I received a nice email the other day from Alejandro Cartagena, a Dominican born photographer, who has lived for many years in the city of my birth, and the city closest to my heart, Monterrey, Mexico. Cartagena was a researcher on one of my semi-obsessions, a book titled Nuevo Leon, Imagenes de Nuestra Memoria and he is also responsible for a photo project I've been meaning to post titled Lost Rivers . If you've spent much time in that part of the world you know the significance of the often empty river beds that lead off into nowhere. In fact Monterrey itself is split in half by a lost river, the Santa Catarina, that is a chaotic mix of sand, overgrown palms, squatter homes, markets, and soccer fields. But you don't have to have experience in Mexico's northern states, to appreciate the melancholy of images of rivers that are vanishing into the dust, some photographs speak for themselves.

I love taking pictures of people asleep. In sleeping children we see their futures. In adults we see their childhoods. We relax. Our waking masks lowered, we become truer versions of ourselves.

The image above is from the site Square America which collects vernacular photography and has posted a wonderful collection of vintage photos of people sleeping. Check them out.

The impact of changing the order of a sequence of images always surpises me. I was looking around for work by Yola Monakhov after seeing a photograph of hers in Harpers and found two sites that featured sets of her images. Both sites present the images in a similar manner and the images mainly overlap... The first series is presented on her gallery's site and the second series is presented on her personal site. I read the images on the gallery site as a journey going from Point A to Point B (The captions distract from this but I didn't read those until later), they work as a group for me whereas in the personal site edit I couldn't find the throughline and was forced to consider the images as individual pieces.

Unrelated but gripping: Ms. Monakhov's account of being shot while working in the West Bank.

It might be a little bit of inside baseball recommending shows being put on by my business partner and my gallerist, but darnit, both are worth seeing. Both shows are composed primarily of landscape photography, both are by photographers that speak in quiet voices, and both photographers happen to be super nice guys in person.

So go see Sweet Water by Ian Baguskas at the Jen Bekman Gallery. It opens on Friday and runs through the end of April (Ian was just included in the PDN 30 btw).

Then hop on the F and go see The Town and the City by Mark Marchesi at the Nelson Hancock Gallery in Dumbo. It opened last week and also runs through the end of April.

Leonie Purchas' In The Family project is full of the type of photography that gets me out of bed in the morning- intimate, revealing, and true with the occassional punch in the solar plexus to leave you totally gobsmacked.

One of my favorite blogs, Square America, has posted an online show titled African-American Portraits & Snapshots, a collection of 160 photographs taken between 1900 to 1975 (several home movies are also included). It's a rich and varied collection that I hope gets put into book form some day. Note the site takes a few seconds to load and the site curator Nicholas Osborn mentioned he's still tweaking the layout, so things might change in a day or two.

Photo by Tony Cenicola
Great story in today's Times on Robert Capa's lost negatives.

I had never gone through Denmark based photographer Joakim Eskildesn's portfolios because the work I had seen of his had a high polish finish which doesn't suit my taste (overly dramatic skys are always the tipoff...National Geographicy for want of a better adjective.), but his project titled iChickenMoon which I believe was shot in South Africa is beautiful stuff and got me looking. And my stylistic qualms notwithstanding Eskildsen has seen more than most of us, and his portfolios all hold fascinating imagery. His site is worth delving into.

Guillaume Herbaut travels to many of the world's grim hard places; his portfolio is a catalog of suffering and woe. By photographing what most of us would run away from he forces us to consider the large swaths of the world where misery is the norm. The two images above are from the series Vendetta taken in Albania where thousands of people are locked in blood struggles...

When I was a kid one of things that made photography so compelling was the idea that it was a way to fold time. I dabbled with long exposures, double exposures, photographs of the same exact spot on different days, etc etc. Later I became a light junkie... sometimes spending days scoping out a place to find the exact time when the light would be just right-obsessing over the exact film stock to record the blue of my grandmother's front wall when it was first illumated with morning sun. After that I became emotion obsessed and so on and so on... I imagine most beginning photographers go through some similar trajectory. This comes to mind because today I was looking at the work of 2 photographers who have distilled their work down to time and light. Both work with a camera on a tripod and a mirror to make their images.

Photographers who shoot long exposures and light trails are a dime a dozen, but Tokihiro Sato's shothe manages to create light that feels organic and mysterious. Many of his images remind me of fireflies (they remind me Crewdson's firefly pictures more than actual fireflies) or of childhood imaginings of sprites and woodland ghosts.

Julianne Swartz makes similarly lyrical images using the same basic tools as Sato. Her Placement series is a project in which she shoots photos of hands holding mirrors reflecting the opposite horizon. I saw a few of them at Mixed Greens recently and they've stuck with me. If you're in Manhattan you should check them out.

Check out SVA MFA student Clayton Cotterell's project 'Teens'. The series is shot without the sentiment or judgment or worship so often seen in series about that age group taken by older photographers.

Cottrell's series brought to mind another somewhat darker set of portraits called The Dirt Squad by a young Canadian photographer Jaret Belliveau. Belliveau has several hyper intimate portfolios most centered around his family and their friends...
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I've been looking at lots of art photography lately and realize I am, for the most part, tired of posed pictures. I'm hungry for images with the spark of life, pictures that raise more questions than they ask- those that force you to look and look again.

Two of my favorites from this week:
Eliot Shepard

Emily Stein

About 2 years ago I linked to an exhibition of early color photography by the Russian Photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. Now a Belgian researcher, Frank Dellaert, at Carnegie Mellon has converted thousands more of the Prokudin-Gorskii images (the restored color was produced by a technique called Digichromatography which digitally combines the 3 black and white glass plate originals shot with blue, green, or red filters).

Alex Gridenko has also converted more of the images... There are only 60 images on his page, but he did nice large versions and his conversions were obviously carefully done by hand.

Well worth the clicks...

I remember seeing some early color photography from the same era of New York City in a book somewhere, but I can't find it online. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

Ping Magazine interviews John Millichap editor of the new book 3030: New Photography in China as well as some of the contributors of the book. Of the book, one online reviewer wrote:

My main impression of looking through the book was adolescence. These are young photographers indeed, and the photos contain a heavy mix of the sort of self-obsessed, crude, and banal that you might expect from a similar collection anywhere in the rich world. That is, these young photographers are being normal. This bodes well for the future of China even if it does not suggest much for the future of photography.

Amazon: 3030 New Photography In China

Many of the photographers in the book have blogs: 223     Birdhead     Peng & Chen     Alex So     Ou Ning     Yao Yi Chun     Xu Zi Yu     Liu Ding     Cao Fei     Zhou Yau     yiki liu     Zheng Zhiyuan     Liu Ren     Tang Yi     Si Wei     BNE     K1973     Ziboy     Cai Wei Dong     Lu Yang Peng

And more emerging Chinese photographers in an exhibition called Chinese Neo by the OPPS felting gallery.

This image is from Jean-Christian Bourcart's Stardust project which he describes this way, "In my neighborhood, just behind the void of the World Trade Center, there is a multiplex theater where I go early in the morning. There, in the empty screening rooms, I photograph the little window that separates the projection cabin from the public space; or more precisely, I photograph the image that appears when the film passes through the window."

Bourcart's website showcases a wide range of projects in a variety of styles, but all have a trademark detached voyeuristic/cinematic quality about them. The artist comes off as having loads of confidence (maybe even arrogance), but not in a way that is off-putting..it just feels.. very... um... very French.

Note the text area of the site includes some interesting reads including an essay on Bourcart by Nan Goldin.

Peter Henry Emerson was one of the first vocal proponents of "naturalistic" art photography (photography done out in the field) at a time when most art photographers worked exclusively in the studio.

I've heard rumors that a museum in England is going to publish a catalog of Emerson's works for an upcoming show, but I'm not seeing anything on google. Do any readers out there know anything about this?

By the end of his life, Emerson completely reversed himself and published a pamphlet titled 'The Death of Naturalistic Photography'. A quote: "I have...I regret it deeply, compared photographs to great works of art, and photographers to great artists. It was rash and thoughtless, and my punishment is having to acknowledge it now... In short, I throw my lot in with those who say that Photography is a very limited art. I deeply regret that I have come to this conclusion..."

Virtually all the photography blogs I read, have paused to note the passing of legendary curator John Szarkowski who played a major role in establishing a place for photography in the art world. I reread The Photographer's Eye last night (you can find the opening essay on the web as both pdf and html...) and was struck by this paragraph...

But it was not only the way that photography described things that was new; it was also the things it chose to describe. Photographers shot "…objects of all sorts, sizes and shapes… without ever pausing to ask themselves, is this or that artistic?" Painting was difficult, expensive, and precious, and it recorded what was known to be important. Photography was easy, cheap and ubiquitous, and it recorded anything: shop windows and sod houses and family pets and steam engines and unimportant people. And once made objective and permanent, immortalized in a picture, these trivial things took on importance.
By the end of the century, for the first time in history, even the poor man knew what his ancestors had looked like.

Earlier on in the essay Szarkowski noted

The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process—a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made—constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes—but photographs, as the man on the street put it, were taken.

This also made me think of digital imagery and the ease in which is manipulated of synthesized... I wonder what Szarkowski would have made of today's digital image making that is rapidly turning film photographers into curious and arty anachronisms. Would it matter to him or would he dismiss the entire digital vs film debate that rages so fervently amongst photographers today as irrelevant? He seemed to value image itself as opposed to the mechanics of making it so my guess is he wouldn't have paid the debate much heed. His view was always expansive:

The history of photography has been less a journey than a growth. Its movement has not been linear and consecutive but centrifugal. Photography, and our understanding of it, has spread from a center; it has, by infusion, penetrated our consciousness. Like an organism, photography was born whole. It is in our progressive discovery of it that its history lies.

Venice Beach, 1980

There are some photographers whose work doesn't translate well to the web. Robbert Flick is one of them. His photographic murals are often 7 or 8 feet long and consist of hundreds of stills taken in sequence along specific roads. He's been making these kinds of images for a long time and moreso than many artists who work with a single idea his collages become more interesting over time because of the changes inherent in the landscapes he is traversing.

Along Central, 2005

Flick presents several sections of his Along Central mural on his website. The photographs are in a format called MrSid which is optimized for very large images full of detail (MrSid often used with maps. Get the MrSid viewer here). After downloading the software and option clicking to save the various files to your hard drive you can zoom in and out of the murals down to the level of single frames... It's worth the effort if you're into this sort of thing.

Ghost Trajectories is a website going into more technical detail on Flick's murals. The information as it's presented reminds me of 19 century landscape surveys which often included maps with their photographs...

Flick is sometimes accused of ripping off Ruscha's Every Building on the Sunset Strip but that's unfair. Both sequential image making and mapping have a long traditions going back to the dawn of photography and Flick in returning over and over again to familiar terrain has built a body of work that has his unique signature..

Semi related: Natchwey's sequential mural, murals from film stills

photo by Benjamin Donaldson

Every blog that has anything to do with photography has mentioned the exhibition A New American Portrait opening today at the Jen Bekman Gallery. The opening will be packed so if you want to actually see the photographs, plan on arriving early or returning later in the week. This promises to be a killer show and perhaps one that surfs zeitgeist smartly enough to be an deemed an important one. Jen has mentioned she titled the show 'A New American Portrait' as opposed to 'The New America Portrait' because the natural limitations of her small gallery space placed certain constraints on the scope of the selection of images. My suggested remedy: expand the show into a book not bound by lack of wall space...

Full disclosure, I'm partnering with Jen on a new venture called 20x200. If you're curious, you can read more about it here and here. Much more on 20x200 soon.

Perhaps because I haven't had a good travel fix for my wanderlust lately I've been seeking out portfolios from photojournalists covering places I want to visit. Here are two that scratched my yen for a walkabout:

Magnum photographer Alex Webb's Istanbul City of a Hundred Names

and

Tamas Dezso's Romania portfolio...

When I was in college I interviewed Roy Lichtenstein for a paper and during the course of the interview we started talking about landscapes, specifically oceanscapes, "You know what picture of mine everybody loves, even people in Kansas?" he asked.

"Girl with Ball", I ventured?

"Not even I like that one any more. No. The painting everyone loves isSun and Sea. Do you know why? Because everybody wishes they could live by the ocean and it's easy to put a picture of the ocean in any room in the house. [chuckles] My advice to new artists. 'Do you want to sell paintings? Paint the ocean.'"

Robert Phillips (via Mr. Colberg)

Michael Wesely

Hiroshi Sugimoto
(Be sure to click around the Sugimoto website put up by the Hirshhorn for this exhibition. It includes some nice podcasts with the artist.)

"I am often accused of being a portrait photographer. A bit like accusing your reflection of being mirror. My people may be staring at the camera but they are not portraits. They are not staring at you, I am."

read the entire post on Olivier Laude's new blog...

In a couple of hours I'm headed out to attend Review Santa Fe, so over the weekend posting will be sparse...

I've been so busy I haven't had much time to think about Santa Fe, but I'm sure things will click once I'm out there as I have a super list of people to meet. The reviewer lottery was most kind.

Here are just a few Santa Fe participants whose portfolios popped for me: Jeongmee Yoon, William Lamson, Caitlin Atkinson, Whitney Hubbs, Garie Waltzer, Derek Dudek, and Ferit Kuyas (whose website appears to be down right now)... of course there are many others.

Some of Jessica Dimmock's best photography is difficult to look at. Her photo essay on heroin addicts published last year in the New York Times Magazine (The 9th Floor) was as forceful as anything they've published in ages. Her website includes a complete set of images from that essay as well as essays on child workers in Zambia, a go-go dancer, and transvestites in Nepal amongst others. All are hard stories heartbreakingly well told..

Today is the Queen's birthday here in Holland so literally everything was shut down, virtually the entire city was out on the streets wearing loud orange outfits. In the center of the city the crush of drunken revelers looked much like the crowd you see in Times Square at New Years, or in New Orleans at Mardi Gras, but further out it felt more like an American 4th of July, with people barbecuing on their house boats, having picnics by the canals and in the parks, and generally being jolly. My big camera got me invited onto several boats where I was always received with good cheer (I'm now officially obsessed with Dutch house boat living.). Late in the evening I met several blog readers who graciously invited me into their homes and provided an evening of good food and great conversation. My new friends Gertrudia and Hilde recommended I check out the photography of Juul Hondius. Illegal immigration came up several times in conversation today and they see the images as highly politically charged...

Laurel over on Iheartphotograph linked to a beautiful mellow set of images from the Russian heartland by Sergey Chilikov. The pictures are hosted on an online magazine photographer.ru which features russian photography and has many image galleries by Russian photographers. Definitely worth checking it out. Here's a link to the site translated into English by google. The translation is rough but it lets you know what's going on...

**Correction: There's an English version of the site, someone I overlooked the obvious link on the top right corner of the page.

One of the great evocative travel experiences of my life happened in a dingy windowless room in a Rajastani guesthouse. I was bed-ridden with both dysentery and giardia and had not been outside in two or three days. I wanted to change rooms but was literally too weak to move. There were a tiny pinholes in the wall letting in shafts of light and a dim 5 watt bulb overhead which only worked a few hours a day. Hours were spent watching the ceiling fan circle ever slowly around and around and killing flies... so many flies. The nights were absolute black which was actually a relief as even the flies would stop buzzing.

One morning (at least I think it was morning as time had little meaning in there), when I awoke I noticed a dim but unmistakable image projected on the opposing wall... actually several images. There was the inverted village and the red hills, a tree with a swing, the train... dusty blue skies and clouds... The pinholes in the wall were turning the room into a natural camera obscura... They had been there all along but I had been too sick to notice. It is hard to express what comfort those images gave me and I think they were the boost I needed to get well enough to get out of there. I've never seen the camera obscura phenomena in any room since, although I've often dreamed turning a room of our house into one for a while.

I was thinking of those days in Rajasthan today which led me to revisit the work of Abelardo Morell the great creator of roomsized camera obscuras... His work is a reminder all rooms have secret lives as silent witnesses not only of the comings and goings inside but of the world beyond... and this is as true in the great rooms of New York City as it is in some miserable flyblown guesthouse on the Udaipur to Jodhpur railway line.

Related: a camera obscura fan site, Wifi Camera Obscura, Did Vermeer use a camera obscura?

Shorpy calls itself the 100 Year Old Photo Blog, it's a blog featuring well selected vintage images from the early 1900s. Shorpy is the sister blog to The Ghost Cowboy which features photographs of the old west. Both projects are smart marketing for the The Juniper Gallery which sells modern prints of the images featured. (via david gallagher's always super delicious links)

Long time readers of this blog know I love photostudio portraits. In the hands of a good photographer these types of portraits, when collected, become a more than simply the record of people passing through a studio and function a a poetic window on the life of a particular place and time. Henry Clay Anderson's portraits of the people of Greenville Mississippi are exactly such a window.

You can view some of his images on the web along with thoughtfully organized background information at the The Anderson Photo Service website or in person at the Steven Kasher Gallery on 23rd street in New York.

Joerg Colberg has posted a thoughtful interview with Andrew Moore, one of my favorite contemporary photographers.

Moore's site

After a post a few weeks ago featuring a Japanese photographer, several emails came in from Japan pointing me to this big list of Japanese photoblogs. The list features a huge range of sites from serious art portfolios to casual everyday "I ate eggs this morning" kind of blogs. Navigation is often obtuse so be warned. Images from a few of the photographers whose work caught my eye are listed below (click on the image to launch the respective sites).

TetsuomiSukeda

Okajimax S.Hondart

Koji Takiguchi

Ayao Nakamura

Sachiko Kawanabe

Yoshihisa Kajioka

Atsushi Saito

Here's a bonus: The project "broken" on this blog by Akihiro Takahashi adds snippets of live sound to the images... I find it adds a real immediacy... nice idea.

Jen Bekman and her panel have announced a new round of Hot Shots winners. I particularly like the work of Ka-Man Tse (her image is shown above) and can't wait to see her prints in person. You can find more of her work on her website.

New Yorkers should note that tomorrow night (tonight actually as it's after midnight) Nelson Hancock will be moderating a panel discussion on ethnographic images at the School for Visual Arts... sounds pretty interesting and I'm going to try to make it there. The image above was taken in Guinea by panelist Robert Gardner and is titled Ritual War.

The panel will include:

The aforementioned Robert Gardner, filmmaker "Dead Birds," "Rivers of Sand," "Forest of Bliss." Author most recently of The Impulse to Preserve (Other Press 2006). Founder of the Film Study Center at Harvard. images

Susan Meiselas photographer and filmmaker, books include: Nicaragua, Carnival Strippers, Kurdistan and Encounters with the Dani. Meiselas is a member of the Magnum Photo Agency and has held solo exhibitions in major cities around the world. She has received numerous awards, including the Leica Award for Excellence, The Hasselblad Foundation prize and a MacArthur Fellowship.

Rosalind Morris, professor of anthropology, Columbia University. Her writings include monographs on spirit mediumship and the mass media in Northern Thailand, and the archive of visual anthropology. Other essays have addressed photography and its discontents, art in South Africa, the history of fetishism and the violence of culture in anthropological theory.

For more information, please contact the Artist Talk on Art office at 212-779-9250 or contact Nelson Hancock, the panel organizer and moderator at 718-408-1190.
@ School for Visual Arts (209 East 23rd) in the amphitheater. It's $7.

On the heels of yesterday's post about a photostudio photographer, today I discovered a fantastic set of photostudio images on flickr. No context is given so I don't know the story behind them.

For the past couple of years Photo Eye has been my favorite photo magazine/photobook source with consistently smart editorial choices and thoughtful reviews. Tonight I gave their website a spin for the first time in a very long time and discovered they host online galleries with scores of artists. Unlike many similar sites these gallery feature decent sized images (on each artist click the small thumbmnail, then the medium sized one, to get a pop out window with large images). Many photographers also have prints available. Navigation of the galleries is clumsy, and artist selection is somewhat tame, but suffering bad HI is a small price to pay to be able to check out so many excellent photographers in one place.

In small towns, like the one in which I grew up, you can often go weeks without running into a stranger. You know people's stories and they know yours. You find mystery by picking up on dissonance between the facades people present and the realities underneath... But in big cities virtually everyone you encounter in a day is a stranger. You pick up little snippets of conversation, see bits of urban drama, but you always catch the stories in the middle. And the beginnings and endings are left to the imagination. Why was there a man in a black overcoat and black sunglasses standing alone on the promenade holding a child's pinwheel? What happened to the young couple fighting on Cranberry street? Did he mean it when he said he would change? Change what? Did she believe him or was she going back to her mother's house in Connecticut as she had threatened? Did the young thief being chased down Atlantic Avenue by cops escape with his loot from the pharmacy? And what of the very old man who wanders the neighborhood with a little camera around his neck? What does he do with those pictures he takes so unobtrusively, unnoticed except by other photographers? Does anyone ever get to see them?

related: photographs I did not take today, unphotographable, urban drama

One of my favorite photographers, Andrew Moore, has a show up at Yancy Richardson through the end of January. It's a broad review of his work over the last couple of years... I missed the opening last night which is annoying as I was only a few blocks away.

535 West 22nd Street 3rd floor
New York NY 10011
tel 646-230-9610
fax 646-230-6131
Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 10-6 PM

related: Andrew Moore's Russia

These days photographers whose work focuses on the landscape of suburban dystopia are a dime a dozen. Strip malls, gas stations, chain stores, and so on. But few of the photographers inhabiting this milieu can compare to Robert Adams who was out there in the 60's and 70's. I found a signed copy of The New West, his minimalist masterpiece at my favorite used bookstore this morning for $16. Looking through the book I was struck by how Adams' photography works on me like Antononi's early films (La Notte, Aventura) in which each frame is so subtle and formally perfect that they need to be digested and relished slowly. The bookstore owner was happy to get rid of the book, "Who wants to look at pictures in black and white anymore?" he asked as I paid.

related: found at the same bookstore

A few weeks ago at PhotoNY I stopped by the booth of AM Richards Fine Art where the gallery was exhibiting the street photography of Andrew Garn taken in Times Square during the 80's. Looking at the prints today you can't help wonder what happened to all the people in that darker, grittier New York which has been all but erased. Garn's website doesn't do justice to the images the gallery has selected, so if you happen to be in Brooklyn, check them out in person.

328 Berry Street (Williamsburg)
Brooklyn NY 11211
USA
tel: 917 570 1476

Check out Michael Hughes' super fun souvenirs project.(found via davidfg's linklog.)

"The final small color Polaroid camera of any distinction was the SX-70. The company got into the practice of giving film and cameras to well-known photographers, who would repay the gift by the donation of some pictures made with the materials. Toward the end of his life Walker Evans could be found with multiple cameras, and a case or two of SX-70 film. When he found a suitable subject, Evans would expose a case or two of SX-70 film. When he found a suitable subject, Evans would expose a full pack of eight sheets of the same thing, stuffing each successive exposure in his jacket pocket while they were developing themselves. ... Evans tended to find a young man to drive the car, make the tea, and carry the packages, so he could keep working even as he became more and more frail with advancing age. He had the habit of collecting old signs and detritus from the roadsides, and those of us who traveled with him were often pressed into service to steal the old advertising signs or even, on some occasions, actual road signs."

excerpt from The Physical Print

As an aside: I'm sad to report that my beloved SX-70 with sonar autofocus has died. 20 years of rough handling and several trips around the world have left the plastic body cracked. A few shots from this camera can be found here.

related: The Polaroid Collective

I was hanging out with my friend and printer Gabe Greenberg (pictured above taking a break on the fire escape) last night and found a copy of Richard Benson's "The Physical Print - A Brief Survey of the Photographic Process" in his studio. This is an super little book detailing in concise clear language (and with beautiful illustrations) the history of photographic printing methods. It seems to be an exhibition catalog for this show. I can't find a copy for sale anywhere online (Gabe received his as a gift). Any ideas?

Update: I called the Yale art department and they sent me a copy... so excellent.

related: interviews with Benson and other artists

Photo by Mike Sinclair

I was about to publish the following blog entry, "It seems to me that some of the most interesting contemporary American photography is coming out of the Midwest. The Museum of Contemporary Photography in has put together collection of work from 75 photographers living out there in the middle of the country and has titled it the Midwest Photographer's Project," when I noticed this Gallery Hopper entry in my RSS reader saying virtually the same thing and adding information about a talk this Thursday by three of the photographers at Aperture. Can't wait to pick up the book.

A friend of mine is a successful photographer known for doing a certain kind of work... large format cameras, spectacular handmade black and white prints using obscure processes, etc... He's an obsessive photographer who shoots in other styles, but his other work some digital, some shot on 35 clashes in theme and style with his classy 'brand.' To avoid sullying his good name he created an alternate persona and started showing the alternate work under that name. All contact with the outside world is through associates in on the joke. As part of the joke he invited several other photographers to shoot in the style of the alternate persona to create a body of work. The problem is the alternate persona has been successful. The work has sold, been in shows, etc. Dealers and collectors want to meet the artist. The artist always refuses and the refusals of course serve to enhance his popularity. Now an important magazine has asked to interview the artist. The question is what to do. Do the interview and risk a slip up, continue to be mysteriously unavailable and continue the joke, or spill the beans and risk lonelygirl15 type resentment?

DP Review feaures a preview of the Leica M8 today. For a digital camera it's design is refreshingly clean without the overabundance of buttons and controls found on most comparable machines. The size is just about perfect. Still my dream digital cameras would not be a rangefinder. I still hope for an SLR, with this level of simplicity, about this size, with a full sized sensor. And all this said, even if someone were to give me an M8 tomorrow I'd still mainly shoot with my Nikon FM2 and Mamiya 7... well I think I would. Give me an M8 and let's see.

Update: I have now both played around with an M8 for a while and seen the files it produces... the camera feels just about perfect in the hand, and for me has exactly the right number of controls (very few and virtually all manual dials). If you love other cameras in the M series, you'll love this one too. The RAW files are very sharp. I was looking at them with a master printer and he feels you could easily go up to 30x40 with them even at 10 megapixels... so in essence they are about equivalent to 12-14 megapixel files produced by cameras with inferior lenses. Noise is pleasantly film-like. Low light performance was slightly less good than the 5D. The price is rumored to be around 5,000. Time to sell the car? Probably not...

I found a copy of Sweet Flypaper of Life by photographed by Roy DeCarava and written by Langston Hughes in a used bookstore yesterday for $3. I've always wanted a copy, but have never found one in good shape at a decent price. It's a picture book marrying an imagined story by a woman in Harlem to images...poetic fiction. I couldn't think of many other examples of this kind of collaboration, (Photobook text even when it is written by poets and famous authors is usually simple description, and when photographers do create imagined narratives they usually write the text themselves). Anyway, beautiful and fascinating book. My guess is in this case the words came first and they were illustrated by DeCarava but somehow it would please me more if it were the other way around.

Alec Soth's child had inspired him to blog. (via a tip from Eliot.)

Update: In a few short weeks this blog has moved up to the top of my daily read list. Soth is every bit as sensitive and intelligent a writer as he is a photographer.

Travels Without Maps: 
Images from China's Western Frontiers

"Nelson Hancock Gallery
111 Front St. #204 (Dumbo)
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Opening Reception September 14, 6-8PM
Show continues through October 14th.

I hope you can excuse me for being a bit self promotional, but I wanted to let everyone know about my upcoming show. If you're in the New York area on September 14th, please stop the opening by and say hello.

When I was 14 I wrote this: "truth, emotion, technique, beauty. A good photograph has 2 of these. A great photograph 3. A photograph you never forget has all 4."

A bit pompous perhaps, but it still basically works for me.

Do you ever miss the light of a particular place? It was misty and humid today in New York City and I was missing the clear light of Garze where late every afternoon you get these great long shadows as the sun sets below the horizon.

bigger

Those of you who have visited the house know of my minor obsession with vintage panoramic images. The American Memory Project houses a rich selection of panoramics including some of my favorite subjects: beauty contests, disasters, motorcycle clubs, and presidents.

Photo by Angela Strassheim

On Tuesday by chance I ran into Pieter Hugo the South African photographer I have mentioned on this blog. Being a fan I introduced myself and he invited me to a show he's a part of: reGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow. The opening took place tonight at the Aperture Gallery. Of the 50 the photographers, the ones whose images grabbed me most included Mieke Van de Voort who shoots the homes of people who died alone, Natalie Czech's interiors, Angela Strassheim's creepy playful portraits, Jaret Belliveau's intimate family record and of course Pieter's 'hit you in the solar plexus' images from Africa.
I met several of the photographers and all turned out to be interesting folk. I was particularly impressed with Ms. Van de Voort. In a very short conversation we covered topics including transformative power of death to confer meaning on objects and the loneliness of children. An email she wrote about her work can be found here. (I had a hard time finding her images online so you'll have to check out the show). Jaret Belliveau is a young soulful Canadian whose pieces in the show documented his family's struggle with cancer and it's aftermath. His current work (not in the show... he showed me his book) is equally unblinking and personal. He follows his little brother's friends through their chaotic high school years. And of course Pieter had interesting things to say about his work and his process. All in all a nice evening I enjoyed hanging out with everyone over beers. The show runs through June 22. 547 West 27th Street, 4th floor

"The girl is very handsome, but what's so magnificent about this picture, apart from its immediate beauty, is that it takes me to a world where groups of friends re-enact scenes from Godard films. That's already a very bold, sexy and interesting world. It reminds me that an image is not just remarkable for itself, but also for the parallel world it invites us to imagine and enter, the world in which the anomaly it depicts is normal."

From an essay on photoblogging by Momus. (describing this page)

Ever wonder how Red gets such a distinctive finish out of his digital images? He's been posting a really nice series of simple Photoshop tutorials on his site.