Shooting Wide Open

I saw this on Engadget: (Chinese comprehension recommended but not required for those who like to decipher graphics)

Apparently China is about to build huge buses that basically swoop over passenger cars, carrying riders on a raised level. The video of a short presentation given by one of the, I assume, design team claims that the vehicle can track white lines on the road and thus does not need rails. Supposedly each vehicle can also carry up to 1200 people, if I’m understanding him correctly. That sounds a bit high, and makes me wonder how the cost scheme is going to work if they don’t run at full capacity most of the time. Not to mention how in the world sidewalks would accommodate that number of people waiting for one. Sounds like it would take a good 15 minutes just to load one.

But if they can get the kinks and the accident prevent worked out (driving in China isn’t exactly orderly, and I assume they’d need to implement a truck lane), it’s a clever plan to take advantage of existing infrastructure to reduce pollution. I doubt it’d really reduce the amount of passenger car traffic though.

Unfortunately I won’t be able to see any on my trip since I won’t be in Beijing, but even if I was, they are hoping to have the tech side of things wrapped by late August and begin construction by the end of the year, so I’m too early for once. Cross my fingers that there’ll be something on it at the Expo though.

What would you call this sort of vehicle? In fact, if you have a clever name for this thing, drop a note by the end of the month and the cleverest name gets this little volume (catalog to this exhibition). (I’m sure it already has a name, but I bet it’s not clever.)

Stanley Greene

The Lens Blog ran an interview with Stanley Greene: Stanley Greene’s Redemption and Revenge. Do you remember when you realized that the camera suited you better than anything else?

Greene: I wanted to be a musician. I wanted to be Jimi Hendrix, but when I heard Jimi Hendrix, I realized I could never touch him. I wanted to be a painter, but Matisse and all those guys were ahead of me. And I wanted to be a writer, but you know, Richard Wright and all those guys.

And I looked around and all there was was Gordon Parks and Roy DeCarava. I could compete, and I knew I could bring something. It’s like Miles Davis. He was a drummer. But when he picked up a trumpet, he realized that he had found his instrument. When I picked up a camera, it was like one of those movies.

Then a bit on heart over technique, especially when it comes to disaster tourism:

NYT: I have been hearing this from a lot of older photographers: that the young photographers today are technically amazing, they have learned what an amazing photograph looks like, but they sometimes lack a variety of influences or a certain humanity.

Greene: They don’t have humanity. They are definitely much better technically. They know that backwards and forwards. And they should. It’s their generation. But at the same time, because of all that technology, they are losing the humanity.

When we get to the point where we start digging up graves to make photographs, I think we are in trouble. When we get to the point where a woman is standing there with a bucket, trying to hold her guts in, and we are trying to get the right frame, and chimping at the same time we are doing it, we are in trouble. “Wait a minute, I need to take this picture, but I need to do an interview with you, but also, I need to shoot some video. Do you think you could keep that bucket there and maybe a little bit more, so we could see the blood running out?” And she is just shell-shocked.

…First thing, I think that photographers need to get away from the computer and get out and walk around the communities that they photograph. I think that a lot of photographers are taking nothing away.

And there is a thing called disaster tourism. That is disgusting. I am sorry. But that is disgusting: to bring people, like they are going to the zoo, and show them how to take pictures.

And finally, some words to live by:

Greene: Because I think — at the end of the day — we have to be diplomats. I don’t like the word “photojournalism.” It’s been bastardized. I am comfortable with the idea of being a photographer, just being a photographer. I don’t want to be an artist; I want to be a photographer. That’s what I do. And a photographer is someone who looks at the world and tries to make some sense of it for themselves, and for everyone else. And that’s what I want to do.

Taryn Simon, Contraband

Contraband includes photographs taken 24 hours a day of over 1000 items detained or seized from passengers and express mail entering the U.S. from abroad. Over five days, in both the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Federal Inspection Site and the U.S. Postal Service International Mail Facility, Simon documented items including counterfeit American Express travelers checks, overproof Jamaican rum, heroin, a dead hawk, an illegal Mexican passport, deer penis, purses made from endangered species, Cuban cigars, counterfeit Disney DVDs, khat, gold dust, GHB concealed as house cleaner, cow manure tooth powder, counterfeit Louis Vuitton bags, prohibited sausage, undeclared jewelry, steroids and an ostrich egg. – Steidl

Reminds me of this photo from American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar.

All items in the photograph were seized from the baggage of passengers arriving in the U.S. at JFK Terminal 4 from abroad over a 48-hour period. All seized items are identified, dissected, and then either ground up or incinerated. JFK processes more international passengers than any other airport in the United States.

(via A Photo Student)

Turns out I’ll be going to China a little earlier than expected, which means, unfortunately, I’ll miss Bob Dylan in Monterey this August because travel plans changed, but in anticipation I had been reading the Essential Interviews, and came upon this, in an interview with Nora Ephron in ’65:

Great paintings shouldn’t be in museums. Have you ever been in a museum? Museums are cemetaries. Paintings should be on the walls of restaurants, in dime stores, in gas stations, in men’s rooms. Great paintings should be where people hang out. The only thing where it’s happening is on radio and records, that’s where people hang out. You can’t see great paintings. You pay half a million and hang one in your house and one guest sees it. That’s not art. That’s a shame, a crime. Music is the only thing that’s in tune with what’s happening. It’s not in book form, it’s not on the stage. All this art they’ve been talking about is nonexistent. It just remains on the shelf. It doesn’t make anyone happier. Just think how many people would really feel great if they could see a Picasso in their daily diner. It’s not the bomb that has to go, man, it’s the museums.

Hmmm.