It’s beautiful here, isn’t it… was the first book published on Ghirri in the United States. It appeared in 2008, and I found my way to Ghirri in 2016, I think, maybe thanks to Teju Cole’s article in the New York Times Magazine, following an interview I heard with him on the Magic Hour podcast (and saved for later listening), so I’m a bit late to the party.
Continue reading “Luigi Ghirri – ‘It’s beautiful here, isn’t it…’”Luigi Ghirri – ‘Kodachrome’ and ‘The Complete Essays 1973-1991’
By all rights, these two books should be reviewed separately. Sadly, though, they arrived in the same box and I unboxed them together, so here we are.
Kodachrome is MACK’s 2013 reprint of Ghirri’s 1978 classic. From what I understand, it’s a facsimile of the original, albeit with the inclusion of a pamphlet containing a new essay by Francesco Zanot and translations of the original introductions into French and German.
The Complete Essays 1973-1991 is, as the title suggests, Ghirri’s complete essays. This English translation was published by Mack in 2016.
Continue reading “Luigi Ghirri – ‘Kodachrome’ and ‘The Complete Essays 1973-1991’”So I found a roll of film in a thrift store camera…
My darling, adorable wife was looking at jewelry and I peered over her shoulder and spotted a tiny Nikon case. I assumed it was a digicam of some sort, so imagine my surprise when I opened it and found a Nikon Lite Touch Zoom, complete with a roll of film inside!
I’ll have a proper review of the camera at a later point, this is just to share some pictures from the roll.
Continue reading “So I found a roll of film in a thrift store camera…”My Little Game (part 3)
Part 3 of theonlinephotographer’s Little Game threw me for a bit of a loop. “You should not only concentrate on your Top Five categories, but also actively avoid the other twenty.” What?
Really, this makes complete sense to me, and my first impulse was to go back and re-order my categories. After all, there are things in the list that I want to do more of, as I expect they’ll lead me somewhere. And some of the things in my top five (family snaps, for example) while wildly important, aren’t something I want to make a project out of: I just want to document my family. For five things to focus on near-exclusively, I wouldn’t put family snaps in there, especially since my darling, adorable wife now tires of being photographed, and my family isn’t really together all that often. Does this make me a heel? I don’t know. Probably.
So I went back and started looking.
Continue reading “My Little Game (part 3)”So I bought a Holga…
I don’t quite know why…
I never bought one when they were still being made. I thought about buying one when they stopped being made, but the price of used ones skyrocketed (briefly). Then I was going to buy a new one, but heard that they were even less good than the originals.
But then Freestyle had 25% off plastic cameras for Buy Nothing Day, and they ran it through the Monday after, and after hunting eBay and studying the (few) different types of Holgas made and looking at prices, I went ahead, threw caution to the wind, and jumped on a new one.
Continue reading “So I bought a Holga…”My Little Game (part 2) – Analysis Paralysis
For part 2 of theonlinephotographer’s Little Game, Mike instructs us to “prioritize your list. Put the things that are most important to you at the top and the ones that are least important at the bottom.” Is that all? “Be intuitive about it if need be; be logical about it if that appeals. Think only of yourself, not of an audience. Eschew thoughts of remuneration. Keep shuffling till you’re satisfied.”
This is a hard one for me.
A couple of years ago, Jeff Curto put out series of short lectures on his Camera Position podcast on photography projects, from conceptualizing, to shooting, to sharing, to archiving (Episodes 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, and 81). In episode 75, Curto instructs listeners to “make a list of at least 20 things that are really important to you.” Try as I might, I could never get to 20.
Continue reading “My Little Game (part 2) – Analysis Paralysis”Joel Meyerowitz – ‘Where I Find Myself’
What can I say about the first lifetime retrospective of Joel Meyerowitz’s work, with comments throughout by Meyerowitz himself? If you’re the least bit aware of Meyerowitz and his practice, you probably know something about his trajectory, from 35mm street shooter to 8×10 landscape and still life, and Where I Find Myself has it all.
Continue reading “Joel Meyerowitz – ‘Where I Find Myself’”