January 2012
10 posts
I'm Done Here
For more than a year I’ve been considering whether to put this blog on hiatus or give it up altogether. Since I shuttered my previous blog, Gallery Hopper, the effort I put into blogging has gotten smaller and smaller. Tumblr’s structure let me keep going with a minimum of effort while fooling myself that I was producing something useful or worthwhile.
I want to grow more as a...
Watch
Little Brown Miscellanea: Advice →
littlebrownmushroom:
From Nick Hornby in the The Believer (December, 2011):
One of the things that did me no good at all in the formative years of my career was prescriptive advice from established writers, even though I craved it at the time. You know the sort of thing: “Write a minimum of 15 drafts.” “A good…
there are no magic tricks or short cuts. Just work and work and work.
Explore Old S.F. →
heymiki:
Really slick interface for exploring old photos of San Francisco :)
The gulf between practitioner and public taste
From A Photo Editor, here’s the list of top selling photo books from 2011. Where’s Redheaded Peckerwood?
Simply Beautiful Photographs (National Geographic)
The Great LIFE Photographers (Little, Brown & Co.)
The Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton (LIFE)
One Nation: America Remembers September 11, 2001, 10 Years Later (Little, Brown & Co.)
Portraits of...
December 2011
8 posts
November 2011
10 posts
Alec Soth portrait commission on eBay « LITTLE... →
To benefit artist Brad Zellar, Alec Soth is auctioning a portrait commission on eBay. As of this writing, the session is going for $4,250 with 6 bids so far. Ends Nov 25.
“And so people produce the kind of work that they can show, they kind of work...”
– Colin Pantall’s blog: Art that sells is the destructive 1%
If you haven’t read this yet, go read it. This is what I’ve been trying to solve for myself - the narrow requirements of the gallery representation lottery - and how to make art that fits with my life rather than the...
More great photo lectures, courtesy of ahorn. →
greatleapsideways:
Daniel & Anya at ahorn magazine have just published to their blog a selection of the photography lectures that have been hosted at the Columbia College Photo Department. Invaluable crack cocaine for all you photo addicts out there. Network TV be damned!
Water in the West: Photographs from the Center for... →
(via Design Observer)
October 2011
12 posts
“the important thing is not the method but your command of the method and your...”
– Robert Adams - artforum.com / 500 words
WatchDoug Rickard, talking about “A New American Picture” for Pier 24
2012 Society for Photographic Education National... →
“Intimacy and Voyeurism: The Public/Private Divide in Photography”
March 22-25, 2012 at Hyatt Regency in SF. Sally Mann keynote. $375 for non-members is insanely affordable in comparison to fees for the sorts of marketing and design conferences I’m used to seeing as part of my day job.
“I never took it upon myself to change the world. And those contemporaries of...”
– Walker Evans, Yale Alumni Magazine, 1974
I predict a very similar outcome to Occupy Wall Street.
WatchAdobe and University of Washington train a computer to select the best candid photos from frames of video.
The Mind's Eye | MIT Technology Review →
Artist David Hockney making 18-screen video montages using tethered Canon DSLRs. On view in London through Jan 2012.
The guy is 74, so I will now stop listening to anyone who tells me they shouldn’t be expected to learn something new on account of their age.
(via Milky Blacks)
WatchDesktop (made with loop+)
September 2011
3 posts
1197 Conference. iPhoneography and Mobile... →
Is there anything more polarizing in contemporary photography than cell phone photos? (Maybe Google Street View photography.)
“1197 Conference” is a whole day of talking about it. You can attend in person in SF or via the Web. Oct 22.
Book Review: Saul Leiter: Early Color →
Interesting to see equipment site dpreview.com doing photo book reviews. Shocked to find this out-of-print book going for $250-800. Happy to have a copy on my shelf. Leiter’s work is so inspiring, a fresh vision of street photography.
“If you go to the supermarket and buy a package of food and look at the photo on...”
– Martin Parr in an interview with the Telegraph
August 2011
13 posts
#fotochat with Miki Johnson, Aug 23 (transcript) →
If you missed the tweetchat last night with Miki Johnson, here’s the transcript. We were discussing the new models available for funding photography projects, particularly emphas.is which has successfully funded a number of photojournalism and documentary photography projects. Terrific participation from the Twitter photo community and Miki was an engaging and knowledgable guest. Next...
“Car as medium … rotating motorized camera … a series of contiguous horizontal...”
– Rob Walker: Ruscha Vs. Street View: Observers Room: Design Observer
Heroes & Mentors: Stephen Shore and Gregory... →
Crewdson: Were your pictures making a commentary of any kind or was it more of a formal investigation? Shore: Any artist can deal with both content and structure at the same time and have two paths of exploration, so I think they were both going on. In formal terms I wanted to make pictures that looked—the way I put it at the time was “natural.” Today I might use: “less mediated by visual...
Brain Pickings: Photography Speaks: 150... →
I’ve been reading Photographers on Photography edited by Nathan Lyons and originally published in 1966. Photography Speaks is in a similar vein, but with contemporary voices.
When you go back, back, back into photo writing from 40, 50, 60 years ago it give you perspective. Photographers in those times struggled with all the same issues we do today, irrespective of technology. I find that...
