My Pitcher's on a Book!

Here's my picture, To Jewishness, on the cover of a real, live book. It's a college writing textbook. The picture is of a tea cup with a poem by Kenneth Koch written on it.

Everything Is There

Robert Frank, Canal Street, New Orleans, 1955, from The Americans.


No matter how much I try to be hip and up-to-date, the photographs I loved as a student influence me, even though I haven't paid them much attention for years. There's something powerful about what you learn first.

In an interview with Philip Gefter in the New York Times, December 12, 2008, Frank says of the above photograph

It’s rare that you have that movement and the variety of people on the street. So many faces to look at. There’s a seriousness here.... That is one of my favorite pictures. The movement, the people walk this way and this way, they’re young and they’re old and they’re fat--everything is there.

He's talking about exactly what I'm trying to do--photograph everything, all at once. It's a feeling I get that there's so much happening everywhere all the time, and, maybe because I'm a photographer, I want to pin it down and make it hold still. But life and art have changed since 1955, and I'm glad I figured out a new way to do this.

First Snow

Here's my most recent picture. The bottom picture is how the scene looked before I put all the people in. That's me on the far right. I did the photo part (vs. the Photoshopping) of this picture a few weeks ago, and it was, as indicated in the title, the first snowfall.

I just learned this about snow: when you see big flakes, it means there won't be much snow. In the middle of my photo session (about an hour and a half and 300 exposures), sandwiched between fine light snow, big flakes appeared.

Looking

Looking
Looking (detail)

Here's my newest image. I tried to collect people who were really looking at something. A good portion are looking directly at me. Or at least the camera, which was on a tripod. I try to look bored or like I'm waiting for a friend or the real subject of my pictures to show up, so it's possible their eyes just passed over the camera when I clicked the shutter.

How I Work

Here's the picture below (Boston Common in Winter) but with the background removed. It gives you an idea of how I put these pictures together.

Boston Common in Winter

Here's the first picture I've done in a few weeks. It's funny. This is only about five minutes or less worth of pictures, maybe only about 50, instead of the two- or three-hundred I've been doing lately. I thought nothing interesting was going on, but as I compiled it, it seemed to work better and better. I like the woman in the extreme foreground, how she is repeated to the right, and how the other black figure (second from the right) looks like the extreme-foreground woman, but distorted, somehow.

Into the Top 50

I'm pleased to be named one of Photolucida's Top 50 photographers of 2008. The honor is the result of 200 photo professionals--curators, gallery owners, publishing people, etc.--voting on the work of 608 photographers from all over the place (but mostly the US). Here's the link to the Photolucida blog with the rest of the Top 50. Here's the link to the main Photolucida web site.

Olaf Breuning

Isn't Olaf Breuning great?

Some Influences

Garry Winogrand


Jackson Pollock


Pablo Picasso


Nicolas Poussin


Here are some obvious influences on my recent pictures of people. Winogrand, Pollock, Picasso and Poussin are more or less formal influences. I've used the way they distribute the figure (or gestures in Pollock's case) kind of evenly over the composition.

Influences on how I think about my work are much more all over the map. But some obvious names that bubble up: Harry Callahan, Walker Evans, P.-L. DiCorcia, Ed Rusha, and the Bechers.

Nate

Here's my daughter's friend Nate. I was taking pictures of something else when he said I should photograph him. It was dusk. He launched into this crazy five-minute dance.

Cold Day

This picture is done from the entryway to my apartment. It was too cold to stand outside for the necessary several hours picture-taking for this composite. I cleaned and cleaned the storm door window so it wouldn't affect things too much. I think it added a pleasant flatness and slightly magnified the overcast feel of the day.

Choosing Titles

I've been thinking about the titling of my series of people pictures. I have been calling them Color People after a line from an Animal Collective song, De Soto de Son: "Color people say oh no, cause they think it’s contagious/Marshmallow people say oh yeah, 'cause they think it's a masterpiece." I think it fits perfectly, but it's a little obscure. It seems to allude to race, without really doing so, which I kind of like, but I doubt other people will be drawn to it for this reason.

So I've been leaning toward "Selected People." It's descriptive, it's plain, it proabably helps the viewer figure out what's going on a little.

My final choice is a little more poetic: "Many Are Chosen." This, of course, alludes to Walker Evans's series "Many Are Called," his series of grave and sad subway portraits. (It comes from the Bible itself: "Many are called, but few are chosen.") These pictures are a serious influence on my work. As are PL di Corcia's Heads and Harry Callahan's downtown Chicago candid street portraits. I'd like to put myself in a line with them, naturally. Who wouldn't?

I like "Many Are Chosen" because, in my book, all are welcome, all are equal, and nobody's going to heaven anyway. But I like "Selected People" for it's simplicity. I like "Color People" because, to me, anyway, it's funny and it explains my work a little.

So, for now, it's "Selected People."