These photos by Eric Gunderson just caught my eye on Tumblr. He has a set of color photos as well but I like the black and white ones better. There’s definitely something baltzy about these but there’s also a lot more physical depth in the images where I get a better sense of the space being depicted.
Saturday morning. It’s almost noon. I’m standing in line at the department store cash register. A few people in front of me, behind me a small group forming. I look at those waiting in line—people of all kinds. A broad spectrum of society. What will they do after they’ve finished shopping—how will they spend their Saturday? And what about Sunday? How was their week? How do they spend their free time?
Another one from the Tumblr wires. Ursula Sprecher and Andi Cortellini’s Hobby Buddies is a straightforward typology which manages to be more interesting than its “kind of high school yearbooky” premise would suggest. Part of this is due to the variety and hyper-specific nature of some of the clubs depicted. But a large part is that these photos are often very funny while typically not poking fun at the people depicted.* Which is a very hard line to tread.
*I don’t think any of the photos are meant to poke fun. But some groups, like sadly, the photo club, are probably impossible to not laugh at.
Came across these on Tumblr. Sometimes it really is this (deceptively) simple. This feels like one of my basic design assignments—take a selection of colors and sort them in multiple ways—taken to another level via repetition.
In class, the common mistake was to rely on paint chips—a mistake since paint chips are all based on a white base so the palette is way more limited than anyone realized. The point of the assignment was to really get to know and understand color gamuts and how they interact. You had to sort by light to dark, warm to cool, and bright to dull. It’s not just about hues interacting.
Emily Blincoe’s work is more hue-based but because of the limited palette in each arrangement, does a similar thing since each sorting has to determine the distinguishing feature of the selected objects. They look neat. But they’re also a great exercise in thinking about color.
Watched this and thought about tropes, gaze, and representation again and how people in power tend not to like their gaze turned back on themselves either.
I also remembered a flickr comment I received a few years ago.
This is a really unique place that is somewhat spoiled by the necessity (?) of capitalism. I didn’t mind paying an entrance fee but I thought charging a fee per camera to take photographs was rather silly. I asked one woman if I could take her photograph after I bought one of her home made pies and talked for a while. She told me that it would cost an additional dollar for a photograph. At that point I lost interest in photography and the spirit of the moment. It was clear that the only connection between us was of buyer and seller. Why should I have expected it to be otherwise?
Yeah.
There are lot of entitled people with cameras out there. And there are a lot of marginalized people who understandably have issues with photographers treating them as zoo animals. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens as more and more people have cameras.
Note: This originally posted on NJWV.
I always love it when I’m at a museum and information about how an artist worked is available along with the actual art. I’m not just interested in learning how something was constructed,* I love to see how artists worked through their ideas and found what worked and what didn’t. The effort part of art is too often framed as being only in the actual creation side of things—painting, sculpting, etc.—not in the ideation and working through of the concepts or in the decision making about what to actually show people.
*Though that’s cool too.
This is especially important with photography since discarded work is preserved in ways which are often indistinguishable from the keepers. Unlike other arts, photography is in many ways a permanent work-in-progress as discards return to the archive and projects evolve. Being able to view a photographer’s unpublished work and see how it evolved is a rare pleasure.
Which is what makes Stephen McLaren and Bryan Formhals’s Photographers’ Sketchbooks so exciting. Rather than being about a single photographer, this book has samples from dozens of them. The term “sketchbook” doesn’t begin to describe the various working methods in here. There are contact sheets, maquettes and dummies, online streams, notebooks, workbooks, work prints, plans, sketches, and more. All vastly different ways of conceiving projects, working through them, and editing them. This is how art is made. There’s never one right way.
Many of the samples involve working with the stream and the archive. Taking unfinished work and knocking the corners off or reshuffling things. Showing the results to trusted peers. Rinse and repeat. That we’re allowed in to see this unfinished, unreleased work—oftentimes without explicit references to the finished pieces—is a major privilege which demonstrates the significant amount of trust that the artists have placed in McLaren and Formhals to handle and present these private documents into a more public space.
For photographers whose work I was familiar with it was great to see the behind-the-scenes side of how the work was produced. For those whose work I was unfamiliar with, I enjoyed being introduced to new work as well as learning some backstory for when I encountered the finished work. I can see myself returning to this book as I encounter more photography in the wild.
As a photographer, it’s also great to see how many different approaches there are. This isn’t a how-to guide. But it is inspiring. It’s easy to accumulate an archive of photos. Winnowing through and turning that archive into projects—even if they’re just family photo albums—is something I’ve been putting off for too long. Where most photobooks influence how I take photos and see things, Photographers’ Sketchbooks is encouraging me to do something with them.