Thursday, September 8, 2005
There is a Martin Parr retrospective up at La Maison de la Photographie in Paris. It brings together his work from the 70s through the present. By the end of the show I couldn’t help noticing how thoroughly grounded Parr is in community. He shoots from within a situation. It’s a different perspective from that of the New York documentary tradition – which I feel tends to view the world from the outside, rather than the inside.

Saturday, August 27, 2005
I must apologize. It has been a month since my last entry. I blame in on the summertime.
Don’t worry, this blog is still active and I’ll be posting more soon.

Friday, July 29, 2005
While going through old family papers I came across a sweet little book called The Happy Valley; The Elegant Eighties in Upstate New York by Pauline Dakin Taft, with photographs by Leonard Dakin. Leonard’s photographs were taken in the 1880s in and around Cherry Valley, New York – a small town not far away from Cooperstown. The images show the summer amusements – tennis, picnics, music, carriage rides – of young people of that era. The text elaborates on the photographs with tales of family lore, regional history and the customs of respectable Victorian life. It’s an excellent little books, and I’m thrilled that it’s now mine.

My favorite passage follows:
“The minister’s wife, Mrs. Swinnerton, who watched Mrs. Woodburn’s needs closely, doubtless did the most for her. One day Mrs. Woodburn conceived the idea of giving a dinner party to all those who had been so kind to her. Mrs. Swinnerton went in to help her prepare it and found her, with Tarzy [the maid] excitedly hovering over, composing a dessert from the innumerable little souvenir boxes of wedding cake she had saved over the past fifty years! These she was blending together with some of Mrs. Cox’s excellent homemade elderberry wine into a never-to-be-forgotten pudding. ‘This I got when Katherine was married,’ said she, indicating a certain dried-up morsel. (Katherine had been married some thirty years before.) ‘And this piece came from you own dear mother’s wedding!’
Mrs. Woodburn’s deep Victorian sense of the proprieties led her to separate her cats, the male from the female. The gentlemen lived in the barn, the ladies on the upper floor in her house. Since neither group was allowed any liberty, her house was sometimes referred to as ‘the nunnery’.
It is said that since Mrs. Woodburn’s death, on windy nights cats can be heard crying near her house.”

Tuesday, July 26, 2005
So, call me behind the times, but, for the first time, I made one of those little, bound, photo-books on Shutterfly. I got the completed book in the mail today. I like it a lot! The book I made was of a road trip my mother and I took from DC to Santa Fe. I like it a lot better than all those huge photo albums I used to put together...

Secondly, I want to talk a little bit about Mathew Brady since I just read a book about him, but unfortunately I don’t have anything particularly profound to say. The only thing I can think of is this: that Brady was in truth the first photographer in that venerable lineage of New York documentary photographers. He is the Adam of that line. Of course, he, in turn, descends from a history of portrait painters, and now I need to learn more about them.

Tuesday, July 19, 2005
A friend just send me this. I don’t know where it is from:

"The debate over photography rages on...
This test only has one question, but it's a very important one. By giving an honest answer, you will discover where you stand morally. The test features an unlikely, completely fictional situation in which you will have to make a decision. Remember that your answer needs to be honest, yet spontaneous. Please scroll down slowly and give due consideration to each line.

You are in Florida, Miami to be specific. There is chaos all around you caused by a hurricane with severe flooding. This is a flood of biblical proportions. You are a photojournalist working for a major newspaper and you're caught in the middle of this epic disaster. The situation is nearly hopeless. You're trying to shoot career-making photos. There are houses and people swirling around you, some disappearing under the water. Nature is unleashing all of its destructive fury.
Suddenly you see a man floundering in the water. He is fighting for his life, trying not to be taken down with the debris. You move closer ... somehow the man looks familiar. You suddenly realize who it is. It's George W. Bush! At the same time you notice that the raging waters are about to take him under ... forever. You have two options - you can save the life of G.W. Bush or you can shoot a dramatic Pulitzer Prize winning photo, documenting the death of one of the world's most powerful men.
So here's the question, and please give an honest answer:

Would you select high contrast color film, or would you go with the classic simplicity of black and white?"

Monday, July 11, 2005
Well, the photo fair was an interesting experience, but not a financial gain. This was in part because they set up the booths near the convention center and far away from the central plaza. As a result, most of the “customers” were other photographers, not tourists interested in buying art. The other problem was that I didn’t have any cheap, ink jet, postcard-ish things for people to buy, just original prints. Most of the other photographers who sold anything sold such, small, cheaper reproductions. Ah well, I had some interesting conversation.

Sometimes I find a passage that seems to sum up and pull together all the threads of my thoughts. I then wonder if my ideas are original at all or if they are simply the unwritten subtext of all I read.

W. G. Sebald, “The Rings of Saturn”
“On the desk, which was both the origin and the focal point of this amazing profusion of paper, a virtual paper landscape had come into being in the course of time, with mountains and valleys. Like a glacier when it reaches the sea, it had broken off at the edges and established new deposits all around on the floor, which in turn were advancing imperceptibly towards the center of the room…In the end Janine was reduced to working from an easychair drawn more or less into the middle of her room where, if one passes her door, which was always ajar, she could be seen bent almost double scribbling on a pad on her knees or sometimes just lost in thought. Once when I remarked that sitting there amidst her papers she resembled the angel in Durer’s Melancholia, steadfast among the instruments of destruction, her response was that the apparent chaos surrounding her represented in reality a perfect kind of order, or an order which at least tended towards perfections. And the fact was that whatever she might be looking for amongst her papers or her books, or in her head, she was generally able to find right away.”

Thursday, July 7, 2005
This week I’ve been busy getting ready for Photo Arts, Santa Fe – which is this weekend. I'm one of a group of about thirty photographers displaying their work in booths near Santa Fe’s central plaza. This is the first time I’ve ever participated in an “art street fair,” so I’m curious to see how it goes. I’m crossing my fingers in the hopes that I’ll sell enough prints to cover the cost of my expenses in putting my booth together.
While I have confidence in my work, it isn’t necessarily the type of thing that most people buy to put up on their wall. In any case, I threw in a few landscapes to even out the odds…
I’ll leave this entry at that today – otherwise I’ll either start talking about current events or recent movies I’ve seen; Both of which are a bit off topic.

Tuesday, July 5, 2005
Yesterday morning the city of Santa Fe held a pancake breakfast in the central plaza. To celebrate the Forth of July they also had a vintage car show, craft booths and live music. I attended, of course, in order to wander around and snap pictures of people. I don’t know yet how the shots turned out since I still have to develop the film, but I have a feeling that they will either be very good or very bad…perhaps that’s just wishful thinking and they’ll just be mediocre, which would actually be very bad...
I love those kinds of events. Everyone knows they are on display so they have no problem with the odd photographer taking pictures of them rather than of the entertainments. Indeed, half the people there are hoping you’ll notice them – dressed in their red, white and blue hats, T-shirts, and shooting star headbands. At first I just wandered through the scene taking the odd shot here and there, but my preferred strategy for the day was to chose a spot where I liked the lighting and wait for the people to move in and out of it – as they inevitably did.

Friday, July 1, 2005
I was in California for a few days last week. As some of you may know, I used to live out there, but I hadn’t been back for over four years. I found in California the perfect combination of familiarity and disassociation. I could get really excited about spending some time photographing there, sometime. I like seeing everything anew. I wonder what will happen when New York looks that way to me?

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.