exploring photography @fotocurious-blog - Tumblr Blog

blog transfer

for anybody that is interested:

I made a new blog www.foto-curious.tumblr.com

"fotocurious" was originally made as a secondary blog and it bothered me that I couldn't follow anybody and now that is changed!

I sense that photography is concerning itself with real issues again. For some time much of photography seemed to be about itself, and while this was fine, and interesting in some cases, it’s not what photography is really good at. Understand this by familiarising yourself with the rich and wonderful history of our medium. Be proud of it, what it has, and what it can, achieve. Don’t try and reinvent the wheel. Be inspired. Try and copy, if you like (because no one can). Find a subject you care about. Something that moves you. Something which stirs your rawest emotions. And then have patience. Mark Power

Ernst Haas, the early master of color photography was never celebrated for his personal, experimental work — until now

#ernst haas #color photography #lensculture

The International Center of Photography may be moving, but its director fully intends to keep it engaged in conversations that explain and explore image-making in the 21st century. “I want to be part of the conversation. I want to know for myself what is happening and put myself there to understand it. And of course I am going to document it, through my filter, and then it could be possibly published and shown to other people. But for me it is very important that I understand it.” -- Paolo Pellegrin

streeteraser-blog

Brick Lane, London

The first written steps of making sense where I'm situated with Analog vs Digital

As a photographer, the conversation of analog vs. digital is one that is common (at least within my circles). More specifically the question “Is analog dead”? The answers are nothing shy from unexpected. “Yes” from those coming to terms with the influence demand, technology and cost has on the medium and “no” from the optimistic believers that analog can overcome the impact of the technological age we live in.

Last night I apparently missed a heated and passionate conversation amongst former professors and peers on this exact topic. The professors think that teaching analog in the classroom is not only on a decline for reasons such as students claiming they can’t afford it, but also that they foresee it being phased out. One student, who has her own wet lab for alternative processes and wants to go into teaching, had the contrary belief and was adamant that darkrooms are still here for the long run.

I will approach my own insights to these conversations through a written stream of consciousness. Analog and Digital will both refer to photography unless noted otherwise.

It is no debate when it comes to the accessibility that digital allows. You can take numerous images then process, send, duplicate, etc. with ease in comparison to analog. However, just because you have the ability to take 10 images of the same thing, should you? No. The issues that exist with digital stemmed from its accessibility. Cameras are everywhere and that isn’t always the best thing. From both convenience and technology I can Google any word and thousands of images of the same thing will result.

I believe in an analog approach to digital. Many appreciate the patience, skill and thought process that comes with the practice of analog. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t exist when working digitally. I like to think I perfected my technical approach when I first worked with 35mm. It doesn’t matter whether I have an analog or digital device in my hand, I value each image that I make the same and have high expectations for it. I don’t approach a subject any differently just because I have countless opportunities to say something about it with an image. I want to do that with as few images as possible.

I made the switch to digital not because “analog was dying” but out of necessity and accessibility. I did not have a darkroom of my own and could not afford to send off every roll of 35mm or 120mm roll of film. I do appreciate what digital allows which is being able to make my images and the second I get home have the ability to upload and work on them. This does not change the fact that at the same time I miss the magic of working in the darkroom. The magic of the darkroom, which is the result of chemical processes. That I take a piece of paper that I’ve exposed with light and place it in chemical developer and slowly an image, that I’ve taken will slowly appear before my eyes. It’s a wonderful moment to experience. I miss it and after working digitally for 7 years I haven’t found that same magic yet. It is lost with the price of accessibility and because unfortunately the world we live in today is impatient, my freelance work will not allow me the time to work in analog.

Magazines, newspapers, corporate, individuals seeking commercial work; anybody that does not understand the practice of photography assumes that as a result of digital accessibility the process of photography is a click of the button and a transfer of images from the maker to consumer. We image makers know that is not how it works, but it is this mindset that is in fact contributing to this “end of analog.” Image-makers don’t have the time to work in analog, as we know time is money and consumers want what they pay for with the snap of their fingers. The visual aesthetics of analog is a wonderful thing and regrettably, with a medium that explores the concepts of time and what that means through out the mediums history, society does not have the time for it to exist. Besides, we have the technology today that has the ability to emulate the look of analog, right?

So what does this mean? Individuals working digitally are having to stay knowledgeable with the latest technologies, needing to fight with the latest software updates, upgrade cameras every few years if they want to insure a particular “quality” to their photograph… I can easily go on. It is for this reason that I can personally see darkrooms getting phased out of the educational systems. I’m already aware of changes in darkroom practices and instruction within the educational system such as introducing a digital negative into the darkroom. Teachers are going to have to stay up to date with technology not just for their own work but also to be able to instruct students on how to make images that will get them a job after school. It is all influenced by society and consumerism. At the end of the day though, the true analog makers will find a way to work with their craft; it wont be many people, but they will find a way as their are already alternative processes that can allow for analog to live. All these consumers right now buying the Polaroid’s or Fuji insta cameras, those fads will always exist in some form. Life is cyclical. Trends are cyclical. Things will always find their way back as the endless cycle continues…

Much of this is all quite unfortunate, but particularly pertains to the photographers that use the medium as a source of income. Otherwise null if they make work for just themselves or if they are the ones lucky enough to photograph in any form they want and be the few that are plucked and presented in front of the world.

Despite every word I said, I don’t want to suggest that analog is dead and digital photography is safe, because it isn’t.

Here is one of many photography boxes in my room. In it you can find a couple dozen of undeveloped 35mm and 120mm film, analog and digital cameras. My first d-slr was a Canon XTi. It sits in a box not because it can’t take pictures-- it works perfectly fine; It’s there for 2 reasons. 1. Because the resolution and quality isn’t on par for the digital standards that exist today that come from cameras like the Canon Mark II/III or Nikon D800 2. It can’t shoot video.

Video. Video will be the reason why photography isn’t safe (or rather the decisive moment). Unless it’s just a temporary fad, people want video over photography. I’ve also found an increase in photography being constructed from digital video stills in order to bypass having two different people that might have different vision or aesthetics. I’m still trying to make sense of this.

What does all this mean for photography and myself? I will continue to produce work in the medium that I need, dependant on the content I explore. If something I’m trying to say calls for analog then I’ll use it. If I find that I need to shoot digitally, fine. Maybe I need to pull out my “lo-res” XTi because that aesthetic will comment on a topic I’m trying to present. Right now one of my projects is working with found home movies of strangers and I am turning the moving image back into still. All I’m saying is that I do not try to let these commoditized factors influence my personal work. It is solely because I am also a freelance photographer that I need to stay on top of all the many factors that influence the satisfaction of the consumer and yes it is all quite exhausting when at the end of the day all I want to do is just make images that say something; that express what I want them to.

Untitled, Tracy Fish, 2014

#analog #digital #analog photography #digital photography #thoughts #photography #art #technology #medium #photographer #is analog dead

Duane Michals: The house I once called home

myleftpinky

“When I was a little boy, it seemed to me that there were many moons. My grandmother had a moon, and my other grandmother had one too. We had a moon over backyard, and my best friend Art had moonlight in his bedroom from his moon. When we visited our relatives in Chicago, I was not surprised to discover their moon. Then one night, as we returned from a visit to my grandmother I watched out of the car’s back window and saw her moon follow us home. Her moon was our moon, there was just one moon! Now the sky seemed so empty.”

"What Glanville seems to be showing us in these luminous photographs is the absurd poignancy of our wish to be prepared. That we could never be equipped for what we are doing. The photographer didn't quite know what he wanted until he got it; and he didn't ask his subjects to decide for him, either."

emportesparlafoule

Michael Snow: Photo-Centric

Part 1: Simultaneous compression. When we pick up a camera and frame a composition in the viewfinder, we do so with a number of key assumptions about what happens when we press the shutter button a...

My experience of viewing Ken Jacobs

I watched a selection of Ken Jacobs films before reading Tom Gunning’s Films That Tell Time, and similar to Gunning’s, I instantly wondered the connection between these select films and if in fact it was by the same maker. For instance when comparing Nissan Ariana Window (1969) or Spaghetti Aza (1976) to his much later work such as Ontic Antics Starring Laurel and Hardy: Bye, Molly (2005) or Celestial Subway Lines / Salvaging Noise (with John Zorn and Ikue Mori) (2005) there is an evident change both in the aesthetic and content. The later work is using some interesting experimental processes visually, particularly in A Tom Tom Chaser (2002), which the film is distorted during the telecine process, however I find it much more challenging to watch due to the length of time these visuals are occurring. That is a typical problem I have in general with experimental work of this aesthetic.

Despite this issue during my experience of watching Jacobs’ films, there is a connection for myself to be made with viewing Nissan Ariana Window, Spaghetti Aza and A Tom Tom Chaser. As of recent, my work has been navigating found home footage which requires me to search the archives for particular material. When creating A Tom Tom Chaser, Jacobs uses appropriated footage, originally filmed by Billy Bitzer, making it his own. Gunning raises the question, “Is Jacobs simply playing a dadaist game, signing his name to a discarded ready-made?” The issue raised with the particular issue of his lack of manipulation to the original footage. About 5 years ago, the thought of using appropriate work was completely out of the question. I would wonder why the artist couldn’t just create what was needed on their own and then got into the issues/questions of whether or not they should even be given credit if they didn’t create the piece on their own. Well, something happened in the past year, I like to call graduate school, and I began thinking of these issues slightly different. It basically came down to, why not use work that’s already out there since the accessibility to the visual is so accessible and over saturated, in order to make a statement or say something different than the original intent that it was used.

With that in mind, began my relationship with the found footage. Like the issues raised with Jacobs, I wondered whether or not am I manipulating/altering the footage enough. Enters, Nissan Ariana Window and Spaghetti Aza, two home movies filmed by Jacobs. I found my experience however quite different watching those two films in comparison to the home movies on the archives that I was viewing for my own work. The difference may be the intent of why Jacobs’ films were made, which were evidently for the public eye, despite the “home movie” label, in contrast to the unknown reasoning of these archived home movies. I doubt when they were originally filmed, the audience was meant to exist in the realm it does now. Jacobs used his experience as a filmmaker to orchestrate these home movies. There’s intention witnessed in his editing, particularly in Nissan Ariana Window, when noticing both the existence and passing of time during two separate yet similar narratives that are coincidentally occuring at the same time. That cutting of specific double narratives of similar context, spoke to me, in comparison to the short film I am working on (Generation/Regeneration/Time [working titles]).

This cyclical dance of the found footage and experimental reuse of appropriated work that I share with Ken Jacobs was interesting to experience. I quite enjoy the fact that his films are not the same visually; that the maker is not readily recognized. He is trying different things as I am in order to examine the meaning of time. Gunnings states, “Jacobs realizes that these images of the past need not serve only as inert matter, or as totalizing versions of the past. Unlike the written text, film images may be interrogated, not only to reveal their falsity, but to unearth their hidden truth as well. Jacobs crawls inside the images he finds, and reveals that the camera really did catch it all—provided we know where and how to look.” That last line to me is a powerful statement. I wonder, why not reexamine what already is there? Scrutinze it. Pull it apart. Perhaps, view it frame by frame to notice the unnoticed as a result of the number of frames viewed per second. After all, that is what I am doing with the creation of printed stills of the found home movies I am coming across.

“Remnants are the remains, what is left over, what has survived in a marginal state. Remnants are the traces of time past, of events passed on, the crumbs from the feast...Jacobs understands the feast that can be made on what others discard.” - Tom Gunning on Ken Jacobs

I am not an image junkie

The first time I read Susan Sontag’s On Photography and Roland Barthes Camera Lucida was my junior year of undergrad. Photographic Theory and Practice, being a new upper level course to the program, I was privileged to be able to take it since I had completed my prior pre-requisites. I can slightly recall being furious at the readings of Sontag and strongly disagreeing with her statements as well as my confusion of Barthes terminology. My senior year, semiotics reappeared in Art Theory, in which I realized the inevitable, there was no escaping these discussions. Recently, it has been my third or fourth time having to read these writing’s during a completely different point in my photographic career, but to be frank, the churning in my stomach has returned as the letters jumble across the page while attempting to make sense of what I previously had difficulty understanding. I also attempted to remember what exactly had frustrated me about Sontag, wondering if I still felt the same as my angsty-younger-photographic self did.

I will start with Barthes. To be honest, much of Camera Lucida I still struggle understanding and wonder if its because of the fact that he was not a photographer himself. Consequently, he creates a dance, a sort of tango with understanding his own relationship with the medium and its function. Photography was everywhere, fighting to be a recognized as an art form, yet from my take, Barthes seemed to see it as science and overall, struggled with finding images with what he describes as “punctum.”

“I cannot penetrate, cannot reach into the Photograph. I can only sweep it with my glance, like a smooth surface. The Photograph is flat, platitudinous in the true sense of the word, that is what I must acknowledge.” It seemed that photography’s role was to inform, providing what he claimed as an “evidential force” and “authentication.” Overall, his need of semiotics, studium and punctum was derived as a way of his entrance in navigating photographic territory.

I was fascinated by his regard to photography as a “temporal hallucination,” “false on the level of perception, true on the level of time,” and was it “mad.. or...tame...one or the other.” Temoral hallucination? Hm. Not quite. Aside for the fact that for me, photography has always had the ability to play both roles, the art and documentation. With out getting into semantics of “What is art,” art for me always contained the ability to reveal the history of the time it was created and although it does not have the ability to provide the same truth a photo can, it is still representative of its time.

Now Sontag, also was a critic/theorist, not a photographer and I still stand by the fact that there is still not a full understanding, just as Barthes struggled with and she created her own rubric as well. “Photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.” “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.” “Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.” Sontag essentially just tears apart the role/attempted role of photography, rattling off the dark side of the medium and the commodity role it played. Re-reading Sontag for the first time in 3 years, I vaguely remember being protective over photography, quick in defense of her accusations, thinking “the audacity” of these claims she makes. Now I’m not saying I have had a change in heart, because there’s still much I will quickly defend, however I try to read her work more open minded and see both sides. When Sontag states, “Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution,” I let out a long exhale. I hate, HATE more than anything to admit that this is true, but between accessibility of technology and social media, this is the product society has created. On the contrary, I like to believe that true image-makers, are not defined under this category. From Sontag’s bold proclamations that “...one never understands anything from a photograph” to Barthes struggles of classifying photography, I feel almost how I did in undergrad, juggling my emotions, ready to drop the mic and leave the stage after debating their sheer negativity towards the medium of photography and sit down with a hot cup of tea.

I. “When I witness an event, I am present to it and it to me. It presents itself to me. Those present are present to me. I am indeed in the present.

When I film an event, I am also present to it and it also presents itself to me. When I view what I have filmed, I enter into a double relationship. The film is present to me while the event is re-presented. The representation is not simply a reprise, for while the vent is present to me, I am no longer in its present. The re-presented event is missing several things. If I turn to the left or right, I encounter the limit of the frame and not the extension of the real space. IF I move my head, I do not see around objects However long a shot may be held, the continuity of time is eventually broken. What is on the screen then is a portion, a sample of what one can witness and, being so, it exerts a claim to be representative, taht is, to stand fora larger whole, even a totality.”

II. "Film is haunted by missing pieces: the before, the after, the left, the right, the top and bottom, the front and back - and more than this, the event itself, so vividly evoked, so poignantly absent. Indeed, film is in the business of manufacturing absences. Does it do anything else so powerfully?

— Notes on Representation and the Nonfiction Film - Alfred Guzzetti

#alfred guzzetti #moving image #film #photography

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