Finding Vivian Maier on Having It:
She didn't have these measures of status that people aspire to but she didn't have to compromise with it. She did what she wanted. That's what she taught me. She got the life she wanted. She had it.via Finding Vivian Maier by Finding Vivian Maier.
Paul Byrnes on Bill Cunningham:
His own mode of dress is self-effacing, workman-like. In Paris every year for the fashion shows, he buys a $20 blue smock with lots of pockets, the kind worn by Paris garbage men. There's a funny scene here where he wears a new one to his investiture as an Officer of the French Order of Arts and Letters.via Life through a lens by Paul Byrnes.
I saw this movie at the Dendy Newtown in Sep 2011 shortly after our return from the USA. It was an unusally cold rainy working week day, but he brightened my day with his enthasasim for life, fashion and photography. Forever an inspiration ..
"Very deeply I think he feels he does not believe he deserves it. That's why he deserves it .. Even more."
Keep writing. Give everything away for free. That's what worked for me.Remember: Every word you write makes you one word better than you were before you wrote it.
I might have survivor bias but I believe if you keep doing the thing you love, eventually you get good at it and people notice it.
via reddit by Iain S. Thomas.
Mary Ellen Mark on the Thrill of Street Photography and :
From the very first moment I took pictures [on the streets of Philadelphia], I loved it. The thrill was the idea of just being on a street, turning a corner and looking for something to see. It was just an amazing feeling. Photography became my obsession. In a way it’s not so different when I go out to work now. It’s just that now I have years of experience in knowing how to use that little machine in front of me – at least better than I used it then. When it’s good and interesting it’s still that feeling of being on the street and wondering — God, I love this! - what’s going to happen next?
via Celebrating the legacy of photographer Mary Ellen Mark, dead at age 75 by Nicole Crowder.
It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are...via California (part 2) (*) by Garry Loughlin (*).
I'm nobody! Who are you?Seen in Eye to Eye: Photographs by Vivian Maier (*)
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
The reason his photographs often feel numbly impersonal now is not just that they are familiar. It’s that they’re so coolly composed, so infernally correct that there’s nothing raw about them, and you find yourself thinking: would it not be more interesting if his moments were a little less decisive?via Cartier-Bresson's classic is back – but his Decisive Moment has passed (*) by Sean O'Hagan (*).
The best way to do anything is to begin, then to adjust your course based on what happens next.via What’s The Best Way? (*) by The Story of Telling (*).
I learned to trust that we’d be OK, even starting life afresh [..]. I learned that we can adapt and survive, and cope with the fear of not being OK.via A Simpler Family Life: Starting Life Anew with Our Six Kids (*) by The Minimalists (*).
there are only four ways to function as a photographer. Either you are independently wealthy; or you get paid to take pictures (a commercial photographer, with whatever independence of mind you can retain); or you get paid for photographs (i.e. as an artist [..]); or your photography is a hobby, a pastime, and you earn your living elsewhere.via Walker Evans: the magazine work STEIDL, 2014 (*) by David Campany (*).
I write a lot about photobooks on this blog. The photobook world is small, a few thousand people, but it is dynamic. Sometimes it's too small and it gets too self-congratulatory. When it becomes most interesting is when it looks out of itself, That's when you get great photobooks that are great books - that touch on the world at large, that tie in with a bigger picture, and touch hearts and souls beyond those of the 10,000 people in the world who regularly buy photobooks.via Luton Airport, x-rays and Blue Peter (*) by Colin Pantall (*).
Self-published in a small edition, Borissova’s (*) book (*) reached me from Russia. Here then is one of the beauties of today’s photobook boom, which to a large extent is fueled by the internet and its way of allowing for connections to be made: Stories from far away can be told and brought to one’s door step, without requiring the need of a major publisher. All it takes is an artist willing and able to make a book, and to allow for that little piece of art to sail off into the world - a piece of art not part of the electronically floating world, but a real thing, to be held and enjoyed.via Review: The Farther Shore by Julia Borissova (*) by Joerg Colberg (*).
Any photograph is both more or less a record of what has happened, and more or less an artistically enhanced experience, both more or less empirical, and more or less interpretive, both more or less accurate, and more or less suggestive. The point here is that photographs –whether analogue or digital—operate in the interspace between reality and imagination. The camera records the surface of the world like no other instrument, but the truth of what is shown can be realized only through an act of imagination. Stated otherwise, the photograph is inherently not reducible to a simplistic realism, but is instead a heterogeneous object where different sources of meaning intersect, and the intersections are lodged in the formal design and explored through interpretation.via A Realist Imagination (or is it An Imaginary Realism?) (*) by No Caption Needed (*).
Doing the best I canvia Doing the best I can (*) by Seth Godin (*).
...is actually not the same as, "doing everything I can."
When we tell people we're doing the best we can, we're actually saying, "I'm doing the best I'm comfortable doing."
As you've probably discovered, great work makes us uncomfortable.
The past (*) is interesting in some regard because it is littered with treasures (*). Those who have never taken time to savor those treasures (*) are condemned to working without good boundaries and, to a certain extent, without inspiration (*).via A visit to the museum is rejuvenating for the eyes and the mind. Also, how art taught me to stop caring about sharpness. (*) by Kirk Tuck (*).
