The image on our home page is from Cyndi Bemel ...and speaks for itself “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Antoine de Sainte Exupery Our guest today was Marc Todd a local street / urban photographer working on the analog side in B&W. He started with a brief background...the following is his statement: "I began photography with earnest around 2005. I started with black and white film and continue to do so that I develop and print myself. My interests are the city and social landscapes. When I walk out my front door to take pictures I do so without any clear direction or agenda. I much prefer to embrace the surprises and chance encounters of pure discovery as I move through the cityscape." Just a few additional factoids about Marc: he was/is an abstract painter and he presented at Open Show He showed a series entitled "Meet Exciting Singles"...a few examples are below Marc showed a large series of street images focusing on a variety of topics including image metaphors, semiotics, religious icons, protest and human relationships on the streets. His compositional ideas wee discussed including his idea of shooting just two people in relation to one another. See gallery below Marc also brought a large number of B&W prints. A lot of photography and discussion of nuts and bolts of shooting and aesthetics of the street. Thanks Marc.
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Today Joe Loudermilk lead the f8 discussion focusing on his found family photographs and leading into a broader discussions of snapshots and family memory. Below is the narrative from Joe... Kodak Moments 1920 -1950 "George Eastman introduced roll film which allowed for small cameras that could take and hold many photos easily. With this photographic advance of roll film, he also introduced the first Kodak camera in 1885, the Brownie, "You press the button, we do the rest," which was Kodak’s motto. Prior to these small cameras, family portraiture produced by painters or professional photographers usually in formal settings were the only two ways to capture visual images of family members. Both expensive and often time consuming, and out of reach for most people. Family photographs can be considered cultural artifacts because they document the events that shape families' lives. Thus, the recording of family history becomes an important endeavor. In many cases, photographs are the only biographical material people leave behind after they die (Boerdam, Martinius, 1980). Joe presented two groups of family photographs. This first group of photos, scanned from old prints, were taken starting around 1920, of his dad as a young boy with his family up to his service in WWII.The photos were taken in rural southeastern Tennessee and the Taft California area.The second group of photos, scanned from found negatives, were taken starting around 1940 and ending around 1950, mostly by my mother in and around Petrolia California. The Kodak Brownies allowed for this visual family history to be recorded and enjoyed, shared and passed on, now to four generations of family." Below are just some examples from the set he showed Several things were obvious from the images. First, his mother had a good eye for composition and her work could stand as art in and of itself if published. Second, these like most family snapshots conjure up stories of both the family and the times. We also noted a related story in the NY Times "Photos Connect People to Stories"....a three part series on PBS byThomas Allen Harris where he invited people to bring out their photos and tell their stories. https://familypicturesusa.com Thomas Allen Harris hosts this three-episode series that explores American cities, towns and rural communities through family photographs. Each episode begins at a community photo-sharing event, where participants engage in conversation stemming from the people and places shown in their photos, then moves to specific communities to expand on family narratives. From North Carolina to Detroit to Southwest Florida, families introduce ancestors, parents and friends, keeping their memories and stories alive by sharing them. Family Pictures USA is a documentary-style magazine show, filmed before a live studio audience, that journeys through a rapidly changing landscape where the foundations of a familiar and idealized “AMERICA” are being transformed. As ordinary Americans begin to discover their hidden family histories, stashed in boxes in dusty attics or on old floppy disks and new smartphones, they will unpack more than artifacts and ephemera. They will re-meet their relatives and old friends —fascinating characters, brought back to life by images and stories —giving them a new home in our collective consciousness, and introducing us to a more nuanced and diverse story of our common history, shared present and evolving future. Family Pictures USA will mine this rich treasure trove of personal narratives to reveal roots, connections, and provocative parallels that will surprise us and illuminate the path toward a new America for a 21st Century. Finally, we noted a new book..."The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media" / Nathan Jurgenson reviewed in LA Times on August 11th. from review LA Times August 11/ Leah Ollman / edited for space "Jurgenson, a sociologist employed by Snap Inc. (more on that later), normalizes the phenomenon of snapshot saturation by erecting a historical, contextual scaffold around it. The social photo fulfills a fundamental human impulse to document experience, he writes, an impulse that takes different forms as technology evolves. The tools we see with affect what and how we see; they shape our “documentary consciousness.” This has ever been so, but because digital images are largely ephemeral, they upend our assumptions about what a photograph is, and what purpose it serves. Social photography, according to Jurgenson, is more about appreciating the present for its own sake than compiling a permanent visual archive. Attributing a be here now sensibility to a practice that interrupts engagement more than it intensifies, it feels overly generous at the least, specious at best. Another innate impulse, having to do with defining and performing the self, also finds a ready vehicle in the networked camera. The articulation of identity, too, bears the ever-changing accent and grammar of new technology. The extent to which digital media conditioned behavior can be witnessed everywhere, as we press pause on the everyday bustle around us to better frame our selfies. The line between shooting the style in our lives and styling our lives for the shoot has become increasingly blurred. If this yields a sort of onscreen inauthenticity, Jurgenson doesn’t buy it. “The Social Photo” is grounded in his rejection of “digital dualism,” the notion that online and offline worlds are mutually exclusive. He scoffs at the term “IRL.” It’s all real life, he contends. The digital and material are continuous and interwoven. There is no pure state of innocence and integrity away from our devices. Those who proclaim, self-righteously, “I am real. I am the thoughtful person. You are the automaton,” Jurgenson says , are mere fetishists, romanticizing a false ideal, and maybe even profiting from the promotion of it — think digital detox manuals, the wellness industry and so on. “The Social Photo” makes for a lively and provocative read. Jurgenson peppers his discussion with references to theorists on culture and photography, Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, Georges Bataille and more, but manages to strike an accessible tone just shy of academic. He bounces his thoughts about the reflex to chronicle our everyday doings against Susan Sontag’s “photograph-trophies” and Roland Barthes’ “certificates of presence.” He discusses insightfully how we use social photography, but is less broadminded when assessing how social photography is using us, what losses might incur from the conflation of private, public and performative. He acknowledges that social media has reshaped cultural norms about exhibitionism and voyeurism, but dismisses as alarmists those who scrutinize the costs, individually and collectively, of our compulsions. Because the offline/online binary is false, his thinking goes, any toxicity identified with the digital sphere cannot reside only there, but is a reflection of larger social problems; it might be a symptom, but can’t be blamed as the cause. Which brings us back to Snap. The company employs Jurgenson and funds “Real Life,” his cheekily titled online journal about living with technology. He notes that “Real Life” is editorially independent, but it’s hardly necessary to claim the same of “The Social Photo,” when Jurgenson’s own glistening take on the networked camera aligns so neatly with Snap’s upbeat mission (as stated on its website) to “contribute to human progress by empowering people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world and have fun together.” Also remember the exhibit at Pier 24 in San Francisco several years ago that featured "family albums as social art...it was called "Second Hand"
"Arguing that some photographers pay too much attention to composition feels a little like arguing that some chefs just pay way too much attention to flavour" David DuChemin Today, was an open session mostly looking at some photography websites followed by a field trip to DTLA and The House of Lucie The first website was PDN (Photo District News) and a short video and article about W. Eugene Smith and his photo essay on the Country Doctor for Life Magazine. This prompted a discussion on the importance of the photoessay. In follow-up of Doug Stockdale's presentation at PPA Forum on photobooks. Also his photo book journal where he and others review photo books...please see last week's blog for discussion We noted the publisher "21st Editions" and their most recent offering of Sally Mann's "Southern Exposure"...book and fine art prints...expensive!!! Image We then reviewed images from the British Journal of Photography Weekly Round-up before being on our way to the House of Lucie / fototeka exhibit "Art of the Archive" "In 2000, Fototeka’s founders discovered thousands of Los Angeles Police Department negatives housed in a city warehouse in conditions that made them vulnerable to decay and created a fire hazard. Fototeka was granted unprecedented access to the negatives by the Chief of Police and the City Council, which tasked the gallery with creating an archive of selected images. In keeping with Fototeka’s mission of preserving the archive and making its images available to the public, in 2001 the gallery mounted the first-ever photographic exhibition of Los Angeles Police crime scene photography with the support of then-Councilman Eric Garcetti, along with former Police Chief Bernard Parks. The images in the Fototeka Collection of Los Angeles Crime Scene Photography on view at the House of Lucie were not originally intended as art. They are crime-scene photographs, shot between 1925 and the 1970s by Los Angeles police officers in the line of duty — as evidence. Through curation and presentation in a gallery setting, they achieve a secondary purpose, offering a real-life window into a world familiar to present-day viewers through film noir. But in their stillness and their basis in real-life situations, the photographs have a power altogether different than that of film noir, much as did the documentary work of Weegee and Walker Evans. The drama of circumstance have imbued these black-and-white images with layers of meaning, heartbreak, and even humor the officer-photographers likely did not intend. Some images have become iconic. A wide shot of a bridge over the LA River in rainy season (1955), a body sprawled in the riverbed, while three men in plainclothes talk among themselves has become emblematic of the collection. A smashed-up car in 1929 looks as if it were staged for exhibition. Some of the images show homicide victims; others incidentally capture detectives at work. Virtually all of the negatives are coded by hand by darkroom technicians, whose handwriting styles vary. The old-style furnishings, clothing styles, and automobiles tell us this is of another time; but ironically the violence many of the images relate, after-the-fact, make these people from another era — victims and investigators alike — seem human and real, their noir-ish surroundings an accident of history. Rarely is the presence of a photographer as witness felt so strongly as in these images. The current exhibition brings together images from Fototeka’s original 2001 exhibit with those of Paris Photo Los Angeles, which was mounted in 2014 at Paramount Pictures Studios. Many of the photographs in this show have not been exhibited in over 15 years." After our gallery visit, it was off to lunch with the group....good field trip
“When you photograph people in color you photograph their clothes. When you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their soul!” – Ted Grant Today was a shorter session with fewer f8'ers but the discussion was animated as usual. Jim showed prints from his archives dating back to 1973. "In 1973, when I shot this series of photos one night at a roller rink, I was already taken with the idea that I was following a succession of documentary photographers. Bruce Davidson's work informed me on subject...the human condition, while W. Eugene Smith showed a tonal scale in printing that placed an emphasis on minimal light falling on the subject to draw us into that drama of life." Below are several images we looked at and discussed These images prompted the continuing notion of aesthetics...one aspect is the aesthetic of B&W vs Color...see quote at the beginning of this blog post today. More later on the subject. We reviewed a few B&W images from Dawoud Bey Dawoud Bey is an American photographer and educator renowned for his large-scale art photography and street photography portraits including American adolescents in relation to their community, and other often marginalized subjects. He was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant in 2017. We looked at Photobook Journal...edited by Doug Stockdale Douglas Stockdale (www.douglasstockdale.com) is a anartist/photographer, book author and educator. He is the influential Editor and Publisher of PhotoBookJournal, (www.photobookjournal.com) the contemporary photobook magazine, which has continually ranked the #1 for photobook reviews. Stockdale is a submission reviewer for LensCulture. He frequently curates and serves on juries for international photographic exhibitions and photobook competitions. He provides mentoring on the development of photographic projects including the concept, editing, sequencing, layout, and design which is equally applicable towards an effective project, portfolio, submission or a published book. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museo d’Art Contemporanea di Roma (MACRO), Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (Yale University), Reminders Photography Stronghold (Tokyo) and other photobook archives. He has self-published five books and two artist books, Pine Lake and Bluewater Shore, were Best Photographic Books of 2014 and 2017 respectively. His first monograph, Ciociaria, was published by Edizioni Punctum (Rome) in 2011. He is represented by Fabrik Projects (gallery), Los Angeles.
He even reviewed by first publication from the Art of the City Wall…”Artifacts” …see review below https://photobookjournal.com/2019/05/10/bill-wishner-artifacts/ Finally, Paul brought more samples of his UV prints on various substrates. We will visit his studio sometime in the future |
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