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from The World’s a Mess, and It’s All Your Fault
“My feeling in my heart a sympathy for the poor does not change the life of the poor,” our narrator unsurprisingly says toward the play’s conclusion. At least Mr. Shawn displays a self-knowledge to match his narrator’s when he has him continue, “And artists who create works of art that inspire sympathy and good values don’t change the life of the poor.”
Form Conscientious
the kind of stuff you'd expect from a toddler who has just entered the phase where he or she is saying "dirty" words to get reactions out of people and for some reason knows how to take photos.
Descent
Copyright 2007 Ron Diorio
From Reality Check for a Generation That Knows Best
Revolutionaries turn reactionary once they seize control; the generation that prided itself on freedom and nonconformity keeps Generations X and Y walking behind it in lock step, weaned on reruns of “M*A*S*H” and remakes of “Charlie’s Angels” and each new lunar phase of Madonna. Like the youngest children in a large family, the post-boom generations are living on hand-me-down pop culture, and don’t seem to mind.
From Crazy Love
“My New York is a small place,” he said. “It’s not Fifth Avenue. It’s not the Thanksgiving Day Parade. It’s people in gray, and it’s working class people. It’s a different New York, and it always was. ”
From Robin Good
"To me the great hope is that now these little 8mm video recorders and stuff have come out, some... just people who normally wouldn't make movies are going to be making them, and - you know - suddenly, one day, some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart - you know - and? make a beautiful film with her little father's camera...corder - and for once the so-called professionalism about movies will be destroyed. Forever. And it will really become an art form.
That's my opinion."
Francis Ford Coppola
From Notes from nowhere
Having spent a considerable part of my life in editing, both photography and text, I do believe in the grueling necessity of it. This obviously includes my own photography. The editing may be even more important than taking the images in the first place. I am convinced that no matter how good you may be, if you choose the wrong images, the result will be mediocre at best. Hence, although I have edited roughly two million images of other people over the past ten years, I don’t ever do the final edit of my own work - you just can’t edit your own images with a 100 percent success rate. But you can choose people who are good at it (and avoid those who are not).
I am looking for a an editor to work with, so if you are out there .... call home
Mindy McAdams reports on an interview with Rob Finch of A photo a day and she quotes him:
There are two specific camps of people in our still picture world. There are people who love photography and there are people who love to tell stories. People who love photography only for the act of photography might have some trouble in the future assuming they want to work at a media outlet.
I think that photography by its own nature is very "elastic" in practice. For image driven news media that elastcity is an opportunity to diversify the use of photography. The challenge is being very transparent about what is illustrative and what is documentary.
from the NY Times Anywhere the Eye Can See, It’s Likely to See an Ad
“We never know where the consumer is going to be at any point in time, so we have to find a way to be everywhere,” said Linda Kaplan Thaler, chief executive at the Kaplan Thaler Group, a New York ad agency. “Ubiquity is the new exclusivity.”
In Quantity has a quality all of its ownv Davin McHenry writes:
I joined a Yahoo email group recently the focuses on newspaper video. The group seems to be mostly photography staffers hashing out how to add video to their websites. What struck me was how most folks seemed to be centered on buying high-end video equipment and expensive and complicated editing packages. The goal seems to bring documentary-quality video to newspapers, mostly in the hands of photographers-turned-videographers.And I just don’t see how that’s going to work.
A bit of disclosure here. At Bakersfield.com we’ve taken a decidedly low-fi approach to video. Ninety percent of our video is shot by reporters and 99 percent is shot with point and shoot , consumer-grade cameras. With our staff (~24 reporters) and our equipment (2-3 cameras) we’ve been able to shoot and edit 600+ videos this past year. We’re averaging about 700-800 views per day in recent months.
If we had taken the opposite approach and focused entirely on our photo staff I think the flow would have been significantly lower. I imagine we would have had, at best, 2-3 videos per week, rather than per day.
I don’t see how you build a daily audience with that kind of content flow. Especially given the nature of online video.
I contributed this to a conversationon on Art & Perception
My old Nikon FM collects dust on my dresser becuase the digital darkroom transformed what I had come to know as photography. It moved me from picture taking to image making. Now the only real "photographic" moment is the end stage of the manufacturing process when a Digital C-print is pulled. For me it has been important to have the "photographic" in the making of the object while disregarding the "photographic" in the image making process. So in a traditional sense, for me, there's not much photography in my process to enjoy.
What I do enjoy is where image making intersects with storytelling - you frame the world - frame a point of view. In some ways "view finder" better describes what it is. The really emancipating thing has been to find/seek/uncover the authentic - the essence of the emotional connection in the image without the "view" being my truth or something close to me. I'm always chasing that both in my own work and when I'm looking at other's work.
When I first posted on Fotolog in June 2003, I called my page "A photographic imagination". I had just read Sontag's On Photography and I wanted to put a marker down that these images should not be viewed as documents - they were manipulated and as such the images were not representative but representational.
I was also beginning to undestand how pixel based display was a great democratizer - all these screen images were made of the same substance. A Picasso painting, a DaVinci drawing, a deep space image form the Hubble Telescope or an Ansel Adams photograph were certainly different objects in the real world but on the screen they were just a collection of pixels. The playing field was leveled, the image content would be judged on it's own aesthetic and against every other image that could be displayed. The eye would decide.
From the start I wanted to give people something to think about - but not as a message or a lesson or a meaning. I think I lacked the confidence to articulate that early on. But it is there like the manipulation is as part of my whole apporach. I want the viewer active to "look into the image" rather than just looking at the image.
I am not an equipment geek. If the device captures images without a flash, has a memory card I can read and a charged battery I'd probably use it. I don't need a perfect capture, I want to make a capture perfect. I need raw materials so I "harvest" images, hundreds per day. I'll capture till I drain my battery. I hardly look at the LCD when I am shooting, I try never to stop moving. I capture everything at. low res 640 x 480. I have lost any connection to the preciousness of any individual snap.
I use Flickr to post my images because it is a distribution point and provides a publication platform and an audience. I want an audience. Of course this serves two masters because I can move easliy from presenter to an audience to being part of the audience.
At the point where I was searching for a way of working - first Fotolog and then Flickr gave me a daily production and publishing structure and a format to see a body of work developing.
It allows me to be prolific without purpose and organically find threads in the work. The dark side is that there is such a need to get the next image - almost an obligation. I realize this is a product of my own need for immediate gratification. I tend to ration the published images to one per day. The sheer volume of images posted on both of these services is a stark reminder of how insignificant any single image can be. It is quite intimidating.
I am always surprised by what people connect to in an individual image, what they are moved by. I am starting to sense a bond. It is not that I said something nice about their picture or made them a contact so they say something nice about mine. There is something we have in common, something they know and I know.
In the end to me photography is like sex, the intersection of what interests you and what you can get. This is what I can get.
Wishing you peace of mind in 2007.
From me, a long delayed group show in Williamsburg in Brooklyn seems back on track as well as some early interest to show some work in London and LA.