Today’s Photo Pic(k)s (No Pun Intended)
May 29th, 2009
Archive
Archive for May, 2009
Photography Post Without a Name
May 29th, 2009
This is WAY back in my teens, but there was a group who had a “song without a name” on an album. Naturally, I can’t remember who that was, but of course I remember the fact that the song was called that. Go figure. 
Yet, it seems fitting after a day like this when I’m sitting in front of my computer after a 14-hour day at my day job, knowing I need to be fostering what I LOVE to do, and unable to think of a single thing to write. Not being able to put two words that make sense together is utterly unsatisfying.
So I decided to write a few thoughts about the challenge that many of us photographers face. For whatever the reason unable to pursue what we love to do full-time, we resort to “the day job”. Which ideally can feed into other things we are great at, but inherently they will inhibit the artistic end of things. There’s “the boss”, the demands of the job itself, and the bending-over-backwards act to keep it all together.
Last year around this time I read an interview with this guy – a German photographer by the name of Hartmut Schwarzbach, who was on the short list for the 2008 Sony World photography awards.
He described the majority of the amateur photographs as “tiring and average”. My guess is that from the way he was talking, he would probably describe anybody’s work that way who isn’t pursuing photography full time, for whatever the reason. Well, Hartmut, good for you that you have the time and the backing – and success – to do what you love full time. I bet it was hard-earned. BTW, I didn’t think your photographs were all that great, either. I’m likely being sarcastic and unjust here, but so were you.
Rather than dismissing other people’s work like that (and I don’t even consider myself an amateur), what are YOU doing after realizing YOUR dream to help other people – including those kids you photographed on that dump in the Philipines – realize THEIRS? Did these guys all get a camera from you? And if that answer is “yes”, would their pictures fall into the category you so easily dismiss as “tiring and average”?
In the meantime, I’ll post some more of my stuff, if you don’t mind.
New Photos – Another Sneak Preview
May 12th, 2009
This is what I do when I don’t get to blogging. Like every good photographer, I plow through pictures. I know that makes it sound like a chore, but it’s really not. I get to play with Photoshop, pretending I’m working.
This one stood out from one of the shoots a week ago.
Friedlander Exhibit at the Akron Museum of Art
May 9th, 2009
We visited the Lee Friedlander exhibition at the Akron Museum of Art today. For those of you who don’t know this, the Museum sponsored a series of photos by Friedlander, depicting factory valleys, factories, and life around them in the late 1970s/early 1980s. The pictures we saw were all taken around 1979/1980.
In his typical fashion, while carefully composed, to the naked eye they look like snapshots. Sometimes bad snapshots. I made the rounds twice or so, until it finally hit me what makes them remarkable (yes, I AM slow sometimes). They just look like (sometimes badly composed) snapshots, but they are not. They look like photos “everyday” folks would take, and subconsciously those everyday folks might hit the subject the same way. Yet, Friedlander not only offers a lot of irony in some of them, he turns the normalcy and seeming flaws of those everyday snapshots on their head.
One photograph especially stood out to me. It shows a young man in work clothes welding. He’s got all the trimmings, down to the goggles. Yet, he leans on that table with the torch as if it were a cigarette, in the other hand he could have a beer, sweet talking to a woman at the bar. In short, the pose doesn’t fit what he’s doing, which I think was exactly Friedlander’s point.
Gotta love it. I’m still not sure what to make of the warbled branch photos in the Cleveland exhibit (see my related older post), but at least I’ve gotten this far. I think part of me is probably too pictoral. Oh well, if that’s my only fault…
