street + urban

A few links related to night photography:

The Nocturnes

Night Photography blog

An essay by Robert Winkler

A very few night photographers, some in the list to the right, some not (not all street or urban landscape related):

Will Steacy

Todd Hido

Kohei Yoshiyuki

O. Winston Link

Michael Kenna

More can be found in the links page at The Nocturnes.

I’ve adding links on the right to Nick Turpin’s blog and his magazine venture, Publication.

In class I mentioned two books of photographs made in the NYC subway. The first was Walker Evans’ Many Are Called. It was republished recently and is available here. The second book was Christophe Agou’s Life Below. It is also available and cheap. It can be found here.

Also, I’d be remiss not to mention Travis Ruse’s blog of subway photographs. It is here: http://travisruse.com/.

I want to reiterate that most of the things we might photograph have been photographed before. By looking at what has come before, we can take what is useful to our projects and then push that, adding our own ideas to our topics. When I suggest looking at what comes before, I want people to view these as resources.

To see the comments below any post, you can click on either the post title or the red circle with the number of comments.

As suggested in class, here is a post that you can all use, via the comments, to ask for feedback on project ideas or otherwise discuss your self assignments. I will work as hard as possible to approve comments as quickly as I can.

Jess starts us off with this recurring NYTimes series: 1 in 8 Million featuring photographs by staff photographer Todd Heisler. She thinks this is a good example of a self-assigned project; I agree. This is a project that is specific in its idea, but expansive in its execution. Though it now has institutional support, it probably started out as a self-assigned or self-generated project. Angel Franco did a similar recurring series for the NYTimes several years ago using Polaroids to shoot everyday people on the streets, though I can’t find a link to that work.

On the in.sight collective blog, Hin Chua has put up a post on image selection and the editing process. While his thoughts are good and the anecdotes of other photographers’ editing processes is interesting, the best part of the post for me is his asking the rest of the in.sight group for their thoughts on one particular selection. The back and forth is great, something we should think about during our crits in class. The post and conversation can be found here.

Robert Adams, who we talked about this past Monday, has a show at Matthew Marks Gallery. This isn’t the work we saw in class, but is worthwhile viewing nonetheless. Info can be found here. Show is open now and runs through early March.

An interesting interview with Hiroh Kikai on Eyecurious; it can be viewed here. Kikai’s street portraits are fantastic. You can see a few samples of his work here.

While pulling together the slideshow for tomorrow night, I was reminded of the American Suburb X website/blog. There is an excellent essay by Tod Papageorge on Robert Adams’ What We Bought: The New World. I don’t know why I hadn’t seen it earlier, but I first became aware of Adams’ work when I saw the show in 2000 at the Yale University Art Gallery, shortly after the acquisition that Papageorge talks about. This series presented an awakening of sorts for me and was an entry point to the ideas presented by the New Topographics show at the George Eastman House in 1975 (I obviously did not see that show.) The New Topographics rethought the American landscape and the way that photographers responded to it. Out went an aesthetic primacy, jettisoned for the conveyance of essential visual information. Also included in this show, curated by William Jenkins, were Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, Henry Wessel, Jr. and Bernd and Hilla Becher.

I’ll leave the criticism to Papgeorge, noting only that Adams’ What We Bought was a large influence on the work I was making at the time and am continuing to make in the city in Maine where I grew up.

American Suburb X has been added to the blogroll at the right.

I saw this via one blog or another a couple of days ago and it popped up again today on another. This isn’t exactly street photography or the urban landscape; it is about photographic (and the photographer’s) memory and photographic representation. Here is one of Michael Paul Smith’s photographs from his series of photographs of the town of his childhood. Photo is a link to a slideshow on Flickr.

Text link

Photo is copyright Michael Paul Smith and I’m hotlinking to it without permission.