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A list of things I am happiest about from my pursuit of photography would start:
- Traveling to Mexico City to learn and photograph
- Meeting and being mentored by Mark Powell
Mark is running two workshops in MC this fall which are inexpensive, well-planned, and certain to inspire you to exhaustion with the possibilities of social street photography. If you like Mark’s work and have ambitions for your own, I cannot recommend highly enough that you try to participate.
http://www.yoquiero.info/photo/
{Photo by Mark Powell}
Cleopatra’s Last Moments (1892)
by D. Pauvert, for sale by Michael Jackson
“Buffalo, New York”, by Alec Soth.
Interesting to see Alec Soth’s The Last Days of W.
Soth has until now published three major projects, each named after the place it was shot. I think it is correct to say that all three were first loosely conceived, then methodically photographed and edited over a period of time.
The first thing that is interesting about The Last Days of W is that it is an instance of a “project” photographer instead constructing something ex post facto from stuff they have around.
This is a snapshot photographer or even a photo-blogger’s method – editing diverse work to a theme on the basis of vague associations, small jokes, and mood – and I have tried it myself to try to bring some order or even a little gravity to my own messy and conceptually blank photography.
The second thing that is interesting is that this project is just brutally unsuccessful. It mistakes ambience for gravitas. It is a soup of subjects and symbols. It wants there to be meaning in jarring discontinuity. It is a dozen bad dyptichs. It is bad poetry.
To me this is less an indictment of Alec Soth than of the idea that you can ever bring meaning to work made at random, because let’s face it, Soth is a pretty interesting guy.
I still have no idea how to address this problem of having something to hang one’s hat on conceptually. I find it hard to work with a concept because I find concepts tedious after working them for a short time. I realize that this is because I am lazy and my concepts aren’t good enough, but that doesn’t eliminate the problem.
If anyone has figured this out please leave the solution in the comments. It would really help me out.
L. Check-In, Elizabeth Skurnick, first ed. 2005. R. ibid., second ed. 2009.
Progress has been made.
How to wash dishes
- Washing dishes is two jobs: getting food off the dishes and getting grease off the dishes. Water does not get grease off dishes, and soap does not get food off them.
- To wash dishes, put some soap in a bowl or pan and add enough water to make a strong soapy solution. Do not dilute this solution by running the tap into it.
- Run the tap into the other end of the sink. Stack dirty dishes under the tap so that they soak as you rinse clean dishes.
- Dip your sponge into the soapy solution and scrub each dish clean of food and grease. If dried food will not come off, put the dish back under the tap to soak longer.
- Never squirt soap onto a dish you are washing. You will end up eating soap.
- Stack like dishes next to each other in the drying rack to simplify putting away. Putting away is the worst part of doing dishes.
- Continue to add old work to these old sets, because nothing says professional like a loose edit.
- Still unable to attach any consistent conceptual or thematic ideas to the pictures I think have merit, which is a problem.
- Instead enjoying attachment of meaningless overheard and imagined phrases to sets of photographs despite not being high.
- Have less time for relying on chance, less interest in or courage for speaking to strangers, more inclination to art direct and pay an old guy twenty bucks to stand there.
- Added some old work to these sets. You cannot deny the past.
- I need some interesting photo work in New York. I am out of ideas.
- I got eviscerated by some photojournalists at a portfolio review this summer.
- I have a photo in a new book called Street World – the photo of the dog with the brick.
- The dog with the brick is now dead.
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