Friday Night Links/P.J.'s Picks

After coming across a link in the blog of photographer Aaron Farley I've begun to renew my interest in photography. I've been taking photos since I was about three or four thanks to my dad, who bought me my first camera. I don't remember what kind it was, but I'm pretty sure it involved winding the film and choosing an aperture. My mom like to watch me eat Jell-O with my hands, my dad thought it was fun for a toddler to figure out how f-stops worked. Off I went, camera in hand. My photos were invariably aimed up and more than a little crooked, but sure enough, I was a four year old photographer. Over the years I continued to take photos, mostly on family vacations. Early subject matter included Coke machines and chewed gum.

At some point I was given an SLR camera and started taking photos with it. I think I was about 9 or 10. I didn't know I had an SLR or what an SLR even was, but I kept on taking photos, often imitating and trying to one better the shots my dad took, which were often of buildings. My dad, being the consummate site seer and tourist, lugged around a two ton camera with a zoom lens that doubled as a telescope. My mom always opted to wait for us in a gift shop somewhere and browse with great earnestness for a pair of earrings she thought my aunt might like.

My interest in photography began to wane when I was in high school, probably due to my intense desire to distance myself from anything remotely related to my parents. My photographs up that that point were of mostly buildings and cities, flora and fauna. People were largely absent except for the occasional tourist who wondered into my shot; fanny pack and floppy hat. The camera sat in my closet until college.

Leave it to laziness to reawaken my love of photography. The deal was, according to my school's requirements, that I either take a P.E. elective or photography. Sports is unbecoming to those of us in the geek community, so I opted for photography. It was the usual stuff; weekly photo assignments based on technique learned in lecture and the eventual printing of said assignments. My photos were middling at best. Part of the problem was my inability to load the negatives onto the reel for developing. Instead of opting for the dark room, I always chose to unload the film from my camera in one of those lightproof bags. My hands turned into sprinkler heads and I completely soaked the negative in flop sweat. Not that it hurt the negative, but it was kind of embarrassing to still be loading my film to be developed and watch classmates show off their third print of the day. Needless to say, making prints was not my thing.

Photography faded into the background again until the digital age came about and taking photos didn't involve the cost of film and making prints. I've gone the way of the maniac when it comes to digital photos; shooting indiscriminately and editing later. I've gained a lot of practice time that I wouldn't have had under the cost limitations of film. I've learned to be patient with the execution of taking photos. Tripods are now acceptable as is taking the time to frame and figure out the correct aperture. I have come to terms with photography being a process of trial and error.

Part of my initial reticence toward taking photos was the fear of making a mistake. I'd never know if I had taken a bad photo until I printed it, but the fear was still there as was the proof; that print with the blurred finger in the corner or a building out of focus. Now I can make as many mistakes as I want because it doesn't cost me anything. My photos are better now. Not great, but better. I even have a few that I think would be acceptable as a large print, 8x10 even. It's nice to know I can do decent work.

Why do I take photos, why have an interest in photography at all? A lot of photographers say they want to document their world; capture and remember events that might otherwise fade from memory if not for the photo to remind them. And while this is true, photos do capture moments, they also capture moments in other people's lives. And so the photographer is not just a documentarian, but co-opter. He is taking moments from others and using them to create/remember his own life experience.

Not all subjects want to be photographed and not all photographs are taken with permission. It requires bravery on the photographer's part to essentially steal moments away from people and make them his own. What right does a photographer have to document another person's life? What will be done with those photos? How will the people's lives be judged based on the use of the photos? A photographer has to have a certain brazenness to work against the resistance of his subjects and capture the moments he wants to; to co-opt their lives into his own.

It is a brazenness I lack and probably the reason so few of my photos include people. It seems impossible to me to make such claims, to demand such intimacy from my subjects. It is an invasion I don't feel right making. So I stand along the periphery and gaze at the world.

I look at photos by Diane Arbus and wonder how she got so many people to let her photograph them, how such relationships came into place, and how fortunate it was for both of them that such a relationship existed. Not just for the sake of the photo, but for each other, for the tremendous freedom and relaxation that I fantasize must exist between the subject and the photographer. It all comes down to intimacy and closeness and people letting their lives mingle together for just a moment and to share something together. They are creating a memento and a secret shared by only themselves.

As a spectator, I enjoy imagining that closeness, that feeling that each person (both photographer and subject) is a part of. As a photographer, it is a challenge for me, on a personal level, to break through my shyness and forge those relationships and catch something between me and my subject. The photo that results is largely, in my mind, a happy by-product of the relationship; it is secondary and merely a reminder of something far greater than what the photograph can show. Maybe such relationships don't exist, maybe I have romanticized delusions about how photography works, but I think I am allowed such delusions, as every photographer is. If nothing else, what is photography, but the framing of the world through one person's eyes. And through their photographs we are allowed to see their reality, however unreal it may seem.


FRIDAY NIGHT LINKS:

American Suburbs X: A collection of photos, movies, and essays by and about some of America's greatest contemporary photographers.

I Heart Photography: A photography blog that gets updated daily with photographs from around the world.

Gary Leonard: L.A. based photographer who has a gallery open downtown. The current exhibit shows photos of billboards around Los Angeles in the 1960's.

Robert Adams: A photographer whose career was largely focused on the American West particularly California, Colorado, and Oregon. One of his more famous photo collections, "The New West," came out in 1970.

William Eggleston: Another photographer greatly interested in the American suburban landscape who rose to prominence in the mid 1970's.

Bill Owens: Yet another chronicler of suburban lifestyle.

I'm greatly attracted to suburbia for a couple reasons. First of all, it's a fairly recent development that really came about during the Post-War boom years. The 50's were a time of economic prosperity for a lot of Americans, or at least it was important to project an image of prosperity. We were beginning the Cold War and domestic perfection had to be maintained at any cost. Although the above photographers took their photos in the late 1960's and 1970's, there's still a pervasive image of optimism mixed with the mundane( i.e. watering the lawn or feeding a baby). It's kind of like watching residents of OZ doing their laundry. It's the breakdown of the American ideal into its very real and often uninteresting parts. Life is no better in the 'burbs than it is anywhere else. It just happens to be shiny and new.

Also, I think suburban life is largely overlooked because it has been documented by every family and their point and shoot camera. It is a pedestrian photography subject that is of little interest to the art community. What these photographer have done is explore the dynamics of suburban life and bring to light the complexities and yes, trivialities, of that lifestyle. Suburbanites are people too and are fraught with the same dilemmas as everyone else.

The interest in suburban life has seen a resurgence as of late thanks to movies like "American Beauty" and "Revolutionary Road." Of course, not all of suburbia is as dysfunctional as those films portray. The above photographers, I feel, strike a delicate balance between showing the dysfunction and the everyday.

Jonathan Harris has a couple cool sites that track what is talked about on the Internet.

One is called, We Feel Fine. It searches through websites and blogs throughout the world and picks out sentences with the phrase, "I feel..." It then saves those sentences and records it based on emotion listed (i.e. love, lame, scared, grumpy, busy...) The sentence is then cross-referenced on the site according to emotion expressed, location, age, gender, and weather forecast at time of posting. It then turns all these emotions into colored dots floating across the screen for you to click on. It's actually a lot more fun an interactive than I am describing. Check it out.

The other site is called Universe and it tracks any subject and the articles/bits of information that mention or pertain to that subject. It is similar in scope to We Feel Fine. Again, it is something better experienced than described.

Some miscellaneous links:

Interactive map of farmers markets in L.A. and OC

Good Magazine's three-part series on conserving water.

A highly unauthenticated Wikipedia article about the California Water Wars. Think "Chinatown," but without the incest sub-plot and oddly amusing cameo by Polanski.