Andrew

May 18, 2012

Friday Inspiration: Jerry Uelsmann

Jerry Uelsmann is well known for his masterful photo-composites that are achieved in the traditional darkroom. While it is true that this kind of composite can now readily be created with the help of Photoshop, for me, few are able to create the kind of surreal masterpieces that Jerry has been able to produce over the years.

I plan to visit the exhibition of Jerry’s work ‘The Mind’s Eye: 50 Years of Photography by Jerry Uelsmann’ at the Peabody Essex Museum in the coming weeks. Check it out on-line here and read the Boston Globe review here.

Listen to Jerry talk about his photographic process in the video below:

For the full length video of Jerry discussing his work visit http://www.maurofiorese.it/ and also see his interview with Randi Lynn beach of PixChannel

May 16, 2012

Going Coastal – Blurb Book

When it comes to looking at other photographers work, books are a major resource for me. I find it easier to get catalogs of photographers shows than I do to actually get to the show. I know that I’m missing out here because scale dramatically impacts the viewers experience of the photograph. I’m trying harder to get to more exhibitions but that does little for my weakness for books.

The tools that are available to us now make book production very simple and the on demand book printing services such as Blurb, put book production within reach of ordinary mortals. With that as a back drop, I decided to put together a book/catalog to support my current exhibition at the RMSP gallery. It includes all of the photographs that are in the show and some that didn’t make the cut because of space constraints. The book is now finally available on the Blurb website. Check out the preview below.

http://www.blurb.com/books/3217027

May 11, 2012

Friday Inspiration: Todd Hido

Todd Hido‘s name penetrated my consciousness at some point along the way and so when his name came up again yesterday I thought it was time to finally find out more about him. I’m probably most familiar with Todd through his books that Nazraeli Press have published. His work seems to have focused on the American Landscape – interiors of vacant buildings and night shots of homes – that remind him of his childhood in Ohio. Check out the videos below to hear Todd discussing his work.

May 8, 2012

Pictures From An Exhibition

I’m back home after a cool and crazy time in Missoula last week. Hanging my show ‘Going Coastal’ went relatively smoothly, Alyssa and Melanie from RMSP were a huge help in getting the prints up on the wall and in dealing with the problems that cropped up along the way. I even got my name on the window out front. The RMSP staff are terrific and I’m looking forward to having a chance to go back later in the summer.

May 4, 2012

Friday Inspiration: Douglas Ethridge

I recently came across the photography of Douglas Ethridge. The first image of his that caught my attention was one from the same series as the example I posted above, featured in an interview with him in F-Stop Magazine. There’s more to Douglas than just these images of water, his black and white work is equally stunning. Check out all of his portfolio’s here and my favorite black and white set, Waypoints, here.

Finally check out the video of Douglas discussing his work below.

May 2, 2012

5 Things I learned Preparing for my RMSP Exhibition

I’m very excited about my upcoming exhibition at the RMSP gallery that runs from May 4 – Aug 3. The opening reception is this Friday May 4 from 5pm – 8 pm. Please do stop by if you get a chance.

I wanted to print and frame the work myself at least this once, even though I know that there are people who tell me that photographers should photograph, printers print and framers frame. It was a good experience and I learned a few things along the way that I should have already known. Here are 5 of those things:

1. It took longer than I was expecting

While I thought that I had a good handle on how long the various steps in preparing, printing, framing and shipping my photographs would take I was very wrong. It’s always the same whenever you’re doing something for the first time, or come back to it after awhile, it takes a while to get into a rhythm that is efficient.

2. Stuff happens

While you can’t know what’s going to go wrong you need to anticipate that something will go wrong and plan and prep before hand to allow you to be able to deal with whatever happens. For me, I ran out of ink while printing the prictures but i was ready for that and had new ink on hand, getting the glass took a little longer than I had expected, and then I broke one of the large pieces of glass. That I hadn’t expected but was lucky in that I had a spare piece on hand from an early framing effort.

3. I enjoyed the process of framing my prints

While the novelty would surely wear off if I were framing dozens of prints a day, I really did enjoy the process of framing my prints. Not sure whether the purists would consider it really framing, in that I bought the glass from a local glazier and the assembled wooded frames and matt-board and then just assembled the sandwich. I enjoyed the process and could see myself doing more of this in time.

4. I like big prints

Until this exhibition the largest I’d printed my images was about 10 x 16. 24 x 36 by comparison seems gigantic and comes with a whole set on handling issues that I wasn’t ready for. For instance, I ended up doing all the framing work on our dining table because I didn’t have another flat surface, other than the floor, that was large enough to deal with both the print and the frame. 44 x 66 would be completely out of the question. It also made me think hard about image quality. When you are up close to your image at that size you see all the imperfections. Even if I don’t print every image at this size in the future, knowing that I might will make me step up my game and look for ways to maximize image quality.

5. The product of the work is the print

While I had always considered that the print was the destination, seeing this project through to a completed set of prints under-scored that thinking. I will certainly make more of an effort than I have in the past to work up images regularly to framed prints, even if it’s only one a month.

April 30, 2012

Book Comment: Freedom is Blogging in Your Underwear

Hugh MacLeod‘s third book Freedom Is Blogging in Your Underwear arrived at my house earlier this week and reminded me all over again why I love Hugh’s work. He mixes quirky cartoons with very pithy commentary that cuts to the heart of the issue. It’s very cool. The balance of text to cartoons in Freedom is biased towards cartoons, which makes it very easy to dip in and out of, or to go through at once, which is what I did.

Check out Hugh talking about his book below.

April 23, 2012

Interviewed for the RMSP Blog Paper Airplanes

I was interviewed for the RMSP blog recently to discuss a little about my experience with their Exhibition Mentorship program. Check out the interview here.

April 18, 2012

Getting Ready

It’s been crunch time here over the last week as we get into the last two weeks before the opening of the exhibition at the RMSP gallery. While a more sensible person would have outsourced the printing and framing of their work for an exhibition I wanted to do all of it myself so that I would have at least had the experience of doing it at least once. As it turned out I quite enjoyed the process, although it was indeed work.

Frames and mats came from American Frame. The UPS driver that comes to our house is now used to the weird and wonderful things that he has to deliver to us and so the 6 boxes of frames were no big deal.

I went with glass rather than plexi and sourced that from a local glazier. I also ended up having to get a full ink set for the 7900. Fortunately EP Levine is not too far away and all too easy to visit.

I had done a reasonable amount of printing on the 7900 with cut sheets but this was the first time that I had used roll paper in a serious way. For this exhibition I used Breathing Color’s Optica One that I stock piled when it was on sale earlier in the year. It’s a heavier paper and has a more neutral color than Epson Ultrasmooth that I had favored up to this point.

I don’t have a big layout table where I do the printing and so ended up co-opting the dining table for the framing work.

I was quite pleased with how the framed prints came out. I’m looking forward to having a couple of these on the walls here.

I used the same packaging that the frames came in to ship the framed images off to RMSP, although I did use blue painters tape to help reinforce the glass and hopefully hold the pieces together if it breaks. I don’t even want to think about that!

I’ll be posting more about the exhibition in the coming weeks. If you’re going to be in Missoula over the summer please do stop by and check out the exhibit. I’d be interested in your feedback.

April 16, 2012

The Value in Competition?

It’s been a big few days for sport here in Boston. Friday was the first home game for the Red Sox and today is the Boston Marathon.

Fitting then that I had a conversation at the end of last week about the sport of photo competitions. If we ignore all the flat out bad things about photo competitions – that they are money earners for the organizations that are running them (not strictly bad) and attempt to get royalty free images – are they useful?

You could argue that competitions give you an opportunity to judge your work against that of others and also that this is also an effective way to market your work and build an audience. I would say no on all points. Art is subjective, ask three people and you’ll get three different answers. Competitions can be an effective way to get your work out to a broad audience, that is, if you win. Otherwise there’s probably not a lot of value in it.

It’s always nice to win, for some this is more important than it is for others,

Competitions bring out the worst in me. In a competitive situation I want to win and will do whatever it takes to win. I don’t think that this is terribly useful when it comes to fine art photography where the goal, or at least my goal, is to effectively capture my emotional response to the scene in front of me or to make the image that’s in my head. As soon as I start thinking about what it takes to make a successful image before I’ve made it then I’m not going to be true to myself.

I don’t view fine art photography as a competitive sport. For me it’s much better to use your own work to benchmark against, a little like the runner who is interested in personal best time, but to do that after the fact. After you’ve made the image and worked it up. Then see how it fits with the rest of what you’ve done and whether this meets the standard you’ve set for yourself.

Competitions aren’t an end game for me. I may enter the occasional competition but it will be will photographs that I made for myself not with the competition in mind. What’s your position on competitions?