“Reading on-screen tempts us to see things only through the pinhole of our immediate curiosity. I don’t mean to sentimentalize the Reading of Books, but as a practical matter, when you hold a book in your hands, it is very different from what happens when you are typing something onto a glassy, featureless screen. Online, your experience is personalized, but it is also atomized, flattened and miniaturized, robbed of its landscape. Physical books require you to literally hold some of the context of what you are reading, and that is a crucial dimension of understanding.”
William Gedney
…course, those people who say, ‘But the public is not interested in watching people practice. It wants the finished thing or nothing.’ My answer is that if one does not practice in public in reality, then in nine cases out of ten the world will never see the finished product of one’s work. Some people go on the assumption that if a thing is not a hundred percent perfect it should not be given to the world, but I have seen too many things that were a hundred percent perfect that were spiritually dead, and then things that have life and vitality, which I prefer by far to the other so-called perfect thing.”
“Still photography and poetry are very close. To capture in a single frame visual forms organized to the point where neither more or less are needed. The single moment when form and content are one. Poetry does the same with words with the same strictness and economy. The exact arrangement of words to produce the effect with no more words than are needed. Art is the seeming perfect blending of many elements to produce a whole.”
Photo Devoto Picture of the Day #8
Identify the photographer and win!
Ph.D. Picture of the Day, #7
ID the shooter and… win!
Photo Devoto Picture of the Day #6
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Everyone Lives In Modern Times
…from “Printing By Flash” by William J. Frazier, 1967
Photo Devoto Picture of the Day #5
Identify the photographer, win a prize.
W. o’ W.: Nobuyoshi Araki
“Each time I write the word “love,” it comes out looking different. If I write it a lot it begins to look like a new word, and I doubt if it’s even the word “love” anymore. And this feeling is similar to what I feel when I take photographs. Or it’s like a woman you love. She’s the same person everyday but she’s also different. These two feelings, her being the same forever, and changing every moment- between this back-and-forth movement is where photography occurs.
“When I write, the materials I use change according to my mood. Whether I use a brush and ink, a magic marker, a ballpoint pen- it all depends on the mood. And this the same when choosing what camera to use, too. Maybe I’ll choose a compact camera with a date-imprint function or a 6×7 camera on a tripod. It’s all very similar.”
W. o’ W.: David Graham
“I tried to load as much as possible into each negative,” he said. “I would make photo-historical references, or I would visually comment on resonance between colors, and then shapes and structure that I would have learned from Ray Metzker.”
“Humor was one more thing to put in there. Not every picture had it, but to me, it was a component of the best pictures.”
Creative Camerawork 