland for the premiere party of Pirates of the Caribbean, the faithful were shuttled to one side, allowed to cheer the gods’ entrances at a distance, then expelled quickly from the park. It is not for mortals to see Darryl Hannah riding Indiana Jones, save through the channelling mediator of a TV camera.
Falsies
Almost Monday and time for another Streetphoto Salon. This week I actually had a photo at the ready, shot just a day or two before the announced theme: Reflection.
I must admit to feeling a bit awkward, having approached the theme in what looks like a straightforward, literal manner. Still this one does contain a bit of the layering of images and images of images that I seem to like these days, not far from the “palindrome of indirectness” I made for John B’s Shell Game.
Honestly, the photo isn’t entirely made of reflections. It’s a multiple exposure of different reflections. No intrusive Photoshopping — it’s all there on the negative — but not as it appears at first glance.
And no, it’s not the photo on the right. Surprising myself, it’s yet another color shot. You’d think this ambiguity schtick would always lends itself to black and white….
Tip of the week: Yevgeny Mokhorev
Gated Community
Three rolls Delta 400, 11.5 mins @ 20C Xtol 1::1. Mixed at 24C, brought the temperature down by tossing some ice cubes in a baggie and floating it in the already-diluted Xtol.
Yesterday afternoon I spooled about 20 rolls of Delta from a 100’ bulkroll — as I was cranking along, I read the Ilford label for the box, which recommended Xtol 1::1 for Delta 400 at no speed slower than ISO 500… 13 mins @ 20C. Hmmm, wonder why they don’t like Xtol?
Eliminate the Negative
Two rolls Kodak 100 dropped at the lab. Start to cut one up for scanning when I realize that I’m in the shot… hey, this is Kodak 200! Courtney….! Ah, she’s got the right one.
I’ve had no luck finding good C-41 lab services here in the Santa Clara area. In Hawaii, the Kailua Long’s Drugs would run C-41 process-only for 99 cents. I knew the lady at the counter and talked to her a bit about her beloved shiny new Noritsu print machine. The negs I got from Long’s were as good as the ones I could get from the $7 pro lab downtown in Honolulu. I could even leave her my 6x7 negative-sleeve pages and she’d use them in place of the drugstore 4x sleeves they normally used.
Threes
Three rolls TMax100, 9.5 mins @ 20C. They all look a wee bit thin, though the occasional dMax peeps through. Left in the fixer far too long (like by a factor of 3)? Hmmm.
I’ve realized that over the past two years, I have purchased, in order: a Canon G1, a Contax G2, and a Canon G-III. Ironically, each camera is older than the previous. I guess the next cameras in this pattern would be a 4x5 and a 6x7, if I can find any that start with the letter “G” (thank goodness for Fuji Medium-format cameras, heh). Or does my highschool-vintage 124G already count?
Notes on My Own Methods, 2003
Documenting my typical photography working methods, May 2003.
This is a long, dry post: you’ve been warned.
Formulae
Three rolls Delta 400, 11.5mins Xtol 1::1 @ 20C
Got my new bulkroll of TMax (and a new pack of PrintFile pages) and found that I still had a good 30 feet of it in the loader all along. Doi! Spooled-off six rolls to potentially use in San Francisco today.
Paul Graham says Hackers and Painters just want to be loved.
Outta here.
Fragility
Hoped to do some printing Thursday night for the second Contax G Print Exchange. I had planned to make silver prints for this but there’s been no time for the darkroom & a dozen prints are due in Scotland in two weeks. Back to the Epson.
I thought of using the photo at right — already posted in this journal once. A few days ago I posted it to Contax G and to my surprise it proved terrifically popular, rapidly attracting kudos and the highest site ratings I’d ever had there; before the jpeg was corrupted by a database glitch a couple of hours later. Only a handful of people ever saw more than a 150-pixel thumbnail. After two days of struggling and failing to be allowed to replace the file, I ended up deleting it.
An object lesson in impermanence, pride turned quickly to humiliation by a few errant lines of bad code.
A Matter of Proportion
How has Kodak managed to sell 8x10” paper, 5x7” paper, and 11x14” paper, for year upon year upon year, and none of them have the same aspect ratio? 8x10 at least matches the aspect ratio of a 4x5 camera, but none of them match the aspect ratio of 35mm, 6x7, 6x6, 6x9…. then digicams come along and almost all of them are the aspect ratio of a video camera, 4::3, and digital printers come along and expect everyone to switch from 8x10” to 8.5x11”, or 13x17”, with each printer having a slightly-different printable area within those fields. Only the humble 4x6” quickie print actually gets the aspect-ratio game under control.
It ticks me off.
Pretty much, you’re guaranteed not to be able to use some significant portion of the expensive paper you’ve purchased, or some significant portion of your (probably more-important) photograph is going to get cropped. Paper waste: borders to adjust, or chunks trimmed-off, or both.
Signs of the Times
John Bolgiano, aka “coldmarble,” runs ColdMarble Musings,the only alternative-process (Cyanotype, Van Dyke process, etc) blog I’ve seen — so far. Looks like Courtney might give him some competition soon.
She checked-out Reed & Webb’s Alternative Photographic Processes from the library yesterday, prepping for an alt-process class, and noticed that it was completely untouched — never checked-out before, the book’s binding crackling as she turned each page.
We’ve noticed similar behavior on some other library photo books recently — she acquired a stack of beautiful Martin Parr books via loan from a library in San Diego, and their stamps showed they’d not been checked out for years. Tsk!
Little Disasters
Two rolls TMax 100, one roll Fuji Neopan 400, Xtol 1::1 9.5mins @ 20C
So the backlog is dropping — tonight’s trio leaves only a couple of C-41 rolls in the “pending” box, and both of those were shot by Rebecca — not me. I think.
I fished out three white-labelled DX-coded-for-ISO-100 rolls from the box, grabbed the changing bag and tall tank, threaded them up. Pulled out the snips of leader and…. they didn’t match. Two were the expected pinkish TMax 100 color, but one of the snipped leaders was gray. Huh? I turned on the PDA, checked the GoPix log. Roll “G100,” Apr03b, TMax 100, Stevens Creek landscape photos. Hmmm.
Dwindling Source of Excuses
So Courtney brought my last two C-41 rolls from the To-Do box to Long’s this afternoon and now I have a shot-but-unprocessed backlog of zero, not counting the couple of rolls that are currently loaded in cameras (including an Ektachrome 100VS 6x6 roll from January, sigh). If I want more pictures, I’d best go out and make some.
Current supplies: five rolls of TMax 100, 13 rolls of Delta 400, two rolls of Kodak Gold 100 neg and a test roll of the new Ektachrome 100 G. About a half-dozen 120 E100VS rolls, two long-cut (old bottom-loading Leica-style) TMax 100 rolls, and of course the digital… with about 200 exposures of ancient digibacklog from Helsinki needing to be spooled-off to CD (never to be seen again?).
That Last 10%
Picking through Dave Beckerman’s Journals on his printing process. Yeah, a lot of steps, many things to go wrong.
The darkroom here is partly re-assembled. I put the Durst back together, but the head wouldn’t light. Not sure if it’s the bulb, the wiring, a fuse in the power supply, or what. I only got to use this enlarger a very few times at the old house — it’s nicer than I remembered (if it will work).
The water situation in the new space is poor. That’s still the biggest limitation, one I’ve previously been able to bypass by just running negs in the kitchen and scanning them at my desk.
Overheard a conversation last week, two illustrators discussing one illustrator’s desire to take a photo class. The other thinks it’s a waste: “not that photography isn’t an art and all, but I don’t see how it has any effect on being able to make pictures.”
TMax I hardly knew ye
Okay, forget anything bad I ever said about TMax 100 (except maybe the drying part, and the mysterious pink stuff). These last rolls (coupla nights back) have made me a believer again. Crisp, broad latitude, good stuff. The last batch had a number of frames from something I’m calling the “infinity project” though it may be a while before any of it starts to see the light of day here or elsewhere. Looking at them gives me more ideas to improve it, and reassures me on the validity of some of the ideas.
No surprise, no Salon win for me. Maybe in a couple of weeks I can come up with something funny for the next topic, “Traces” selected by Michal Daniel.
Acros
One roll Acros, two rolls Tmax 100, Xtol 1::1 9.5mins. I forgot about the mystery red stain from the TMax (anti-halation layer?). One Neopan400 rated 800, Xtol 1::1 11.5 mins.
Acros has a unique snap, described well by one early reviewer as “metallic.” I’ve never run any charts on it, but suspect it’s just that it blocks-up in the highlights, similar to slide film. Anyone know?
I can say this much — dries faster than Kodak, probably due to the plastic film base. This is ready to scan and sleeve after 4-5 hours, while the Tmax is still a wee bit sticky and still hanging.
More Delta
Feeling better about the Delta switchback — as contrasty as the Fuji maybe, but then again that just seems to be due to the Ilford’s better latitude. Scanning/printing to adjust makes all the difference.
Took me until tonight to even begin to look in detail at the first of the rolls from a couple of nights back. Previously I just grabbed a frame from the end of the roll and rushed it through. Been really slammed on schedule at work, and the process of reviewing scans has been slow. The slogging part, ironically, is the computer — takes time, even on a fast computer, to pick through photos in detail, and the little 200-px sized thumbnails are no replacement for a clean, hi-res viewing.
On the way back from errands Courtney & I stopped at Kamera Korner in SJ and bought some Dektol. Looks like the darkroom is poised to rise again, after a long hiatus…
Back to the Delta
Xtol 1::1, 11.5 mins @ 20C. About 18C, make that 12.5 mins. Three rolls @ ISO 400.
After a four-month fling with Neopan 400 Presto (aka Neopan Professional), as of this batch I’m back to Ilford Delta. The Fuji is great stuff, easily pushed, crisp, contrasty. I picked some up in a corner store in Tokyo, having run out of Ilford. I was delighted with the results, but Delta has a smooth tone and latitude that I’ve grown used to. And I can actually find it bulkrolled in the store.
I ran the Fuji through a battery of tests — to ISO 200, pushed to 800, 1600, 3200. Xtol, Rodinal. For web purposes, running it at 800 was perfectly fine — for reasonably-sized printing. Good for an overcast winter. The last dozen rolls were all shot that way.
In going back to Delta I’ve realized that I hadn’t done any methodical examination on it since first shooting the old version, almost a decade ago. So it’s overdue! Hopefully over the next few days I can run a few rolls for the sake of the same tests — do some more-formal comparisons on Tmax 100 too (Acros is really great but hard to find around here and never in bulk). Rich has said he’d like to go out shooting in Marin sometime soon… hmm
Two rolls of unprocessed Neopan still sitting in the “need to process” box. One marked “Jan03K.” Tsk.
Books
Animated Speaker, Part One
Consider:
It's a hard simple fact for travelers above the 40th parallel: in the depth of winter, the indoor temperature is sure to descend quickly if the furnace isn't running.
This sort of sentence has been historically difficult for even the best computerized language bots and GPT variations: both of the kind of bots that attempt to understand human language, and those other bots that try to emulate it. Computers struggle because this single sentence has a range of different embodiments that map physical attributes like vertical position to completely different physical or non-physical attributes like temperature. Why does a furnace “run,” and what defines the “hardness” of a fact? Are seasons shallow as well as deep?
How did our language get to be like this, and yet why is it so easy for humans like you or I to understand it?
All Nature Shall Paint Herself
The announcement in America of the invention of photography, as reported in The New Yorker (later renamed the New York Tribune), 13 April 1839:
The New Fuji/Chrome: Fujifilm-X and Chromebook
(Updated November 2018)
Can a Chromebook be your photo-production machine?
While the first Chromebooks could basically just run a browser, current Chromebooks can also run Android apps, placing Chromebooks somewhere between a “regular” laptop and a phone or tablet in functionality — opening up the possibilities of using a light, inexpensive device in place of (or alongside) a larger, pricey one.
Of course a new under-$400 Chromebook is no match for a full-powered $2000+ laptop as a photo workflow machine… right?
Che Guevara
You don't have to go out looking for Dr Ernesto Guevara when in Cuba -- his picture will find you. Guerrillero Heroico Che has become, as it was described to me more than once, the logo of Cuba. I've read that it's the most famous photograph in the world.
Havana: Caged Bouquet
Nine Statements
Here are nine statements that I hope clarify to readers (and myself) what I'm on about here at PhotoRant.
It's also a useful prep for me as I try to write up more about the nature of my actual working methods. I don't expect them to apply for everyone, but here they are:
Recent Finds
Contemporary Photography in Asia
Mono Books
I've received two handsome books of current black and white photography, just before the holidays.
Three Essentially Difficult Pieces
This post started as three different posts, each of which got bogged down in its own overwrought explication. I realized they all shared concerns about essentialism, of what makes a photo… a photo. I’ve decided to just stack them and cut straight down in straight lines across all three. Kick ‘em all.
Many Unreasonable Apples

Another, more-recent Paul Graham lament about the lack of respect afforded "straight" photography. and a discussion(?) of the same essay/address, which oddly attributes a review of Jeff Wall photos to.. Jeff Wall? Misreading aside it has an interest list of conflicting viewpoints, like these:
A Kind of Radiance
More from The Cruel Radiance:
In 1986, the critic Andy Grundberg observed that postmodern photography "implies the exhaustion of the image universe: it suggests that a photographer can find more than enough images already existing in the world without the bother of making new ones."
Perhaps telling is that a list of Grundberg's articles for the New York Times is dominated less by art criticism and more by obituaries: Irving Penn, Julius Schulmann, Arnold Newman, Gordon Parks, Avedon, Ellen Auerbach, Carl Mydans, Eddie Adams.
Which brings us to his difficulties with the very much living Robert Bergman (PDF):
The Subject
Last night I grabbed the growing stack of unopened issues of Aperture off the living room magazine rack and started in at them. On top was the current issue, which contained an except from Susie Linfield's The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence. I'll excerpt from their excerption:
This is a book of criticism, not theory [...] It is written, in large part, against the photography criticism of Susan Sontag. [...] who was responsible for establishing a tone of suspicion and distrust in photographic criticism, and for teaching us that to be smart about photographs means to disparage them.
Another, longer except can be found here.
JokerPaint
Speaking of painting and computers, I’ve been working off and on on “JokerPaint,” a little let’s-beat-images-senseless sort of toy made using Processing and with a lot of the heavy pixel lifting being done via chains of filters that I’ve made using the GLSL framework in Andrés Colubri’s GLGraphics library. I expect that at some point I’ll post it to OpenProcessing.
The image above was generated from the photo in this recent post. Unlike most paint-like image processes, JokerPaint’s imaging is continuous and real-time – never static. It’s constantly revising and touching-up and I just picked a frame at random for this still picture.
Parallel Developments
Color study shot for Rift: Planes of Telara
Earlier this week we were privileged to have painter & storyteller James Gurney visit the art department at Trion, both to have him speak with us and also for us to get a chance to show him our game. He’s best-know to the public for the Dinotopia books (favorites at our house for many years – See See & I were also lucky enough to see the Dinotopia show at the Norton Museum in Palm Beach a few months back), and known to a lot of artists for his blog and several art technique books, including the new Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter.
ARTFORUM 2007-2009
The survivors are the pages that get scissored.
58 Years @ the Same Crossroads
Photoquotes has recently put up Berenice Abbott’s 1951 essay, “Photography at the Crossroads.” Mentioned twice already here on Photorant, it’s the same essay reprinted in The Education of a Photographer (which is now also indexed on Google books).
So you needn’t take my word for it:
"The stale vogue of drowning in technique and ignoring content adds to the pestilence and has become, for many, part of today's general hysteria..."
Pockets
I used to carry a set of pocket-sized and mid-sized gadgets. Then technology reduced them to one gadget. But now in their places are a bunch of new pocket sized gadgets that I keep on carrying. Without North Face and Columbia making trousers with ample extra pockets, where would I be?
The Critique
So many good books recently, and some good ones that I've never sung about here though I've had them for many months. There has been a special bounty of books that have no or very few photos, though they are indeed photography books. I'd like to mention four (well, four and a half) of them.
(And one video.)
The Sadness of Men
Fortune & Farewell
In the morning I’m off to Japan. I stopped at Kinokuniya in San Jose today, to see if there were any interesting recent Japanese art books I could buy here and thus not have to carry around while I’m wandering – guided by my earlier acquisition of their entire collection of Rinko Kawauchi books.
To my delight, I found a brand-new copy of Farewell Photography, selling for un-marked-up retail. Yatta-w00t!
I’ll be back the first week of October, just in time to see Kawauchi in person at SFAI.
Correspondances Japonaises
I’ve been squinting through the details of Things As They Are: Photojournalism in Context Since 1955, another of those books I’ve been procrastinating at cracking. While uncredited to him, in a way this book was one of the last to fall under the shadow of John Szarkowski, who challenged the editors: “I share your hope… that your exhibition and book will be more than one more fat compendium of the pictures that editors expect photographers to make.” I think they’ve had some really admirable success in this book.
Timeless
(San Diego)
I have been picking, one by one, through the many many MANY unread blog posts that have been steadily accruing in my bloglines feeds. The numbers have been intimidating. Alec Soth, 65 posts. Ed Kashi, 28 posts. Joerg Colberg, 158 posts…. even a long backlog of What the Duck. And that’s just the “Shoot Me” folder. It goes on and on. I haven’t even dared to get started on the flickr feeds.
These things creep up on me because I want to read in detail and my circumstances so rarely give me time and focus for anything more than a glance. And then the lists grow and keep growing while I’m trying to make time for it.
Child Portraitists
This post has been lingering half-written for months, I was reminded of it this morning, as I came across this post from Suzanne Revy, and prodded with the notion that in fact this little rant has been curdling in my mind for my, much longer.
Suzanne is one of an undeclared informal group, the APUG B&W Child Portrait Society, a club that includes photographers like Cheryl Jacobs in the U.S., Nicole Boenig-McGrade in Australia, & Heli Huhtala in Finland.
In all these cases we see similar sorts of classic iconography being used to similar means: to reveal, or seem to reveal, a private world in which children are fully involved and which adults can only glimpse. Even then, the contents of that private world remains hidden – only its existence is shown, and the rest is hidden through deep shadows and restrictive or soft focus (or even, as in Cheryl’s current title-webpage image, both shadows and soft focus combined with a wire mesh screen between the child and the photographer).
GPU Gems 3 - It’s Here!
We got the first copy back from the printer today, and it’s available from Amazon if you’re not going to Siggraph in San Diego this week.
Is Photography Inherently Humanizing? 3/3
This post is part of a series which can be found through these links: Part I. Part II.
Yesterday morning, I found in the New York Times an editorial by Nick Kristof. The article, “Save the Darfur Puppy,” tries to grasp at some of the issues revealed by psychological research and “the implication of a series of studies by psychologists trying to understand why people — good, conscientious people — aren’t moved by genocide or famines.”
The Nature of Colored Rectangles
Shannon Ebner’s forum comments on Charlotte Cotton’s recent “Tip of the Tongue” article sent me to revisit Stephen Shore’s The Nature of Photographs. This is a slim — no, lean — book that should be available to anyone who wants to approach their picture-making and picture-appreciation in a thoughtful way. It is a remarkable book not only in its direct economy but also in that it so deliberately and successfully provokes you towards moments of personal insight and reflection as you are reading it.
Future Nostalgias
Right on the heels of the Conscientiously Gray list, both Jörg and Tim Atherton have cited this Charlotte Cotton essay on contemporary B&W photography, which in turn contains a fair number of interesting B&W links — and some great comments in the short but dense forum discussion on the right side of the page.
POSSIBLY the Best of 2006
Yesterday I received a Fedex envelope from Mexico, and within it was a bright yellow giftwrap containing a shrinkwrap containing Mark Alor Powell’s book V.I.P. (Mark is also known as “locaburg” on flickr). It’s only March but I’m considering it a Best of 2007 already.
Is Photography Inherently Humanizing? 2/3
Part I is here.
Marc Hauser is was a professor at Harvard’s Deptartment of Cognitive Evolution (a fully different person from photographer Marc Hauser), and his recent book Moral Minds is chock full of “morality tests.” These tests take the form of little thought experiments, similar to those math “word problems” of trains leaving Chicago and Philadelpha at the same time at such-and-such a speed. Unlike the meeting of two fixed-speed trains, however, these problems don’t have fixed answers — rather, they are presented as a means for the person taking the test to shine some light into the internal nature of their own moral sense.
Is Photography Inherently Humanizing? 1/3
One of the most difficult topics surrounding the practice of war photography (and other “socially concerned” photography, as exemplified by, say, Salgado’s gold miner photos) is that almost universally, the stated aim of photgraphers who pursue that vocation is that they desire an end to war — a specific war, or all wars. Yet as has been pointed out by a number of detractors, most prominently Susan Sontag, there’s little evidence to show that photography has done much of anything to stop wars.
Has it done anything? What imagery might have a chance to succeed at that lofty mission? Are these claims just the ad pitch for adrenalin junkies?
The 2007 World Press Photo awards have been in announced in the past couple of days, and it’s no surprise that the dominant award winners — especially in “singles” — are of combat and its aftermath. The World Press Photo of the Year itself is one: Spencer Platt’s celebrated shot of a group of well-heeled and comopolitan young Lebanese cruising through post-airstrike destruction in their red convertible, one of the passengers sourly fiddling with her celphone camera.
"One needn’t write essays about it."
As many people have discovered, Alec Soth now has a blog and is one of the many fine photographers now writing about their work (and a bunch of other stuff).
Alec hasn't just appeared in his own blog, of course. Here's a snip from the Walker Arts Center blog which I like a great deal:
This is totally corny, but the way I think about it is I really close my eyes and I try to imagine an exhibition of pictures and see what kind of pictures what is it I really want to look at? and then go try to make those pictures. You never make those pictures, because they just don't emerge that way, but it takes you on a path. Recently, I was in Georgia and it was the beginning of a commission. What did I want to photograph? Like, I'm interested in hermits. So I do a little Google search on 'hermits,' 'Georgia.' And I find this Greek orthodox monastery in rural Georgia, and I go there and have this amazing encounter with these people. Those pictures weren't in my head Greek Orthodox monks but something developed and it took me on this crazy path.
My Private Africa
Today was a good reading day and saw as its centepiece Okwui Enwezor’s Snap Judgements: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography.
The 2point8 Book Corner
A couple of weeks ago I was reading Michael David Murphy’s 2point8 and started clicking the “previous entry” lin ks— eventually, over the course of a few hours, I worked my way back through the entire history of the blog, mostly in a straight line backwards but with a few Memento-like sidebars of reversed reverse time. Regardless of direction the time was well-spent (later I tried the same thing with this blog, and frankly Botzilla doesn’t bear extended reading nearly as well, with its many random discursions and distracted tone. You do what you can).
Monet
A few days before I failed to go to the show at the SF Legion of Honor, Garrison Kiellor ran the following poem on his daily radio show, which I only heard via podcast later. By further concidence the poet, Howard Nemerov, is the brother of photographer Diane Arbus and uncle of Amy.
Private Crossings
Just before Siggraph I ran across an imported, ad-free, all-black-and-white magazine that hadn’t been in my local store before: PRIVATE. Issue #33 bears what I consider to be an rather classic-looking (almost clichéd) image for its “East Europe” issue: a George Georgiou cover shot of Serbian workers in front of a heavy, rust-era-looking pipeline — a bit grainy, contrasty, and one assumes that other than a slight shift in the fashions of their coats, these fellows coud have been working on the same heavy-industry line in 1980 or 1950 or 1930.
On this surface we can see reflected a great difficulty in the “timeless” character of black and white — its very timelessness reveals its disconnection from immediate reality. For example, the image above could have been made twenty years ago, or yesterday — only subtle clues can let you determine which.
Short, Attentive Spans
When we lived in Hawaii I enjoyed what seemed like a relatively short commute: only twenty minutes from Leeward to Windward sides of Oahu, traffic permitting. I could have the sunrise over the sea going in and up the Pali, and the sunset over the sea driving back away from the harbor.
In the morning I would usually time my drive to coincide with the local broadcast of the local news in Hawaiian, tacked-onto the end of All Things Considered and just before a program I had not heard since our move: Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. The presence of some single poem each morning was a regular reminder that life and spirit could contain more than just another predictable workday.
Alba
When I was a teenager my mom bought me the standard-for-the-time poster of Farrah Fawcett, to pin up on the wall of my room. Maybe she just thought it was in fashion, or was worried I might not know what a girl was. Not for me to say. It seemed okay, but nothing about the Charlies Angels style really worked for me anyway.
Memory Pool
Six rolls Tri-X, two rolls Acros, rolls Neopan 1600 in Fomadon F09 (Rodinal formula) 1+40, then two rolls of Neopan 1600 stand-developed in F09 1+80 for an hour.
Obviously this shot isn’t mine, but I’ve decided to start including some shots that I’ve felt strongly about, shots that I think have had a direct personal effect. Unlike Roland Barthes I don’t think first of family photos. Neither is it some list of “my favorites” or “greatest” shots. They’re just shots that changed the way I thought about pictures and picture-making.
Three Lines
Another ten-day delay. Like everything, I can find a reason.
In a recent post-new-year’s post on 43F, Merlin linked to Thoreau’s Walden, which to my (not great) surprise exists in its entirety on Wikisource. The section Merlin was quoting from is the introductory chapter, “Economy,” which in turn contains the famous line: Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Like most Americans, I was given this to read and ignore when I was 14 years old. Y had been mentioning Thoreau too, just a few days ago. So the coincidence prompted me to re-read it, and I was struck by both the sentences before and after the famous line above:
Paxil & Pandas
I got the new National Geographic yesterday and the lead article was simply banner-titled: “Love.” The text was about the neurochemistry of attraction and attachment, with connecting photos by Jodi Cobb. I have to admit that I was a bit puzzled on (a) what made this a NatGeo story (yeah, yeah, an easy one: to sell magazines. But why NatGeo instead of Cosmo then? Where’s the market differentation?), and (b) why they sent Cobb out on this one, since the resultant photos of affection are, well, charming but hard to point as particularly specific to the topics in the article, and why would you need to fly around the world to get them? Anyway, to the Real Meat of this entry:
Gratitude
Phil Perkis writes of photography:
To experience the meaning of what is. To stay with it for even a few seconds is no small task. The sound of voice without language, a musical line, a ceramic vessel, a non-objective painting. The presence of it, the weight of it, the miracle of its existence, of my existence. The mystery of the fact itself.
And Merlin found this comment from Thich Nhat Hanh:
When you drive around the city and come to a red light or a stop sign, you can just sit back and make use of these twenty or thirty seconds to relax to breathe in, breathe out, and enjoy arriving in the present moment. There are many things like that we can do. Years ago I was in Montreal on the way to a retreat, and I noticed that the license plates said Je me souviens "I remember." I did not know what they wanted to remember, but to me it means that I remember to breathe and to smile.
It often seems to me that photography is a daily form of gratitude.
Thank you.
Pole Dancing with Pinter
One of my favorite work-related blogs is Garr Reynolds’s Presentation Zen. In a recent entry, Garr writes about the recent Nobel Prize award lecture given by Harold Pinter.
The transcript of Pinter’s lecture uses the context of his plays as a bridge from literary theatre to the principles of political theatre and then into a biting and at times terrifying polemic against modern US and British foreign policies.
At one point he nominates himself as a speechwriter for President Bush, and while reading one can almost hear Bush’s voice in Pinter’s parody:
Homebody
Tonight, perhaps for the first night in a while, I managed to stay home mostly, save for a jot to the market. It let me knock-off the last bits of several library books that I'd been lingering on, but that are now due to return to their many homes across the state:
Millions
I really should have anticipated that after attending WebZine I’d be spending a good chunk of time picking-through all the many blogs and bloglike web resources that I’d see there. doi! In fact I’d already started before WebZine began, and the pace has increased significantly.
Veni, Vidi, Valori
The word of the day (well, Sunday) is “valorize,” rarely-seen in America these days and which I encountered twice in the same morning’s reading, in two different (non-American, ahem) texts on related issues, each written some forty years apart.
The older passage came from Pierre Bourdieu’s 1965 Un art moyen: essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie whose title his American editors provocatively streamlined to Photography: A Middlebrow Art:
Carrying Your Own Box
Three rolls of Neopan 400 120, three rolls of Acros 120, two rolls of HP5+ 120, two rolls of Ektachrome E100S 120, the B&W in Xtol 1+1, Rodinal 1+50, and in one case, Rodinal 1+100…
You do what you set out to do. Even if you fail, it’s normal to frame the failure in terms of the original goal. Goals can be useful and powerful motivators, but they can also restrict. A common tragedy, told many times, is of a protagonist who pursues a goal only to find, as he approaches it, that it wasn’t what he thought — everything looked perfect, from far away.
More Portraits
Here are a few more portrait gallery additions to the Gray Scale. And some of them aren’t entirely in B&W, given the realities of commercial publication (and the varying tastes of photographers — color isn’t bad, it’s just different). Mona Kuhn, for example, who says in an interview on Lens Culture that she prefers B&W for its “depth,” despite her current fame as a color portraitist.
Why so much emphasis on B&W portraiture? Mostly because I continue to believe that portraiture is one of B&W’s stronger genres, and that portraiture in general is one of the most-difficult forms of photography — despite its universal appeal, look how many sites and portfolios one can find without a single portrait. Instead we see rocks, we see skyscrapers, we see trees and flowers but portraiture… that’s hard. Even most of the portraits that one does find online tend to be driven more by fashionable stylings rather than portraiture’s implicit promise: that through this image you will touch. It will touch you, and perhaps you will even feel the opposite is true as well. Fashion is a mask — portraiture’s revelation tries to find the unmasked individual.
Zone I - Just a Little Detail
Afer a few pokes at this particular issue, I’ve added a filing category to this journal, specific to the question: where can I find great new black and white photography?
I Bought a Book
Big deal? My space is packed with books. But in fact I rarely buy them, prefering to pull from the library and its well-connected LINK+ system. Usually the only books I purchase these days are books I can’t find there, usually because they’re esoteric, rare, or too-new to be found (or stolen, as has been the case with title’s like Mona Kuhn’s Photographs or most anything that’s highly-collectable or controversial, like first edition Steichens or most of Jock Sturges’s works).
An exception is this book, by linguist and cognitive psychologist George Lakoff — the book is in the library, it’s not new (this edition, 1990), and it was readily available at the local Borders: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things — What Categories Reveal About the Mind. It was recommended to me by Roman Ormandy over at Caligari, whose software embodies some of the principles described in Lakoff’s book. After picking at the library’s copy, I was off to the bookstore for one of my own.
Take Pictures
Two strong recommendations today for excellent but almost unknown photoblogs:
The first is a new blog attached to the established site of Clay Enos, who had previously been half of the StreetStudio team (the other half being fellow New York photographer Stephan Ghukfvin). Clay’s blog, begun late last year: Take Pictures.
Famous
A new surprise among library books: Famous Photographers Course, in three oversized volumes.
Yes, it was published by “Famous Photographers School,” which apparently is now completely defunct after being absorbed a while back by Al Dorne’s Famous Artists School (which doesn’t offer anything about photography at this point, AFAIK). These books were published back in 1964.
What attracted me to them initial was the list of “faculty” instructors, including Bert Stern, Richard Avedon, Alfred Eisenstadt, Irving Penn, Philippe Halsman…
GPU Gems 2
It’s here! Today I had a copy of GPU Gems 2 in my hand, newly back from the printer. Like new cars, freshly-printed books have that Special Sellable Smell all their own. Sweet. You’ll find a teensy print of this photo inside the front section, as I’ve reprised my section-editor role from the previous edition — though this time I’ve stepped back to let other people write more of the book content proper.
Side Projects
After having an enjoyable swipe through a few best photo books of 2004 lists, I thought the task was worth expanding — so a new project is to work through the titles in Andrew Roth’s The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century and read each one I can find. A couple of them, I happily realized, I already owned (okay, not originals but I’m not after originals — the goal is reading, not collecting). After a couple of weeks of picking-around, the score so far:
Narrative Baggage Check
Over at her always thoughtful site the space in between, Stacy Oborn threads together three writers and their relationship to photography in perfect images, written photographs and the absolute.
For all three writers — Hervé Guibert, Roland Barthes, and Marguerite Duras —the photographs they most admire are either imagined or images from their family or even both. In each case the photo, real or imagined, comes along carrying a lot of narrative baggage. It’s the narrative baggage, more than the image, that gives value and power to each photograph. And specifically, personal narrative. The authors will not see this photograph (“their” perfect photograph) as others will see it.
Photography Made Difficult
No Real Secret
Three rolls of Tri-X rated ISO 3200 in Xtol 1+1; two rolls of Portra 400UC.
I keep wanting to stop mentioning Henry Rankin Poore so here’s a last (?) chance to diss his opinions just a little more (not that he deserves it in general).
Xmas Gifts
Four 220 rolls of TXP, two 120 rolls of Neopan 400, two 120 rolls of TX400 (sometimes you use what yuou can find, on the road…). All in Xtol 1+1.
As Courtney has wisely reminded me so often, the best gifts are the unexpected ones that you realize really ought to have been on your wish list (though the couple of gifts I received from my wish list are most treasured too). I’d place as a close second the gifts you give to yourself to share. Thus the best gifts of the season have been the trip to see our family in Minnesota, and as a happy side-effect, a chance to make pictures of my parents and brother’s family in their own homes (note to my sister, who lives nearby in Oakland: you’re next!).
AMOT*SL
Henry Rankin Poore again: This page was in his last 1933 book, the long-out-of-print Art Principles in Practice — a sequel to the only book of the series still in print (the first one, oddly enough), Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgement of Pictures, a book regularly assigned to painting and photography students across the lands. Pity this little taxonomic chart isn’t part of that still-popular paperback.
I call this the AMOT*SL chart.
Burdens
The long flights to and from Europe last week gave me a chance to catch up again on some of my reading. Some, at least. One of my burdens, literally at times, is a fondness for reading and the ability to read very quickly — so I end up carrying multiple books in my briefcase alongside the big Dell computer. Cab drivers and bellmen are always surprised when they discover my briefcase’s weight (along with my suitcase, which is usually further loaded-up).
Twitchy Eyeballs
It’s been many days again since I’ve written here (though I have written a few short entries for PhotoPermit.Org), a good chunk of them consumed by reading. I feel like I’ve had some growth and change in the way I approach picture books. And that’s separate from doing a perhaps nutty thing with photo books: trying to view them through a camera viewfinder, to get a better grasp on what might have been seen by the original shooter (something worth doing once, but if it’s persistent, call a doctor).
The horse whip unfolds the human
A good way to rate locations is to gauge how likely it is that something randomly wonderful will occur on any given day. Downstairs from the Grand Hyatt in Beijing is a very westernized mall, the Oriental Plaza. While cutting through it for an air-conditioned shortcut, I found in a clutch a Sony store, and Apple store, and an Epson store, adjoining one of Epson’s epSite galleries (try using http://www.worldlingo.com/wl/translate to translate from Simplified Chinese). I’d embarrassingly failed to find the epSite in Tokyo a few days before (though supposedly it was next door to my hotel), and hadn’t even tried to find the one in Shanghai — and now here was their newest, so handy I almost tripped over it.
Inside the gallery, almost empty save for the staff, was a collection of magnificent Jiang Jian prints.
Simple Happy
Today:
Two new PDF books from Cosmin Bumbut (you know, the 7 days guy who also cropped-up later on in Lenswork): Tilted Land and Dimineti
My China?
This morning, while randomly surfing I came across Vincent Laforet’s Website. Laforet is an excellent well-known shooter with the New York Times.
Looking into his “Projects” area, I saw “China - Past and Future Intertwined …shot in Beijing and Shanghai, China over a period of eight days.” Figured I should take a gander, having just returned from a similar trip (though not for the purpose of making photos, but to attend developer events and meetings — photography simply gives an excuse and structure to my compulsive flanerie, squeezed in for an hour or two in bits during the week).
What surprised me was just how much the photos Laforet had made, and my own photos, overlapped — at least in terms of very particular locations, situations, and in one or two cases, I think we may have even photographed the same people (in a country with a billion population).
Every Man for Himself: Werner Herzog
A few years back (okay, a bunch of years back), I was having a few beers with Werner Herzog & Al Milgrom.
That evening I’d attended a session of the University Film Society, at the Bell Museum on the University of Minnesota campus – an event managed by Al. Guest for the evening: Werner, I think to promote Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, though that night we watched Aguirre, the Wrath of God, part of a series.
Afterwards, we went for drinks. A hot topic of the day – the Jonestown People’s Temple mass suicide – came up in the conversation. The Jonestown Massacre. It was still very much in the press. What did Herzog think?
“I think that’s great, 900 fewer assholes in the world.”
Kevin’s blog
Coupla days ago I was pointed at this old link on B&W World, in which Mason Resnick writes his recollections of a 1970’s class with Garry Winogrand. A key lesson: “He told us that the most successful art is almost on the verge of failure.” Not that anyone was asking me, but I couldn’t agree more.
Winogrand also told his class that “without technique you won’t get anything good,” but it’s sad when that fear of technical failure takes over — when people become obsessed with ensuring that every print have at least one point of full white and one of full black, or fretting over blocked-up highlights or maximum sharpness. Everyone obsessed with getting an A for craftsmanship, for managing-away all the elements of risk.
Why I started this blog
On the BotzBlog link page, in the blog roll, you’ll find the Three C’s: Conscientious, Consumptive, and Coincidences; run by Joerg Colberg, James Luckett, and the slightly reclusive Robert Mirani respectively. They are the leaders in a form (also followed by some sites like Luis Forrolas’s flux+mutability) that presents an alternative to sites about photo equipment — they are sites about Other People’s Pictures. All of these sites have great photos — I mean great — every single day. Because they’re OPP.
Content
The spring 2004 issue of Modern Painters is out, containing an interview with John Szarkowski, the man who was appointed by Steichen to run the photo program at MOMA and brought us the first large shows by Winogrand, Arbus, and Eggleston:
Q: Do you think photographs become more interesting with time?
A: Most become more interesting with time. Naïve photographs always become more interesting with time. By naïve I mean photographs that were not made with high artistic ambition. On the other hand, if you take the photographs that Steiglitz exhibited at the Albright Gallery in Buffalo in 1910, those pictures have become much less interesting — and they weren’t very interesting to begin with because all they had was artistic ambition. Whereas naïve photographs almost always have something of the world in them. Misdirected artistic ambition can turn into an effort to squeeze the world out so that there is nothing left but aesthetics, because everybody can then plainly see that it is art. It has to be art, because there is nothing else there! [My emphasis]
Szarkowski’s sentiment seems very close to a response to what I see far too often on photo websites: “this work elicits nothing in us but a dreary impression of quality.”
Optimistic Requiem
Some time ago I’d mentioned David Pye’s The Nature and Art of Workmanship, a book recommended to me w.r.t. photography but which I felt has far-reaching consequences throughout all creative, information-intensive endeavors. It’s actually a follow-on to a 1964 book titled The Nature of Design (in fact in it he hints at the later book to come, writing in the final pages: “there is no space here to write what needs writing about workmanship…”).
Today we’ve been discussing upgrades and rewrites and redesigns, the advent of the next generation of graphics hardware, algortihms, and paradigms. Great, amazing stuff, to follow (and eventually bury) the great, amazing stuff that’s already been accomplished. We collect our facts, our task plans, our AI’s and PORs; scratch our heads wondering “how will we ever get this finished?” But really, is it ever finished? Has software ever been finished?
Pye writes, in the days before lasers, desktop computers, or anyone had bothered coining terms like “software engineering,” “use cases,” or “design patterns”:
The Message
Emese asks: “Is photoblogging good for photography?” Though it’s not clear if she means her photography or the general world of all photography (or more likely, some particular slice of it, like advertising photography).
Here on PhotoRant, Dirk asks: Is the chef with three Michelin stars getting upset about people cooking their daily meals?
A Corker
So if you live in NYC, as I used to, you know what WFMU is, and you probably know that they have an interview program called The SpeakEasy, and you might even know that the hostess Dorian has a habit of bringing photographers on the air to talk, without pictures, about pictures.
Recent guests have included Steve McCurry, Mary Ellen Mark, Jerff Meremelstein, Jonathan Torgnovik, Peter Howe, and Philip-Lorca di Corcia, so very recently distantly parodied on this very site.
Di Corcia’s interview is in the true photrant tradition — “Cindy Sherman… fruit flies have evolved more than her work” is just the tip of the iceberg. A worthy waste of an hour of your time.
The Certainty of Risk from Power Tools
I’ve enjoyed Michael Johnston’s Sunday Morning columns for the past couple of years — back in 2002 he published a short list of book titles that he considered crucial for “practicing photographers.” Some I had read, and others I logged-away in my PDA for future reference. I generally trust Michael’s opinions on photography as being reasoned and informed, even if they don’t always coincide with my own (He also was the one who, through this article, got me going on a chain of links to John Brownlow and the streetphoto list).
Paper Trade: A Book List
See the many nice things I do for you. I have given you many hours of wonder, and a reason to visit your library many times over. Here’s a book list compiled by folks on the StreetPhoto mailing list:
Stumbles
On my last afternoon in Toulouse, I had lunch with Ken Perlin of NYU, Naoko Tosa of MIT, and Ryohei Nakatsu of Kwansei Gakuin University. On the way over to the restaurant, I was churning mentally — I found myself quite unable to think of even a single word in Japanese.
I’d been speaking French for the previous several days, for the first time in years — after the first anxious moments (afraid I’d forgotten everything), I discovered that le français had merely lain dormant, and I had little trouble re-grasping it. But to my dismay, it had completely displaced le japonaise. Apparently my brain can only handle one non-English language at a time, and Japanese had been swapped-out to make way for French. It was infuriating — try as I might, my mind was just blank, blank, blank. It was only when I heard someone else speaking Japanese that the logjam burst, and the nihongo started bubbling up as the furansugo drained away.
Essential
I was reading a recent ArtForum article about moblog photos, and the reviewer hit upon a key word: inessential. Photos that run counter to the notion of “a perfect flower,” they are just: “a flower.”
They don’t contend to any special uniqueness or meaningful significance. They’re just tonight’s dinner, or the cat. They’re even less momentous than old snapshots — at least old snapshots were made on someone’s birthday or on the family’s Grand Canyon roadtrip. Moblog photos tend to be somewhere even less worthy of inspection, between snapshots and the dull gray eye of a security camera. And there’s a lot of them.
Quotations from Today’s Emails
Such a literate bunch today – quite a lot fo quoting back and forth, incuding these.
Also, Street Photography Googlism is Link Number One
To get on with things:
To photograph is to hold one’s breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It’s at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.
Photography has not changed since its origin except in its technical aspects, which for me are not important.
Scotopic Photo Topic
Debate about the application of color in photography will continue as long as there are photographs. Feature articles on the topic pop up with great regularity in the standard photo mags, and online articles and debates rage endlessly. My local bookstore carries at least two magazines, B&W and Black and White Photography, dedicated entirely to one camp (and yes, Benetton’s advertising rag Colors, too).
The language of these debates is often laughably inflammatory, raging from “anyone shooting B&W today is morally suspect” to “B/W is the true photographer’s medium.” It’s right up there with declarations like “film is dead” (and has been for many years, or so I’ve often been told in one well-meaning lecture after another since at least the early 90’s) or “digital is just craftsmanship, photography [with silver wet processes] is art.”
Can somebody open a window in here? Phew!
Truth
Before I left San Diego I ventured over to the Museum of Photographic Art in Balboa Park, to view the prints from Eddie Adam’s exhibition and book Let Truth Speak to Power.
It’s hard not to bring some presumptions to a show with such a title, if only because of its similarity to Gene Smith’s dictum Let Truth Be the Prejudice. Is Adams, like Smith, convinced that he has the inside track on “truth?”
The show is a collection of portraits, large prints, the faces of people who have in some way fought against the predjudices, inequalities, and brutalities in their home countries. These huamn rights activists (err, in the language of the show, “Defenders” — always with a capital “D”) are scattered around the globe — some of them exiled from their original homes and now living in places like the U.S. or Switzerland, others hiding out in the jungle, some resting peacefully at home because their primary goals have begun to be addressed.
It’s in There
At long last, the library has re-opened in San Jose.
A good library is one of the most useful photographic tools. Here in Santa Clara we’ve been a bit starved. I had an excellent library just at the bottom of the hillside block from the house in Mill Valley — the state (formerly royal) library was a five-minute walk from my office in Honolulu. But here we just have a local suburban library packed into house trailers, while the city is building their own new building. It’s been a long dry spell.
Almost no individual can have a collection to match even a minor library. Robert Bergman’s A Kind of Rapture? Got it. Every issue of U.S. Camera from the 1950’s? All volumes of August Sander’s portrait books? Got those too. de Tolnay’s History and Technique of Old Master Drawings? Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook? Check and check.
Advice
A young photographer shows his work: pictures of gratings, crosswalks, curbs, textures, grids, faultless exercises in graphics that seem to repeat all of recent American photography. What can we say about it? Mention the quality of the prints? The precision of the framing? What can we do to not appear inattentive? Looking at the photographs twice, go through them again slowly while we feel the other’s presence near us, tense, pretending to be looking somewhere else? And then, why can’t we say that we have nothing to say, that this work elicits nothing in us but a dreary impression of quality? “You should photograph the people you love with the same precision as you photograph your gratings.” That’s what we should say.
– Hervé Guibert,
Ghost Image, 1982
Seven Days in Romania
Not by me, sadly.
Cosmin Bumbut and six photographer friends of the 7 days photoclub have been spending just such a week annually for almost five years, in the more-traditional and remote parts of their country. The 2003 version, set in the village of Harnicesti, is due soon. The variation in styles is particularly interesting — each photographer has a different take.
Signs of the Times
John Bolgiano, aka “coldmarble,” runs ColdMarble Musings,the only alternative-process (Cyanotype, Van Dyke process, etc) blog I’ve seen — so far. Looks like Courtney might give him some competition soon.
She checked-out Reed & Webb’s Alternative Photographic Processes from the library yesterday, prepping for an alt-process class, and noticed that it was completely untouched — never checked-out before, the book’s binding crackling as she turned each page.
We’ve noticed similar behavior on some other library photo books recently — she acquired a stack of beautiful Martin Parr books via loan from a library in San Diego, and their stamps showed they’d not been checked out for years. Tsk!
Essay
Unsocializing
Five or six years ago, I found a simple way to squash social-media addiction, one that I haven’t seen among the many 240+ page self-help books offering paths to escape from the modern internet Attention Machine.
My method didn’t require erasing, cancelling, or closing my various accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or the rest. The de-FOMO method is quite simple:
Make it a chore, and schedule it.
Re-Dubya
A repost: the 2003 photo above, "Explaining US Foreign Policy, London," is currently part of the 15th-Anniversary Members' Show show at the Petaluma Arts Center. It was used here on Botzilla previously, in the post reprinted below.
I'll be giving a brief talk about it and some related photos at the Arts Center on December 16th, 1PM.
From November, 2003
The very day I left London last week for parts more Nordic, George W. Bush was arriving. A good or bad thing, depending on your perspective. Personally, I’d have liked to witness the public fracas, but was glad to be away from it as well. The paranoia was evident everywhere — just taking a quick snapshot of the American flag decorations along the Mall a few blocks away from Buckingham Palace was enough to attract a pair of quick-stepping constables (who had been sitting in a nearby parked van, watching the street), wanting to know what I was up to.
Pictures Have No Meaning
(©1957 The Richard Avedon Foundation)
I have long admired this photo, made by Richard Avedon in 1957, and you should too.
Roland Barthes wrote in Camera Lucida that “great portrait photographers are great mythologists” and that’s certainly been true for most of the celebrated ones.
For all the deserved accolades, in this brief post I’d like to assert that this picture, and really nearly all pictures: photo, painting, AI or alabaster – are meaningless.
Negative Half-Life
Rocks, Stars, Money
In 1907 Ernest Rutherford realized that certain materials in certain rocks were slowly decaying into other materials. Specifically, the newly-discovered radium degenerated into the stable isotope lead-206. He realized that this decay’s speed was exponential: faster at first and slower as it progressed, leaving less and less radium. In his equations he labeled the time it would take for half of a radium sample to decay into lead as its half-life.
From this realization he and others could compare the amounts of a specific isotope of decaying radium or (even better) uranium to the amount of stable lead in a mineral sample, and use this proportion to estimate the rock’s age. By the end of the 1920’s they’d managed to show reliably that the age of the earth was at least 3.4 billion years old.
The idea works great for rocks. Also, for software & development.
The Browser and the Pope
The excitement of 2021 about “the metaverse” hinges on hardware, but probably not in the way you think.
The metaverse’s enabling device is not a perfect future headset or muscular neuron sensing or brain-machine interface. No memex is required. Instead, as an explanation I’d like to offer some very noisy graphs and a map of 1648 Europe to spell out what’s really going on.

There’s no such thing as psychohistory, but there are some useful models. Sometimes models overlap: the above graph overlaps the story of the 30 Years’ War…
Animated Speaker, Part One
Consider:
It's a hard simple fact for travelers above the 40th parallel: in the depth of winter, the indoor temperature is sure to descend quickly if the furnace isn't running.
This sort of sentence has been historically difficult for even the best computerized language bots and GPT variations: both of the kind of bots that attempt to understand human language, and those other bots that try to emulate it. Computers struggle because this single sentence has a range of different embodiments that map physical attributes like vertical position to completely different physical or non-physical attributes like temperature. Why does a furnace “run,” and what defines the “hardness” of a fact? Are seasons shallow as well as deep?
How did our language get to be like this, and yet why is it so easy for humans like you or I to understand it?
Che Guevara
You don't have to go out looking for Dr Ernesto Guevara when in Cuba -- his picture will find you. Guerrillero Heroico Che has become, as it was described to me more than once, the logo of Cuba. I've read that it's the most famous photograph in the world.
The Thing
"In photography, you always have both the medium and the depicted subject at the same time." -- Thomas Ruff
In Ruff's work, the image is a very particular thing. I especially like his over-enlarged internet Jpegs. His more recent work has wandered into CG and crypto-photograms, a process that creates an image of imagery, where the "true" object, placed on photo paper, is itself replaced by an ephemeral concept, a mental image of an optical image. So meta.
The crisis of "thingness" in photography is at once at the root of many of its greatest strengths and weaknesses, as pointed out by painter Gerhard Richter:
Shading
(JMW Turner, Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps. Feel free to knock this out in ZBrush some time – yet without those figures at the base, it would be so much smearing)
As “ Senior Technical Artist” on Rift, my tasks often involved the creation of specialized tool software; helping non-technical people within the art dept (usually) solve specific problems; interfacing between the art, management, and engineering groups… But the part of my job that’s be