Thanks for the recommendation, @swerdnaekalb! Now to figure out where that spot comes from…
And, coincidentally*… it’s Polacon 5: #PolaconVirtual edition! If you’re reading this on the weekend of 9/25-27/2020, grab an instant camera and join in the fun if you can.
Continue reading “I cleaned the rollers on the Impulse SE…”Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities is the fifth book in Aperture’s Photography Workshop Series, and it’s a worthy entry to the collection. I’ve learned a few things from the other books in the series—Todd Hido on Landscapes, Interiors, and the Nude, Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb on Street Photography and the Poetic Image, Larry Fink on Composition and Improvisation, and Mary Ellen Mark on the Portrait and the Moment—and while I’m not a portrait photographer, not much anyway, I’ve gleaned some good insights from Bey through this book.
Continue reading “Dawoud Bey ‘on Photographing People and Communities’”Worldwide Pinhole Day, 2020, occurred, as always, on the last Sunday in April, April 26.
Today, the day I’m posting this, is the 17th of September, 2020…
Continue reading “Worldwide Pinhole Day 2020… better late than never, I guess.”Patrick Demarchelier: Fashion Photography is the second, or other book in the two volume series of American Photographer’s Master Series of workshop-type books from 1989, the other being William Albert Allard: The Photographic Essay. Like its litter mate, Fashion Photography reads like very long puff profile piece from a mass market hobby magazine.
Back in March, right before the Covid-19 lockdown began in Texas, I saw some panoramic photographs on Twitter, probably from an X-Pan, and got the pano bug again. I started for the excellent Sprocket Rocket, but wanted more control, so, after hunting some, I ordered a Zenit Horizon S3 u500 direct from Russia.
It arrived in May, and here are a few shots and thoughts from my first roll.
Continue reading “Early results from the Zenit Horizon”The Photographic Essay was introduced to me via a conversation on Twitter, if I recall. It was a couple of years ago, I think, and maybe I just read it but didn’t participate and that’s why I can’t find it now. No matter. William Albert Allard was a National Geographic photographer in the 1960s, and then a freelance photographer for the Geographic in the prime years for freelance National Geographic photographers and well into the magazine’s Fox-owned decline.*
In my YouTube blurb for the unboxing, I call The Photographic Essay “… a sort of master class on documentary photography and creating photographic essays….” After spending some time with it, well, I guess I stand by that. Sort of.
Continue reading “William Albert Allard – ‘The Photographic Essay’”John Szarkowski’s Atget was recommended, or, rather, referenced in Geoff Dyer’s The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand, if I recall, as the model on which Dyer based his 100-comments-about-100-pictures arrangement of that book. It’s quite similar to Szarkowski’s classic Looking at Photographs, which I picked up cheap at a Half Price Books years ago, but still haven’t worked all the way through, and shame on me.
In brief, Atget is Szarkowski’s pick of 100 images from MOMA’s Atget collection, paired with essays that speak around the photographs and Atget’s life. It had me laughing and looking closely, and I wholeheartedly recommend you get one through interlibrary loan or something, if you have any interest at all in writing about photography (or writing in general).
But allow me to go on a bit…
Continue reading “John Szarkowski – ‘Atget’”
