Don’t get on the plane.

Room with a view

Pick one

a cloud follows me wherever I go

its just alec baldwin

how many jokes can you come up with that involve Tiger, POTUS, and Putter?

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright in the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? well…Frank Rich has a nice column about Tiger and the decade in the NYT

David Sedaris always makes my holiday brighter. With apologies to Eggleston.

you may recognize the colour scheme from my website. ?

When I let myself drift into the intoxication of inverting daydreams and reality, that faraway house with its light becomes for me, before me, a house that is looking out-its turn now!-through the keyhole. Yes there is someone in that house who is keeping watch, a man is working there while I dream away. He leads a dogged existence, whereas I am pursuing futile dreams. Through the light alone the house becomes human. It sees like a man. It is an eye open to the night….a rather large dossier of literary documentation could be studied from the single angle of the lamp that glows in the window….” Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space.

From Ms. Deane- photographer Ӧzant Kamaci has two projects, Pause, and Landing. From the statement:

Pause

In ‘pause’, the work depicts the juxtaposition of powerful machines which are symbols of advancement and technology against nature which is widely accepted as precious and untouched. The medium of photography provides a visual dichotomy of reality and illusion through the aesthetics of plane and tree and their spatial relationship. Planes behind trees as individual objects are familiar and common, but when combined and interrelated, the viewer moves to a new space to behold the unexpected.

Obviously I really like these- I like the scale distortion, the idea of a plane caught in a tree like a kite you might say, the unexpected visual merging of two graphic entities. I could see variations on this where tail markings and other insignia become part of the result. I also like how you can have an idea and someone else will have a similar idea but a completely different take on it. There is no end to the difference you can generate.

Early on I had some failed attempts where I was playing sort of in this garden:

But the results are completely different. And I didn’t have all the technical things worked out.

I think they might have worked best printed large from 35mm negs.

A long time ago I mentioned my friend Steve Guttenberg. Not that one. Steve is a freelance writer and artist and likes to hook up extremely expensive audio and video equipment in his apartment and relax to aural nirvana. He has been feeding my vinyl craze. And my TFK craze. Recently he got an absurdly expensive turntable, the googlifonic kind with a moonrock needle. He played it for me. It went to eleven standing still. I in turn have been setting him up with photoshop techniques and he has gone a very long way in two years. He photographs, and then, well, I’m not sure. This comes out…

Dancers

The part I haven’t told you is that Steve really can’t see that well. He is legally blind. A birth defect left him with impaired vision, but as a child he used to stare at the sun wide eyed because the colour effects that he was seeing were irresistible. The resulting scars on his retina made things worse. But that didn’t stop Steve from eventually becoming a movie projectionist in New York in the Eighties. Did I mention that when you meet Steve, he will tell you a story. And then another. Possibly a third. All fascinating. You see, you want a paranoid projectionist! Focus! Steve brought binoculars into the booth to see better. So he was constantly on the lookout for blurry images. It makes sense if you let it.

Montauk #3

Digital cameras for Steve are like bionic eyes. He can see things very close up. Like a computer monitor from about 3 inches. And also an LCD on the back of a camera. Viewfinders are useless to him, ah, but on a preview you can magnify your picture…10x or more. All of a sudden, distant details are visible. Steve literally takes pictures to see what things look like. Which is by definition, is what a photographer does. And very Winograndian.

The Corner

We are up to 30% of my TFK pledge. More contributors to come.

Over on the Resolve blog this quote from Marc Asnin

I also think you should dress for who you are. I don’t know if people still do that, but when I was a kid, you had to get dressed up for everything. I’m not saying show up as a slob, but you know, I’ve had some interns show up in suits. I’m like, listen, never wear a tie to meet me. You’re in the photo world in New York now. No one wears a tie, man.

So what do you think? I have had to wear a tie but once-photographing in the New York Stock Exchange. Not even in the White House was I required to wear a tie, although I was shooting behind the scenes and not at a State Dinner.  I have had to photograph a lot of ‘Guy’s in Tie’s’ (GITS) and generally felt for them on hot days.

So do only Wedding Pro’s wear ties?

(mad man Thom Browne)

Do you remember? The very first night of September? Love was changing the minds of pretenders, while chasing the clouds away…

Above: Stack o’ promos to go out. Don’t accuse me of being cynical about this photo business…

TFK UPDATE:

Thanks to some recent donations from the  Mr and Mrs. Jackanory, Mr. and Mrs. Bumble, and Mr. and Mrs. Wright, we are sitting over $600 of $2500, that is more than 25% of the way there!

For perspective, my last marathon training program topped out at 44 miles maximum. There were only two 40+ mile weeks in the last go round. Now I have ahead of me two more months of 40+ mile weeks, going up to 54 miles at the peak. (40, 44, 35, 46, 49, 51, 41, 54, 42, 28, 38) Aye Carrumba!

I caught a serious break on Sunday with the overcast skies and mid-temperatures. The rain was a help too. Does anyone actually make a fabric that can dry in 80% humidity? Dryfit, Coolmax? ShamWow? Cause I’m lookin’.

So it was 20 on the calendar, the first of four 20 milers on the schedule, and after this week of speedwork cut short-and cutting 2.5 off last weeks 18 miler, I was starting to feel like Ludicrous Speed as I have named the schedule was ridiculous.

But that was then, Sunday. Now, Tuesday, thinking about then, I knew that now, or then, as it was, was the time to really commit, so that soon, when then becomes now, I will look back and have done it. Because now you can’t go back to then, you will have just missed it. When? Just now. Got it?

Nick Calcott recently wrote me thinking about running the Paris Marathon, and asked how I got started. A long email followed which I have copied below. Like discussions of photography for non-photographers, discussions of running for non-runners are pretty boring. What isn’t boring is Nick’s work or his blog, 12thpress.

“Thanks for your note-I love getting random shout-outs. Plus I really like the Night Dance series and Nana’s house.

I looked at the paris marathon website faq and noted that they said they serve mineral water every 5km. Too funny. In new york they just open up the fire hydrant to fill garbage pails lined with trash bags and volunteers scoop paper cups of it up.

The first race I ran was last august this time, it was the nike 10k run–I had been running only since june but managed to finish ok. In the two months prior I was just running as I felt, often times every day, about 4 miles or so. What happened in the beginning is that I didn’t know or ignored the advice to step up training in 10% increments, and I started adding mileage too soon just to see if I could do it. I would run 6 miles one weekend, 8 the next, 10 after that, going up to 13. So in a month I think I went from running 12 miles per week to running 25, which was too much too soon on no base. so I got hurt.

Basically all the books and websites give similar advice. Runnersworld.com has a lot of free advice, and you can generate training plans based on your current level. I think what the advice would be is this: have a “base” of regular running, something like 20-25 miles per week before you start the 18 week training for the marathon. Since the Paris is April 11 that means you would start training roughly the beginning of February. And the base should be 6 months or more. So if you are running only 15 miles per week now you might want to slowly ramp that up over the fall to give yourself 4 months of base. (still with me?)

You might also want to and hopefully would enjoy doing some intermediate races in the fall, 10k’s are a great distance, and the Half is also a good distance. Doing these races will give you an idea what to expect running in races, and also about water management and food issues, race day prep, the bathroom! etc. Things that you want to have a grasp of before getting to a marathon. I did a bunch of half’s and 10’s all through my first winter running and loved them all, also loved winter running in general. what I would not give right now for a 32 degree morning! It is so much easier to run in cold I find. In terms of training for Paris you will have to deal with winter running.

So from the fall races you will get a sense of times, your 10K and half marathon times. All of the training plans online and in books predicate your training on your current fitness. This is what you were asking me. When you know that you run a 10K in 50 minutes then that will accurately predict you will run a marathon in 4 hours. Something like that. The reason this works is mountains of data over the years. So for example the plan on Runners World which is what I am using, takes inputs such as a recent 10k or half marathon time, the current number of miles per week you are used to running, and the training effort you want to exert, moderate, intense, severe, and generates an 16 week plan based on that. The plan is similar to other plans – it assumes the “new” thinking that you might not want to run every day- they have you running 4 of 7. You can cross train other days or rest. The thinking here is to avoid injury and overuse. The “old” thinking was that you just buried yourself in miles at a slow steady pace, which now is only one component of the whole training.

What they advocate now is three kinds of workouts- you have speed workouts like tempo runs and intervals to focus on speed, running form and increasing oxygen efficiency, increasing your lactate threshold and teaching the muscles to fire fast, then you have easy days where you run with low intensity to give some recovery, and then you also have the long run day where you go slow and long to increase time on your feet, train your muscles to burn fat calories stored in the liver not muscle stored sugar which helps you avoid hitting the wall (burning through all the glycogen in your muscles entirely, which happens around mile 20).

Combining these three kinds of workouts and optional cross training will give you the ability to run long, economically and finish strong without running mass mileage every day. It is better to be slightly undertrained than over trained and injured on race day. One book is Run Less Run Faster by the RunnersWorld staff.

On a monthly level you go through 3 week circuits of progressive overload and then you get a recovery week. You do this four times, and the mileage increases and the speed workouts get faster progressively. In the last two weeks of training you taper off so that you are well rested for the marathon day. Basically that is it.

You asked about picking a goal time for your marathon-it doesn’t exactly work like that. You can only train so much, so your goal time or marathon pace is dictated by your fitness level going in to the training minus what the training can reasonably hope to achieve. Knocking 30 sec/mile off is a lot. Trying to improve beyond the plan limits risks injury. All of the training plans generally hew to the 10% increment. Once you have some intermediate races done this fall and some times for that, the training plan will dictate a reasonable goal time. For a first marathon I would say completion is a great goal in itself! You only have one first, and Paris is such a spectacular course that you might want to just focus on enjoying all the sights and sounds (meaning try to run no-ipod) and maybe take some pictures. You also want to finish strong, so that it is enjoyable, so speed is not a big issue.

If you read my account of the NJ marathon which was my first, I think it was “an experience” which was owing to the rain, the double loop course, etc. I knew I could finish so it was mainly to do it. Maybe not a great first experience but I was not in pain or cramping or bargaining heavily, so by that measure it was a great success.

My second marathon will be NY this fall, and even tho I am better trained now, I am approaching this with a great deal of trepidation, no matter what, it is one hell of a long way. anything can happen. So you really have to dedicate yourself and not shortcut the training. My last track workout was sub-optimal in the heat, so I give myself a pass because of that, but it bothers me to make excuses, because there are no excuses at mile 20. You have 6.2 more.

Very long email. good luck and keep in touch with what is going on. Take the plunge and commit and you will not be sorry you did.”

best
Robert

Image left of James Worrell circa 1985, Iowa proving that the kids are alright. I am certain of meeting James before circa New York Magazine 1990’s but that feels like a world away. Anyway in the spirit of childhood athleticism he responded to the TFK challenge and made a big contribution to my fundraising. 

Both of us had slideshows in last Thursday’s Slideluck Potshow, you can see his here. 

Week 5 begins today and features an 18 miler sunday.

Around mile 6.

Everyone is away, nothing is doing, we are into August. The gallery openings and free booze are a couple months away, the blogosphere is awaiting the next Edgar Martins to grace the stage, and I have just completed week three of training for the NYC marathon.

Week four is a rest week, the idea is that your muscles get a chance to recover a little from the steady overload they have been experiencing the last three weeks, which culminated in a 16 mile run Saturday evening. See above.

In photography it feels like progressive overload all the time. The steady drum beat of what to do next, how to keep the little ship from sinking. But in August, you really can’t do that, no one is around to hear the sound of your one shutter clapping.

For a while I have been tempted to write in bold caps “PHOTOGRAPHY IS DEAD” as the headline to a post. Catch me in a bad mood and I still might. Still photography for me was the defining art form of the Twentieth Century. Do I need a degree to say that? You might even say that the moon landing July 1969 was the culmination of all that still photography could do, to relate the actual imprint (via another actual imprint) of man on a landscape. Somewhere in a vault at NASA, exists the actual frame that was exposed to the 1/500th of a second of sunlight reflected from the boot imprint of Neil Armstrong. He also shot the same patch of lunar soil minus his bootprint, the moment before. It shows a great presence of mind to understand that there is the moon “before” and the moon “after.” And more than film or video, still photography is the exact medium in which to contemplate this. There is the film “before” and the film “after” exposure as well. The silver salts are like the lunar soil. Grains recording our existence. Wow. Pretty existential.

You could also argue, and I will, being that it is August and there is nothing else to argue, that at that moment photography died and the moving image became paramount in the culture. It was already happening, in Vietnam, for example, the shootout as it were between still and motion, I think still imagery won that war, pun intended. But the moon landing as it was shown on TV around the world galvanized the power of the flow of images over the still. A series of stills from an alien planet in real time does not have the same power. I remember when the Mars landers started sending back panoramas for the first time, and while the NASA scientists were besides themselves in the control room, the line by line reveal of the  Martian landscape was pretty ho-hum to me. I have watched a scanner work too long to find what it reveals to be that exciting.

I know I would get a lot of argument over whether stills or film was the defining art form of the Twentieth Century. Motion pictures have shaped our culture enormously. But I feel as a pure art form the still image has evolved the most.

I think we are at the other end of the telescope now, looking back at photography and what it did and meant to us. I say this because almost all of the work I see now is essentially nostalgic, nostalgic of a time or feeling or place or process. Recently Todd Papageorge published “Passing through Eden”, a collection of images from his years wandering Central Park. The work is completely modern in conception, the unrelenting gaze of the camera making what the camera makes, photographs, but the publishing of it is essentially nostalgic. I have read that TP urges his students at Yale to contemplate working in this genre, the lyrical documentarian, camera in hand, and he says he gets no takers. I think that for photography, quote-unquote, this period in the late 60’s early 70’s was the ultimate period, the point at which art photography reached its apogee to borrow a space term. It is hard to get any better than the unblinking, unrelenting, rigourous exactitude of the black and white or colour images of Robert Adams, Arbus, Friedlander, Winogrand, Eggleston, etc.

This power comes from that sense that you are seeing the trace or existence of something real. Like the lunar footprint, or the image of Lincoln in the Smithsonian, you look closely and it feels as if you can touch reality just on the other side of the glass. But this necessarily limits photography to what actually exists. As soon as you admit fabrication, the power ebbs. And for me the last couple decades of photography have been bouncing along in the nostalgic, either borrowing from painting, or borrowing from the history of photography itself. Sort of like current Broadway musical theatre, a recreation of a long gone heyday.

As I said, we started this trek away from photography during that moon landing. The essential difference between a still photograph and a motion film is that one exists and the other doesn’t. You can hold a photograph in your hand, see it, understand it, confirm it’s existence. You can only apprehend a film, it exists only in your brain as the joining of 24 frames per second by persistence of vision. To see the physical film, there is no motion. It exists only in projection. And you can’t even hold one moment, except as a still, a broken fragment of the whole. This makes motion film the idea medium of what might be, of fantasy. Nothing is real, so it needn’t be. You might argue that the power of documentary film suggests that we still value the real in motion film, but I think we equally value being tricked in film, the willing suspension of disbelief, the surprise twist, the Kaiser Sose at the end. It doesn’t bother us in motion to find out it was all made up. But in still photography, it does. You feel let down. Edgar Martin’d.

Photography is dead. Slowly dying since the 70’s, on life support the last decade or so, I think you will see motion film (video) in many of the applications where the still was used formerly. And I believe the internet is the natural home of the video as print was to the still image. Stills on the internet are not as compelling as motion is. Bandwidth is the only obstacle, otherwise we’d be there now. With youtube, we mostly are there.

Of course there are those that point out that Radio didn’t kill live music performance (although how many of us now know how to play an instrument?) that Television didn’t kill Film, or Print Journalism, and that the Internet will not kill Print. But this does not mean that different mediums have not had to adapt to different, altered or reduced roles. What we are seeing now is the decline of the still image and print. I don’t see any way that it will have in the Twenty First Century, the impact that it did in the Twentieth.

But it is August. Ask me again in September.

edit: another take here on fin de siècle. My opinion, Talk was no George.

Back in the day story #16734: Encounter with Dan Winters. Shooting his opening at Saba Gallery for InStyle. (that will date this story…) Making sure to get pics of Sandra Bullock, and that guy in Speed 2. Whatshisname. Not really what I do. It was a hurricane outside, literally. But that did not stop Dan’s Fans from coming out. Obviously it speaks to how much people like this guy.

I thought of all this after reading about his new Aperture book here and the process of making it, the little cutouts, moving things by hand. (via Rob)

The other desktop

And all this relates back to-running-yes. I bought the book at the opening and indicated the picture I liked most, Dan explained that he was on a job somewhere and got up early to wander around the downtown to make some pictures. So that is how he signed it, “To Robert- Get up Early- Dan Winters”

This is week One of Sixteen in Marathon training. Gonna hafta get up early.

Commentary to what happened here-

Edit: ok so this is what I should have written-I did say off the cuff…there were so many errors I did not want to perpetuate any misunderstandings-it was the Magazine, not the paper, in which this ran. I had that wrong. So I rewrote the post.

The whole thing struck me as odd-”long exposures but no manipulation”-why exactly are you telling me how these pictures are made-it is like when they do a panorama-”a panorama is a series of photographs put together”-I wrote about this before, about the little girl in the Microsoft ad who is 4 and an PC, and how she sends a photograph to her family, she knows more about digital imaging evidently than we are giving the rest of society credit for…

It is ham-handed, and when someone lies, you get stuck with your hand in the cookie jar as has happened here.

What they should have done was run Edgar Martins own words, his own artist statement:

With artful composition and controlled framing—but no digital manipulation—Edgar Martins creates sublimely beautiful views of often un-beautiful sites. Minimalist nighttime beaches, forests ravaged by fires, and Iceland’s stark terrain have all served as subjects for his large-scale color photographs. He also explores the unexpected impact of modernism on the landscape, including startlingly graphic airport runways and colorful highway barriers that, at first glance, read like abstract murals.-Aperture

Nothing more. Then when it hits the fan, you turn on the author and say, you were telling the truth no? Like Oprah got caught vouching for James Frey-there is ambition on both sides of that equation, and it is not pretty.

Why is NYT running explanations of the ins and outs of digital photography? It is not their place. You can’t fact check a photography, even in film. It could be staged. All you have are trusted sources. How do you have trust? You establish relationships with photographers over a period of time and assignments and then they don’t lie to you. This also means you might not want to run with the flavour of the moment, the MFA grad who just had a sold out show. Because you never know.

Update

An interview here with the person who called it first (evidently). Thanks Simon.