Photography as system, practice, and art

I’m too focused on the getting everything done in the next four months or so to concentrate on my own writing, so I’ve been photographing instead.

I’ve added some notes on photography.

For writing, Twitter is dessert: there’s always room for more.

At the end of The Ongoing Moment Geoff Dyer shows a photograph by Regina Fleming. The photograph, taken on September 11, 2001, shows the likeness of a man wearing a sign that reads

AFTER DEATH WHAT ? ?

Dyer has just finished detailing the emulsion of objects and scenes—hats, broken benches, barber shops—that make repeat appearances in the great photographs [...]

John saw a woman and fell completely in love.

I jokingly threw Sontag at him. Sontag called photography “a way of certifying experience.”

Photography has become one of the principle devices for experiencing something…Taking photographs has set a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events.

John responds [...]

Last weekend we visited John and we took home a haul of work prints.

Looking at photographs online is convenient and if they are hanging in a gallery they must be art. But for appreciating what makes some photographs beautiful objects, there’s nothing like a print that you can pick up and handle (even photographs in [...]

If it hasn’t been obvious from looking at these images, I have been making a number of microphotographs as a side effect of my lab work. For those wanting the technical details, most of these images have been made using a Leica 1-8x stereomicrosope and a Hamamatsu digital camera. I’m still learning how to make [...]

Vials

This week at work we’ve been switched over to plastic vials to store flies in. We had been using Pyrex* ones but, for whatever reason (economics? safety? processing convenience?), now it’s plastic.

Handling hundreds of vials every week, I had gotten used to their balance, their weight, their finish. I knew how to grip them and [...]

The careful mismatch in lighting between the indoors and outdoors in Raul’s Afternoon at the Hui Restaurant flattens the outdoors into a picture, sealing us inside a box with only our dining companion to keep us company. And yet that smile breaks the division between the two worlds.

Can you tell who took a picture?

Of Adams’s non-landscape photography.

The lighting and colors in this series by 野糞日和 makes the scenes look like they’re from a model train set. They’re outdoors but they look like they were taken indoors with color film balanced for sunlight. The only technical detail included with these pictures is “Nikon PC 35mm f/2.5;” the photographer was trying out a [...]