Ocular Octopus

Desktop (made with loop+)

Crazy.

(Source: littlebrownmushroom)

Why do we take pictures of iconic things that are already extensively documented? Surely nobody sees the Mona Lisa and says, “Boy, that’s some painting! I should take a picture of it!”

Design Observer: Pictures of the Familiar, by Rob Walker

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.

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 the front, the food never looks like that inside, does it? That is a fundamental lie we are sold every day. Part of the role of photography is to exaggerate, and that is an aspect that I have to puncture."

Martin Parr in an interview with the Telegraph

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 scheduled chat is Sept 13 with Larissa Leclair, founder of the Indie Photobook Library.

"Car as medium … rotating motorized camera … a series of contiguous horizontal images of buildings and the street on which they are situated … Did Ed Ruscha invent Google Street View?"

Rob Walker: Ruscha Vs. Street View: Observers Room: Design Observer

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 convention.” What was it like to look? What was it like to see the world? And how is that different from the way people photograph? This was part of my interest in snapshots. Every now and then one would come across a snapshot that had this raw, unmediated spontaneity and I wanted to use the form of the pictures to refer to that. At the same time I was also taking pictures that you would never see in a snapshot and so it plays against the form.

(Source: ninaperlman)

(via Rescuing Eliot Porter: Down the Colorado « I/Eye: On Photography)