Larry Cloetta
Veteran
Wow, thanks. Nothing is ever quite what I think it would be if I were better, but thanks for the encouragement. Mostly, when I think about that trip, I think about the shots I didn’t take, the places I didn’t stop. Next time.
Thanks, again.
Calzone
Gear Whore #1
Robert,
"Maggie" was on Gail King's Morning Show today. Somehow we are having a meeting in February with her old agent from London. Maggie looks like she is heading back to her first agent, who I met a few years ago when she came to NYC. So I was remembered as striking, and there seems to now have a follow-through to some of the talk of modeling.
So the other day I was playful, and "Maggie" has been writing about her life and the world as being a "hot-mess" so I photographed her in the bedroom that she uses as a big closet littered with shoes, bags, clothes racks. Our 1912 Baby-Victorian is a tiny house with 40 windows so it pretty much is a place of great light, and because we are in the lower Hudson Valley there is something great about the light.
So like Bill Cunningham I think I have my muse. Bill Cunningham photographed his neighbor at Carnegie Hall as his muse.
So without me in the conversation Maggie's old agent was back by the thought of representing me, or in the least marketing us as a couple.
Anyways, I just retired, but somehow I'm getting dragged into things. Anyways something is happening.
Cal
"Maggie" was on Gail King's Morning Show today. Somehow we are having a meeting in February with her old agent from London. Maggie looks like she is heading back to her first agent, who I met a few years ago when she came to NYC. So I was remembered as striking, and there seems to now have a follow-through to some of the talk of modeling.
So the other day I was playful, and "Maggie" has been writing about her life and the world as being a "hot-mess" so I photographed her in the bedroom that she uses as a big closet littered with shoes, bags, clothes racks. Our 1912 Baby-Victorian is a tiny house with 40 windows so it pretty much is a place of great light, and because we are in the lower Hudson Valley there is something great about the light.
So like Bill Cunningham I think I have my muse. Bill Cunningham photographed his neighbor at Carnegie Hall as his muse.
So without me in the conversation Maggie's old agent was back by the thought of representing me, or in the least marketing us as a couple.
Anyways, I just retired, but somehow I'm getting dragged into things. Anyways something is happening.
Cal
Calzone
Gear Whore #1
Larry,
I think the wisdom you gave that struck me is how a truly great photo can stand alone and not need any caption or title.
Anyways for me, and possibly us, it is a numbers game, where the more you shoot the more you might get lucky.
Cal
robert blu
quiet photographer
Cal, you have your Muse, a bicycle like Bill Cunningham and a beautiful light in your valley. Of course your cameras and your photographic eye, cool!
Perhaps next a "Monster Book" about the Hudson Valley ? What a super project it would be !
Calzone
Gear Whore #1
Robert,
Like you I enjoy making books, but I have to give credit to John (JSRocket) for his bookmaking discipline.
My monster books are kinda crazy and over the top. I give Salgado the credit for that. I saw his show Genesis at ICP and Salgado used the best lab in Paris to print huge. He shot both film and digital over a long period to create this body of work. It was told that tight airport security helped inform the switch to digital midstream.
I have to say that Salgado printed mucho big, and the IQ was of large format shooting. Kudos to a great lab in Paris. Separately in SoHo I stumbled upon a gallery that had some of the same images I saw at ICP framed but without any cover glass. The experience of seeing the print for real was very different than at ICP.
Also something I learned from a bookbinding workshop over two decades ago is how a book can be a fetish, an object, a tactile experience, a sculpture, and a great way to guide a viewer. I learned that books are overlooked. I don't think posting work online is the best presentation of my work, archival framing is mucho expensive, so creating books that are a limited edition of one I think provides actually the best presentation of my work, and I don't need no stinking gallery. The thought of a 50% commission and losing control of my work I just find so oppressive.
At the last NYC Meet-Up I wanted to show "Snarky Joe" this smaller book that was developed around 19x13 paper. Somewhere in my printing studio, I found a box of paper I didn't know I had, so I made a scaled-down folio of sorts. Still a big book, not a monster size which is my trademark, and the smaller book was and provided a more intimate experience. Meanwhile the big prints I think had more personality and were bolder with more expansive detail and a more open tonality where the mid-range becomes the voice of the print. Know that the Lightroom setting on both the large and small prints were identical. Interesting to note that shooting Leica with modern Leica glass compounds good technic where you actually get to large format IQ.
I am inspired by "Project Runway." In the Fin- AL-LEE they have 3-4 finalists. They get ample time to develop a body of work, but the best advice is "be very mindful and careful with the editing because it will either make or break a show." Good advice that for me is universal. Sometimes less is more, and sometimes additions dilute a body of work and are a "distraction."
The way I now see my books they are kinda like a museum retrospective because of their size. The folio is more like a gallery show.
For those that are not in the know realize that I use a folding hand truck to transport one of my books to a NYC Meet-Up. Also, the newest version that I call a "book of proofs" features archival tissue cover sheets in between pages, and are designed to fit into a stock size archival presentation box made by Archival Methods. My new binding system has a thinner spine for the pages to lay flatter. My first Monster Book I call a workbook and is less developed and less elegant than my Book of Proofs.
I had a gallery that specialized in photograp[hy look at my work. I hand trucked some of my large prints and the workbook. In the critique, I was told that one-off books that are the artist's personal property are "estate pieces" and can be UBER valuable. I was directed to think of how a curator or dealers would love to "discover" a great new talent, and it seems ideal that a book is the best presentation of my work. The Book of Proofs is on a scale where I could see a retrospective in a museum as large as the old ICP. The Workbook has my lightroom settings written on the back of the prints to help me organize the mess I have accumulated.
Also know I destroyed an Epson 3880. One day the capping station just exploded. It was beyond repair, I was printing extensively trying to deplete my Piezography ink supply so it would not shelf life. When I graduated to my Epson 7800 I gained the ability to printng using roll papers, so it was easy to scale things up to a bigger print size.
Currently I will have the kitchen remodeled this month. Covid delays made last year impossible, but after the kitchen I intend on building out the two car garage as a workspace studio that will be heated and well insulated. This involves replacing a hip roof with a gabled roof so I can have an attic as a digital workspace. Pretty much a darkroom for digital where I can optimize the advantage of owning an EIZO calibrated monitor.
Then in half the garage which is detached from a 1912 Baby-Victorian will be a "clean-room" for digital printing. The other half of the garage will be a workspace also, but be shared with a car. Then there will be an addition of a "Conservatory" that overlooks my lawn in the "back-backyard" (the back-backyard is a second building lot off a dead end), a marsh, and a forested hillside as a shooting studio with a wall of windows on three sides for a panoramic view.
The ground fogs in the fall and spring are particularly mysterious and wonderful that roll off a cliff-like edge over the marsh. I am reminded the Hudson Vally is really a rainforest...
Thanks for this thread. What is undergoing is my retirement dream.
Cal
robert blu
quiet photographer
One year ago I started this thread, simply to know if I was the only one "needing" a project to be satisfied with my photography.
I'm now curious to know if anyone has changed his habits about it. Or if anyone who had difficulties to log in with the previous less user friendly version of the RFF software now desires to share his thought about it.
About myself I still prefer to shoot with a project in my mind knowing that sometimes you can deviate from a project
Or not?
Of course even casual photos can become the starting point for a series or a project.
Perhaps someone his wondering why to ressurect an old thread: there have been recently in RFF some comments about the use of "like" and or the comments about photographs of other members, and this brought to think more about the way (and why) we photograph. But this could be the topic of a different thread.
I'm now curious to know if anyone has changed his habits about it. Or if anyone who had difficulties to log in with the previous less user friendly version of the RFF software now desires to share his thought about it.
About myself I still prefer to shoot with a project in my mind knowing that sometimes you can deviate from a project
Or not?Of course even casual photos can become the starting point for a series or a project.
Perhaps someone his wondering why to ressurect an old thread: there have been recently in RFF some comments about the use of "like" and or the comments about photographs of other members, and this brought to think more about the way (and why) we photograph. But this could be the topic of a different thread.
Godfrey
somewhat colored
Sorry to say, I missed this thread last year. So I am coming to it afresh, not from some PoV of whether or how it changed my thinking.
I just read through all of it, albeit somewhat quickly and without investigating the links. It raises a number of thoughts from related, and sometimes not related, personal experience.
The past three plus years of The Pestilence has been a bit of an anomaly for me. My getting "out and about" has been mostly confined to where I walk in my neighborhood and a couple of trips with friends to other places further afield where photography was not the focus of the trip. As such, instead of the "go to the city where there are people interacting and record my impressions with a theme in mind" or "go to a specific place I found interesting due to the shapes/the light/the activity and find the interesting things that connect it together in my mind," most of my photography has been more of a meditation as I walk on the close world around me. I like to walk every day, both for health and simply because I enjoy seeing the slow change of things in my neighborhood as the days and seasons progress. I don't do well when I'm confined to being at home all the time and can't get out for at least a walk. I meditate on things beyond the immediate but also on the graphic structures of the things around me, things that I see first hand, as they change over time.
I have also been going out to test and learn the equipment I've acquired last year and this. Usually checking out a specific lens on various kinds of subjects with the M10-M body in the past few months. Or to remember how to shoot with the Polaroid cameras again. Or enjoying the ancient Kodak Retina IIc, or a Minox B. etc etc. I do much the same kinds of picture taking as I do when I'm meditating, but it is more pointed to learning the lens or the camera in some ways.
So from going out with a specific goal or project in mind, or a hired job to accomplish in the past, I've moved to a more "see what I see, capture it, see how it relates to itself and other work afterwards" kind of shooting model this past few years. While I haven't spent a great deal of time doing the analysis and coalescence of the work that's been accumulating into some articulable notions yet, I do see that there are themes and projects to be assembled out of it. And I feel I've learned a lot about who I am as a photographer NOW, not who I was as a photographer a decade and more ago, which helps my meditations on future photographic works focus in on what will satisfy my sense of having accomplished something.
Some of the simple things I've come to accept have to do with the equipment I use, and how what I use now changes what I see and what I think I can achieve. For instance, I have become much more sensitive to carrying a lot of gear: I'd rather carry a minimum and see what I can get out of it than carry too much and not use most of it. The absolute size and weight of what I'm willing to carry has gone way down too. And what I look for in my photos has become more refined and more nuanced over this time.
It's all good, and a process to enjoy. I am long retired from my career, and long since no longer take assignments other than what I assign myself to do with my photography. But the learning continues and motivates the work, and the work brings great pleasure in the doing and the results.
Onwards!
G
I just read through all of it, albeit somewhat quickly and without investigating the links. It raises a number of thoughts from related, and sometimes not related, personal experience.
The past three plus years of The Pestilence has been a bit of an anomaly for me. My getting "out and about" has been mostly confined to where I walk in my neighborhood and a couple of trips with friends to other places further afield where photography was not the focus of the trip. As such, instead of the "go to the city where there are people interacting and record my impressions with a theme in mind" or "go to a specific place I found interesting due to the shapes/the light/the activity and find the interesting things that connect it together in my mind," most of my photography has been more of a meditation as I walk on the close world around me. I like to walk every day, both for health and simply because I enjoy seeing the slow change of things in my neighborhood as the days and seasons progress. I don't do well when I'm confined to being at home all the time and can't get out for at least a walk. I meditate on things beyond the immediate but also on the graphic structures of the things around me, things that I see first hand, as they change over time.
I have also been going out to test and learn the equipment I've acquired last year and this. Usually checking out a specific lens on various kinds of subjects with the M10-M body in the past few months. Or to remember how to shoot with the Polaroid cameras again. Or enjoying the ancient Kodak Retina IIc, or a Minox B. etc etc. I do much the same kinds of picture taking as I do when I'm meditating, but it is more pointed to learning the lens or the camera in some ways.
So from going out with a specific goal or project in mind, or a hired job to accomplish in the past, I've moved to a more "see what I see, capture it, see how it relates to itself and other work afterwards" kind of shooting model this past few years. While I haven't spent a great deal of time doing the analysis and coalescence of the work that's been accumulating into some articulable notions yet, I do see that there are themes and projects to be assembled out of it. And I feel I've learned a lot about who I am as a photographer NOW, not who I was as a photographer a decade and more ago, which helps my meditations on future photographic works focus in on what will satisfy my sense of having accomplished something.
Some of the simple things I've come to accept have to do with the equipment I use, and how what I use now changes what I see and what I think I can achieve. For instance, I have become much more sensitive to carrying a lot of gear: I'd rather carry a minimum and see what I can get out of it than carry too much and not use most of it. The absolute size and weight of what I'm willing to carry has gone way down too. And what I look for in my photos has become more refined and more nuanced over this time.
It's all good, and a process to enjoy. I am long retired from my career, and long since no longer take assignments other than what I assign myself to do with my photography. But the learning continues and motivates the work, and the work brings great pleasure in the doing and the results.
Onwards!
G
robert blu
quiet photographer
Thanks Godfrey for your articulate reply. At the end the most important is your closing sentence:
"It's all good, and a process to enjoy. I am long retired from my career, and long since no longer take assignments other than what I assign myself to do with my photography. But the learning continues and motivates the work, and the work brings great pleasure in the doing and the results."
Being motivated, learning and enjoying our passion: this is!
"It's all good, and a process to enjoy. I am long retired from my career, and long since no longer take assignments other than what I assign myself to do with my photography. But the learning continues and motivates the work, and the work brings great pleasure in the doing and the results."
Being motivated, learning and enjoying our passion: this is!
Bob Michaels
nobody special
No change for me. I am still focused on projects. Some go for years, some are finished in a month. Some morph into another project.
My photography is because I want to say something, to convey some emotion or information. I struggle to do that with a single photo but a series of photos works much better for me.
Same for me, I am still concentrating on Projects. I have had some philosophical changes though. I think I will try to make all of my old NYC photography into one project, one title. The Santiago "street" photography that I've done since 2017 is 3 projects. One finished and printed as a zine already. The other two are before covid and during / after covid...but have nothing to do with Covid. I just changed the way I photograph during that period and want to keep them separate.
I also have 5 non-street projects that I am working on in Santiago. However, in a few months, I will move slightly outside of Santiago and I will consider all Santiago projects finished at that time. I will have to edit them and change my website to reflect the changes in this work. Also, start making books of them or at least book dummies.
After the move, I will start new projects in my new little city / town. I am excited to see what I can do without the cover of the big city.
I also have 5 non-street projects that I am working on in Santiago. However, in a few months, I will move slightly outside of Santiago and I will consider all Santiago projects finished at that time. I will have to edit them and change my website to reflect the changes in this work. Also, start making books of them or at least book dummies.
After the move, I will start new projects in my new little city / town. I am excited to see what I can do without the cover of the big city.