Robert Frank: Sick of goodby’s, from “The Lines Of My Hand”
Sometimes I feel so happy,
Sometimes I feel so sad.
— from Pale Blue Eyes, Velvet Underground
felt sad, when I accidentally stumbled upon this short note from Lou Reed on Robert Frank’s photo, realizing that he was actually gone and I’m entering an age where the heroes of my youth are starting to die. This is purely self-pity of course, so instead I put up an old record of him and felt happy to have his music still here with me.
In 1853 the New York Daily estimated that three million daguerrotypes were being produced that year.
— A.C. Wilers, “Poet and Photography”, in Picturescope, Vol. XI. No 4
Flickr has grown to the point where it now has 92 million users, spread across 63 countries, who contribute to almost 2 million groups and share around 1 million photos every day.
— Flickr At 10, Darrell Etherington, Techcrunch, Feb 10, 2014
Julia Margaret Cameron
Fantastic images by an almost forgotten pioneer of British photography – read the full article in AnOther Mag.
Now let’s all get not sentimental about this.
I believe that when you present something that’s real, that’s well done, and told in an honest way, people are moved. I think the bemoaning that this has been lost is more often used as an excuse for not doing the work, or for excusing poor quality: “Oh we can’t do this because no one cares anymore.” I think that’s too simplistic, too easy a way out.
Matt Black in an Interview
I stumbled upon Matt Black while I was looking for people using mapping and data-visualisation together with photography: He did this when he was following the trail of the poverty line in America and photographing the people that have drop beneath it and, as it sometimes appears, almost out of sight. The pictures that came out of his five year travel look like they could have been done in the thirties or fourties of last century:
Geography of Poverty](http://www.msnbc.com/interactives/geography-of-poverty/ne.html)
And he documented his travel on Instagram – so he is both at the same time very modern and almost ancient, atavistic in his means. I don’t know if the world at one point just stopped moving into a common direction, or if it is just this ubiquity of media, that makes us suddenly aware, that all our clocks are out of sync. And while the western world describes the last 60 years after WWII as some sort of “progress” or even as a success-story, from other view-points than the eye of the storm we are living in, this history is interpreted completely different…
The Monster in the Mountain is a story about the 43 students that went missing in a little town in Mexico and are assumed to be dead.
I think he is right: If the work is good, people will notice. We are not made out of stone, although, sometimes when I read and see these stories, I wish I would be…
Photography has a minor role in the media nowadays. Television, with its ability to reach the masses in real time, is the leader . Most photographers are operators whose version of reality must stick to the version on television- the official version. This visual standardization is increased by technology. The fast transmission of pictures is not a plus anymore; it is necessary for survival. Conferences, festivals, museum exhibitions, new grants and prizes all prove that photojournalism is in a process of institutionalization. Although photojournalism has lost its audience and role in public life, it has gained prestige. It ‘s becoming a cultural object, sometimes superfluous and often self-absorbed. And the fact that photojournalism is obsessed with its future is the· first symptom; if it was really alive, living would be enough and there would be no need to talk about it.
— LUC DELAHAYE Photographer, Magnum, Paris
Flashback to 1996: American Photo (which has now ceased to exist) had asked several photojournalists about the state of the union:
I don’t know, but now that everything is digital and effects are coming out of a computer, things have gotten way more boring than that…
…or somewhere in between the 60ies and the 70ies, as I got the golden age of the Rolling Stones (Beggar’s Banquet, Exile on Main Street, Sticky Fingers and Goats Head Soup) on constant rotation right now. Sweet Virginia somehow seems to be fitting when temperatures are dangling around 40 degrees Celsius and any conscious attempt at taking a photo has been dissolved in the jelly my brain has turned into…
I could never really shake the feeling to be strangely out-of-time and out-of-place. And it doesn’t get better with the ancient 1955 Leica M3 I drag around and this Robert-Frank-Nostalghia that I can’t seem to get rid of. If you look at too many old pictures, you loose your feeling for now. Or your interest. Or both.
And yes, I know that Robert Frank has been to Valencia long before I went there and so my own pictures feel a little ephemeral… The Beauty of our times is that all that has come before us is at our fingertips – but this is also a curse. It does not get much easier when you’re constantly plagued by the feeling, that everything you have done has been done before, only better. So, why take a picture at all.
Because.
After searching for a more or less complete copy of Robert Frank/Rolling Stones Cocksucker Blues, I found this article on their corporation on the cover of Exile On Main Street. It is sometimes funny how things move in synchronicity….
And if you are looking for something too read: “Photography Within The Humanities” has a quirky title, but it brings together interviews with some of the most important figures of photography in the 70ies (apert from Robert Frank, John Szarkowski, Curator at the MoMa at that time, Susan Sontag, Irving Penn…).
And it all started out with this article in the NY Times on Robert Frank and The Americans…
For the easter holidays, we visited friends in Valencia. Apart from my trusty RX100, this was the first time I took my recently acquired Leica M3 from 1955 out for a spin. Photographing the Easter procession, which started at mid-day and went on till late at night was challenging with the M3: It’s of course fully manual, so you just use it as low as you can think you go: I shot wide open (1.8 with the 50mm Summicron) and went down to 1/60 or 1/30 and had the film pushed two stops. You cannot expect pixel-peeping sharpness under these conditions, but there were some glimpses of what you can do with this camera, but it certainly still needs a lot of practice and experience to use the effects of this camera more deliberately and less random. I’m not sure if I’m hooked yet, but it was an interesting experiment…