March 2011
“People think photography is about photographing. To me, it’s about relationships. And it’s about doing your homework and making people comfortable enough where they open their lives to you. People underestimate me because I’m always laughing and joking. That helps. They let their guard down.”
—Lynsey Addario: ‘It’s What I Do’ — Why She Will Cover War Again - NYTimes.com
Ansel Adams: Portraits
With my upcoming trip to Jackson Hole, Wyoming and Yosemite National Park, California I have been thinking a lot about the work of Ansel Adams. His landscapes are some of the most well known works of art today, and will undoubtedly be so for a long time to come. Although, I find a lot more interest in his portraiture for which he is not as well known for. I took the time and scanned a few of my favorite portraits from the book 400 Photographs. Black and white is starting to really appeal to me.
Tony Lujan of Taos Pueblo, New Mexico, 1930
Gottardo Piazzoni in His Studio, San Francisco, California, 1932
Alfred Stieglitz At An American Place, New York City, 1939
Itinerant, Merced, California, 1936
Trailer Camp Children, Richmond, California, 1944
“You have to take risks. You have to take risks even now. And if you go out, and you take only safe pictures, you have not achieved anything. You have to make a hole for yourself every day you go out and you take 50 pictures, at least a few of them have to be risky. I mean technically risky. You have to do something you have never done before.”
—Fred Herzog – Flaneur, Not Voyeur | Street Reverb Magazine
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“The Lens blog is a high profile site with some 750,000 users visiting each month. Instead of raising money by hoping some of those subscribe on their 21st visit each month, consider the monthly visitors as a community of interest around photojournalism and offer goods and services to that community. There could be Lens-sponsored master classes, special events and workshops for both professionals and the general public; print sales; discounted equipment and photographic services via business affiliates; photo tours and themed travel; equipment, medical and travel insurance for practitioners; logistics and visa services for photographers having to travel at short notice…you name it, anything that interests a broad photographic community, amateur and professional, could be offered by negotiated deals where Lens’s earns a percentage on each transaction.”
—Paying for photojournalism: a review of the New York Times ‘pay wall’ | David Campbell
“Some musicians at their prime step into a studio with an idea and after a few experiments record some of the most deep and memorable sounds one could image (I like to remind people that improvisation is best when it comes from experience). Others need that long grueling-budget crunching-drummer quitting experience to produce the manifesto album that pushed musical ideas by leaps and bounds. In either context the idea can fizzle or flame, the deeper question might rely on where ideas come from and what possesses a person to invest so much in them.”
—Fizzle or Flame – BRIAN ULRICH : NOT IF BUT WHEN
