The Pumpkin Has Two Faces

The National Parks - America's Best Idea, Episode 1

Just finished watching the first disc of the Ken Burns documentary and it's exactly what I hoped it would be. I'm going to savor the rest of the episodes.

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountian parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.

-John Muir

Chelsea: Ross, Hockney, Fischli Weiss and Pierson

Clifford Ross' Hurricane series at Sonnabend, excellent black and white images of the pounding surf during hurricane sesaon out on Long Island.

David Hockney's first NYC show in 10 years of crazy color landscape paintings. Apparently he's become quite obsessed with making digital paintings on his iPhone with the Brushes App.

Peter Fischli and David Weiss' piece at Matthew Marks is pages of advertising laid out on several tables that tells a loose narrative.

And Jack Pierson at Cheim & Read shows his found letters sculptures turning more abstract. No photos.

John Bartlett's blog

Check out more photos of Noah (part 2 of our shoot last week) on John Bartlett's blog.

Bond Street at Night

Light in my apartment at 2:23pm

"Luxury" by Martin Parr

I've always been a fan of the punchy color wide angled shots of Parr. His new photo book, Luxury, published by Boot, is filled with more amazing pictures. Culling images shot at events from around the world, he edits down the work to crystallize and point to the absurd moments of wealth and the so called high life.

The fashion designer Paul Smith writes in his introduction to the book:

"In Martin's case, it's about noticing things; about looking at the way people are and how we live, describing human life as it is rather than as we wish it was. He doesn't add glamour, he see through it. Other photographers like Annie Liebovitz or Mario Testino offer us a perfect vision of glamour - and there's room in the world for that - but what Martin does is show us the gap between how we are and how we like to think we are. Which i think is more interesting."

Shooting at polo matches, World's Cups, fashion weeks, my favorite images are from artfairs, where he finds his version of a doppelgänger for an artwork and its viewer.

I don't think this world exists quite like this any longer, but then again when looking back at Slim Aarons that world seems simliar yet miles away.

New Interiors Photos

I put up some new photos on the interiors page of my portfolio today.

aphotoeditor.com

I've been reading a lot of stuff on aphotoeditor.com and it is really great. It's Rob Haggart's site, he was the former Director of Photography for Men's Journal and Outside Magazine. He interviews some awesome people in the photo industry and covers interesting innovations in photo technology. Recently he's posted some cool videos, I particularly love the animation Editor vs. Photographer.

Greenmarket in the rain

PDN Photoplus Expo

Ok, photo gear nerdness at full blast. I went to the Jacobs K. Javits Convention Center for the PDN Photo Expo today. Backdrops, Photo books, lighting equipment, tripods, bags, more photo books, oh yeah and there were cameras. Besides the big companies there were the usual suspects of little booths devoted to everything from photo business cards to women's "foto fashion". Sony even had a little race track set up and lit to play with their point & shoots. I got to spend a lot more time with my Canon EOS 5D that I WILL own, someday! There are lots of accessories out now to use it as an HD video camera. Canon released the new EOS 1Ds Mark IV and I stared lovingly at the beautiful Leica S system. The big mystery was the absence of the Red Camera, I thought there would be a presence as I'm very curious to see and learn more about it.

from "On Photography" by Susan Sontag

"In photography's early decades, photographs were expected to be idealized images. This is still the aim of most amateur photographers, for whom a beautiful photograph is a photograph of something beautiful, like a woman, a sunset. In 1915 Edward Steichen photographed a milk bottle on a tenement fire escape, an early example of a quite different idea of the beautiful photograph. And since the 1920s, ambitious professionals, those whose work gets into museums, have steadily drifted away from lyrical subjects, conscientiously exploring plain, tawdry, or even vapid material. In recent decades, photography has succeeded in somewhat revising, for everybody, the definitions of what is beautiful and ugly along the lines that Whitman had proposed. If (in Whitman's words) "each precise object or condition or combination or process exhibits a beauty," it becomes superficial to single out some things as beautiful and others as not. If "all that a person does or thinks is of consequence," it becomes arbitrary to treat some moments in life as important and most as trivial."

– Susan Sontag, 1977

Details Magazine – November 2009

I've got photos in 2 stories for the November issue of Details Magazine. One is a shopping & eating story about the lower east side and the 2nd one is my first published food shot! (coincidentally also on lower east side.)

Long Beach Island

I was shooting a beach house in Long Beach Island, New Jersey this morning and here are couple outtakes and detail shots.

The Stone Masters – California Rock Climbers in the Seventies

My friend Alex from Loden Dager gave me this new book this weekend (images from it were on their inspiration board for the SS10 collection). It is an awesome book of images by Dean Fidelman and stories/essays by John Long, published by T. Adler Books. They are the same company that put out great surfing books a few years ago.

It's cool to look at the great stye & looks from California in the seventies being worn for functional purposes (and a bit of fashion) in their natural environments.

"Jim Bridwell had a quiver of silk scarves and he gave me one he thought suited my personality – bold, but unpretentious. With hair cuts far and few between, these scarves kept our long hair tied back and, over time, became part of our style."

- Mike Graham

More photos of Noah

James Nachtwey

I watched the documentary War Photographer about James Nachtwey from 2001 on DVD last night. He has been a photo journalist for over 30 years, shooting in locations around the world like Kosovo, Rwanda and Indonesia to name a few. I first saw his work only a few years ago in the New Yorker but was immediately drawn to the intensity of his photographs.

They mounted a small video camera on his 35mm and you are able to see what he is shooting and the subjects reacting to their situations in real time. You also watch his finger changing the aperture and the shutter speed and you hear the click of his camera firing.

"I also had to learn in taking pictures how to develop a personal vision, how to express my own feelings about it, in order to do that I had to get in touch with my own feelings and it was through photography, through the discipline of the frame I learned about the world, it became the way in which I discovered the world and it also became the way in which I discovered myself."

- James Nachtwey

Snails

I was at a french restaurant last night with a friend who ordered escargot and i was reminded of these images I shot this summer. It's hard to tell the scale of these creatures from the photos but they were almost the size of my fist, the ones he ate were a lot smaller.

League of Nations Map

More editing of old photos. And again another vertical shot. Love the colors on this old map with the soft daylight from the window.

Final Gourmet arrives

Edward Burtynsky

Oil is the name of his show at the new Hasted Hunt Kraeutler gallery. And they are amazing images of industrial wastelands, oil usage and the bi-products of our auto/petroleum based world. I can't wait to get my hands on his new book Edward Burtynsky: Oil published by Steidl.