Haven’t posted anything new a few days.
I went to a lecture exactly a week ago. Seems like longer. It’s been so long ago these people are already old.
23 July 2009
18 July 2009
Post-It's Post
This is the first video I've seen in a long time - way too long - by a professional creative type that actually has a fun, creative spirit, and isn't fundamentally concerned with the fashions of technology or entertainment.
15 July 2009
Roadside Attractions
Started a new Flickr set for photos I take from the driver's seat. These are from a recent trip to/from Lincoln, NE for a shoot.
Read more...
Read more...
Satirization of Anti-Intellectualism in Public Discourse... Shorty.
It's an inspired melody that makes you walk around, absentmindedly singing, "Cancers! Heart disease! Respiratory disease!" I have been bobbing my head to the ubiquitous Autotune the News songs ever since I officially became the last person on earth to learn about them.
It finally occurred to me what is so satisfying about them: their recontextualization of talking heads' inanities, malapropisms, and conceits is actually more fitting than their original settings. Public discourse - from actual congressional hearings to shows like The View that are relatively open about their entertainment slant - has become so inconsequential and ridiculous that it fits seamlessly into the R&B universe of shawties, crunk'd out partiez, and pimpin'.
"I'm an angry gorilla. I heard you needed me." LMAO! These guys have skewered the whole entertainment-news industry with this character.
The character "Junkie Einstein" has to be one of the greatest satirizations ever. He is a man with great faculties of reason, but he has crippled his own mind with amusements. It's as biting as it is hilarious: "My brain says no, but my body says yes."
Kudos to the Gregory brothers (and sister-in-law) for putting politics in its proper place: that of engaging, first rate, inconsequential, mindless entertainment. BTW one of the brothers is named Michael Gregory. There are lots of other Michael Gregorys - a session musician in Nashville, a smarmy fashion[/softcore porn] photographer in Australia, at least two working musicians in NYC, etc...
13 July 2009
Original Art Work
I came upon this little gem at 2nd Chance Thrift Store on Wornall in Kansas City, MO. I have been thinking for some time about how discarded items at thrift stores evoke the lives of previous owners, and this one got my gears turning on what kind of life the artist might have had.
Clearly this was an art student who wanted to express himself. He expressed the desire to express himself through this expressive painting. I try to stay away from expressions like, "Abstraction Expressionism was a useless dead-end that legitimized every bad tendency in the art establishment," but sometimes thrift store items call for a strong stance.
No matter how suggestive an artifact, it always excludes most of the specifics of the previous owner's life that would transform it from a mystery to a banality. With this painting, for example, I can't work out whether it was his mother or his girlfriend who put him through his angry three semesters of college.
08 July 2009
I thought I'd treat myself to a little television nonsense during my dinner and downloaded the Michael Jackson Funeral Show - or whatever they called his event at Staples Center. On one hand, I feel really bad for the guy, seeing his passing from the earth made into a spectacle of such rank foolishness. I don't care what you've done - once you die your account on earth is settled and your memory deserves to see your remains treated respectfully.
On the other hand, there are a lot of fans still alive. Man, the Schadenfreude is at toxic levels. I only made it through about 5 minutes of skimming the MJF Show before I thought I'd rather just remember him in my own way, so I searched for the choicest artifacts of his stardom, the music videos from the mid-1980's.
Read the comments attached to this video. You will not be sorry. It's right up there with some of the best misunderstood movie reviews on Amazon.com.
BTW, yes, I know really needs one more blog post with some trite, pithy truisms spun out of careless reaction to Michael Jackson's passing. But I figured it was worth a post because the link that should make you laugh. There is no higher form of discourse than amusement.
How not to present your pictures
Museums and galleries have traditionally displayed photographs as big prints hanging on walls. You peruse them at your own pace and in any order you choose, even if a certain order is suggested. Captions and other information are usually provided, and you can absorb that information any way you like, or not at all. There is generally an air of gravitas that inspires reverent quiet.A lot of these conventions translate well to the books published to accompany big/important exhibitions.
Compare that with your uncle Hobart's slide show, where you willingly travel to his house, march unfettered into the rumpus room, sit down, remain seated when the lights go out, and then slowly surrender your will to live as uncle Hobart reacts to each 35mm film slide, extemporizing a disjointed narrative that falls somewhere somewhere between disorder and schizophrenia.
The contemporary analog of the slide show is the multimedia slideshow DVD. You would think these would be more tolerable to sit through, considering the forethought, discipline, and self-editing that is built into the process, but still they manage to raise the bar for bad taste. Now uncle Hobart adds his favorite songs to the mix - a sort of air support in the assault on your sensibilities. If uncle actually did have any pictures you might want to see, there is new prime real estate available in Tartarus, because Hobart is going to follow the long trend toward cinematizing photographs; the borders of the image - photography's most important design element - will not be visible because of the asinine scaling and movement that are supposed to simulate cinematic dollying, trucking, and panning.
How is it that the gallery's cool, minimal approach to displaying pictures is so satisfying and inviting, but the sincerity and hard work that poor uncle Hobart puts into his slide shows yield little more than frustration? Is the content really that different? I don't think that's it at all; the art world is full of examples of shows in which gallery walls are crowded with recontextualized vernacular photography (crappy little prints of snapshots, among others); uncle Hobart's pictures could easily have been displayed in a hip New York gallery in something like Stephen Shore's All the Meat You Can Eat, and enthusiastic, intellectual crowds would laud Hobart's work as great.
I think it has more to do with the basic way in which people experience photographs, and how presentation either encourages or discourages that experience. Any photo can be a contemplative object in a way that is preverbal, preintellectual; any child can look at a picture depicting something abstract like sharing and go to work on what is happening in the scene, where it is, what might happen next.
Pictures invite viewers to discover the surface of another world - to speculate about its underlying reality. Photographs by themselves demand that you draw your own conclusions, make your own story. When the para-descriptive information is taken from the small card politely placed out of the way on the wall next to a photo - or the text on the opposite page in a book - and forced into the viewer's mind by uncle Hobart's ill-considered ramblings, it spoils some of the fun of viewing a new picture.
There is another level on which Hobart is at war with the photographic sensibility. The normal viewing of photographs has been beautifully illustrated in a number of movies in which a child or young adolescent or Adam Sandler finds some magical way of freezing time. This device is a metaphor for the way a photograph allows the viewer to roam through a world that is frozen in time, free of haste or any compunction to interact with the surface of the depicted world. This is one of the things that makes viewing pictures so fun - you can go crazy in a self-contained little fantasy world, discovering explicit details, guessing implied details about its inhabitants and accoutrement, generally just taking your time to do whatever you want inside that frame and any space implied beyond it. The forced pace of Hobart's slideshows is destructive enough to this important aspect of appreciating photography, but when he uses animation to change the frame of the photograph within the frame of the viewing screen, there really isn't much left of photography's quiddity; it has become something else, and mostly likely Hobart's skills are not up to the task of jumping between media. Then again, Hobart is pretty old and there is a lot we don't know about him - maybe he worked as a big time film editor in the Noir Age. Mom said nobody knows what he was doing out in California for those two years after high school...
So there's a great heap of fetid negativity for you - that's what I do best. By now you get the gist - I am a cranky, frustrated photographer who would rather blog than make pictures or do any productive work. Wait, no - the gist was supposed to be that the slideshow is an unideal mode for displaying photographs. The slide show - and especially the faux-cinematic animated slideshow - is really a medium altogether different from photography. And yes, I'm cranky. Sorry - I'll work on that.
The easiest ways of displaying photos are still the best. For example, there is no reason you can't come back from your vacation to Hawaii and make relatively large prints and display them very simply, either in a portfolio or in simple mounts on picture ledges in your house. I purchased an "annual plan" from Shutterfly, for which I get something like a 30% discount on prints, so a flawless 11x14" print on great paper only costs $5.59. You can keep using the same portfolios or foamcore over and over and return the photos to their shipping tubes for archival. Cheap, easy, impressive - perfect.
In the past few years photo books have become one of the most popular ways to share photos, and with good reason. When you get back from Hawaii with your six full SD cards, you can pare them down to the fifty best photos, have a book made cheaply via Shutterfly or any of the other such services, and just leave the book out in plain view when company comes over. The photo sharing activity will just happen organically; like locking a dude and a hot girl in a room together for a couple of weeks - actuaries, anthropologists, and womanizers agree that human nature generally follows a predictable course.
Another method I like a lot is to simply plug a camera into a television and hand it to the most attention-needy person in attendance, e.g. a child. This way everyone still engages in the the temporal aspects of browsing pictures, but as a group. Giving suggestions/directions to the kid navigating the images adds another social dimension to the activity. Make sure to edit your photos - either in camera or on the computer - before you make someone else try to navigate them.
The least imposing way to bother your friends and family with photos is with a web gallery like Flickr. If you want other people to see pictures of your pets - and you're not William Wegman - this is the route for you. Your family and friends can skim hundreds of pictures at a glance and then truthfully tell you that yes, they saw the new Fluffy glamor shots, and yes, they enjoyed them, especially the one they noted for the specific purpose of proving to you that they looked at them. If you notice the theme of the order, this is also the least impressive medium for displaying pictures. The impression made by a photo takes a big hit when it ceases to be a physical object - moving from prints to a purely photon-based display - and the web is pretty much the last stop on the devaluation bus route. The upshot is that nobody feels compelled to look at pictures they don't like.
There are a few simple things you can do to help your pictures generate more interest in any presentation. First of all, edit ruthlessly. Photography has been aptly described by many artists and brainiac critics as the process of selecting and organizing interesting scenes from the disorganized universe. The selection process can continue long after the last shutter click. The most obvious way in which selection can continue is by selecting which pictures to display. Software can help; I try to steer newbies toward Google's Picasa software, which they provide free, no strings attached. Software like this - or Adobe Lightroom or the impressively overhyped Apple Aperture - gives you lots of tools for rating, sorting, selecting, and ordering pictures by any number of criteria you choose, including your own keywords. It is better to be too critical than too permissive in your self-editing; a tiny collection of an extremely few good pictures always looks better than a great herd of rejects with a few good ones thrown in. Don't show your rejects.
You can also revise your selection of scenes by cropping. Most underdeveloped photographers shoot way too wide with the subject in the middle. This makes for static, uninviting pictures, but the good news is that this composition flaw invites revision. Cropping basically lets you change the design of the photo, which gives you the potential to change its appeal and its meaning.
Design/composition is too big a subject to tackle in a couple sentences, but it's not rocket science. Get a book like "The Photographer's Eye" by Michael Freeman¹ and work through it. The world heavyweight champion of intro-to-composition books is "The Simple Secret to Better Painting" by Greg Albert, but using that book there is no hand-holding to figure out how to relate the concepts to photography. With any such a book you can move from hack to competent photographer in a week or two. There are even good videos on visual composition specifically for photographers.
Consider groupings and order in your presentation. Chronology is often the worst choice for any medium, even with a book that is easily navigable in any order. Put a little more thought into it. If you really think it's so important to document the exact order in which you apprehended the prefabricated plastic awnings at Holiday Inns and Best Westerns, make a separate design of it, e.g. a collage based on a map. Make something of it - chronology is not intrinsically narrative.
If you absolutely cannot help yourself - and your family and friends do not love you enough to intervene - and you decide that you must make a slideshow, consider the following. Your project is really a movie and not a collection of pictures; you have moved from the medium of photography to cinema, so adjust your thinking and your skill set accordingly. Tell a story with your slideshow. Even documentary films follow a pretty rigid narrative structure. If you can't make an outline of three act dramatic structure or the hero's quest from memory, your story is guaranteed to suck. Get some books from the library. This stuff is at least as old as the Hellenic Period, so there is no need to send your money to Amazon.com. Study cinematography. Cinematography is just a fancy word for the technique of making movies, which is exactly what you're engaged in. Again, the public library will probably have everything you need. And of course, DVD commentary tracks are widely touted as a poor man's film school, so you can start investing hours in those.
The best thing you can do to beat the odds against making a tolerable slideshow is to plan your movie on paper - or any fancier kind of storyboard, but paper is fine - and bend the software to execute your vision. This is opposed to the more popular approach of letting the software instruct you how to put together your show. Don't just use a stock template because it's easy; create your own movie from scratch that looks exactly as you imagine it. You'll notice that most big Hollywood blockbuster movies generally use cuts, dissolves, and deliberately designed text titles - that's it. No novelty wipes, no flying 3D text, no purposeless trucking/panning. Use the 100-year-old, well developed language of cinema for your cinematic project. Just because you can add music doesn't mean you should. Better yet, just because you can make a slideshow doesn't mean you should.
I think if you are interested in a moving presentation, you're more of a cinema person at heart. The good news is that cameras are starting to include better video features, to the point that hyperweenie, tech-watching nerds are already announcing that video and still cameras are merging into a single class of device. In the here and now, you can shoot adequate video (for home/web presentation) with any digital camera made in the past several years. I have a Canon SD450 that is practically an antique on the timeline of digital photography gear, and even it takes decent video. Why not make a video project instead of a collection of photos, or in addition to it?
I think the one thing you can do to make any kind of artistic exhibition more enjoyable is to simply let go of your creation once it is finished. When your friends and family come over to your house and you are dying for them to see your Hawaii pics, let them discover the pictures on their own. If you have photographs, let them flip through them at their own pace and without unsolicited commentary; if you have a movie, let them watch it without your additional narration. In general, say what you need to say in your art and let the viewer ask you for more information. If your art is good, they will be fascinated.
¹ This book is inexplicably titled the same as the older, vastly more important book by John Szarkowski, of which the author was doubtless aware. This is a great mystery to me, as the text is absent of the kind of hubris necessary to pull off the apparent stunt.
06 July 2009
Another dump of old pics
Previously unreleased! Digitally remastered! Haven't seen that one in print or heard it in an ad in a long time - "digitally remastered." I miss that one.
Read more...
Read more...
I Heart Oprah Magazine
I bought the current issue of Oprah Magazine. For myself. For real. The cover promises "OPRAH'S PRIVATE PHOTOS... We gave her a camera, she gives us a snapshot of her perfect lazy Sunday." The actual article is the absolute last content in the magazine - right inside the back cover but before the important inside-the-back-cover advertising; it has been tucked away as far as the editors/art directors could manage. It doesn't fit the magazine.
TANGENT: But this is proof that a publication/creative enterprise ruled by the proverbial benevolent dictator will always offer things that a rule-by-committee "Poochie" rag will miss. Clearly this article is off the mark regarding the message/image/whatever of the magazine - and the images are not of the same quality as all the editorial and ad stuff - but if Oprah insists that it goes in this issue, by god it's going in this issue. If nothing else, Oprah got me to buy one more of her magazines than I ever would have otherwise. So in the case study of whether Michael Gregory would buy this magazine based on content, Oprah's call on including her own snapshots was a good one.
BTW I wonder what kind of camera Oprah uses. I love the idea of her swatting at the etherial mirages of stasis in front of her with a midrange Canon A-series Powershot, for which she sent a staff member to Wal-Mart. "Could you run to Best Buy and get me a camera? Nothing too big, but I want one that takes good pictures."
What stuck me about the article itself was how heartening it is to learn that Oprah - one of the single richest people in the world - has the exact same impulse as everyone else to savor and try to capture small, enjoyable parcels of time - and especially that she struggles with it, just like the rest of it.
Her pictures are not great photography. They are better than those of any other non-serious photographer in her age group that I know personally - probably her friends get her unsolicited "Look what I did this weekend!" emails full of her pictures and actually reply saying how great her pictures are - but she's not an accomplished artist.
Even when you have some attainment in the basic grammar of the visual arts, it can be the most frustrating thing in the world to conjugate the simplest sentence. Even with supernatural Photoshopping skill and every other advantage, it is hard to convert intent into a coherent composition.
So I guess I was happy to see that Oprah - a person who probably has access to literally any resource extant on earth for making an image - struggles like the rest of us. She chose to try to capture by herself the impressions of a pleasant afternoon in her backyard, and she had a rough ride. She does manage to paste together a rickety account, spanning multiple images and heavy captioning, but clearly it was not easy. And for some odd reason I was glad to discover that Oprah, obviously a first-rate conversationalist, is not a great writer; she has good insights and gets the point across just fine, but Faulkner she is not.
Speaking of poor writing, I'm still not sure what I learned from this, what's my point, why I starting writing this blog post.
Man, how great would that be if Oprah got her camera from the disounted/discontinued bin?! And wouldn't it be awesome if she used that little mini-USB cable to connect the camera to the computer? You know she printed 4x6's of every one of her snapshots on a POS compact printer she [her assistant] got at the same electronics/discount store. God, she probably even set aside an 8x10" for her ever-growing stack of things to frame/scapbook/decoupage/whatever that she is realistically never going to have time for.
Real Bad Wrong
Check out my set "Real Bad Wrong" on Flickr. I originally created a site realbadwrong.com for these, but I was too lazy to do anything to drive traffic to it, including telling friends. I have found Flickr to be a much better place for my casual photographic endeavors.
Read more...
Read more...
05 July 2009
Eugene at the hotel
Had an unusual gig in a characteristic venue in a strange little town after a fascinating drive. So of course I came back with one interesting pictures. Part of the problem is that I don't have a camera that is both tiny and usable as a photographic tool. I am eagerly awaiting the day when a camera the size of an SD-series can creative a negative like a 5D - and be quick, responsive.
Read more...
Read more...
03 July 2009
Amazing Trends
In my ongoing effort to stay on the front edge of trends, I am hereby limiting my entire vocabulary of adjectives to the word amazing. So if I want hash browns with my breakfast at Waffle House, I order amazing browns. If I want to tell a salesman [amazingperson] that I want to look at a hybrid car, I say, "I am in the market for an amazing car."
Amazing I'm amazed that this amazing trend has come this amazing. In the amazing months I will be closely watching the adverb totally. I will be totally watching amazing adverb.
I have also decided that when I run for U.S. President in 2016, I will promise to promote legislation requiring all books even obliquely related to photography to include the word moment in the title. In the time being, I am publishing The Amazing Moment, my series of leather bound books with my photos and essays by Roland Barthes' great nephew:
01 July 2009
It is easy to grow pessimistic about USA's ability to respond well to tragedies. However, I am heartened by our ability to rise to this particular occasion with grace and elan.
Read more...