LOVE ONLY MATTERS ONCE : LOMO
about /
-
Some thoughts after watching this in full:This is a little old now, but a great documentary on William Klein. Worth spending an hour on.
I didn’t realize the significance of Klein’s black and white New York photographs, and really never connected the dots until they blatantly bring up Moriyama, which is super cool… I need to look more into that work.
Also what the fuck with the sexual harassment of the models standing in the street posing for Klein? (referring to the stripe dresses and the striped crosswalk photo) … Those women looked NOTHING like prostitutes, and even if they were what gives anyone the right to just gawk at them and grab their ass? Fuck em, the glaring men sorta makes the photo, but I would never put a model I work with in a situation like that (and that’s not to say Klein had bad intentions - he clearly didn’t - just watch the scene).
Also .. I had a third thing but I forgot. Regardless, anyone interested in photography that has/had only a passing interest in Klein (such as myself) should watch this. Eye opening, fascinating, etc. -
-
Street Level Japan Tumblr: Photography reading list sent to me by a friend
Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2008 Chpts. 1-4; 1- 215.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida.
Batchen, Geoffrey. Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
Baudelaire, Charles. “Review of the Salon of 1859.”
…
-
You know it’s Zooey D cute and all, quoting Belle & Sebastian “color my life with the chaos of trouble” … But really a shame that no one says anything about the next line “ANYTHING’S BETTER THAN POSH ISOLATION.” - which to my point about the actualities of my life/photography last night actually says a lot….
-
vivian-fu asked: what are you interested in saying with your photography? Why are you drawn to photography?
Honestly most of the new work that i’ve posted in the last 6 months is all contrived bullshit. it’s this fantasy of a suburban kid trying to imagine life in the city but is all this shallow, touristy, meaningless vignettes of city life when in reality i live in the absolute middle of suburban nowhere on a plot of several acres with families of geese, deer, and my 40lb terrier that likes to bark at them. the city and most of the people around me mean nothing to me.
i was originally drawn to photography in the sort of analytic, scientific (literally, most of the technical things I know about photography I learned from working at an observatory and doing astrophotography), and documentary style - but all of this is extremely passe’ … i want to believe that approaching photography like this will make a comeback (the internet street photography community that i casually follow desperately wants to believe this, i think), but when everyone has a cell phone camera (let alone instagram), can you really argue with that? So I don’t know why I’m drawn to photography anymore. I wish that I had some grander conceptual ideas to build on with my work, but honestly I don’t. I wish i could almost be a painter with a camera, someone using the camera to craft visual metaphor, symbolism, and allusion, whatever - with the boldest of intentions of saying something about society and life as a whole (even if it just meant something to me, that would mean more than what I do)… but i have nothing.
The truth is I’m probably only interested in photography at this point out of habit, but I sincerely believe in its ability as an artistic medium, even if I fall short in my own ability.
i really appreciate questions like this though, thank you.
