…yet another blog that shows video of a photographer setting up…enjoy.

Those of you who know me personally may be able to guess what is going on…

It is one thing to see it on TV, another thing to live it I am sure. But it is definitely a third thing to read about it on a blog. What am I talking about?

One of the many people forced out of 475 Kent Street this weekend (NYT permalink) was David Alan Harvey, someone I have never met, yet though reading his blog and the comments of his wonderful online community of friends and fellow photographers, I was immediately struck by the emotion of this difficult situation. As it turns out David was in India when the eviction order came, can you imagine being half a world away and finding out your home was being evacuated, possibly never to return. This is a break-in of another kind, one formed out of a lot of people looking the other way until it was too late.

I have no idea what kind of resolution there can be to such tragedies, New York, being what it is probably has thousands of such situations. I am left wondering about my own building, recently a pressure valve gave way, again, and gallons of water flooded into the apartment above me, leaving a full two inches of water on the floor. Thankfully, and mysteriously, very little of that water made its way into my apartment where my camera equipment, computers, prints and negatives are stored.

In David’s case his wonderful friends came to his rescue and organized an impromptu emergency move of his archive to a safe location. His blog was instrumental in the sharing of this information, and also in the creation of that same community. Again, I have never met David, but the spirit and energy of his contributions to others and their contributions back are evident in every post and something to take notice of. The lessons are share with others, and be very suspicious of your landlord.

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Another photographer and blogger Liz Kuball recently completed a month long trial by fire where she publicly initiated a “portrait month” project where she challenged herself to photograph strangers on the street. It is not easy to do this kind of thing, harder still to own up to the work as you do it.  She gives herself a passing grade but is not in love with most of the work. I posted some followup comments that I want to call out:

As a “task” goes, it seems the portrait month was a success in that you got over the approaching people thing. Now that you are over it you see from the other side that many people are just not that interesting…:)…which is not to say anything “bad” about ordinary people, it is just that you found nothing to hook your interest and that is normal. You can’t be “interested” in everyone, it just does not work that way. So the exercise was limited from the get-go, one by the fact that finding people that you are drawn to is difficult, so substituting anyone is not going to cut it mostly, and two, you had the limits of the street itself as backdrop.I think the challenge of portraiture is in selection mostly, the picture itself happens once you are activated and interested. This is why all those random craigslist projects look so bad, the selection methodology is less than intuitive. You really have to select carefully, look at Avedon, for example, he never photographed a face he was not intensely interested in for one reason or another. And he did that across all social types as well. The gift was he knew what he was trying to find out about people, so the selection process was self-generating. Once you can generate an inquiry about what it is you are searching for in a portrait of a person, the rest will be easier.  

What is so interesting here is the process of generating work. Looking around the internet, (which may not be a good thing) you see a lot “projects” with hooks, work made to satisfy a statement. And also there is that idea of “the sentence”. This was one of the ideas left moldering in the unplugged fridge of Alec Soth’s blog, like Christmas cake that won’t go away. When I try to think of the sentence for some of the photographers that I admire I get nowhere. For example, Lee Friedlander; how in the hell can you “sentence” him? He has done everything, flowers, nudes, self portraits, factories, parks, street, it goes on and on. Of course he has to write grant proposals like anyone else, but never in any one of his books that I have seen have I seen anything about a project statement. The project statement is “I’m a photographer, this is what I shoot.”

I linked to a John Szarkowski interview in LA weekly a while back:

Some photographers think the idea is enough. I told a good story in my Getty talk, a beautiful story, to the point: Ducasse says to his friend Mallarmé — I think this is a true story — he says, “You know, I’ve got a lot of good ideas for poems, but the poems are never very good.” Mallarmé says, “Of course, you don’t make poems out of ideas, you make poems out of words.” Really good, huh? Really true. So, photographers who aren’t so good think that you make photographs out of ideas. And they generally get only about halfway to the photograph and think that they’re done.  

I think the corollary is that you make projects out of pictures, not out of ideas. In other words, it is the pictures first. It seems to me that that is essential, the pictures should tell you what you are doing. Ok, you do have to have an idea of where to show up. Or what to show up for. But none of that is going to create good work on it’s own, in this case, “showing up” is not enough. Perhaps showing up long enough to find out what it is you are really doing is another way to look at it:

…but I hope you continue because you really have only scratched the surface, what if you did this for a year? there is so much you can’t tell what is going to come of it that just allowing the current process to continue might be good.I say that because I was in a cafe today and saw some work from someone else who had been photographing in my neighbourhood, and I could see that it was all the pictures I made in the first couple of months, same places, same ideas. More or less. But lately my own work on the same subject has changed and I am seeing things I did not see before, this is after almost two years of photographing basically the same few square blocks. It surprised me. So there is value in just humping it out for a long time with no intention of anything, just to do it. All of a sudden you get “it”, or why you are doing it.  

This discovery for myself was startling, it came out of being the most playful I could be with a camera, yet still seriously trying to make my pictures. And I started to see the narrative power of light by itself, which is another thing entirely.

I remember going to Washington DC the first time and seeing a show by Lee Friedlander, I bought the monograph, since lost, “Like a One-Eyed Cat.” If you have my copy, please return it! What was so great in 1992 was how totally bamboozled I was by this work, I really had no idea of how to make sense of what he was doing, you have a phonebooth with those holes drilled in the side of the metal shield and a city and a dumptruck all falling together. I really could not fathom the “why” of those pictures, in other words, “why would you do that in a picture?” Well the really interesting thing is that I don’t remember when I started to “get” those pictures. For a long time I copied that style, I shot store windows, reflections, self-portraits, but of course that is only imitation. Whenever it was that I started to get the work, it took even longer then to be able to talk about what is the “why of it,” and I think it is this: this is a language, these are the shapes and symbols of the city used like words and formed into sentences that express something greater than the parts. To say that his pictures are about the experience of the city is only halfway, the pictures actually exceed the experience of the city, they distill it into a kind of poetry that is only available to photography. You could say it is like jazz, but the difference between photography and jazz is that photograph gets a whole new set of notes every decade or so, jazz is stuck with the same twelve tones. That is contentious of course. But what I want to emphasize is how photography creates its own language out of the thing it records; reality. So a photograph can be anything as long as you define your language with the pictures. And the pictures define the project.

The new year is that time when we look forward to new projects, what is yours, or how do you go looking for it?

I”ll leave you with this cherry from Tod Papageorge in Bomb:

No. I think now that, in general—and this includes a lot of what I see in Chelsea even more than what I see from students at Yale—there’s a failure to understand how much richer in surprise and creative possibility the world is for photographers in comparison to their imagination. This is an understanding that an earlier generation of students, and photographers, accepted as a first principle. Now ideas are paramount, and the computer and Photoshop are seen as the engines to stage and digitally coax those ideas into a physical form—typically a very large form. This process is synthetic, and the results, for me, are often emotionally synthetic too. Sure, things have to change, but photography-as-illustration, even sublime illustration, seems to me an uninteresting direction for the medium to be tracking now, particularly at such a difficult time in the general American culture. All in all, I think that there’s as much real discovery and excitement in the digital videos that my students at Yale are making as there is in the still photography I see either there or in New York, perhaps because the video camera, like the 35 mm camera 30 years ago, can be carried everywhere, and locks onto the shifting contradictions and beauties of the world more directly and unselfconsciously than many photographers now seem to feel still photography can, or should, do.  

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The following people…nakyung, gerard, wesley, dillon, chris, julian and jed…without whom I would not have had such a good time. Coming soon. Thanks…

Tonight is the last night of a Brooklyn landmark. Don’t you feel ashamed of your storage locker now?