matt's pictures

On 'On Being a Photographer'

Reading On Being a Photographer (OBaP, for short). It’s a good, if probelmatic book. It’s stronly opinionated about what is and isn’t a good photograph, and how they are made. It’s helped greatly by the fact that the two authors are generally dead on. There’s a lot in there that is about half rhetorical trickery and half untrue. They completely miss the point of photography after, say, John Szarkowski’s tenure at MOMA, and of a lot of the legitimate criticisms of photography. The book oozes the subtext of two old men yelling at kids “Get off my Lawn!” That said, the descriptions of working methods, how to do the work of being a photographer, are invaluable, and would have saved me about 5 years of learning if someone had put the book in my hand 10 (12?) years ago. It’s way more practical than “the mind’s eye”:http://www.amazon.com/Henri-Cartier-Bresson-The-Minds-Eye/dp/0893818755, but not as good as “beauty in photography”:http://www.amazon.com/Robert-Adams-Photography-Defense-Traditional/dp/0893813680. I’m only halfway through, but I think I’ll finish it this time (last time I started it I couldn’t get over the old man tone of the thing). Totally worthwhile. I’ve got about three weeks, wall clock time, until I can replace my camera. Call it a month, by the time it ships to me. This is the longest I’ve been without a camera since I started photographing seriously in 1998. Even when I got hit by the car, breaking my 5d, I had a loaner. It’s really weird. It doesn’t help that I was in the middle of discovering a new subject, the ‘signs’ project. One of the problems with OBaP: they think you can’t go out without a subject in mind and find one. It’s simply not true. It really seems absurd if you think about it, that you couldn’t dicsover something visual by working visually. It just requires a lot of patience. Now I’ve finally found something new to shoot, and it’s really exciting. I can’t wait till I’ve got something to shoot it with again.

Posted on 2014-03-26T03:58:13Z GMT

TURKUAZ at the boom boom room

My friend MKB invited us out, got us on the list. His cousin is the guitarist/keyboard/melodica player (plus more besides). We sat around pre-show and talked about being from the midwest, they talked about family things, and we all got good and drunk. We went around the corner to eat when our need for metaphorical tacos became a need for actual sushi. When we got back, they were still getting ready to take the stage, and then I really got to taking pictures. These guys were really, really rad. A lot of fun in a packed house. I would have paid to get in, and I almost bought a t-shirt, but I think I was either out of cash or too drunk at the end of the night. I do remember stopping to get a gatorade before ubering home.

Posted on 2014-03-25T06:17:35Z GMT

game night at the old casa

Almost two weeks since I posted here. I’ve been busy. The new apartment is pretty livable at this point; the commute is settling into a routine, as is everything around the house. We have a microwave, finally, and groceries. We’re still working on breaking the habit of eating out all the time, which is hard, with so many good options by our door… but that’s totally a thing we can handle. Speaking of things that we’re ready to do again, these pictures are of a game night we had sometime in january. “Game nights” are a sort of proxy for inviting interesing and cool people over to the house, having food and conversation. The games present a sort of framework for alleviating social awkwardness. It fills the awkward pauses, takes the pressure of having to actually talk to each other off, and so everyone actually talks. They pretty regulary become more like dinner parties where the dinner is delivery pizza. I’m thinking next time I might actually cook something. Spaghetti or lasagna and fresh bread, something nice. I’ll have to consider how to accomodate vegetarians, though.

Posted on 2014-03-24T03:00:53Z GMT

more signs work

It occurs to me that I’m going to have to come up with a better name for this work. There’s a feeling at the heart of it, about being lost, coming unmoored. It’s a thread that’s run through my work since I did “the world doesn’t make any sense”:http://bit.ly/1fiShkO work. That book was also where I learned the hard way to hate gutter bleeds. The PDF is ok if you view it with two pages together though. Back to what I was saying though: I look at those pictures today and I see how far I’ve come, and yet I’m still pretty much just groping around in the dark. Why are you reading confused and confusing shit on the internet? Go outside and take some pictures.

Posted on 2014-03-10T06:18:26Z GMT

noon light deserves love too

Everybody always goes on and on about golden hour light, where the sun gives everything a glow that is supposedly the best light. So much so that some photographers don’t even take pictures except during the two hours around sunrise and sunset. Bullshit I say. Of course, I’m saying this with a camera that holds detail for something like 11 or 12 stops in a decent ISO. It’s as good as negative film ever was, and that’s saying something. It’s exposed differently, but there’s incredible tonal range available. One of the reasons earlier street photographers shot in black and white is that it offered the ability to handle these super contrasty situations. The signs project, which I don’t think any of these go with (save the middle one), is sort of becoming about playing with ambiguity of evidence. So, a sharp clear photo that could be any number of events, interpreted any number of ways. I’m trying to wrap my head around the idea. Signs may tell you something, but how can you believe it? Why do you think the person who put it there isn’t just as lost as you? How do you know someone in the equation (the signmaker, the photographer, the people in the photo) aren’t actively working to deceive you? It’s still at the stage that there are more questions than answers, which is really fun for me. The not-fun part is not having a camera, not knowing when I will again, etc. Oh well. At least it gives me time to work on the backlog.