While I have my preferences when it comes to subjects, I tend too shoot quite a variety of them – landscapes, urban, night, some sports, the occasional informal portrait, and more. On the other hand, some photographers focus almost exclusively on mastering a single subject. Poesie is one such photographer – her work features lovely images of flowers, a subject that she has mastered. Check out her Flickr Gallery where you’ll find an amazing and beautiful collection of photographs.
Category Archives: Photographers
Friedlander at SFMOMA
SFGate reviews the Friedlander show currently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
We accept an image such as “Nashville, Tennessee” (1971) as an instantaneous document of social reality because everyone in it – maybe even Friedlander himself behind the lens – appears taken by surprise. And because it appears to make no assertion about what it records, unless we care about the importance ascribed to highly coiffed hair at a certain American place and time.
But look at a recent picture, such as “New York City” (2002) in the Fraenkel Gallery’s concurrent Friedlander show, “America by Car,” and you realize immediately that his camera has constructed a moment of layered, colliding optical perspectives that the eye unaided could never assemble, let alone fix.
We might see “Friedlander,” the retrospective, as tracking a career-long disproof of any presumed equivalence between seeing the world and seeing the world as photographed. Yet Friedlander works as if he has no ideological stake in this truth, merely a fascination with it, a fascination continually reawakened as different subjects come before his camera.
Thru May 18…
Dorothea Lange at Shorpy
If you aren’t already following it, take a look at Shorpy: The 100 Year Old Photography Blog, where really wonderful old photographs appear daily, often with some descriptive text or comments. Yesterday’s Dorothea Lange photograph (“A New Beginning: 1939“) is absolutely wonderful. (You can view it full size.) At first glance it might seem like an old photo of some guy, but there is so much to like in this photograph. The face of this “Ex-Nebraska farmer” is an absolute wonder – simultaneously inscrutable and open. And the image is a lesson in reducing the content down to only that which is absolutely critical to the subject – nothing more and nothing less.
(For something a bit more scary, take a look at this photo while you are there…)
Charles Cramer – Renewing an Old Acquaintance
Back in college – and I’m not going to confess how long ago that was – I knew a talented keyboard player by the name of Charlie Cramer. It turns out that my wife and her family knew him as well from their church – and he even played organ at our wedding.
Yes, that Charles Cramer – the very talented and highly regarded landscape photographer. (If you don’t know his work, take a look at his web site. Even better, try to see some of his prints. His large scale prints are wonders of form and detail and color and really must be seen large to be appreciated.)
This week I finally had a chance to visit with Charlie. On a very rainy afternoon I drove over to his home and spent a couple hours in his studio talking about old times and about photography. Charlie is a warm and generous person, and I am grateful to him for sitting and talking with me – and for sharing some wonderful insights into photography and the tools of the trade. (Yes, Charlie, I’ve already applied “selecting smaller” and “to make it lighter, first you must make it darker” and I’ve now done “the thing that Ansel couldn’t do.”:-)
(By the way, I understand that Charlie does workshops and I hear that they are excellent.)