...Santa Fe and New Mexico...

Vince: When can we expect the Vince Lupo Presets for Lightroom? Or Nik, or wherever you’re conducting experiments with grit and pixie dust?

In the meantime: If you could be persuaded to do your RFF colleagues a service, you could do a Chris Crawford (that soul of teacherly technical generosity, recently glimpsed here) who has shared here a lot of what he has learned in his photography career (thanks, Chris).

Shoot, you could offer photography/development workshops based on the New Mexico work, and I bet Steve, Chip, Randy, and others active or lurking here would show up. I would. Especially if Allen does a guest lecturer stint.

Re book publication: Of course you must see many photo books out there, if you are looking in that section of good bookstores. They can form a wall and stare you down. But none of these books are yours. And I’ve seen some of those books, recent photographers and the venerable ones, too, and they don’t overshadow your vision or your work. Maybe a limited edition clothbound Blurb is a good way to take the project beyond the exhibits, and put it in the hands of prospective publishers, as well as making it available to us.

I know there are photographers, still pretty young, with studio degrees and well-known/connected mentors, with requisite tech skills, real vision, and serious ambition (and 4000 Instagram followers) who are getting book publication with art presses, university presses, etc. So why not you? Surely several university presses in the West should consider your portfolio, though from what I know about university presses, there’s no reason university presses with art/photography interests elsewhere shouldn’t consider your work. It might be that you’d benefit from an essay, or forms of interspersed text, by a good writer (fiction, nonfiction, poet, historian....) who lives in that part of the West. Ed Abbey is gone; Scott Momaday may still be around; Cormac McCarthy would provide great prose for your work, but who knows whether he’d take that on? If he did, you could be on the best two million coffee tables in the USA. I think I’ve mentioned to you Alex Harris of the Duke University Center for Documentary Photography...as a photographer, he worked with Robert Coles on a book about the Hispano people of New Mexico. Alex is worth seeking out.

Enough kibitzing and artist locker room talk, though I imagine others participating in this thread root for you, and may have better ideas than mine. Here’s a parting thought: if Walt Whitman had decided to wait for the right publisher to recognize the scope and depth and grandeur of his vision, he would have died waiting—like Emily Dickinson. But he believed in his own genius, thank goodness, and published it, boosted it, and in that way earned greatness, reputation, and immortality.

Thanks everyone for how this thread has evolved.
 
jscolman@scolma said:
48839673002_9456128a88_c.jpg
[/url]JWS_190922_00262-10.jpg by Jim Scolman, on Flickr[/IMG]

...Santa Fe.....
Fall, 2019.
Click to expand...

This was done before, Ansel something or other.
He waited for better light.
 
i'll try one more time :(

i'll try one more time :(

<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/164802581@N07/48962816122/in/dateposted-public/" title="Taos door sm"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/48962816122_b134b4ca29_b.jpg" width="928" height="1024" alt="Taos door sm"></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
 
rhl-oregon said:
Vince: When can we expect the Vince Lupo Presets for Lightroom? Or Nik, or wherever you’re conducting experiments with grit and pixie dust?

In the meantime: If you could be persuaded to do your RFF colleagues a service, you could do a Chris Crawford (that soul of teacherly technical generosity, recently glimpsed here) who has shared here a lot of what he has learned in his photography career (thanks, Chris).

Shoot, you could offer photography/development workshops based on the New Mexico work, and I bet Steve, Chip, Randy, and others active or lurking here would show up. I would. Especially if Allen does a guest lecturer stint.

Re book publication: Of course you must see many photo books out there, if you are looking in that section of good bookstores. They can form a wall and stare you down. But none of these books are yours. And I’ve seen some of those books, recent photographers and the venerable ones, too, and they don’t overshadow your vision or your work. Maybe a limited edition clothbound Blurb is a good way to take the project beyond the exhibits, and put it in the hands of prospective publishers, as well as making it available to us.

I know there are photographers, still pretty young, with studio degrees and well-known/connected mentors, with requisite tech skills, real vision, and serious ambition (and 4000 Instagram followers) who are getting book publication with art presses, university presses, etc. So why not you? Surely several university presses in the West should consider your portfolio, though from what I know about university presses, there’s no reason university presses with art/photography interests elsewhere shouldn’t consider your work. It might be that you’d benefit from an essay, or forms of interspersed text, by a good writer (fiction, nonfiction, poet, historian....) who lives in that part of the West. Ed Abbey is gone; Scott Momaday may still be around; Cormac McCarthy would provide great prose for your work, but who knows whether he’d take that on? If he did, you could be on the best two million coffee tables in the USA. I think I’ve mentioned to you Alex Harris of the Duke University Center for Documentary Photography...as a photographer, he worked with Robert Coles on a book about the Hispano people of New Mexico. Alex is worth seeking out.

Enough kibitzing and artist locker room talk, though I imagine others participating in this thread root for you, and may have better ideas than mine. Here’s a parting thought: if Walt Whitman had decided to wait for the right publisher to recognize the scope and depth and grandeur of his vision, he would have died waiting—like Emily Dickinson. But he believed in his own genius, thank goodness, and published it, boosted it, and in that way earned greatness, reputation, and immortality.

Thanks everyone for how this thread has evolved.
Click to expand...

Great post as usual Robert. I to am a huge fan of Vince's work.
 
rhl-oregon said:
Vince: When can we expect the Vince Lupo Presets for Lightroom? Or Nik, or wherever you’re conducting experiments with grit and pixie dust?

In the meantime: If you could be persuaded to do your RFF colleagues a service, you could do a Chris Crawford (that soul of teacherly technical generosity, recently glimpsed here) who has shared here a lot of what he has learned in his photography career (thanks, Chris).

Shoot, you could offer photography/development workshops based on the New Mexico work, and I bet Steve, Chip, Randy, and others active or lurking here would show up. I would. Especially if Allen does a guest lecturer stint.

Re book publication: Of course you must see many photo books out there, if you are looking in that section of good bookstores. They can form a wall and stare you down. But none of these books are yours. And I’ve seen some of those books, recent photographers and the venerable ones, too, and they don’t overshadow your vision or your work. Maybe a limited edition clothbound Blurb is a good way to take the project beyond the exhibits, and put it in the hands of prospective publishers, as well as making it available to us.

I know there are photographers, still pretty young, with studio degrees and well-known/connected mentors, with requisite tech skills, real vision, and serious ambition (and 4000 Instagram followers) who are getting book publication with art presses, university presses, etc. So why not you? Surely several university presses in the West should consider your portfolio, though from what I know about university presses, there’s no reason university presses with art/photography interests elsewhere shouldn’t consider your work. It might be that you’d benefit from an essay, or forms of interspersed text, by a good writer (fiction, nonfiction, poet, historian....) who lives in that part of the West. Ed Abbey is gone; Scott Momaday may still be around; Cormac McCarthy would provide great prose for your work, but who knows whether he’d take that on? If he did, you could be on the best two million coffee tables in the USA. I think I’ve mentioned to you Alex Harris of the Duke University Center for Documentary Photography...as a photographer, he worked with Robert Coles on a book about the Hispano people of New Mexico. Alex is worth seeking out.

Enough kibitzing and artist locker room talk, though I imagine others participating in this thread root for you, and may have better ideas than mine. Here’s a parting thought: if Walt Whitman had decided to wait for the right publisher to recognize the scope and depth and grandeur of his vision, he would have died waiting—like Emily Dickinson. But he believed in his own genius, thank goodness, and published it, boosted it, and in that way earned greatness, reputation, and immortality.

Thanks everyone for how this thread has evolved.
Click to expand...

Jeez maybe I should hire you and Allen as my agents!

Many thanks for both of your very kind thoughts -- honestly I am the worst marketer of my own work, and I haven't had a whole lot of luck in the commercial gallery scene. For example, I stopped into a new-ish photo gallery in Santa Fe earlier this year and spoke at length with the gallery owner. I sent her a link to my Mapping the West project, and her response was "I looked at your work and your images are a great documentary of the West. I don't think I have the clientele for them per se, but that certainly doesn't diminish their worth! I'll keep the work in mind of course, I have a memory bank for this, should I ever curate a show they would fit into, etc." So we'll see if that ends up going anywhere at all. The other gallery (Monroe) in Santa Fe is very well known for its displays of historic work - you name it, they've shown it. They also represent 'emerging' artists -- I can never tell if I'm 'emerging' or not. Can a guy in his 50's who has been doing photography for over 40 years be 'emerging'? Emerging from what? Obscurity? Irrelevance? Very frustrating experience, to say the least.

As far as my 'special sauce' for getting the photos to look the way they look, I'm pretty much just using PhotoShop CS5 and Silver Efex Pro (very sparingly!). I shoot everything RAW, so I'm initially processing in PhotoShop Camera RAW and really getting the image pretty close in that, then bringing the image into PhotoShop itself and doing whatever it is I do. I couldn't work exclusively in a program like Lightroom. Plus I'm not of the 'straight from the camera' school -- I'm more of the Ansel Adams' 'the negative is the score, the print the performance' (Have a look at Ansel's 'Moonrise, Hernandez' in its original, as shot form and you'll see what I mean). And I'm a stickler for print quality. I think the local camera club doesn't want to invite me to do print judging any more because I stick my nose against every submitted print (and unfortunately am let down more often than not). As far as the actual shooting of the images goes, I keep it pretty simple -- usually a 35, 50 and 75 lenses, Monochrom 246 body and M-D 262 as backup. Sometimes a portable printer to provide 4"x6" prints on the spot to people I photograph.

But beyond the technical widgets and pixel-gazing is the content of the images themselves, which to me is most important. What am I (or you!) trying to say? I'm sure there's a degree of 'non-thinking' that goes on when one photographs, but there should also be some kind of conscious direction or intent that you're following, yet being open to the spontaneous and unplanned. When one creates a 'body of work', I like to think that's more than just a collection of 'greatest hits'. It took a long time for this project to evolve to where it is now (and it's still evolving!), and I think - finally - it's becoming a 'body of work'. And it's been tough, because I'm making a conscious effort to do something that is different than what others do out there. I think the work is always 'becoming', for better or worse.

As far as any kind of book goes, right now the only thing I'd consider is a print on demand / Blurb-type book. I really can't afford to have a book printed (as in a few thousand copies, hard cover etc), and I don't think the work is at the point where I'd like to put it in book form. Plus I'm not much of an online 'influencer', so I'm doubtful about sales potential. However, if I did do a book I would be receptive to doing some kind of collaborative venture with a writer. Combining forces, so to speak.

There's still so much to do out there -- I've just scratched the surface with the farming community in Mesilla and Dell City, TX, and there are so many other aspects out there to study (I'm planning on going back the first week of December for the pecan harvest). Not sure if I'd necessarily want to do something on, say, the border wall and immigration, but that's definitely an aspect of the West along the border that's worthy of study. Guess in a way I'm putting borders around my personal 'West', perhaps to my detriment.

I'd be definitely receptive to doing some kind of workshop / mentoring program - whether here on RFF or even out West. Not sure that I have anything to say that's worth listening to -- I'm still trying to figure it all out myself!


The New Mexico Kid by Vince Lupo, on Flickr
 
A considered and circumspect response. It seems perfectly fine to choose the integrity, authenticity, formal coherence etc. of the work—the process of growing the body of work—for as long as you like, rather than taking on self-promotion tasks as another side job. Self promotion is a necessary evil; it’s just a matter of where one draws the line between necessity and narcissism and nausea.

How did Adams go about it? I have a 90 year old acquaintance who has been in the Sierra Club forever and still lives near Yosemite who knew Adams more as a Sierra Club member who photographed—before he was an artist-celebrity. I don’t know the Adams biography or career arc, but the clues are there, just as they would be for others since then.

PS: Maybe your nesting word above, “agent,” is a suggestion from your inner self—about farming out the work or promotion. Is there an art-photography equivalent of a literary agent? Some painters and sculptors have agents. Researching what forms of ‘agency’ might be out there could be interesting in a way that grinding out and circulating promotional copy is not
 
I don't know when I have ever seen such consistently gorgeous work both black and white and color, in one thread! Thanks to all for posting these. These shots make me want to pick up my camera and get busy!
 
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