Shooting Wide Open

I have no fashion sense whatsoever and can’t be bothered to think about it, but I can’t get enough of the Sartorialist. Tons of perfectly executed photos, breaking down the aesthetics, talking digestibly about something I know nothing about but is visual… all combined with the fun of approaching random people in the street and sometimes profiling them. Somehow, I can’t resist.

I went into Long’s to drop off the cheap Walgreens film and as I’m filling out the envelopes, an old lady comes in and pulls out a memory stick for the digital printing station. She does a small double take when she sees me at the film drop off. For a moment it feels like we’ve been cast for the wrong roles.

We had our final critique class, which didn’t have any constraints so I took the opportunity to plaster as much as I could up there without seeming too greedy for wall space. It felt like I was putting up The Wall, except this time it was my own photos. I’d forgotten how anal I used to get about all those newspaper and magazine photos – everything has to look right against its neighbors, everything must be spaced within a millimeter of its life. Guess in a weird way, it was practice for shooting. When I think about it, a lot of things are. I feel like I got some sort of cheesy composition training when I was a teenager just by looking back at the crappy vacation videos I shot of boring touristy spots. If the frame moves or sits in a way that makes you want to lean to see something out of the frame, it’s bad composition. Of course some conceptual artists might do that just to make viewers uncomfortable, but guess that’s not me.

What’s great about the big time photographers is that they can make an uncomfortable framing comfortable. Headless people are always gonna be uncomfortable. For me, a photo like that works when the framing is strong enough that it overwhelms the headlessness and draws your attention to the lines or other content of the photo. What doesn’t work though, are all those half assed “street” shots of cut off torsos and random people’s legs or backs most likely taken because the photographer’s too afraid of attracting attention to actually bring the camera up to eye level.

There was a thread on Flickr about blocked creativity and it occurred to me that there’s a distinction between creativity and productivity. For me, creativity isn’t an every day thing, but productivity is. I try to be productive on days that I don’t feel creative, which will increase the chances that a creative spell will hit more frequently. That means going to photo shows, looking at plates in books, watching well-shot movies, thinking about potential styles and projects, reading up on techniques and gear, or reorganizing my old photos to try to make some sense of them.

I’ve been looking at more and more photos from Asia by westerners and easterners on Flickr. Sometimes I’m not very happy with taking photos void of cultural background. Taking the Chinatown photos felt different than taking other photos, but at the same time, those were a very superficial rendering of cultural background. All I can do at the moment is kind of hope that somehow it’ll come through eventually in the photos, cuz I have no idea how to move on this front. But here are some cool Chinese photos from a blog I came upon today: China: 1934-2008.

Here’s a really cool project by Robert Rauschenberg: reshooting Atget in Paris.
And a different kind of pairing: before & after death. It’s a cool blog.

Here’s a link in honor of the fact that there really isn’t such a thing as a purely, uniquely original idea any more. I bet people only thought ideas were original back in the day because they didn’t have the internet. One of the photo TAs presented some of his sculptural work in class and I followed up online, where I was amazed to see that he also had the idea of drawing with hair as the lines, which had occurred to me years ago but I never thought seriously about how it could be done. I guess I could still do one with white hair. Okay, not really, but god knows I have enough of my own. The rest of his work is pretty interesting too – he works with the idea of visual punchlines. I especially like the opera singing with a libretto of tagalog spellchecked into English. I don’t know what the hell they teach people in art school, but what’s cool about sculptural work with different materials is that there’s a lot of research, trying new things and failing involved.

It’s a strange mindset to me to take my ideas seriously. I don’t have an art background or move in art circles, so every time I have an art idea I can’t see it in any but a half-assed, glue our the sides, amateur hour form. I guess almost everyone goes through a period of being pretty bad when they first start to learn anything, and it just takes a bit of patience and repressing a piece of self dignity to bear to be bad for however long it takes to get better. I think it’s been a lot easier to sit out the bad period with photos. Granted, when I was bad I probably didn’t really realize how truly bad I was so there was no pain in it.

Is it just me or does David Maisel have some very Radiohead photos? The Terminal Mirage series is very Kid A.