Recently in photography Category

I was asked recently by barb, from the Melbourne Silver Mine to answer a few questions. The answers are now posted on their blog, check it out, thanks again to barb and the Melbourne Silver Mine for the opportunity.

An essay from, AMERICANSUBURB X

[From "Perfect Uncertainty - Robert Adams and the American West (2002)"]

My admiration of Mr. Adams is well known by those who know me well enough, this essay I stumbled upon on AMERICANSUBURB X is yet another glimpse at Mr Adams creative output adding to the already impressive body of written work about him that exists. It is just a pity it took me 8 years to find this one. Something that I've now come to take for granted is the speed and frequency of readily available information out there on my favourite subject Art Photography. Obviously this wasn't the case in 2002.

I was disappointed, that I missed, buying the Canon G10 in 2008, I hunted high and low for it in late 2009, to no avail. I purchased the G11 early this year and, I'm much happier anyway. Noise levels are reduced in this model, according to the specs and the banter on forums like dpreview.com

[From Canon Camera Museum | Camera Hall - Digital Compact Cameras]

Unfortunately due to the awful lighting conditions this time of year, I've not been able to shoot a great deal, to really get some results from it.

Interesting too, note that Canon, list it in the “Museum;” already?

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

This is a screen grab from iView Media Pro, it shows I have 108 images from 2009, queued up for upload,to flickr. My 2008 file has 34 also awaiting upload to flickr. Making a total of 142 images. Based on a loose regime of 3 images uploaded a week I have 47 weeks worth of images to upload. This is only counting my phone-camera, there are a few from my Nikon Coolpix 3700 and my Vistaquest to upload as well.

As I head into my 5th year of using flickr, looking back things have changed, changed dramatically. When I first started using flickr, I would upload almost daily, and spend innumerable hours connecting with all the other great people I'd 'meet'. Now, I have to remember to upload and some weeks it takes me so long to pick, which images to add, to keep the flow happening in my stream, I give up and leave it for a few days. Fortunately the altfotonet group still has some outstanding stuff, as does several others, where some cross posting occurs. Other changes to my online activity come from external sources like twitter and facebook. Now if I could just find a way to get paid for all my online activity?

Some Great news for the festival created by Jeff Moorfoot

The Ballarat International Foto Biennale [BIFB] has just been accepted for membership into the Festival de la Luz or Festival of Light [FOL], a grouping of 32 festivals of photography worldwide, including some of the biggest and most important similar events on 5 continents. The announcement was made in Buenos Aires by FOL Director and Director General of the Argentina Festival ‘Enceuntros Abiertos’ Ms Elda Harrington.
Ballarat is the first Australian photography festival to be accepted as a member festival, following the hugely successful BIFB’09 in September, and membership gives recognition to the impact that such a young festival has already made on the international photography stage. The application for Ballarat to join was proposed by BIFB board member Senga Peckham at the FOL directors meeting in Paris in November, and was considered along with applications by festivals from Luxembourg and Turin by the directors of 15 festivals which make up the FOL executive. The BIFB received a unanimous 15 votes for admission while Luxembourg was also accepted as a new member with 13 votes.

[From BALLARAT PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL JOINS WORLD GROUP @ free radical]

Read more

Larry Sultan, California Photographer, Dies at 63
By RANDY KENNEDY
Published: December 14, 2009
Larry Sultan, a highly influential California photographer whose 1977 collaboration, “Evidence” — a book made up solely of pictures culled from vast industrial and government archives — became a watershed in the history of art photography, died on Sunday at his home in Greenbrae, Calif. He was 63.

[read on Larry Sultan, California Photographer, Dies at 63 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com]

I have to admit, I've not seen much of Mr. Sultan's work, but the little I had has stuck in my mind, another book to add to my collection I guess.

Thanks to Nettsu a contact on twitter, I was pointed to this article about the benefits of film. It is a good read and given my own background in film photography, made plenty of sense.

Way back in 2003 I wrote an article on the issue of film versus digital. Back then cameras, where prohibitively expensive, and digital storage was far more expensive than it is today. Photoshop of course, was the, mostly widely used application used to open and edit photographs on a computer, in some cases the only application. RAW files were yet to be part of the mainstream.

Raw files and new applications for sorting and editing photographs aside things haven't changed that much. Making a good image still requires a modicum of understanding about, lenses, light, at the minimum, making a print either digitally or via analogue requires it's own skill set, making a body of work, requires another skill-set, that has no bearing on technique or the ability to understand how your camera works. Making prints and using cameras are skills with a plethora of manuals [10,723 Results on Amazon today alone] available to anyone with enough interest in the medium to buy a handful of books and get access to the machinery to do this. Creating a body of work can often be done in isolation, or done in a more formal manner through training in a fine art degree program. Learning to 'pre-visualise in photography can be both learnt and taught, but is I feel the most difficult part of the process to really master.

Many of the points alluded to in the article above by Ken Rockwell, assume you have mastered the craft of photography, something that can be quite expensive to learn as a beginner in photography, and this is where digital shines over film, I feel. Making mistakes is the quickest and easiest way to learn the basics of exposure and composition. Making mistakes with film, on the other hand can cost a lot of time and wasted effort, if you haven't already mastered your camera craft. Finally the biggest issue I had with Mr Rockwell's article, was he seemed to sometimes refer to colour neg and other times colour slide, or positive film, two films with vastly different exposure latitudes, and some of his points were invalid if you used negative film as reading a colour neg over a light box, requires considerably more skill and knowledge than a slide film, which is simply a positive of the scene as taken.

So, here's a new table of the pros and cons of digital over film, based on my own experience of teaching camera craft, and using a variety of film cameras since the early 1980's, and digital cameras since the mid to late 1990's.

I do however agree that digitial has it's place in industries like catalogue photography fashion, and photo-journalism.

It seems I'm not the only person concerned about what will happen to photo-book publishing in the future? The good folks over at, Resolve, LIVE BOOKS BLOG, have started an online collaboration that looks at the future of the photobook.

Pop in add your 2¢

From where I sit, there will be online publications such as cod magazine, who most likely will exist as pure online entities. Publicationss like, RMIT's second nature, will offer both online and hardcopy, as I will with several of my own future projects, I already have two e-books available for download.

Polapremium, sends out a weekly e-mail. This week's really caught my eye. In particular, this line;

In order to shorten the waiting period until the premiere of our new Impossible film,

The impossible film project has been burbling along now quite nicely for some time, in an attempt to resurrect film for vintage Polaroid cameras, now we finally have a a timeframe to look forward to. Hurry up please Polaroid project , I know many many folks here in Oz, who are very keen to buy some film.

Recently found this site via a e-mail, and noticed it was geared towards, the US, the UK and Europe only? Is there no interest in the Australian or Asian art market?

Is there not enough entrepernurail interest to try and set up something similar, and yes I'm aware of Red Bubble, but this site focuses on fine art prints, Red Bubble covers all manner of visual arts.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Chatting with a peer in Darwin who has just completed their Honours Year, made me dig up my own Masters project, which I completed in 2002. At the end of the project is a series of notes I added post production, here's one I'd like to share.

“A fine print is the culmination of a complex sequence which begins with the recognition of the visual event. To produce such a print, the photographer must make a negative that is properly exposed in relation to the pre-visualised image...This sense of fine, almost unseen, detail and clarity allows the viewer to experience subtle differences in reality. Each viewer brings to the photograph their own personal sensitivities and the “fine print” allows the viewer to more easily intuit the connections existing between the viewer, the photographer and the photograph”
Gordon Hutchins
pg 7
“The Book of Pyro “
Bitter Dog Press
1992

Publication - Produced by street photographers for street photographers

[Produced in London, UK by Nick Turpin Publishing

• Aims to publish the best Street Photography we can find
• Consists of an illustrated color booklet of essays and articles accompanied by twenty-two unbound prints
• Has a different theme for each edition
• Is open to suggestions and submissions
• Is self financing and contains no advertising, your purchase contributes directly to the next edition

Publication - Produced by street photographers for street photographers]

It will be interesting to see how this pans out, I like the idea of financing the publication through the photographers buying the mag themselves.

16 October 2009 – 4 April 2010
Photography Gallery, Level 3
Free entry

[In 1967, the NGV established the first separate curatorial Department of Photography in an Australian art gallery and since that time we have delivered a continuous program of exhibitions and publications featuring the rich history of photography. The heart of our activities is based on the permanent collection which now numbers over 15,000 photographs, of which 3,000 works are by international artists. This year marks the 40th anniversary of our first acquisitions to the collection and, as such, it is timely to ‘re-view’ what has been achieved. National Gallery of Victoria]

read on...

I will be visiting this exhibition over the coming months I hope to use it for some inspiration in at least blogging, we shall see.

Revisiting a favourite bookshop, in Daylesford, I recently returned with several gems of books. Jo Spence's Autobiographical treatise on herself and her photography [Putting Myself in the Picture: A Political, Personal and Photographic Autobiography], and 1999 exhibition catalogue of William Wegman's work.

While I have yet to pick up the Jo Spence book, my last reading would have been whilst at University, I did have a read of the Wegman catalogue. I was very surprised to read that he began his creative career as a painter sculptor and conceptual/experimental artist. Wegman picked up photography out of convenience, to document his art work, while also experimenting with video. His art works, in the early days were fleeting and ephemeral, thus photography proved the work existed.

Slowly his attention shifted to the way images could be made that questioned the nature of the document created, till eventually all his work became photographic while still proudly displaying his surreal and conceptual roots. The work featured in the catalogue is at times funny, and others deadly serious. His dogs feature only briefly towards the end of the catalogue. The time this work was being made? In the 1970's.

It's fortuitous or perhaps, disastrous that the 2 books surfaced AFTER I submitted some work for publication in 2nd Nature, published by RMIT. As being able to refer back to these early pioneers of 'documentary photography' would have helped bolster my argument about the my use of photography, with my mobile phone, in this day and age of wireless networks and mobile computing.

"Man is the actual medium of expression not the tool he elects to use as a means. Results alone should be appraised; the way in which these are achieved is of importance only to the maker. To the extent that the completed work realizes depth of understanding, uniqueness of viewpoint and vitality of presentation, will the spectator respond and participate in the original experience. This premise, restricting too personal and therefore prejudiced interpretation, leads to revolution---the fusion of an inner and outer reality derived from the wholeness of life sublimating things seen into things known."

From "A Contemporary Means to Creative Expression, by Edward Weston,"
The Art of Edward Weston (1932, p.7)

Taken from; the Frederick Sommer Website

His style and approach has been a major influence on my work and methods.

I guess I'm not the only one who has an interest in arcane imagery such as this one post of on this is not cod by Annene

Check List

Frederick Sommer often used found articles and books in his work, and they are as intriguing and beautiful as any art object could hope to be. Perhaps while in Ballarat this weekend, I'll find something worth buying and using in an appropriation ideas, who knows?

Flickr has introduced a new feature, allowing each person to take another's work and "curate' it into a cyber-show all on it's own. The implications are far reaching, I for one am excited, _barb_ has an example of a great series of street photography.

Eastman House is not only re-running the New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape, from 1975; but this exhibition, entitled, Nature as Artifice: New Dutch Landscape in Photography and Video Art

The description “Dutch landscape” may evoke an idyllic vision reminiscent of Dutch landscape paintings, but today the Netherlands is known for its planned, manipulated landscape. In the last two decades a number of Dutch photographers and filmmakers have taken contemporary Dutch landscape and nature as their point of departure. George Eastman House presents a major survey of this new work, titled Nature as Artifice: New Dutch Landscape in Photography and Video Art, on view June 13 through Aug. 16. It is a companion show to the Eastman House summer exhibition New Topographics, originally mounted in 1975, illustrating the profound influence of that exhibition on the generations that have followed.

The tyranny of distance lingers.

I follow Photojojo on twitter, they claim something, I've been suspecting all along, the most commonly used camera on flickr, is no longer a DSLR. No surprises for me, but what strikes me as the most intriguing is,

"Now that many of our phones have cameras that take photos that really are good enough for most situations, and our capacity to take photos (without worry for film cost or memory space) is nearly limitless, expect our usage of photography to continue to shift in this direction — from dedicated cameras to always-present devices. From special occasions, to everyday documentation."

We have reached a certain point here in the history of western art, where history seems to be somewhat insignificant, or perhaps less significant. My training in the arts, had a heavy emphasis on what had gone before it [In all the arts]. The path was/is to an extent linear, but not in a mathematical/chronological sense. The great/new artists of the past, tried/explored/created something that had not been seen/heard before; more importantly though 'borrowing' and sometimes even outright theft was not uncommon, that, 'theft' was then re-invented.

Now we are so far down this slightly linear path albeit curved, twisted, and modulating, path that Modernist Art History is hardly taught at art school.

We can give beginners directions about how to use a compass, we can tell them stories about our exploration of different but possibly analogous geographies, and we can bless them with our caring, but we cannot know the unknown and thus make sure a path to real discovery"¹

What then for young people starting out? Who do they emulate, copy ridicule; other post modernists? Any wonder few people feel they understand modern art.

For me, part of this whole history of art, was the materials, concepts, & techniques explored by all artists, often in combination of all three. Not like the idea alone, as Duchamp said:-
"I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products"²
However; for some myself included, it is difficult to reconcile the quality of brush strokes, in a Caravaggio to the day to day rumblings/ramblings of my own highly digitalised life. Image making in particular using a camera, has become a single point perspective about the moment. Millions worldiwde are participating. With so many 'creators' is anyone a 'consumer', should there be, will there ever be again, does there need to be?

Part of the difficulty in trying to be both an artist and a business person is this: You make a picture because you see something that is beyond price; then you are to turn and assign to your record of it some cash value. If the selling is not necessarily a contradiction of the truth in the picture, it so close to being a contradiction—and the truth is always in shades of grey—that you are worn down by the threat.³

If 'art' is materials, processes, concepts, techniques, how then does digital photography one of the least tactile processes known in the history of art, fit in to this equation? Given that the process of Digital photography is even more removed from the average person's ability to control and manipulate results to match their own emotions and ideas does this make it less of an art-form. Or does it? Photographic prints are still able to be manipulated to match vision and emotion, by more people more easily and more often than in the history of the medium so far. But do people want to, how many stories can be told ultimately? Stories that are expressed iin a unique way; exploiting medium's unique characteristics?

For me Digital photography, is the most cerebral it has ever been. It far more removed from the tactile wet process than many imagine, music too has always been non-tactile, in the sense of appreciating it and responding to it. Therefore being non-tactile like, music, does this make digital photography more art like, only with it's own rules in terms of speed.

In my own mind, I keep coming back to speed; digital almost instant, comparatively speaking. For many it is the 'act' of making an image that is paramount, eg barb, and pw-pix. Caravaggio had no say in the idea of speed, each brush stroke was deliberate and carefully considered.

For digital photography to real art, modern art, it needs to be freed from the constraints of it's birth and development in the last century, it needs to embrace the speed and connectivity that the internet allows, the culture jamming that is being conducted out there as well as loose any connection to the idea that it alludes to truth, or evidence.⁴

References

1. Roberts Adams, 'Why People Photograph' ISBN 0-89381-597-7, pg 39,
2. thinkexist.com
3. Roberts Adams, 'Why People Photograph' ISBN 0-89381-597-7, pg 43
4. For a more detailed and complex exploration of this idea, see Fred Ritchin's 'After Photography' ISBN 978-0-393-050240

Getting organised for the collection of Broadcast Media, using my eyeTV, and g5, I decided my archived CDs needed re-organising, it turns out I've been using a digital camera of some shape or form since 1999, 10 years folks, 10 years! I've been scanning longer of course, but as negatives, they need not be archived via CD. If you count 1998 as my start year in serious photography, this means over half of my time making images have been spent using a digital camera!

Of course 1/2 way though 2008, I got my 'DET leased' laptop that actually has a DVD burner, so that'll slow things down.

Not sure where external drives are going to fit into the equation, nor 'the cloud'.

This just in in my inbox.

PolaPremium is more than delighted and proud to announce the opening of the very first pure PolaPemium Shop in Berlin. This is our first step into the challenge of presenting our beloved analogue products not only online at PolaPremium.com, but offline as well. On our continuing mission to celebrate the magic of instant photography, we take our first baby-steps to develop and build a worldwide network of selected authorised PolaPremium partners. The new shop in Berlin is the shining starting point of our offline adventures and based on the experiences we collected and will collect there, we will soon start to search for more retailers and partners all over the world. So please stay tuned.

Things are looking up for Polaroid products, eh.

Currently testing a new camera for work.

Current list of likes at the moment:

• two, yes 2 types of histogram available, being a 2 mere button presses away
• fast, AND quiet
• thumb-wheel at the back of the body for aperture and separate one for shutter at front of camera, can be used to over and under expose in Av & Tv modes
• simple menu set up
• weight/feel, this is a real camera.

• focusing/focus lock, I had to read the manual to work out how to use it, not bad, but not good in my opinion.
• Lens, light and plastic feeling, focus seems too, touchy and fine, crucial at wide aperture.

After using the camera on and off, over the last few weeks, I'm very impressed, it seems simple to use and operate, I guess if I had some spare cash, I'd buy one. When trying to make some teaching aids for a class about exposure I did notice however some differences between [in density] 1.8 and the other apertures I used, but never got to the bottom of it.

Two Years; today:-

One Year today:-

It's been a while since I did this.

It's no coincidence that I uploaded 2 mophone shots. Looking at my 'organiser' on flickr, I see a few shots, around April 2007, where I remember beginning to think about using a phonecam in a more concentrated and excuse the pun focused way.

But the real reason I did this today I feel, is because I picked one of my books of Robert Adams' essays, and felt inspired to look back and see where I've been and think where I could possibly go.

In the past I have talked at length about why, what and how I do what I do, Mr Adams, sums it up far more succinctly than I ever could.§

*Attention only to perfection, however, invites eventually for urban viewers — which means most of us — a crippling disgust; our world is in most places far from clean. Photographs that suggest an Arcadian landscape are recognisable from the city dweller's perspective as partial visions, and they make us uneasy. We feel defencelessness against what we will encounter on the street. How can trees in a National Park save us from the concrete-and-glass brutalities of a BIG city? The answer is, in simple emotional terms at least, that they cannot; to be reminded of the trees makes city streets seem worse.

*page 104, 'Beauty in Photography Essays in Defence of Traditional Values'

§ The actual place names have been changed/removed, to better contextualise it, both were recognisable as American.

• "Beauty in Photography, Essays in Defense of Traditional Values"
• Why People Photograph

Completely unfashionable in today's post modern world, but an ongoing inspiration for me no less.

This is my favorite quote regarding, the job I do to pay the bils.

"We can give beginners directions, about how to use a compass,we can tell them stories about our exploration of different but possibly analogous geographies, and we can bless them with our caring, but we cannot know the unknown and thus make sure the path to real discovery"¹

¹ Page 39, Why People Photograph.

How quickly we forget... how quickly.

The Victoria & ALbert Museum in London has a wonderful photography collection, when I was in London in 2004 I visited the gallery, looks like I need to to return, who says the tyranny of distance doesn't exist?

At least there is a slide show.

I like that The Met's Website, offers extensive background material on their artists too, along with a wealth of other information that is relative. Including a historical timeline

Postcards and books I've always found interesting, there's something delightful about an image designed to sit on your fridge, or just dash off a quick note to friends elsewhere.