UPDATE: There's also a fun piece in jpgmag here (thanks Laura)
Detail at actual size:
Jet Trails 2007 Depicts 11,000 jet trails, equal to the number of commercial flights in the US every eight hours.
There's also an interview with Chris on PBS here
And sticking with the airliner theme the second picture is from the Guardian - Engineer's Concorde prototypes - part of an auction of all sorts of design bits and pieces and sapre parts from Concorde up for auction in Toulouse if you want to go and bid...:
Concorde, that most charismatic of all civil airliners, always did look like a paper plane. Not just any old school playground paper dart, of course, but the most beautifully thought out and most aerodynamic aircraft possible, folded by the hands of brilliant, if still unsung, backbench aero-engineers.
Now we learn that Concorde engineers really did make paper aircraft at their drawing boards and workbenches, testing these outside the former British Aircraft Corporation workshops near Bristol during their lunch hours. Made of any scrap of paper or card available, these primitive, hand-propelled Concordes did their bit in the design process of the most famous, and dynamic, airliner of all.
"The novel is a fictionalised version of the life of the New Orleans jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden. It covers the last months of Bolden's sanity in 1907, as his music becomes more radical and his behaviour more erratic. A secondary character in the story is the photographer E. J. Bellocq. Both these historical figures are portrayed in ways that draw on their actual lives, but which depart from the facts in order to explore the novel's central theme – the relationship between creativity and self destruction.
The novel draws on the style of jazz, being structured in a fragmented, and "syncopated" form, with episodes extending in elongated "riffs" before suddenly lurching unpredictably into an apparently unrelated scene. The structure also conveys Bolden's own wild, fragmenting personality, as his schizophrenia takes hold. Bolden's manic, extrovert but self-harming behaviour is set against the introverted figure of Bellocq, who expresses his own frustrated desires in his intimate erotic photographs, but then compusively violates them with scratches"
JC: After the 1970's colour "revolution" in the fine-arts community - if we want to call it that - the introduction and spread of digital photography appears to be at least equally important. I'd be curious to learn how you view the impact of digital photography.
SS: I'm going to give you a long-winded answer. I guess I see how photographers work as influenced by, among other factors, the cost of their processes. In the 1970s, when I started using 8x10 color, it cost me more than $15 every time I took a picture (film, processing, and a contact print). Simple economy lead me to only take one exposure of a subject. I knew I couldn't economize by only taking pictures that I knew would be good – that would simply lead to boring, safe images. But, I could decide what I really wanted to photograph and how I wanted to structure the picture. This was a powerful learning experience. I began to learn what I really wanted. Digital is the opposite of 8x10. I see digital as a two-sided phenomenon. The fact that pictures are free can lead to greater spontaneity. As I watch people photograph (with film), I often see a hesitation, an inhibition, in their process. I don't see this as much with digital. There seems to be a greater freedom and lack of restraint. This is analogous to how word processing affects writing: one can put thoughts down in writing, even tangential thoughts, with a minimum of inner censorship, knowing that the piece can be edited later. The other side of this lack of restraint is greater indiscriminancy. Here's a tautology: as one considers one's pictures less, one produces fewer truly considered pictures...
...JC: I was intrigued to learn that you have been producing small editions of self-published books. What is the impetus behind this?
SS: Ever since I first saw Ed Ruscha's small books in the late 1960s, I've loved artists' books. Print-on-demand technology allows me to produce books with ease. I like the basic structure of these small books: the individual images are not intended to stand alone, but are seen as a part of a complex whole. I enjoy availing myself of commonly available technology. Finally, my book project allows me to explore many different visual ideas and explore a variety of directions...
Stephen Shore very graciously agreed to share one of his iBooks, which can be downloaded here (file size: about
7.7MB).
When Albert Hastings was eighty-five years old, photographer KayLynn Deveney moved near his small flat in Wales. KayLynn took notice of the small rituals and routines—gardening, laundry, grocery shopping—that made up Bert's life. A friendship slowly developed as KayLynn began photographing parts of Bert's day. The two developed a simple yet effective method of storytelling—with KayLynn's images and Albert's handwritten text—and the project evolved into The Day-to Day Life of Albert Hastings a poignant and profound chronicle of aging, living alone, and the small things that make up our daily lives. Containing seventy-eight photographs along with poems written by Bert, his clock drawings, and personal family photographs, The Day-to-Day Life of Albert Hastings gives the reader a glimpse into one man's life, we can only imagine what stories are left untold.
...Kaylynn’s photography is warm and respectful. As photographers, some approach a subject knowing that it is full of potential to make “good pictures.” Others approach a subject because of an interest in learning something through the process of picture-making. Deveney seems intent on using the medium to bridge a generational gap and befriend her seemingly charismatic and warm neighbor. Photography may have invoked the friendship but after looking at the pictures, it seems to have taken a back seat to the importance of the relationship in both of their lives.
If it were just a book of photographs alone, we might read Mr. Hastings as simply a stand in for a representative portrait of an older Wales everyman, but through his participation in the project, by captioning the photographs, we decipher his personality due to his choice of words in describing the photographs content. They often display, not only humor, but also a directness that comments on his perception of himself and photographs.
Under one photograph of a hat he writes simply “Size 7 1/8”
Under one of him near a golden lit window he writes, “I’m not talking to a ghost, I’m opening the curtains.”... (more).
Do something old in a new way
Do something new in an old way
Do something new in a new way, Whatever works . . . works
Do it sharp, if you can’t, call it art
Do it in the computer—if it can be done there
Do fifty of them—you will definitely get a show
Do it big, if you cant do it big, do it red
If all else fails turn it upside down, if it looks good it might work... etc etc
Don’t do it about yourself—or your friend—or your family
Don’t dare photograph yourself nude
Don’t look at old family albums
Don’t hand color it
Don’t write on it... etc etc blah blah blah
One of the wonderful things about black and white photography - even when it's scanned and printed digitally - is the endless permutations of film and developer (and I know you can get Tri-X and HP5 Photoshop filters - still doesn't mean the end result looks like Tr-X or HP5 though - I haven't tested one that really does the job yet... along with the whole bunch of tools in PS CS3... ). Tri-X in Rodinal, Efke in Pyrocat HD, HP5 in DD-X, Tri-X in D23 and on it goes. Each one has it's own distinct character, look and feel. Add in expansion and contraction development (love it or hate it) and you multiply that again. The majority of digital "B&W" that I see just doesn’t come anywhere close to having these characteristics. It's simply homogenized. Which, on the whole, is rather different from most of the colour work - colour digital work can sing (as can analogue/digital hybrid colour).
Though probably the biggest single reason that so many converted colour images look crappy in greyscale is nothing to do with technique, but rather vision - on the whole, good black and white pictures simply aren't colour photographs with the colour removed.
Now maybe this will all change, but as it stands right now this is Greyscale photography, not black and white.
For Black and White photography, get a real camera and real film (scan it if you don't like darkroom chemicals) - a Leica (All Praise Ernst Leitz in the current New Yorker), a now cheap used Pentax 67 or similar, or a Linhof or Toyo - or a nice wooden thing from China and a box of Tri-X or HP5.
A couple or so more new pictures from Traces: alleyways & spandrels
“A city is nothing but streets and edifices teeming with memories, and memories are inextricably tangled up with civic and family and personal memories,” Guy Maddin
A few updates from the Humble Art Foundation in NY
"Perhaps in its obsessiveness, Maggs's work has some of the serial qualities of the work done by the Bechers, but theirs is a project which cannot escape its subject. Being mainly industrial, the Bechers's buildings are intimately connected with the specific cultural evidence of economic structure. The subject/object dilemma of photography is unabashedly acknowledged in Maggs's work with the presence of some thing as ostensibly subjective as a face."
"TIME doesn’t exactly stand still in JoAnn Verburg’s photographs. Not that her single images, diptychs and triptychs are set up to create narrative sequences in which one thing leads to another, as with Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies of a man jumping or a horse running. Instead her portraits, still lifes and landscapes generate a state of prolonged experience. Ms. Verburg spends most of her days in Minneapolis in her studio, but she makes a distinction between the production work she does there — scanning her film, editing images, researching — and the creative work she does in other places, mostly in Italy or Florida, where she and her husband spend extended periods of time...more
...Italy has been a rich source of inspiration. “Exploding Triptych, 2000” is part of a series of photographs of olive trees that began with a simple snapshot near a house she and her husband rented in the countryside near Spoleto. “There was something I wanted to pursue — I didn’t know what exactly — a freshness or airiness, a sense of vitality,” she said.
Ms. Verburg doesn’t set out with a particular idea of what she wants to photograph. She finds her way into a subject or a theme, “like a dog who circles a few times to make a nest before she lies down in a ball to sleep,” she said. “With the olive tree photos, the best state of mind I can be in is to be without expectations and to be ready to go to work not knowing what the work will be or if I will later like what I have done.”
As ever, she eventually gravitated to the same theme of time and space in that series. As she spent more time photographing in the olive groves, her interest in color grew. She started photographing in the early morning or at dusk, when “the light shifted from blue to yellow to reddish-magenta to purple, and I had to be ready before the yellow light disappeared, or I was too late.”
“Living — being alive — is a present-tense enterprise.”"
Her pictures describe spaces and moments suspended in the reverie that precedes action. Like a Leyden jar, they are containers of potential. - John Szarkowski
A little deceptive, and always somewhat elusive, there is nothing easy, obvious, or spontaneous about these images. Each one appears constructed with a deliberation and care that demands a similar sort of attention from us when we view them. We can see this kind of meticulousness in Verburg’s manipulation of focus. In many of the olive tree photos, she varies the camera’s focus so deftly that the seeming simplicity of a tangle of branches or cluster of leaves is belied by a whole host of visual shifts. It’s a very subtle form of choreography, in which the images are composed not by their content, but instead by Verburg’s delicate fiddling.
We see this best in Campello Olive Trees for Giulio (2003), in which a small olive tree stands alone in the bottom center of the image. The dead center of the tree is in focus, but the rest is clouded in a halo of blur; in the extreme right corner, half of an olive branch is in sharp focus. Meanwhile the upper half of the image, a gray sky flecked with branches, is so blurred that it becomes kinetic, spinning as if it could give us a touch of vertigo if we look for too long.
In her pyramid photos, Verburg uses an ambiguous perspective to similar effects. Photographed from an aerial vantage point, it’s impossible to tell whether these sand structures are miniscule or enormous, monumental or in danger of disappearing entirely. Through Verburg’s manipulations, what we begin to see is the act of seeing itself, or perhaps the way our sight gets confounded and enhanced by invisible elements such as atmosphere, light, or point of view, Joann Verburg has written that her many photographs of olive trees are meant to make the viewer feel connected to them. However, she seems to be withholding something in that connection. If these photos invite us into a conversation, it’s not one we’d have with a lover or a dear friend. Not that the substance of our talk would be idle or insubstantial; instead, it’s rather like suddenly stumbling on a very serious discussion with someone you hardly know. It’s intimate, but not personal.
And yet, these photographs don’t leave me completely cold. There is something unexpected, and suggestive, about such reticence. The images, while they frustrate available associations, simultaneously make room for their own.
"Whatever it is about pictures, photographs, it's just about impossible to follow up with words. They don't have anything to do with each other...Art, or what we call that, you can love it and appreciate it, but you can't really talk about it. Doesn't make any sense."
The more you watch him, the more and more his pictures seem to make simple sense - this is merely how he sees. In the end it all seemed to confirm Geoff Dyers description of Eggleston where he says, in part:
"Eggleston's photographs look like they were taken by a Martian who lost the ticket for his flight home and ended up working at a gun shop in a small town near Memphis. On the weekend he searches for the ticket - it must be somewhere - with a haphazard thoroughness that confounds established methods of investigation..."
(I should add that the "production values" in this documentary are poor - to put it mildly. But if you can manage to put those aside, which I must admit took me a while, I still think it's worth watching)
Richard Woodward: Let’s start with this new book, which is actually a series of books, and work backwards. How did the project originate?
Paul Graham: My principal sources were Chekhov’s short stories, and the critical essays around those. A lot of people have tried to understand why this writing works so well, since in the stories there’s not much happening. They’re dealing with the simple, everyday things—in one of them a woman is combing her hair for six pages, remembering that night at the theatre; in another a school teacher is coming home in a cart dreaming of meeting the landowner, who does ride past and they exchange a few pleasantries, but nothing more. But there’s something magical about how perfectly described they are, the transparency of what’s happening, without guff or show, simply described, with nothing proscribed. I’ve been traveling around the States for a while now, and wanted to do something looser and freer, to take pictures of people at the most ordinary, everyday moments — cutting the grass or waiting for the bus, smoking cigarettes or traveling to and from the supermarket. I wanted to reflect Chekhov’s openness, his simple transparency; this was something I tried to move toward. I’m not, of course, literally illustrating Chekhov’s stories, but similarly isolating a small rivulet of time. So, each of the individual books is a photographic short story, a filmic haiku. They are quite short, but complete in their modest way...
...RW: But if you’re going to travel to Europe and Japan you must have figured out ways to support yourself.
PG: You sleep on friend’s floors. I traveled in an old Mini—the original Mini—and I slept in the back of that for a long time. I ate in truck drivers’ cafes. I had a friend who found out-of-date film for me. Then you do some teaching and get a small grant. The documentary-style tradition is very strong in England. Eventually I met up with Martin Parr, Chris Killip, Graham Smith, John Davis. Then my first book, A-1 The Great North Road, came out in 1983. It was a journey along the main artery of the UK, much like Alec Soth did with the Mississippi recently. Large format, color, landscapes, portraits, buildings, etc. The book proved quite poisonous to that black-and-white tradition. It’s been forgotten how radical it was to work within the social documentary tradition in color, at that time. Now it’s so commonplace, people wonder what the issue was. Within four years I published three books: A1, Beyond Caring and. But by 1987, I could see this juggernaut of color documentary photography in England; it had really taken off. Martin Parr switched to color, so did people like Tom Wood, and then our students, like Paul Seawright or Richard Billingham too. But I felt it was time to move on from that, before it became exhausted. For example, the mixing of landscape with war photography in Troubled Land was striking and quite successful—I had shows in NYC galleries—but what happens is that you hit this resonant note and everyone wants you to repeat it. I was invited to duplicate Troubled Land in Israel and South Africa. Commissions, dollars, travel, the whole nine yards. But I thought, I can’t do this. For better or worse, I’m one of those artists who once something is “proven,” have to drop it and find another way to scare myself...
RW: So you went to Europe?
PG: In the early to mid 80s I had made friends with a group of German photographers who were quite distinct from the Bechers’ Düsseldorf school. They were mostly around Essen- Berlin: Volker Heinze, Joachim Brohm, Gosbert Adler and Michael Schmidt too, who was running these workshops in Berlin and inviting people like John Gossage and Lewis Baltz to come over.
RW: It’s funny that school is so unknown here. Michael Schmidt even had a one-man show at MoMA.
PG:Yes, a great show and few remember it. It’s as though the Gursky show wiped out people’s understanding of everything else in Germany. Gursky is much more accessible. He goes for the jugular because it is about “the great photograph.” Of course, he succeeds, but it’s recidivist, in a way. Photographers have been trying for years to make bodies of work where images work incrementally to build up a coherent statement. It’s not about one great picture by Robert Adams; it’s about twenty or thirty pictures that build a sensitive, intelligent reflection of the world. It’s the same with Garry Winogrand, or Robert Frank. Gursky brings it back to that “wow” moment. It sort of undoes that way of working, and reduces things to the “What a great shot!” appreciation of photography. I’m a sucker for that as much as anyone, but want people to appreciate what Robert Adams does more so...
...I have constructed a forest built from accumulated memory and the ghosts of trees...
The city park offers an escape valve – a window leading the weary city dweller to reconstructed, consumable nature. Although the essence of these spaces can appear pseudo-natural, some of these great trees actually predate the infrastructure of the city, and despite their accommodated appearance have witnessed centuries of human endeavour...
(Edward Steichen, Platinum Print with applied colour)
(Spandrel - 77th Street)
( Alley- 97th Avenue. Beaver Dam or Edmontonosaurus nest? My boy's are conflicted)P.S. - yes, there really is such a thing as an Edmontonosaurus...
De Salignac's time as a city worker coincided with New York's transformation from a horse-and-buggy town into a modern-day metropolis, and his photographs of towering bridges, soaring buildings, trains, buses and boats chart the progress. "In this remarkable repository of his work, we really see the city becoming itself," says Thomas Mellins, curator of special exhibitions at the Museum of the City of New York. "During this period, New York became a paradigm for 20th-century urbanism, and that has to do with monumentality, transportation systems, working out glitches, skyscrapers, with technology—all of the things that emerge in these photos."
De Salignac's photograph of the Staten Island ferry President Roosevelt coming into port, made in Lower Manhattan in June 1924 with a bulky wooden field camera, typifies his ability to stretch beyond straightforward documentation. "This is not your typical municipal photograph," says Moore. "There's a sense of anticipation—that perfect moment where the boat is about to dock, and a sense of energy, a flood about to be unleashed." Adds Lorenzini: "It shows him thinking like an artist."
De Salignac's pictures have been reproduced in books, newspapers, posters and films, including Ken Burns' Brooklyn Bridge; though largely uncredited, his work helped shape New York's image. "He was a great chronicler of the city, in the tradition of Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, Stieglitz and Berenice Abbott," says Mellins. "The fact that he was a city employee may have made it less likely that people would think of his work in an artistic context, but these images indicate that he really takes his place in the pantheon of great photographers of New York."
Lorenzini still isn't satisfied. "I'd like to know what he did for the first 40 years of his life, to see a photograph of him as a grown man," he says. "Where did he learn photography? Was he formally trained? Did he consider himself an artist?" Information about him, and prints by him, keep trickling in. Not long ago, a woman mailed to the Municipal Archives ten photographs of New York that she'd bought at a Texas flea market; Lorenzini immediately recognized them as de Salignac's. And a cache of 4,000 de Salignac prints was recently unearthed in the Battery Maritime Building in Lower Manhattan. "There is definitely more to the story," Lorenzini says...
Yesterday I received the very unexpected news of your death. This news is made all the more painful for me as we did not get to see each other in the past year. You do know, however, how enormously important your influence was—and is—not only to me, but also to a whole generation of younger people.
You and Hilla have produced an invaluable and multi-faceted body of work that has served as an invaluable point of reference for us. We adapted and developed many stylistic characteristics of your technique. Yet, in my opinion, there is another crucial factor that ensured the uniqueness of the Becher School: teacher-artists can be found anywhere, but only a few succeed in transmitting your kind of drive to their students.
You were never a power-hungry man, abusing your international fame for political or institutional influence, but, instead, you stoically endured the criticisms of your academic peers. These made you all the more determined to pursue your unconventional teaching methods, which included affording absolute priority to your own and your students’ artistic visions.When your students came to you with their work, you often reflected upon it late into the night, and took the time to comment, using apt art-historical examples. By the end of these private tutorials, not only were your floors covered with books, but books were also perched on top of the many red-labelled Agfa film cartons, tripods and ladders that were strewn about your studio. A permanent chemical odour signalled the authenticity of your work and living space—where, for the lifeof me, I cannot remember ever seeing a comfy sofa. Having spent my childhood and youth in over-designed advertising studios, it was a key experience to have such an insight into your world. I still remember my tipsy walk home—through that enchanted gateway in front of your studio, past that red van, which was packed with your heavy ladders of all sizes.
Bernd, I thank you for this important time in my life and hope that you will continue quietly to guide me through today’s art circus with your dry humour and carefree attitude.
In friendship,
Andreas
Jörg Colberg: Before talking about any individual project of yours let me ask you something about photography in general. You have been working as a photographer for quite a while, and you have covered a wide range of topics, all the while both contemporary photography and the world at large have undergone fairly large changes. I would be curious to learn about how you think your role as a photographer and your interest in what you wanted to record have changed?
Mitch Epstein: I don’t think in terms of having a ‘role’ as a photographer, nor do I consider my purpose to “record.” I am compelled to interpret, not record the world around me...
...What I want to photograph changes with time. The stakes are higher for me both humanly and artistically, as I get older. I have a family now and a more acute consciousness of the world as a welcoming or non-welcoming place for my child. I have thirty years of photographing behind me, and I’m more demanding with myself than ever — I want those years of experience to support my more mature engagement with making art. I feel like I’ve been building up to or training for a kind of high wire act. I’m using decades of experience to balance me while I try out a way of working (large-format landscape) that is totally new to me. Each picture is now made in a slower, highly deliberate manner that I couldn’t have imagined using twenty years ago...
JC: Coming to your own work, there is one question which I like to ask simply because it touches something that many photographers are struggling with: How do you decide what project to work on, what subject matter to pick?ME: I never pick my projects, my projects inevitably pick me. I don’t mean that
glibly. I’ve learned to listen to what moves and troubles me, and that leads me to where I have to go next.I have been through many hellish periods where I don’t know what’s to follow after finishing a body of work – a kind of post partem. But I’ve learned that it is helpful to remain patient, open, and necessary to allow myself to relax and pursue other interests beyond photography during these periods..." more
"Building Design takes a look at the "joy of car parks" – including this beautifully faux-classical quasi-Piranesian garage, the Parc des Célestins, built in 1994 in Lyon.Unable to resist the obvious, however, when I hear someone say "the joy of car parks" I have to quote J.G. Ballard: "Take a structure like a multi-storey car park, one of the most mysterious buildings ever built. Is it a model for some strange psychological state, some kind of vision glimpsed within its bizarre geometry? What effect does using these buildings have on us? Are the real myths of this century being written in terms of these huge unnoticed structures?""
"half awake and half asleep in the water by Tokyo-based photographer Asako Narahashi. A suite of fifteen 20" x 24" photographs, showing images with half of the photographic surface covered with water. The water looks dark and poetic, and would naturally call in images of sleep and the subconscious.
Asako Narahashi once remarked that she was not particularly fond of the ocean, rivers or lakes. She began her half awake and half asleep in the water probably in 1998, after her visit to Okinawa in the summer, and where she experienced, after a long time, snorkeling and the joy of floating in the sea. She was then working on another project and discovered in her contact sheet this vague and unclear image that she described, "just like the moon without an edge floating on the ocean, beyond everyday life." The image must have been lying in her sub consciousness and imprinted somewhere in her brain. It has now come to surface and steered her towards a refreshingly new direction.
The photographs in half awake and half asleep in the water are images that peek from this shore through to the other shore. They look candid and relax, but are the labour of courage and love from an artist who is not a great swimmer. The art critic Kotaro Iizawa has commented on this series,"The visual line does not settle and leans heavily to one side, while the calm and collected colours of the photographs seem to trip up the viewer in an unstable manner. The feeling of being stranded however, is strangely comforting.""
"When Alvarez Bravo began photographing in the 1920s, the cultural effervescence that followed the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917) had unleashed a national search for identity, and the question of what to do with Mexico’s inherent exoticism was the burning issue for photographers. Perhaps influenced by his relationship with Weston and Modotti, Alvarez Bravo was the first Mexican photographer to take a militantly anti-picturesque stance, and he achieved international recognition for work which reached creative heights from the late 1920s through the mid-1950s, a period during which he perfected a sophisticated approach to representing his culture. Conscious both of Mexico’s otherness and the way in which that has led almost naturally to stereotypical imagery, Alvarez Bravo has always swum counter to the stream of established clichés, using visual irony to contradict what he initially appears to saying, hence inviting the viewer to engage in the task of interpretation.
Consider Sed pública (Public Thirst), the 1934 photo of a boy drinking water from a village well. This image contains all the elements necessary to make it picturesque: a young peasant, dressed in the white clothing
typical of his culture, perches on a battered village well to drink the water which flows from it; an adobe wall behind provides texture. But, the light in the image seems to concentrate itself on the foot that juts forward into the frame, a foot that is too particular, too individual to be able to “stand for” the Mexican peasantry, and thus represent their other-worldliness. It is this boy’s foot, not a typical peasant’s foot, and it goes against the expectations of picturesqueness raised by the other elements, “saving” the image through its very particularity...
Manuel Alvarez Bravo has been a definitive influence on Mexican and Latin American photography. His rejection of facile picturesqueness, his insistently ambiguous irony, and his redemption of common folk and their daily subsistence have marked out a path of high standards for photographers from his area."
"Polyfoto - The Natural Photograph.
Polyfoto is the only system of photography giving natural and truly characteristic portraits, since the sitter can move and converse freely whilst the 48 photographs are being taken. 48 photographs for 2/6d"
I've also liked the work from Japan - Tokyo Polaroid Plus - that I came across a few years ago - it seemed consistently good (unfortunately he switched to a Rollei I think at a later point)
"... Both a reprise of and addendum to everything he had done before, the Polaroids made between September 1973 and November 1974 constitute a final radiant and unexpected extension of his vision. Revisiting his favourite motifs in a series of pellucid dreams, the 2,6o0 Polaroids are like a condensation of and an extended meditation on Winogrand's claim that Evans's "photographs are about what is photographed, and how what is photographed is changed by being photographed, and how things exist in photographs". His subjects remain the ones that had always dominated his work - empty buildings, discreet portraits, signs, found language - all strangely enhanced by the technical limitations of the camera..."
Lorna is one of my artist friends. She has a very infectious smile and very sensuous lips - I had a photograph on my wall for a long time of just her lips. I love the way her face looms out of the darkness and floats there above the out-of-focus neck and chest. I love the way she looks too - the range of things that are in her face. And then there is this sculptural quality, almost like a Brancusi or something...
The picture is a daguerreotype, which used to be called "keepers of light". They have a range from the deepest, darkest velvety blacks to the brightest highlights that reflect into your eyes. Each picture has unbelievable detail and very shallow depth of field. Photographs are often so big now that 20 or 30 people can view one at the same time, but a daguerreotype is the most intimate image made with a camera, because it is small and only one person can look at it...
I'm not interested in daguerreotypes because it's an antiquarian process; I like them because, from my point of view, photography never got any better than it was in 1840.
