Oaxaca workshop exhibit
On Friday I learned that one of the photos I took during a July 2008 workshop in Oaxaca, Mexico, will be included in a forthcoming exhibit at Centro Fotografico Alvarez Bravo. The show will be a 15th anniversary celebration of Mary Ellen Mark’s workshop and her students. More on that here.
Eva, Sandra and Freddie. Escuela Creer Down, Oaxaca, Mexico. July 2008.
Contemplating Three
Book cover of Three, by Ed Kashi.
A couple of weeks ago I picked up a copy of Ed Kashi’s Three at the ICP bookstore.
Bit by bit I’ve been poking through it, delighting in the pages that in some cases fold out to present the photos in each triptych side by side on individual pages.
Today I’ve picked up the book again and am allowing myself more time to pause at each triptych.
Perhaps subconsciously, Kashi’s introduction has been floating around in my head as I also consider the way I work/think as a photo editor/storyteller/multimedia producer – slow vs. fast, contemplative vs. decisive – as well as how the average person reads a sequence of images.
This book plays on the visual appetite of a hectic world. It offers multiple screens from which to process, submerge, and make sense of the chaos that surrounds us. The presentation itself, the triad, is half-resisting, half-accepting the reality of our visual space. A desire for simplicity is often forgotten amongst the cacophony of screens and visual imagery that bombard us each day. We are relentlessly expected to process multiple images simultaneously and to see our world through a refracted lens. In a world inundated with visual imagery, our ability to take in more than one image at a time has become innate. In fact, our attention span demands it. The groupings of images in this book are an attempt to bring still photography to a multidimensional threshold. These combinations of images capitalize on our visual multi-tasking skills. The most rapid response of our eyes and our brains struggles to make sense of a spiraling modern way of life.
Re-reading this isolated paragraph now, I’m not sure if I completely agree with it. Yes, to the multi-tasking way of our world and the desire for simplicity. Yes, to the fact that we can process images too quickly. But no, to the notion of a “multi-dimensional threshold.”
However, on elaboration, I get where he’s going.
Still photographs resist that impulse for speed. They force the viewer to stop, look, think, ruminate, meditate, and ultimately question. They require us to isolate a slice of life and explore its detail, ponder its significance. Despite the accelerated pace of modern life, the power of still photography is as vibrant and important as ever, but the methods we choose to preserve and play with that power are expanding.
Alison Nordström, curator of photography for George Eastman House, elaborates further in her introductory essay. Though, I think I’d also like to hear from the editor/curator, Kristin Reimer, also Kashi’s studio manager.
You can see some of the triptychs here, and the multimedia piece produced by Julie Winokur here.
95% grant writer, contest enterer, Final Cut editor . . .
Brent Foster is once again writing a week-long blog at NPAC.
For those of us from the Canadian photojournalism community and his photojournalism school alma mater, Loyalist College, who look to the 27-year-old former staff photog turned multimedia wunderkind as a bit of a mentor, Foster puts his year as a freelancer in perspective in Day 1 of his blog, which continues through Friday.
I pretty much have no idea what I’m doing as a freelancer yet. I do know I’m now 5 per cent a photographer, and 95 per cent a grant writer, contest enterer, final cut editor, researcher, pitcher, visa chaser, blogger, logistics coordinator, and shameless self-promoter. I think that’s actually how freelance works unless you’re a superstar photographer. The big difference though is the 5 per cent of time I’m shooting has been more fulfilling than most of my years as a newspaper photographer. It’s important for me, at least at this stage in my life to feel like I’m doing important work, pushing myself as a photographer, and continuing to develop my skills as a “visual journalist.
He also says this about multimedia:
Multimedia has saved my life, or at least has sustained me so far. Truly, it’s been about 90 per cent of my income this year. That being said, we definitely have a love/hate relationship. I love shooting for multimedia pieces, layering audio, shooting stills, and capturing things on video that just wouldn’t translate in a still. I truly think it’s the strongest form of storytelling . . . That being said, it’s a huge pain. It’s not the actual editing that’s the pain, it’s hours upon hours of organizing, rendering, slicing, and dicing that lead up to when you really get to create. It also takes you away from shooting pictures for fairly substantial periods of time . . .
For myself, I actually like the organizing part — at Starweek, keeping the staff and the magazine organized was part of my job — but there are some days when it really does have to be either/or. Either I’m organizing, or either I’m trying to be creative. Or half and half. Brent’s bud, Tyler Anderson, who was our multimedia teacher at Loyalist last year, liked to sketch and quickly talk things out, and I’ve realized that sometimes I need to do that do that to get from one side of the brain to the other. Sometimes you can just be staring at a computer screen for far too long.
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Also coming up Tuesday on NPAC is the Photographer’s Q&A with Rod MacIvor. One of the more enjoyable ones I’ve done – Rod has some advice for journalism students, and recalls the years shooting the Trudeaus.
Soul journey
A few things have been kicking around in my head lately, spurred initially by a conversation I had with a friend about intimacy, or more specifically, false intimacy. The conversation was online – and this way of communicating was actually a part of our quasi-philosophical discussion. Then a few days ago, while going through the process of doing interviews for a story, I started to think about intimacy on a broader level, both in how it relates to multimedia and how we live our lives. How well can you really know a person if only privy to one part of their life? If you died tomorrow, would the people who “knew” you well be able to sum up who you are genuinely, flaws and all? Would they be able to explain what truly makes you tick, influences your decisions? Are anecdotes and the stories the way “in” ? Or just tiny pieces of a puzzle? (Or as it relates professionally, part of a multimedia timeline, and how you tell a story.) Then the word “soul” came up with someone else - unexpectedly, but at the same time making perfect sense in the context in which it was brought up, and in my own train of thought. To be exposed to the soul of someone … that is the ultimate thing, isn’t it? Even moreso, to know it. But how many do?
Okay, enough deep thoughts for a Saturday morning. (I swear, only fuelled by coffee and gazing out the window.) Now let’s see what multimedia I (or you, perhaps?) can post here as an example – because the best pieces … yup, they have soul.
Frank
Robert Frank contact sheet. From the website of the National Gallery of Art, which has a tidbit of info on the editing and sequencing of The Americans.
Instead of having my first Columbus Day off, I was off today. I chose to spend part of it looking at Looking in: The Americans, the Robert Frank exhibit at the MET, which I’d had a preview of a few months ago when I sat down with the mammoth book that goes with it.
As an editor and photographer, most interesting to me was following Frank’s original sequencing of images, a recreation of an early grouping of work prints, and the contact sheets and written documents (such as a marked-up edit of Jack Kerouac’s introduction and Frank’s Guggenheim proposal) under glass.
Frank is giving a talk tonight at the MET – of course it is sold out. But you can hear a recent interview with him here, on WNYC.org, and an earlier one, from last December, on the New York Times site.
