Hey guys, just want to send a shout out apologizing for my lengthy inactivity. I’m feeling some spiritual crappiness with regards to my art right now. It sounds like bullshit, because it is.
But I should return to regular programming soon.
Eric Kim, street photographer and all-around cool guy blogger, asked me recently to do a write-up on his magic sparkles and unicorn website about how video games can help make you a better street photographer.
Click here to read said article. I’ve also got photos from my “Tokyo wo Kanjiru” series featured there.
Thanks Eric for the opportunity to do the write-up. Had much fun.
I love starting the morning reading something inspirational, something that’ll get me revved up to go out and take some photos or write some words. This is probably one of the best articles I’ve ever read on art, and I urge you all to read it.
Adam Marelli writes of Cartier-Bresson and how his photography is very much in line with the Surrealism movement of artists long before him. We’re taken on a journey that begins with Caravaggio and his amazing compositions, through to the 20s when Andre Breton wrote the Surrealist Manifesto and thus begun a body of work with his friends that tapped heavily into our subsconscious. Marelli ties all this back to specific works from HCB, and how upon interpretation, it can be seen that there is a heavy Surrealistic influence.
It is also a good article for looking inwardly at one’s own artistic approach, and how we might approach taking photographs or writing stories.
Amazing. And that it is lengthy but easily readable makes it all the more joyous. There are several parts to it.
Part 4 (although it says Part 5)
Part 5 (although it says Part 6)
Thanks to Eric Kim for spotting it first. Eric’s website is a huge sphere of photographic awesome. Follow it for more profound learnings.
Introducing the 2012 Winner for the Pulitzer Prize “Breaking News” Photograph category. By Massoud Hossaini.
Photography is about elements just coming together right in front of you, and all you have to do is be right there to capture the fleeting moment.
This is one hell of a fleeting moment.
photo taken from valerian.
One of my favorite photographers of all time, John Sypal had an exhibition of a new series of work recently in Tokyo. I would’ve loved to have gone (alas I am far overseas) but at least, there is a selected set of images from the series up on his website to gander at.
Check it here.
Milla Jovovich with point and shoot by Chris Floyd~
UPDATE - Camera model is apparently a Contax T2 - I couldn’t identify it. Cheers to http://redfishingboat.tumblr.com for the heads up!
Okay, this is hot.
I must admit that since I began photography, my knowledge of Eggleston and his photographs was minimal. This is most likely because he isn’t a street photographer in the strictest sense of the word (although he worked largely in the streets). Nevertheless, watching a great documentary on a great photographer is always a great learning process.
Most important lesson I took away was how Eggleston took the banal and made it wholly interesting in a photograph. Many people complain, and I know I’ve thought it more than once, that where we live is not nearly as interesting to photograph as some place we’ve never been to in our lives. But people like Eggleston and Winogrand worked in and around the confines of their cities, and made huge bodies of work. It is a case of being “democratic” with the camera, as the documentary says of Eggleston. There is no such thing as a beautiful subject and a non-beautiful one. All is one and the same, all is equal in Eggleston’s eyes and camera.
It is also an interesting documentary as Eggleston is such a character. I thought it somewhat curious the way they broached the subject of Eggleston having had a mistress all throughout his marriage to his wife and both women were aware of one another. And yet, that was all there was to that subject, and Eggleston was just written off as being an Artist who did as he pleased.
—ANSEL ADAMS
Above: Photo from The Man in the Crowd
There’s always something new to learn about Winogrand and the way he photographs just by reading all those writings by various long-time friends, fellow photogs, academics, critics, etc., in any Winogrand photobook.
This is from The Man in the Crowd, Jeffrey Fraenkel- “The Winogrand Enigma”
Since the days almost twenty years ago when I watched it happen, I have never been certain whether the world accommodated itself to Garry Winogrand’s requirements or if it happened the other way around. An example: Garry and I leave the gallery on a bright spring afternoon to get some lunch. We come to the corner that I’ve crossed thousands of uneventful times when Garry lifts his camera toward a young blonde woman in a white peasant blouse standing fifteen feet away. At just that moment, the sun hits her from behind so that the silhouette of her breasts is suddenly etched on the white fabric, and everything about her is blindingly aglow. She is the center of the universe. She is also unconscious of all this - of the stunning clarity of light, of Garry’s pinpoint attention for two or three exposures - and the camera comes down as we continue across the street.
I am convinced that if Garry were alive, he would not consider such a description to be true of the way he photographs. He seems, to me at least, the least romantic of photographers, and yet here is everyone else attaching such magical qualities to the way he works. I even read somewhere about how they likened Garry Winogrand’s physical motion as he photographs akin to a ballet dancer. I don’t know of any other photographer alive or dead who has had the privilege of being described in such ways.
Here’s another one, from Ben Lifson, “Garry Winogrand’s Art of the Actual”
He was muse-driven, muse-ridden - not by a particular muse, but simply and entirely by Woman. She appears everywhere, in three of her incarnations: nymph, mother, hag. He was faithful to each, and kept them distinct, accepted. And so it is his women, possessed of sympathy, compassion, independence, and delight, who brighten and compose the streets. They give out tenderness and charm; they dress for the eye, go on parade, seem gifted and therefore bountiful, dispensing luxury, beauty, splendor. Powerful, magical, mysterious, agents of grace in both senses of the word, they bear evidence of the regeneration latent and often nascent in [Garry’s] fiction.
Here’s one from John Szarkowski, from Winogrand’sThe Animals
Winogrand has made chaos clearly visible; he has disciplined it without breaking its spirit. It is not supremely difficult to make a clear picture of a truism, and it is easier still to hold up a mirror to the maelstrom and call it art. But to see and set down with acuity the flickering meanings that illuminate the menagerie we perform in - this is a creative miracle.
This is probably my favorite anecdote, and it comes after Winogrand’s passing. It is bittersweet to say the least. Also from Lifson:
On West 57th Street late in the summer of 1984, a few months after Winogrand’s death, I ran into a friend of his who commented on the sadness of not seeing him there, photographing, as she had so often. It was also strange, she said, “because his whole cast of characters is here - I’ve seen them all up 6th Avenue. What are they doing out?”
