In Digital Imaging, we talked about HDR Images…you know, those weird, gimmicky, plastic looking photos that lots of people post on flickr. I’m not saying I would never use HDR, I’m just not working on anything where the technique would be in service to the project and not just tarting up a mediocre photo.

I’m open-minded, so if anyone has any examples of great, successful HDR images that show the careful, considered use of the process, shoot me an email.

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In History of the Book, we had to present a rough idea of our final projects. My project is comprised of four books containing photos I made in Azerbaijan. All four books have the same photos in the same layout, but each book contains appropriated texts from different sources: Government speeches and propaganda, human rights organizations, travel guides and finally, Azerbaijani poetry.

Click on the images to view larger:

james pomerantz

james pomerantz

james pomerantz

james pomerantz

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In Visible, Invisible we had our final class and students who hadn’t shared all of their projects yet had an opportunity to do so.

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In Right Here, Right Now the topic was death in images. Sadly, I was unable to be in class but I’m sure it was an upbeat, feel good subject.

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Like I said, a quiet week. So, news and reminders:

The New York Times Online Global Photo Project takes place on May 2nd. learn more about it HERE. It looks like a cool idea and I’m looking forward to seeing the results.

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I’m excited to be included in Fred Ritchin’s exhibition “Bodies in Question” at the New York Photo Festival taking place from May 12 – May 16.

Artists in the show:

Benjamin Busch
Robbie Cooper
Luc Courchesne
Raphaël Dallaporta
Tina Enghoff
Marc Garanger
Jessica Ingram
Alexandre Maubert
James Pomerantz
Joseph Rodriguez
Linn Underhill
Deborah Willis
Michael Wolf
Lim Young Kyun

Additionally, there are three other main exhibitions curated by Vince Aletti, Erik Kessels and Lou Reed. Learn more about the curators and artists HERE.

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This week, it’s more final projects and then next week I have my year-end review: I have to present my work from this past year along with a few paragraph statement about it to my crit instructor for next year and a few members of the faculty.

But, for all intents and purposes, for year one, we’ve just about come to the end of the road.

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In Digital Imaging, we looked at the images in which we had changed seasons:

Our next assignment is to make a composite image that includes 4 elements that the teacher gave us.

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In History of the Book, we talked about archives, indexes and memory.

Essays we read:

Chapter 9 of “The Photobook: A History – Volume 2” Gerry Badger and Martin Parr

Four essays from “The Photography Reader” ed Liz Wells:

“Evidence, Truth and Order: Photographic Records and the Growth of the State” John Tagg

“Photographs of Agony” John Berger

“Reading an Archive: Photography Between Labor and Capital” Alan Sekula

“Remembrance: The Child I never Was” Annette Kuhn

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Wednesday morning in Visible, Invisible we finished considering memory.

Shimon Attie

Ulrich Görlich

Silvio Wolf

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In Right Here, Right Now we talked a little about painting and photography:

Two Ways of Life, 1857. Oscar Rejlander

Beate Gütschow

Joel Sternfeld

Simon Norfolk

Collier Schorr

Vik Muniz

Roland Flexner

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I also registered for classes for next year:

Master Crit with Sarah Charlesworth

Thesis Forms with Marvin Heiferman

Critical Reading with Jan Avgikos

History of Video with David Ross

Photobook Studio with Kiki Bauer

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The highlight of my week?

The Marina Abramovic performance restrospective at MoMA. I don’t remember the last time I was so moved by an exhibition. If you are in NY in the next two months, you really should go. I’ll be returning several times before I take a seat across from her.

Visit the exhibition website HERE.

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In Digital Imaging we took a quick look at Smart Objects:

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In History of the Book we had a chat about porn. A special guest, Lorelei Lee sat in and joined the discussion:

Essays we read for class:

“Pornography” by Andrea Dworkin

Master of Taboo: Araki

Nobuyoshi Araki : The PDN Interview

“How to Look at Pornography” Laura Kipnis from “Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America”

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Wednesday morning in Visible, Invisible we talked more about notions of time. Christian Boltanski’s work really stood out:

In Right Here, Right Now we went over to David Zwirner Gallery and had a gallery walkthrough with James Welling for his new show Glass House featuring photographs of Philip Johnson’s Glass House which Welling first shot for New York Magazine:

And that was Week 25. Coming soon: End of year review, thesis advisor choices and all sorts of fun stuff.

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Digital Imaging:

Just before Spring Break, we had to take a daytime photo and turn it to nighttime. It was a fun exercise. I started with this:

I set up various masks for the water, sky, rocks and people and then tweaked all the colors and levels. I added a few color fill layers with gradients, threw in some stars and a little something to jazz things up a little…Bam!

It’s not perfect and could use more work, but I was pretty impressed with myself!

The next assignment, which is due next week, is to change the season in a photograph.

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I was not in History of the Book for Week 23 which covered post-war photo books (Frank, Avedon and Arbus).

Readings for Week 23 were:

Gerry Badger and Martin Parr: “The Photobook: A History – Volume 2“, chapters 5& 6

Karal Ann Marling, “As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s“,  chapters 3, 5, & 7

Martha Rosler, Decoys and Disruptions, “Place, Position, Power, Politics”

In Richard Bolton, “The Contest of Meaning“:

Carol Squires, “The Corporate Year in Pictures”

Sally Stein, “The Graphic Ordering of Desire: Modernization of a Middle Class Woman’s Magazine, 1914-39″

Esther Parada, “C/Overt Ideology: Two Images of Revolution”

This past week we watched two videos, one was an unreleased documentary about Mike Disfarmer. The other was Allan Sekula’s “A Short Film For Laos”

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In Visible and Invisible we were given our second assignment:

Express your physical, mental, symbolic point of view verbally/visually/acoustically/performing. Be true to yourself.

We also began to discuss the concept of time. Things mentioned:

Boulevard du Temple, ca 1838. Louis Daguerre

The Horse In Motion, 1878. Eadweard Muybridge

Behind the Gare St Lazare, 1932. Henri Cartier-Bresson

Bullet Through Apple, 1964. Harold Edgerton

Cinerama Dome, Hollywood, 1993. Hiroshi Sugimoto

Bill Viola, “The Quintet of the Astonished” (2000):

Kimsooja:

Yom HaShoah:

Fischli and Weiss:

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In Right Here, Right Now we looked at some abstract photography:

Attatonilco Series 0126 , 2009. Shirine Gill

Afterimage #10 (Lingering Green), 2008. Mikko Sinervo

Black Forest, Roland Fischer

HORIZON 13 - RED 2002, Silvio Wolf

Six Color Curl (CMMYYC: Irvine, California, July 18th 2008. Walead Beshty

Mandala #450, 2003. Bill Armstrong

Early Light/Sylvania AG/1B (C-819), 2008. Marco Breuer

Nicki Stager

Untitled #57, 1998. Richard Caldicott

Next week: Changing seasons in a photograph, a look at porn in History of the Book and time to register for classes.

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In Monday’s Digital Imaging class we talked about skin tones. We were advised to work in CMYK and not RGB in the info palette for skin tones so that the info palette would display as percentages and not on a 0-255 scale. To switch to CMYK go to palette options drop down menu in the upper right of the palette.

Here’s a photo of some info from class:

Skintones. Click to view large

In CMYK, yellow should be your highest value followed by magenta and then cyan. The K in CMYK is for black and that value will be determined by whether or not the subject in the photo is black or not. This is just a starting point and then you can tweak as needed.

We also played a little with the history brush.

Tuesday’s class was cancelled which is a shame as Kiki Bauer was going to come visit and talk to the class about book design.

Wednesday morning in Visible, Invisible we talked about Antonioni’s film Blow-Up which has a lot to do with illusion, reality and point of view.

Plot via Wikipedia:

The plot is set in a day in the life of Thomas (Hemmings), a professional fashion photographer. It begins the day after spending the night at a doss house where he has taken pictures for a book of art photos he hopes to publish. He is late for a photo shoot at his studio with Veruschka, which in turn makes him late for another photo shoot with many other models later in the morning. He grows bored and walks off the shoot (also leaving the models and production staff in the lurch). Exiting the studio, two girls, aspiring teenaged models (Jane Birkin and Gillian Hills), ask to speak with him, but Thomas drives off to look at an antiques shop which he might buy. Wandering into nearby Maryon Park, he sees two lovers and takes photos of them. The woman (Redgrave) is nettled at being photographed, and Thomas is startled when she somehow stalks him back to his studio, asking for the film. This makes him want the film even more, so he misleads her into taking another roll instead. He makes many blowups (enlargements) of the black and white photos. These blowups have very rough film grain but nonetheless seem to show a body lying in the grass and a killer lurking in the trees with a gun. Thomas is frightened by a knock on the door, but it is only the two girls again, with whom he has a romp in his studio and falls asleep. Awakening, he finds they hope he will photograph them then and there, but he tells the girls to leave, saying, “Tomorrow! Come back tomorrow!”

As evening falls, Thomas goes back to the park and indeed finds a body, but he has not brought his camera and is scared off by the sound of a twig breaking, as if being stepped on. At a drug-drenched party in a house on the Thames River near central London, he finds both the French model (who tells him she is in Paris) and his publishing agent (Peter Bowles), the latter whom he wants to bring to the park as a witness. However, Thomas cannot put across in meaningful words what he has photographed. Waking up in the same, now stilled house at sunrise, he goes back to the park alone, but the body is gone.

Befuddled, he watches a mimed tennis match, is drawn into it, picks up their unseen, imaginary ball and throws it back to the two players. While he watches the mimed match, the sound of a ball being played back and forth is soon heard. As the photographer watches this alone on the lawn he fades away, leaving only the green grass as the film ends.

Here is the final mime scene:

In Right Here, Right Now we talked about heterotopias. Read Foucault’s essay about them HERE. We also briefly mentioned Beate Gütschow’s constructed landscapes (read an interview HERE) .

Beate Gütschow

Spring Break is next week. I’m heading out of town to shoot right after classes this week so things might be a little quiet on here. I’ll try and post a few things from the road, but no promises.

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Digital Imaging: This week’s class was a lab class. We spent the time practicing using all the tools so far: pen, quick masks, channel masks. We were also told our next assignment. We have to take a photograph shot in daylight and make it look like it was taken at night.

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In History of the Book, we went to a screening of Soundtrack to War by George Gittoes. You can see it right here:

side note…History of the Book teacher David Ross was on The Colbert Report talking about Olympic Poster Art:

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Wednesday morning in Visible, Invisible we talked about eyes.

this is your eye

this is your eye and brain

IRIS (We Share Our Chemistry with the Stars) SO 200L (Dilated). Marc Quinn 2009 oil/canvas

Marc Quinn Installation

“You never look at me from the place at which I see you” – Jacques Lacan.

Giovane Che Guarda Lorenzo Lotto. Giulio Paolini.

Las Meninas. Diego Velazquez. 1656

Rovesciare i propri occhi (To Reverse one's eyes). Giuseppe Penone

Masato Seto

For next week we have to watch Julian Schnabel’s “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” – Buy it here.

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In Right Here, Right Now, we started to look at landscapes, but didn’t get into them in great depth. We did have to read Deborah Bright’s essay on landscapes “Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men”

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On Thursday, Joel Sternfeld came by the department for a little show and tell of his work. It was great to hear him talk about American Prospects, Walking The High Line, Sweet Earth and Oxbow Archive, but I was particularly interested in his recent cell phone camera photos from Dubai.

Glen Canyon Dam, Page, Arizona, 1983. Joel Sternfeld

Ken Robson's Christmas Tree, January 2001. Joel Sternfeld

Queen of the Prom, the Range Nightclub, Slab City, California, March 2005. Joel Sternfeld

February 28, 2007 
The East Meadows, Northampton, Massachusetts. Joel Sternfeld

In non-school news, I had a nice interview run in At Length.

Throw in some wedding planning and some shooting and it was a good week!

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Monday in digital imaging I was introduced to the pen tool. I had never used it before as it had always intimidated me. Turns out it’s actually really, really useful and isn’t too scary once you get the hang of it. I’ve also been trying out using a tablet instead of a mouse. It’s great for some things but for others it feels like it’s giving me carpal tunnel.

Crit was fun this week. I’m going away to work on a project over spring break, so recently I’ve been making snapshots around New York of anything that jumps out at me that might relate or inform the  upcoming project. It’s basically a warm up to get my brain moving in the right direction.

Tuesday in History of The Book, we briefly talked about Japanese photo books. We didn’t have much time to discuss as we also each had to present our series of ten resequenced photos from a photo book. It was great seeing what other people came up with.

The readings for last week were:

Badger and Parr, The Photobook: A History, Vol. 1, Chapters 7 & 9

Vartanian, Ivan, Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s, Aperture Books, NY, 2009, p 11-22

Also in the same book, Interview with Daido Moriyama

Hosoe, Eiko, and Hijikata, Tatsumi, Kamaitachi, Aperture Books, NY, 2009  (a beautiful book worth buying)

Eiko Hosoe

Phillips, Sandy, Daido Moriyama: Stray Dog, SFMOMA, 1999

Also in the same book: Alexandra Munroe, Postwar Japanese Photography and the pursuit of consciousness

No class on Wednesday because of the snow, but I’m busy trying to figure out what to do for an assignment for my Wednedsay morning class: Visible and Invisible.

The assignment:

RESONATE

A) Interpret visually the words that resonate in the most from at least one of the following books:

Paul Auster – The Invention of Solitude
Roland Barthes – Camera Lucida
Italo Calvino – Six Memos for the Next Millennium
Eugen Herrigel – Zen in the Art of Archery
Andrei Tarkovsky – Sculpting in Time
Charles Traub – The Education of a Photographer

B) Interpret verbally the images that resonate in you the most from the works presented in our class.

George Rousse’s work resonated with me the most. See some in this post HERE.

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Next week: Joel Sternfeld comes to visit the department and History of the Book class field trip to a screening and discussion of George Gittoes’ movie Soundtrack to War:

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I still have a few weeks to decide. In the meantime…

This week in digital imaging, we worked with channel masks. It seems like a helpful little way of working. It’s becoming clear there are lots of different ways to get an image from A to B in Photoshop, many of these tools do the same thing, but in different ways and it’s knowing how to use them in combination which is really helpful.

I didn’t show this week in crit. Next week I’ll put up some photographs. Still feeling like I did last week. I’m not overly interested in shooting in NY right now but I figure if I go through the motions, something will happen.  We’ll see. With that in mind I’ve been carrying a friend’s Contax T2. Maybe some of his photo juju will rub off on me and I’ll make some photos I like. I guess the important thing is to at least be making photographs.

Tuesday night in History of the Book, we discussed war photography a little bit. Again, we read from the Parr and Badger books (see last week’s course update). In addition, we discussed an interesting Errol Morris blog post from the NY Times. Click HERE for part 1 and HERE for part 2. Be sure to read the comments that people left too. We also had to read Martha Rosler’s “In, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography),”

Last week we had to write an analysis of one of four photographs. At least 500 words just about the photo and the caption. It’s a good exercise in reading an image. After you do it, click on the photo to learn a little about it. The four photos we had to choose from:

Migrant Mother, Nipomo, CA, 1938. Dorothea Lange

American Gothic: Mrs Ella Watson, Washington, DC, 1942. Gordon Parks

Charles Chaplin, his last day in America, 1952. Richard Avedon

Trolley, New Orleans, 1955. Robert Frank

For next week, we have to pick 10 photographs from a photo book and sequence them. I’ve picked “Arrivals & Departures. The Airport Picture of Garry Winogrand.” I’ve always been a big Winogrand fan and I chose this book for a few reasons. It was made after his death, so the order of the images isn’t Winogrand’s but I believe his friend Lee Friedlander’s. So, I don’t feel like I’m disrespecting Garry by rearranging things (yeah yeah, I know…weird photo superstition thing). Also, the first photo I ever bought was a Winogrand (this one).

In Right Here, Right Now, we looked at more portraits. The first part was a student presentation of familial portraits. It’s hard to summarize what goes on this class as we jump around a lot and the conversation is very fluid. That’s not a bad thing, it just sometimes makes it hard to distill the class down to any sort of essence. But, here are some names that came up:

Juan de Pareja (1650). Diego Velazquez

Portrait of the Bellelli Family, 1858-1867. Edgar Degas

Confrontation 3. Gerhard Richter

Thomas Ruff

The Hirose Family, Hiroshima. Thomas Struth

Tierney Gearon

Rineke Dijkstra

Mitch Epstein

Larry Sultan

Richard Billingham

Oh yeah. And if that isn’t enough, Tim Hetherington came and gave a talk to our department.

Coming up? An interview with Jason Eskenazi on Monday and word is Joel Sternfeld is going to visit the department in a few weeks.

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In digital imaging we worked more with quick masks. It is a really useful tool to know how to use and even more useful if you have a lot of patience. It seems that a good deal of photoshop uses a basic set of skills, but then a great deal of patience…hours and hours of patience. One of the reasons that I love photography is that I’m pretty impatient. Painting, model building, sitting in traffic…not for me. But, I know a day will come when I’ll have an image that requires hours of work in photoshop and I know I’ll be annoyed if I can’t work on it myself.

Monday night crit went well, we’re just getting to know each other in the class and get a sense of what we’re planning to work on this semester. I’ve been frustrated lately. I’ve never really enjoyed shooting for myself in NY. I used to do it for newspapers, but it felt very much like work, which isn’t how I want my personal projects to feel. Also, when I shoot, I like to leave NY and spend a week or two or even a few months on location shooting. So, having to show work every two weeks while I’m not able to travel much is a bit…frustrating. I’m going away to shoot for 10 days over spring break which will be nice, but I want to find something local I want to photograph without feeling like I’m just doing it for the sake of crit.  waaaa waaaa waaa. Poor ol’ me.

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In History of the Book, we had a chat about the readings. The conversation was mostly about Modernist photo books, Futurism in Italy and Russia, Constructivism,  the Bauhaus, Rodchenko…

Again, if you’re interested in books, buy these two:

Badger and Parr, The Photo Book, A History. Vol 1. Phaidon, 2004
Badger and Parr, The Photo Book, A History. Vol 2. Phaidon, 2004

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Wednesday morning in Visible, Invisible. Some of the work we looked at:

Joseph Kosuth (Click to view large)

Paola Di Bello

Silvio Wolf (Click to view installation)

Abelardo Morell

And…as we are so very civilized, we also listened to the following two (we didn’t have video). The first is a humorous, insightful speech by Leonard Bernstein about working with Glenn Gould. The second is part of their beautiful interpretation of Brahms Piano Concerto No 1.

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For History of Photo Books:

Chapter 4 + 5 from Badger and Parr, The Photo Book, A History. Vol 1. Phaidon, 2004

From Classic Essays on Photography, A. Trachtenberg, ed., Leete’s Island Books, New Haven, 1980:

Paul Strand, Photography and the New God

Walker Evans, The Reappearance of Photography

Walter Benjamin, A Short History of Photography

and finally:

Szarkowski, John, The Photographer’s Eye, MoMA, NY, 1966 (Read the introductory essay HERE)

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