Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
Not long ago, I found myself standing on the curb of the Champs Élysées being an annoying tourist. I had a big honking camera (Canon Mark III) hanging from my neck which made me the opposite of inconspicuous, and I was doing what I always do when I have a big honking camera hanging from my neck. I was looking for a shot.
Paris is a great place to take photos of people taking photos. The place is teeming with tourists most of whom spend a lot of their time documenting their time.
In Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs, Ansel Adams gives accounts of how he produced some of his most famous photographs. When I picked up the book, I noted that he had written an account of graffiti he shot at an abandoned military installation north of San Francisco.
A year ago, early on a Sunday morning, I walked past the Gardiner Museum as they were hoisting Jun Kaneko’s giant ceramic head onto its metal pedestal in front of the building.
Just as we tend to sexualize the swan (see my previous post), we tend to anthropomorphize the tree. Like humans, trees have limbs. We often draw or interpret trees as sentinels with arms held up at attention, maybe as a salute to the land, or as a supplication to the sky.
People love to take photos of swans. What is it about swans that gives people photographic orgasms?
The best way to get early morning shots is to shoot early in the morning. Sounds like a Yogi Berra-ism. Nevertheless, if you want the best light…
Goderich is a small town on the eastern shore of Lake Huron, noted for its large harbour where ships take on salt from the local salt mine or grain stored in elevators by the harbour.
Here’s a photo of the Sifto Salt Mine in Goderich, Ontario. I took it maybe 45 minutes before sunset, down at a boat launch where I lay on a small wooden dock so I could get as low as possible to the water.
Stencils are a quick and dirty graffiti. Where murals take a long time (meaning it’s easy to get caught doing them), stencils are easy to execute and you can do them over and over. The gallery below shows stencils I’ve documented in Victoria, Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa & Paris.
In the British Museum, there is a coffin that I’d like to be buried in (when I die). It’s in the Wellcome Trust Gallery (Room 24), a themed gallery on Living And Dying. The coffin is in the shape of a camera, an imaginary Canon EOS 300.
Ogden Nash wrote: I think that I shall never seea billboard lovely as a tree.Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,I’ll never see a tree at all. If Nash were alive today, he might update his poem: I think the billboard’s here to staywith its products on display.If you want to see a tree,try Home Depot, aisle…
Meigakure is a Zen principle of aesthetics used especially in Japanese gardening but no less valid in photography: it is the representation of a part to suggest the whole. It is analogous to the Classical Greek rhetorical principle of synecdoche.
I spent last week on a photo workshop with Richard Choe at the Ghost Ranch near Abiquiu, NM, a 75 minute drive northwest of Santa Fe.
Last week I took part in a photography workshop at the Ghost Ranch near Abiquiu, New Mexico. Led by our hardy pro, Richard Choe, three of us hiked along the riverbed to Box Canyon.