It's time once again for my Seriously Fun Photography class. Follow the link for more information and to register. It starts Thursday, October 11, so tell your friends.
Above: two of my students during a portraiture exercise, as photographed with my Zorki 6.
The photo of Friday's rainstorm was taken at 6:34 p.m.
The photograph above was made about 45 minutes earlier.
On the way to Kashkaval and Russian Samovar a storm broke out.
We took a bus up from midtown. The thing that always surprises me is that one minute you're in Times Square, surrounded by tourists, and then you're suddenly in the middle of a neighborhood, very specific and well-defined and with its own character.
We huddled in front of a fast food restaurant, and waited for the rain to lighten.
By the way, Russian Samovar has a blog.
Since I shot this on film previously, as I was walking in to work today I pulled out my pocket camera and made the shot above.
Here's Errol Morris doing his detective work on a little documentary photography history.
Something to look forward to: on Friday, November 9 I will be lining up at International Center of Photography for the Elliott Erwitt booksigning for his new book, Unseen.
"All book signing receptions take place at the ICP Museum Store on Friday evenings from 6:00 to 7:30 pm and feature a DJ and complimentary wine. Admission to the Museum from 5:00 to 8:00 pm is by donations."They had me at "complimentary wine."
After the talk on Lisette Model, I felt Larry Fink and the other speakers had sent me out into the world with a single idea: carrying a camera is about seeing the world and experiencing it.
On 89th I found a toilet discarded onto the curb, pulled my pocket camera out and took a few photographs. A woman walking past asked "Are you a photographer for Time Out New York?"
I said no. But there's a toilet, I told her. And I have a camera. You can't go wrong.
"Model’s edgy, indelible point of view gave rise to a portrait of the United States at all social levels, from Coney Island to Fifth Avenue. Larry Fink, Gary Schneider, Ann Thomas, and Rosalind Solomon will participate in the panel discussion, which will be moderated by William Hunt of Hasted Hunt Gallery. The New School, Tishman Auditorium, 66 West 12th Street. Free."
If you are in the Los Angeles area, don't forget to visit The Great Picture before the exhibition closes. Saturday is the last day.
An exhibition of the largest photograph ever made. At three stories high and 11stories wide, "The Great Picture" is a gelatin silver print made using a shuttered F-18 aircraft hangar blacked out to form a giant camera obscura.
Well, let's check and see what's making news in the world of photography...
Here's a story about a Nan Goldin photo.
"A Northumbria Police spokeswoman confirmed that an image of a child was removed from the exhibit and said it was being looked over by prosecutors ''to assess whether or not an offense had been committed.'' She spoke anonymously in line with force policy and declined to disclose the nature of the offense police were investigating."
Monday proved to be an interesting day, with stops in the Upper East Side, The Bronx, and Midtown. Cameras are omnipresent in New York, of course, but it's in Midtown that you see people walk to a corner, put a pocket camera in front of their face, and lean back to take in all of a famous building. Foot traffic flows around them, they carefully compose the shot, wait, wait, and finally take the shot.
At one of my gigs I'm near the Chrysler building, so you see this throughout the day. Go another block over and you see it around the front of Grand Central Terminal. And a few blocks further and it's the main sport in Times Square.
As a follow up to this, here's a snapshot from last night's subway ride.
One solution to the traditional tourist problem of shoes that hurt is to stuff a napkin into the heel of your shoe. Then just go with it. No one will notice.
Here's that new Elliott Erwitt book: Unseen.
It looks like it will be shipping in December.
This year's Lucie Awards will give a lifetime achievement award to this Blog's main inspiration, Elliott Erwitt. That is as it should be. I learned two things I wasn't aware of, however, in the blurb about Erwitt:
"In the ’80s Erwitt produced seventeen comedy and satire television programs for HOME BOX OFFICE. From the ’90s to the present he continues to lead a remarkably varied professional life encompassing many disparate aspects of photography. While actively working for magazine, industrial and advertising clients Erwitt devotes all his spare time toward creating books and exhibitions of his work destined for galleries and museums. To date he is the author of over 20 photography books and is preparing a new one titled “UNSEEN” for fall of 2007."So, now I have to go and track down all those HBO shows, and patiently await his new book....
So here's the thing: if I were a painter, it might occur to me to have two white shoes, two black shoes, a play between the idea of legs and chair legs, a confusion of space and directionality and depth and flatness, and so on.
But that fifth shoe stepping into a little pool of light -- that's photography. That's why using some kind of device to observe the real world is interesting.
(This was yesterday, at a get-together for art historians. The black shoes? Studying photo history. The white shoes? Interested in early photographic processes.)
I mentioned Kohei Yoshiyuki's "The Park" photographs last week. Today the New York Times has a serious look at them titled Sex in the Park, and Its Sneaky Spectator.
The exhibition, and the article, do a nice job of bringing up the issues of voyeurism and observational recording that seem inherent in photography.
Karen Irvine, curator of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, said Mr. Yoshiyuki’s work is important because “it addresses photography’s unique capacity for observation and implication.” She locates his work in the tradition of artists who modified their cameras with decoy lenses and right-angle viewfinders to gain access to private moments. Weegee, for example, rigged his camera to capture couples kissing in darkened New York movie theaters. Walker Evans covertly photographed fellow passengers on New York subways.A long while back I wrote about my own experience at a photo workshop photographing photographers as they took photographs.
Over on my other blog, I've posted on watching a documentary about Annie Leibovitz. Go and read it. I wanted to note here, however, a more specific and pithy criticism of the assumption that Leibovitz is our greatest living portraitist.
In the midst of endless praise for Leibovitz' work, for balance Vicki Goldberg is allowed to take a shot. While various other fawn over the Rolling Stone Magazine "concept" pictures -- Whoopi Goldberg in a milk bath, the Blues Brothers with their faces painted blue -- Goldberg says:
"These are supposed to be 'story pictures' -- but the story is one sentence long."
That's my favorite one-line critique ever.
So, as the fall season starts, I'm left to ask: where is photography at this very moment? The answer: it's very fragmented.
The classics roll on ... though it will be very interesting to see if the "blue chip" photographers continue selling in the auctions for record prices or not. The galleries roll on ... but there's no sense of any particular new movement, style or group arising. The museums roll on ... about the same as always.
Yet you can't help but notice, out of the corner of your eye, that more people are shooting more photographs than ever, and that cameras have become omnipresent. There must be change in the works ... but where is it?
