Unspoken

Rule #X: be cool, i.e. alt. i.e. young.

Intense

Full respect to Dave from Photoworks, who writes on the Photoworks blog:

So I got this big deal event coming up. We’re having a baby, and among other things, one of my jobs is to capture the moment of truth. My wife says, “don’t blow it dude, bring the digital camera.” How boring, I mean how many times will be in a labor and delivery room again? I’m thinking this is a chance for some black and white documentary style action. So I’ll be packing my bessa rangefinder, my lomo smena, and maybe a holga. Some neopan 1600, portra 800, and a some expired slide film to cross process. I’m sure the midwife will appreciate my attempt to be artsy while my wife is screaming her lungs out pushing out the baby. Not sure what to say to everyone who wants a photo sent right away. Maybe that’s what camera phones are for. So we’re 2 days past due date and the bags are packed, the laundry is done, and the cameras are loaded.

Photoworks is my local lab in SF. They have a good Flickr group and will be putting on a one-night exhibition of group member photos in September. (There will be wine.)

As a side note, I love Neopan 1600; it's very friendly to toy cameras with flashes. (*COUGHCOUGH*GOLDENHALF) I shot a few rolls of Delta 3200 but I'm not going to make the switch. If anyone knows of a better high-speed black and white film, please speak up!

Golden Half fallout

Play the video below while you read through this post. It will make sense soon enough. [mike spears if you are reading this, i love CLAM$ CA$INO man, my blog has become like an homage to it over the past two days]

Here are a couple of updates for the Golden Half fans out there, who have been writing in droves (ha) after last week's adoring post.

Ryan of manga supersite SAME HAT! SAME HAT! pointed out that the name "Golden Half" does not actually come from a pun on "Golden Calf," as I had imagined. Instead it has got to be a reference to an all-female band from the 1970's. Here's a clip from an article explaining a little bit about the group's cultural context:

By the time I was growing up, the more offensive postwar view of children of mixed race had largely disappeared. The derogatory term "ainoko" (half-breeds) or its equally loaded successor, "konketsuji" (mixed-blood child), were of the past. The experience of my age demographic is captured more aptly by "Golden Half," the wildly popular 1970s singing group that helped inject "haafu" into the language. The five women, all of mixed Japanese and Caucasian parentage, were glamorized and exoticized.

That's Golden Half above, of course.

So this would definitely explain why the book Life as a Golden Half is made up of photos taken by half-Japanese models. I guess it doesn't make too much sense to name a camera after a pun on "Golden Calf," but maybe I was imagining strange rites performed in tribute to the almost supernatural prowess of this image-making object. (Would that make dumb flickr users or digital dogmatists—need a link for that—Moses, breaking up our fun?)

FADER, in a desperate move to show that they're in touch with the youth of today, moved quickly to react to my wave-making post by writing a Golden Half post of their own. But you read it here first. In your eye, FADER! Thanks to Jessica Petunia for pointing that one out.

SF scenes

This is totally gonna break my blog but I don't care. The RSS feed will make this look a lot better (pictures will not be clipped).

"This is photography after all, it’s not rocket science!"

Here's a video put together by the Oakland Tribune about Bill Owens. You can read the full article here.

I can remember seeing some of his "Suburbia" images at the Met a number of years ago. The one that really struck me is the Fourth of July snap, which you can see here in just a couple of clicks. Bill Owens is a Bay Area local—the "Suburbia" images all come from Livermore, where he was living. This video and this interview should give you a good idea of the person behind the photos.

From HAMBURGER EYES!!

Three personal anecdotes regarding the state of film today

#1

I walked into a pharmacy in New York City and saw a bunch of Kodak disposable cameras. An aside: in Japan, you can buy disposable cameras pre-loaded with 1600 speed film—how brilliant. So here's the message on the display case:

JUST IN CASE

• you forget your digital camera
• your memory card is full
• you don't want to risk your camera

Never miss a shot

Kodak Single Use Cameras

Pros and cons here, folks. Yes, it's sad that someone in Kodak's marketing department thought (realized?) that a way to sell film would be to target the market of "people who forgot their digital camera." But I'm glad to see that they recognize the value of never missing a shot, which is what I currently use to underpin my argument for toy cameras.

#2

I walked into a photo store in Long Island, foolishly hoping to get a roll of 120 format film developed. It turns out that the woman doesn't even process 35mm film anymore! She said it wasn't worth the cost of ordering chemicals and keeping them fresh to only develop a roll here and there.

#3

I recently went to Camera Heaven, a photo store in SF's Tenderloin. (If you don't know what that is you can check out this dude's Holga snaps of the loin or TL as we call it. I'm conflicted about his stuff in general but there's no question it works as documentary.) After looking on ebay for a Gossen Luna Pro SBC light meter and getting impatient, I called up the guy there up to see if he happened to have one lying around... which he did.

So I went down to pick it up, and as we were talking I asked him how business for film stuff was. He said it was great, and even laughed a little as he told me that some of his friends in the photo store business had switched over to digital a couple of years ago, only to find now that film was coming back strong. He repairs cameras for other stores, and apparently he gets more film cameras in now than digital ones. "Hey, I've been here for five years," he said. If he can afford to laugh, maybe there's some hope. Not that digital's "bad," of course...

NYC

Flickr star: mulberry_kei

On the heels of yesterday's Golden Half post, I want to highlight mulberry_kei, who has posted many of my favorite photos to the Golden Half Flickr group. Her Golden Half is very blurry, but it produces a pleasant effect.

Don't think, just shoot... dude

Possibly unintentionally funny video about Lomographers. Look at how creative and goofy (but, you know, thoughtful) they are!

A shoutout to my homies producing videos at Current.

Reading

Another quote from Setting Sun. This one is from Daido Moriyama, who might be like the Bill Eggleston of Japan. I'll have to look more in to that.

In the end, I may be considered a "professional photographer" only if that category includes blurred images.

[Originally appeared 10/22/07]

Honest

Finally! An artist statement on 20x200 that's written well.

Laugarás, Iceland by Bob O'Connor

The rural landscape of Iceland is full of horses that are allowed to run wild for most of the year. Unfortunately, this also means that the horses aren't that interested in seeing people with cameras. Everytime I got out of the car to attempt a photograph the horses would turn and run away. On the last day of the trip, after two weeks of trying, I found some horses that were cooperative and let me photograph them. It took a bribe, in the form of some green apples and grass, but I think we all won out in the end. I got my photograph and they got a tasty snack.

I walked by the Jen Bekman gallery last week in New York (she runs 20x200) but it was closed, and I left early the next day. Too bad. Why did I not realize it was there earlier?

"What needs to be photographed will be photographed"

From The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon:

The driver's head was cubical, vines of hair creeping up his neck; there was a gray swirl around his bald spot, not unile a satellite picture of a hurricane. I wished Rora would photograph it, but there was not enough light. He had decided, without consulting me, not to bring a flash on this trip. The flash is for weddings and funerals, he said. What needs to be photographed will be photographed.

I hate flash for the most part, except for when I'm out with the Golden Half.

Small axe

If I was serious about trying to stamp out as much "bad internet photo discourse" as I could, I'd have to look no further than Flickr commenters, who might rival Yelp in their inanity:

He doesn't quite take photos, no he doesn't, he purely experimenting with photography, I hasn't seen one shot that he took as a photographer, but as an experimenter.

Parse this sentence: you'll find nothing! Unless you can think of a photographer who isn't also an experimenter, that is. Photography might be the most "experimental" of art forms, although that's a different discussion.

It's not worth coming down hard on people or groups that don't deserve it. Do you know who falls in that category? Hamburger Eyes. As I was reading all these insipid Flickr comments, the thought occured to me that even though Hamburger Eyes doesn't articulate anything verbally, that's not a goal they've set for themselves: the Hamburger Eyes magazine has no words.

guess the year

I hope amart continues to throw good looking photos up on the Hamburger Eyes blog.

Wakaba Noda is so young, it freaks me out.

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