Sunday, June 19, 2005
In the Wednesday June 8th New York Times article “Which Camera Does this Pro Use? It Depends on the Shot”, the photographer David Burnett says:
“It got to the point a few years ago that everyone in the press was using essentially the same tools…Everyone is using the same couple of Canon and Nikon digital cameras and the same three or four lenses, and it isn’t that everyone is using them in exactly the same way, but I started to notice a sameness in the look of most things I was seeing.”
I have thought the same myself for quite some time.

Wednesday, June 15, 2005
I’ve been helping my family move into their new home, and I designated myself in charge of all the old family photos that have come out of storage. My father has boxes and boxes of slides in his collection. Most of them are in remarkably good shape because they’ve been stored so well. I can’t wait to go through them all…Some of his color slides are from the late 40s and early 50s. I’ve seen plenty of black and white images from that era, but it’s startling to see it in such vivid Technicolor.
As for the prints, the older, black and white images have held up over time much better than the newer images. I think this is partly because black and white is a more archival process than color and partly because people used to use more archival materials to hold and store their photos in the 40s and 50s. So, another of my jobs is to stabilize these old albums and put the new images into archival storage.

On Monday, I went to a slide presentation at the Santa Fe Workshops, a photographic institute that models itself off of the Maine workshops. Douglas Merriman, Josh Withers, and Tony O’Brien spoke and showed their slides. They are all teaching at the workshops this week. They each might be a good teacher, but I have to say that I wasn’t that impressed with either their work or their presentations. Perhaps I expect too much, but I want at least one or two interesting, new, thoughts and startling images when I go hear a photographer speak…perhaps there were one or two… in any case, when I came home I looked through a book of paintings by Albrecht Durer to re-align my priorities.

Monday, June 6, 2005
Well, I’ve left New York for a while. I’m currently headed out West on a road trip and my internet connections are few and far between. However, in a couple of days my entries should become a little bit more regular again. Please excuse the silence.

Saturday, May 21, 2005
From Michael Jennings “Agriculture, Industry, and the Birth of the Photo-Essay in the Late Weimar Republic”

“Antlitz der Zeit (The face of our time) presents itself as a sequence of individual and group portraits arranged for the most part according to profession or station in life. Eash image appears alone, with a blank facing page, and is accompanied by a minimal description of the profession portrayed and, occasionally, by the date of the image. Sander was intensely aware of the complex structure of his volume; in one of his few comments on Antlitz der Zeit, he warned, in fact, against any overemphasis on the individual image: ‘A successful photo is only a preliminary step toward the intelligent use of photography…Photography is like a mosaic that becomes a synthesis only when it is presented en masse.’”

Sunday, May 15, 2005
I was in Washington DC for a couple of days this week. While there I stopped by the Andre Kertesz exhibit at the National Gallery.
The curators did a very nice job of organizing and writing the text for show. (I was similarly impressed with the Toulouse-Lautrec show.) It’s nice to leave an exhibit feeling you actually learned something new.
I had never before seen original prints of Kertesz’s work. Much of his early works are tiny contact prints. Kertesz didn’t have an enlarger or the money to make big prints until later in his career.
Kertesz brings a twist to his compositions that I greatly admire. His photographs are rooted in a classical geometry…but then there is always something, some shadow coming in at a diagonal, some line twisting erratically through the photo, to throw the classical off in just the right way. It’s something I’d like to see more of in my work, but I’m not convinced that it’s anything I can consciously shoot for.

Friday, May 6, 2005
A friend of mine, Christoph Bangert, got one of his photos published on the cover of the New York Times today. He is currently in Iraq.
I don’t always agree with the Times’ choice of cover images, but – yes, I am totally biased in this case – I certainly think they made a good choice today.
In fact, I was walking down the street when that cover photo caught my eye at the newsstand (which it normally doesn’t). I said to myself…"I wonder if that might not just be a photo by Bangert"…and indeed it was.
I'm proud of myself for spotting his style from so far away, but I’m much prouder of him for getting the cover and for following his passion: photography.

Tuesday, May 3, 2005
I bought a 50mm (f1.4) lens for my digital camera last week, and I’m liking it quite a bit. At last, an aperture that actually gives me some depth of field with a digital camera!! And at last, I can take pictures without that dratted distortion around the edges…of course I have to keep stepping farther back from my subject.