da capo, with feeling @johnkilbane - Tumblr Blog

Brooklyn

#hostile architecture #hostile design #nyc

Kingston, NY

John Gossage

“I’m more interested in narrative in relation to the kind of things I photograph, things that almost can’t be called narrative. I often describe my first book The Pond as ‘narrative landscape’: you step off the pavement into the unpaved area, you wander around a bit and then you go home. I think simple stories are sometimes more seductive than complicated ones which can get lost. The running order of a number of projects I’ve done is virtually narrative: you start here and you end here and certain things happen in between.”

Image Copyright John Gossage, from The Pond

#johngossage #photography #photobooks

SUSAN LIPPER

“Starting a project could be seen as entering into unknown territory and hopefully embracing something bigger than oneself, most likely something in or pertaining to the world. Also, it is a mixture of making conscious decisions while drawing upon essential innate material. That innate material being derived from - affected by- a combination of life-experience, cultural-conditioning, past readings, other art appreciation, and finally the unconscious visual ticks that make us ourselves.”

Image copyright Susan Lipper, from the book Domesticated Land (Mack, 2018).

Text qtd. from here

#Susan Lipper

John Gossage

Every photograph has a distinct unit. To connect photographs as some sort of narrative is simply conceit of both the photographer and the viewer. All I can say about these particular photographs, is that they are certainly previous and elsewhere. (from his book, The Absolute Truth)

#gossage #photography #photobooks

ADAM BARTOS

The character of surfaces as well, and in particular, how age or newness affects how things look in the present. I like to champion objects and spaces that I think are not fully seen on some level, and that speak to me. The UN project and the Kosmos projects are both worlds that I felt like I could possess in some way. To me, these places felt as if they had been made to be photographed in color and it had not been done. Also, while the UN building and the Russian space program are symbolic spaces, the references we bring to them have changed over time, as they became relics of discarded aspirations. So in that sense, I’m examining the past, or reorganizing it for myself because I find these places beautiful.

Images copyright Adam Bartos, from Kosmos

#photography

MICHAEL SCHMIDT

From my point of view, my pictures are autonomous; they don’t have any direct relation to what is happening out there, but only show you the idea of what photography is. That is to say, there is no direct comparison with the outside world; a new world has been created instead. There still is a reference within the images themselves: photography thrives on the fact that it has once had a counterpart.

quoted in Natur vs Nutur by Tim Carpenter @thisissausage

#michaelschmidt #photography

ANTHONY HERNANDEZ

Most people in LA never see its river. Going over a bridge, they look down and see nothing but concrete with a bit of water in the middle. The idea is that you have to find it—and you have to walk to discover what’s there.

RICHARD POWERS

Because the lens works so much more quickly and permanently than the eye, the result surprises even the photographer in its particulars: “That sign to the left on the building -- I hadn’t noticed that.” Because the process mixes mechanical control with the surprise of light, and because the product mixes technical exactitude with veiling and distortion, the viewer’s response is a cross between essayistic firmness -- “this, then, the dossier, the facts”-- and the invitation of fiction -- “What can we make of it?”

Richard Powers, Three Farmers on Their Way to A Dance p. 253

#photography

JOSEPH BARTSCHERER/JAMES WELLING

JB I chose subjects that seemed to have their own built-in stories, and I would take that story for granted in the same way that Melville, once he had the plot laid out, took the hunt for the white whale for granted, and could then play against it with the more fragmentary parts of the work. In the same way, Walker Evans took the circumstances of the Great Depression and the remnants of the Old South almost as a photographic set against which he could play his contemporary observations that often had nothing to do, topically, with either subject. His picture of Allie Mae Burroughs can just as plausibly be construed as a picture about a certain erotic tension, or the relationship of youth to age, as it can be read as a picture about a woman caught in the historical flux of the Great Depression—

JW What you’re saying is that when something is released from narrative obligations, then narrative returns in a different guise. JB The narrative is a pre-existing web, not something that exists because I’ve made the pictures. I don’t tell the story of Mattawa, I more or less take that as something you’ll imagine. Or in Construction you sort of know what it is to make a building, and you’ll bring that to the picture of a dead concrete wall with the ghosts of the plywood form pressed into it, so a picture of the impression of plywood on concrete comes to be a picture about the invention of an edifice. The individual images become invested with the metaphoric life of their backstories. The play of backstory against present observation becomes the life and dynamic of these pieces, and of a great deal of work I admire.

Quoted from BOMB Magazine

[Italics mine - JK]

#photography

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

da capo, with feeling