The Runcible Blog

I wandered around the mall for an hour and a half specifically to photograph the spectacle of "black friday", only to leave the building without a single photo. Fully aware of the legal grey-area that is mall photography, I didn't want to shoot indiscriminately. I spent some time looking for visuals that would describe the shopping phenomenon and silently condemn such crass consumerism. Surely I'd be able to find an example at the Cambridgeside Galleria.

But then something hit me. Most of the people I saw seemed to be ordinary, "middle class" Americans. They weren't flaunting their wealth or relishing in materialism. They looked like victims, shuffling from store to store, floating along in life with the inertia of a society bred to consume. I wondered if people understood why they felt compelled to shop today. If the only reason to buy something today is that it's a little bit cheaper, maybe you didn't need the thing in the first place. Or if shopping for a gift, what message does it send to the recipient? "I bought this thing for you because it was on sale." Hmm.

Instead of cynicism, I felt shame. How could I photograph unknowing victims of a well-funded brainwashing campaign as if they were to blame? We're a nation of cattle, but with one significant difference: free will. It doesn't take much prodding to realize the futility and meaninglessness of an unfettered lust for more "stuff". A cow can't just march off the farm and decide not to be slaughtered, but people can renounce artificiality and materialism.

At any rate, I didn't know how to represent the contradiction and the dynamic going on in this mall. Should I show a mass of people shopping? What does that image mean without the context I'm talking about — especially since the mass is made of individuals who each have a story, with motivations and intentions. I was stuck.

A guy close to my age approached me and asked about what I was doing. Then he revealed that he was working for an advertising company trying to sell a salon package to shoppers; unfortunately, his company didn't have a permit to be in the mall, so the three people working had to be very sly in their dealings. We talked about this and that, and I think he briefly tried to sell me the salon thing (I'm teflon to advertising...). But as we were talking I thought that he'd be an interesting example of this whole mess I'd been thinking of -- here was a working class guy, a self-proclaimed punk, from Worcester working for an advertising company from Ontario, trying to sell stuff (without permission) to wealthy people shopping in Cambridge. It's like the barnacle that grows on the whale.

But just as I was about to take his portrait, a sharply-dressed mall stooge told me that I can't take pictures in the mall. He was polite about it, and I didn't ask why or protest because I know about the court cases, and private property, and yadda yadda.

So, that was it. I walked home with a lot on my mind and no answers.

Remember: Today is National Buy Nothing Day. There's still time to celebrate.

I just learned conclusively that I'm not even remotely gay.

That's good to know.

Pssssstt! Look what you can make on Tabblo, now. Exciting!

I have greater respect for James Nachtwey after seeing War Photographer. I was familiar with his work, but I didn't know much about his approach or character. He's one of those "Concerned Photographers" in the same vein as Don McCullin (whom I mention often), Eugene Richards, and many more (including, I suppose, Cornell Capa, who coined the term).

If I had $100 for Nachtwey's Inferno, I think it's definitely worth owning.

Check out an interview with him from a few years ago.

Although it seemed promising at first glance, maybe I won't see Fur after all:

While Kidman is as exquisite as ever, her alabaster complexion and statuesque carriage are the opposite of Arbus’s dark features and small frame. Maggie Gyllenhaal, who was so good in ‘‘Secretary,’’ might have made more sense. But the mania for Kidman continues — Hollywood will put her in anything. I await the possibility of seeing her as Frederick Douglass.

From the Globe's review.

This photographer, Michal Daniel, has an excellent site, 640x480.net, of street photography taken with a camera attachment on an old PDA. Some of the photos are really great (but some are a little too sneaky for my tastes). It's cool to see someone using "obsolete" technology to make serious art (I can't think of a synonym...), and it proves the brain behind the the camera [or PDA!] is more important in many ways than the light-tight box capturing the image.

The gallery could use some editing, but it's impressive to see so many good moments that he's caught over the course of a few years. Well worth paging through the thumbnails.

By hook or by crook, I think I've finally extricated myself from that vile girl. It was pointless to expect anything sane from someone so damaged.

Now, to get rid of all her crap.

By hook or by crook, I think I've finally extricated myself from that vile girl. It was pointless to expect anything sane from someone so damaged.

Now, to get rid of all her crap.

From my hero, Don McCullin:

Every time I went to war, I came back a little more damaged. I'm quite a resilient person, and I've got a lot of hardness in me when called upon. But there's another side of me — not actually soft, but as if my nerve ends are hanging out. I met the photographer Eugene Smith once. When someone asked me what he was like, I replied that he was a man whose nerve ends were hanging out. I discovered later that I had become the same.

There are times when I wish my nerve ends were not hanging out. I realize it's a blessing and a curse, but lately I've felt only the curse.

Is it odd that hearing Aleck Karis play Philip Glass brings me close to tears? Or is it universally moving?

I am alone in my head. As I always am. As we all are.

When people assess a past experience, they pay attention above all to two things: how it felt at the peak and whether it got better or worse at the end. A mild improvement—even if it's an improvement from "intolerable" to "pretty bad"—makes the whole experience seem better, and a bad ending makes everything seem worse.

From a recent New Yorker article on the economy.

I processed the photos from yesterday's New York jaunt. I was a little disappointed at first because I felt that I didn't capture enough of what I wanted to see; I barely even saw the subway, for instance. It would've been nice to get more night shots, and I hoped to find more interesting people to shoot. I guess I'll have to return soon.

Gary Winogrand shot 10 rolls of Tri-X every day for years and left behind thousands of undeveloped rolls and thousands of unedited negatives when he died. I wonder how many of those frames were keepers, and I wonder what exactly he found so fascinating to shoot. Considering I shot only about 100 frames in New York and edited those down to 36 that I like, with perhaps half of those actually "good", I'd say that's not a bad percentage of keepers. But what if I had the time to shoot 200 or 300 shots at the same rate? Considering I spent 7 hours yesterday, I'd need another day or two to reach that goal. And judging by the way my legs and shoulders feel today, I'd need to work out to prepare for that feat.

On another note, one major thought came to me in New York — with so many people living there, how can you meet anyone?
A related thought: what does it take to live in that city? What kind of person thrives there?

It's all very alien to me.

Anyway, here are the photos from the day:

I just got back from New York, and man, do I stink! two days of the same clothes, including 7 hours of walking around the island lugging probably 20lbs. of photo gear.

pictures forthcoming...

No wonder society has a flawed perception of what it means to be beautiful.

I bought an issue of American Cinematographer the other night. Since it's produced by the ASC guild itself, much of the magazine has to do with the craft of cinematography as practiced by its members. Some of the technical jargon is unfamiliar to me — for instance, I don't know about the different types of lenses or aspect ratio choices, and I haven't figured out why they refer to apertures as T2.8 instead of f2.8 — but I try to follow on with an outsider's curiosity.

I have much respect for cinematographers because they seem to understand the qualities of light on a much deeper level than still photographers. A lot of the content in the magazine revolves around the techniques that cinematographers use to deal with tricky lighting situations and limitations of the medium (such as film that tops off at 500ISO). The articles talk about the lighting choices each cinematographer makes to create a mood that suits the director's vision, which involves being in tune with color, light direction, contrast, and softness. It's a very detail-oriented job.

I think one possible explanation for the difference in technical competence between cinematographers and still photographers is the relatively limited post-processing potential of 35mm movie film. I don't know too much about the entire start-to-finish process of film production, but my sense is that it's still mostly a chemical process with some digital color balance adjustments that are possible. In other words, it behooves the cinematographer to get the scene looking exactly right when he shoots it rather than relying on post-processing to clean up any nasty light. Plus, it's probably prohibitively expensive to re-shoot a scene if the exposure was off. Because of those constraints, DP's will make extensive tests using different types of film and lenses, under varying lighting conditions. By contrast, photographers usually have more room for error — a properly exposed negative/digital file has a huge potential for variation by a skilled photoshopper. And certainly flash photography removes many of the limitations of having to setup thousands of watts of tungsten lights for a scene. We photographers have it easy!

All of this is to say that I think I could learn a lot from these skilled DP's. Even watching a well-shot film (most recently, Marie Antoinette by Lance Acord) inspires me. It's great to see a movie where you could snip out single frames and have beautiful still photos (Barry Lyndon comes to mind).