This came in the mail. A little busted-up and slashed by a sullen postal inspector, but no worse for the wear. I'm happy to have the original cover.
I knew I would get it eventually. I'm slow, CDWOW is slow.
if you're a Yankee, you can only get it on The Kindle through Amazon. I hope Sniffy will get on the horn to The Queen and rectify the matter.
Didn't think I could read, did'ya?
I look at a lot of photographs. It’s part of my job, and if that wasn’t enough pain, I do it in my off hours so I can tweet my favorites to my friends. Also, I study the masters of the art in a vain attempt to discover the secret of their magic. When one looks at a torrent of thousands and thousands of excellent photographs, some patterns and characteristics begin to takes shape. It appears to me that one of the characteristics that separate the sheep from the goats is in what we shoot. I don’t mean subject matter here, but rather, what it is in the mind of the photographer that triggers the snap of the shutter.
Amateurs and novices tend to shoot an idea in their heads. They don’t really shoot what they see. They have an idea, like “That’s a nice looking cow.” They point the camera in the general direction of the beast and trip the shutter. When they get home and look at their pictures, it’s a “fail” because the cow is just a small, dark lump in front of the sun surrounded by some telephone poles and half of Bubba’s pickup truck. They have responded to an idea with their camera without ever really looking at the scene, the light, the framing of the picture or anything else that might help to make the picture a good one. These pictures will usually have the subject in the dead center of the frame and will be too far away for an interesting photograph.
Advanced hobbyists and many professionals have gotten past this problem. They have learned to look at the light and to seek interesting forms. They have learned to frame their photos for greater interest. They have mastered their cameras, and are not worried about remembering how to operate the device. They shoot what they see. This is a good thing, and it makes for quality photography. I would hazard the guess that most of us are in this range of the spectrum: we have learned the rules and the devices; we’ve learned to look at the subject, and we can reliably produce decent pictures.
The place that we all really want to be is beyond technical competence. We want to shoot a memorable photograph. We want to shoot that one frame that somehow rises above the millions of other exposures to become iconic. We want to shoot Alfred Eisenstaedt’s “Kiss.” We want to shoot Ansel Adam’s “Moonrise, Hernadez” or Steve McCurry’s “Afghan Girl.” I’m sure everyone has their own list of “memorable” photos, and these are just a few of mine. It appears to me that the truly memorable photos have a characteristic that is beyond just idea and technical competence. To my eye, and this is just my opinion, but it seems to me that the truly memorable photographs have the characteristic of feeling – feeling of the photographer about the moment being captured. Something of the photographer’s history and unconscious bleeds into the photograph.
You and I cannot retrace Eisie’s steps, although if you told me I would be given a chance to photograph Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio and Ernest Hemingway, I would be temped to try. There are many others who have captured memorable photos without the travail that Eisenstaedt faced: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Harry Callahan, Walker Evans, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Lee Fiedlander, Garry Winogrand, and Ansel Adams... I could go on. The common thread is feeling, intuition, involvement and the ability to let a bit of the unconscious bleed into the photograph. The truly memorable photographs seem to have a bit of the photographer in them. He or she is shooting a feeling, a realization about life that brings his or her whole experience to bear on a moment full of meaning which is captured in a single frame.
An aside: Do you know what Eisenstaedt would do for practice when times were slow? He would take a simple subject like and egg and put it under a single light. He would shoot the egg with every combination of f-stop and shutter speed possible (do the math), and then he would print every single negative in the darkroom just to see what the film and paper would do. The message is clear: for the greats, like Eisie, Weston, Adams, McCurry, and Cartier-Bresson, the technical skill is a given. These folks have shot so many exposures that the camera becomes an extension of their nervous system, much like the union of a great musician with the instrument. They reach the point at which the mechanism becomes invisible. As long as we are fiddling with our gadgets, we are not in the place where the truly memorable photographers live.
I don’t care for tidy summaries because they always seem to reduce good thoughts to over-simplifications, but if I had to do it with this idea, I would say that novices shoot ideas in their heads; journeymen shoot what they see, but the truly memorable photographers shoot what they feel.
(...)You are the skin you were born into. You are the scars, the crooked grin, the disheveled bad haircut, the clothes on your back, the car you drive, the shoes with holes in them because you can't afford a car; you are the burden of your face, the size of your penis, the curve of your breasts, the pattern of hair speckled across your chest, the sound of your voice, the color of your eyes, the tip of your nose.
There is nothing else.
You realize that this is your culture: What you see is what you get. Sneak a little substance in and they talk about what brand of perfume you wear. Release 90,000 pages of documents that say the war your country is in was lost before Reagan lost his acting chops and forgot how to pee straight, and they say "How will this affect the upcoming election."
There is no you anymore. 'You' are the amount of followers you have, hits you receive, words per page, pounds you can press, zeros in your bank account. You are a statistic, a poll number, a demographic, marketable, a constituent, a mortgage, a consumer, a follower. You will be told how to cope.
Marx was right. This is the collapse.
(excerpt, via Freelance Pallbearer)
Like millions of other American teenagers, I couldn’t wait to get a driver’s license so I could go racing off in one of my dad’s cars. I scarcely noticed that sometime between my childhood and early teens, the great passenger trains had vanished.
After all, cars are much more fun. You can go where you want to go, when you want to go there. Cars are freedom and individuality; railroads are institutions. And, it didn’t help that when the railroads had a virtual monopoly on overland transportation, they took advantage of working people by charging exorbitant rates to ship farmers’ crops to market. When I was a kid, I never heard a single lament for the passing of the trains.
The last time I rode on one of the great trains was when my mother took my sister and I on the Texas Chief up to Oklahoma City to visit my grandfather in Norman. It was like a luxury hotel on wheels. I couldn’t have been more than about nine years old, but I remember it as if it were yesterday.
When I was a kid, my dad could drive down the middle of the highway steering only with his knee while he lit a cigarette with his Zippo lighter. This drove my mother crazy, but you could do that then because there were so few vehicles on the road. In Texas, you could often drive for quite some time without seeing another car. Things have changed, and changed a lot since those idyllic days. Today we face streets and expressway choked with millions of vehicles almost 24 hours a day. Half of the time I set out to drive from Louisville to Lexington, I am delayed by a multi-vehicle accident. Today, the air is turning toxic, the planet is said to be heating up, and the Gulf of Mexico is filling with crude oil where a living ocean once thrived. In the days of my youth, gas was 25¢ a gallon. Today, people are going into debt to fill their tanks. Times have changed.
I can’t help but think that our friends across the pond have been smarter than we have on the issue of trains. Only we gave up our trains – England, Europe, Russia, India, Africa, China and Japan all kept and developed their railways. Only we relegated our great trains to the pack mule role. Ours still run, but the carry only new cars, coal, chemicals and other bulk freight.
It would be great if we would re-think our ideas about the trains. I know I would use them. I think a vacation on a train would be terrific. Just being able to hop on a train and ride to Cincinnati to see a Reds game would be a hoot. I wonder how many cars we could get off the road if we had a railway system that took people where they wanted to go. How many amphetamine-crazed truckers would have to find another line of work if our railways were truly operational? How many tons of hydrocarbons could we keep out of the atmosphere? How many Deepwater Horizons would we need if we were running the trains?
You can buy these prints and others on Red Bubble by clicking on this link
My picture of the day…
I hang out with a fairly strange crowd most of the time. But they’re interesting.
The process of photography ever invites me. I hope never to lose this feeling. At times I make photographs for the sheer magic of its process, and the good feeling about the very stuff needed: light, chemical combinations, some imperceptible forces at work behind the scene. I am part of the drama which takes the guise of photography.” - Paul Caponigro
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