Belief in inspiration. Artists have an interest in others’ believing in sudden ideas, so-called inspirations; as if the idea of a work of art, of poetry, the fundamental thought of a philosophy shines down like a merciful light from heaven. In truth, the good artist’s or thinker’s imagination is continually producing things good, mediocre, and bad, but his power of judgment, highly sharpened and practiced, rejects, selects, joins together; thus we now see from Beethoven’s notebooks that he gradually assembled the most glorious melodies and, to a degree, selected them out of disparate beginnings. The artist who separates less rigorously, liking to rely on his imitative memory, can in some circumstances become a great improviser; but artistic improvisation stands low in relation to artistic thoughts earnestly and laboriously chosen. All great men were great workers, untiring not only in invention but also in rejecting, sifting, reforming, arranging.read on
Nietzsche in "Human, all too human"
The end of MCV MCV, for now
I've created a new blog, called Street Level Japan, to continue writing about photography. You can visit it at http://street-level.mcvmcv.net. This means I'm going to stop updating this blog, for the time being.
If you are subscribed to the Feedburner feed of this blog—which is probably most of you—there is no need to do anything to receive the posts on Street Level Japan. I will swap in the new feed shortly, and put up a test post to make sure everything's working. If you are not subscribed to the Feedburner feed, you can just visit the new site to sign up.
I am not planning to take this blog down, as I still like the things I wrote about here. After all, as the red herring of the title suggests, I had no real direction for this blog when I started it about two years ago. Early readers may recall posts about a fantastic goal by Leo Messi, thoughts about Rodolfo Walsh, Don Nelson and Walter Benjamin, and an enduring photograph of Baron Davis and Stephen Jackson which still brings in the hits from Google Images.
About seven months after starting the blog I made it about photography only, but I obviously still think about all those things. I think if MCV MCV is to have a future life, it will probably have to do with something a bit more academic, like more translations of Argentine writers.
I've been a bad blogger for a while, but I proved to myself over the summer that I could write five posts a week indefinitely. I'm looking forward to blogging a bit more, my new layout at Street Level Japan is very inviting to me. Thanks to everyone who read this blog, see you soon!
Report from a photo lab
Changes are still afoot here at MCV MCV dot blogspot dot com incorporated, but I want to give a quick shoutout to San Francisco's own Photoworks, not just for being a friendly local lab. Dave, the owner, has had a blog going for a little while, and although it's not updated a whole lot, the posts that go up give a very honest perspective on the lab business. Are there any other blog-friendly photo labs? Anyway, check out his latest post about the end of the one-hour-photo place, and some good dirt on Ritz Camera. It's a good read.
Photoworks is also on Twitter now. And so am I actually.
Blog's Not Dead
Just molting.
In the meantime, here's my new blog of photos. I am happy with the way I got things to look, but that's a double-edged sword, because it makes it tempting to shoot color film, which is easy to have processed and scanned at a lab. I'm pretty sure I don't want to touch another roll of color film for a long while...
In Tokyo news, Totem Pole Photo Gallery continues to melt faces. More to come.
Digital straight talk, and action
Sure, there’s nothing like doing C-prints in the darkroom, but we need to adapt to the times. I think a lot of the digital haters out there simply don’t know enough about color or the behavior of film to create digital images that work the way they want. Before I did photography in college, I was in studio art classes, and in painting we focused a lot on the color of light. Shadows can be warm or cold depending on the light source. Film is like that too—shadows can be cyan or blue or red, for example, depending on the light source, the subject, and the type of film. Quite simply, one has to understand the color of light in order to get the right results from digital. I don’t want to turn my blog into a Photoshop manual, but I will probably still give some hints about RAW conversions soon. It’s no fun to go to a photographer’s website and see flat, oversaturated photographs that just scream out DIGITAL. The results shouldn’t be overshadowed by the means.
- Elizabeth Weinberg, interviewed at Too Much Chocolate
New Ariphotos
Arimoto Shinya updated his site with a batch of new photos, "ariphoto 2008 vol 4." They are black and white medium format, definitely worth a look. I would post one or two here but they are behind Flash, which is worth respecting even in this screenshot-saturated world.
Arimoto Shinya is part of the Totem Pole group.
Polaroid film saved, possibly
I'm surprised none of you serious p-bloggers have blogged this yet. Anyway it looks like Polaroid might come back, a group of Dutch folks have signed a 10-year lease for the factory in the Netherlands and intend to start making film for old Polaroid cameras again.
http://www.the-impossible-project.com/
Got this from Peter
How photos in Japan should look
Basically something like this: at night, black and white, mad grainy, processed and printed myself.
q.e.d.
tensions
serious — light
high — low
theoretical — practical
work — life
closed — open
fragile — strong
"old" — "new"
resolve = work
es asi no?
side note, digital and analog have no place on these axes. nerds
Housekeeping: personal Tokyo blog
I have made the mistake of sometimes forgetting that close friends and family, some of whom have little interest in photography, read this blog. To that end I wish to publicize a new blog I have started, whose sole intention is to shed light on my personal life in Tokyo:
MCV MCV will remain focused on photography. I don't want to bore anyone reading this blog, saturated with information as you may already be.
On a photographic note, I am pretty sure that I won't have any new pictures to post for a while. I don't have a digital camera any longer (more on that later, I think) and I will almost certainly not have a negative scanner here. Instead of these contemporary methods of producing images, I am hoping to use a darkroom.
A contact sheet is quite simple to make. Cut a roll of processed black and white film into strips, mount them in a plastic sheet, and shine a concentrated beam of light through this sheet onto a piece of photographic paper. When this paper is developed, the result is a positive image of each frame from the roll, all in one place. When looking at a contact sheet, it has always been clear to me which images are worth printing larger.
I am sure that getting back to this process will help me actually see what I've shot, and identify what is worth shooting again. When the results do make their way to the great expanse of the internet, as they invariably must, let's hope you can feel the difference.
Personal photobook printing service (in Japan) from Photoback
I found a whole bunch of books printed up by a service called Photoback last night while walking around some shops. If I am not mistaken, it costs about $25 to print a small book like you see below:
I didn't snap any pictures of the books that were there, but the quality seemed very high. The book is a very pleasant size, you can't tell from the picture but it's just about 5x7 inches and feels great in the hand. I will keep my eyes out for other automated photobook printing services here, and maybe report more on Photoback if I can find/learn to read more information about it.
Black and white love
Anthony Suau for TIME
No public end-of-year reflections for me, but a link to an end-of-year list, TIME's Top 10 photos of 2008. This one was deemed "fourth best" (numerical rankings of non-numerical things hardly ever make sense to me). It's been stuck in my head the longest, and I realize it reminds me of this photograph by Shoji Ueda, from 1950:
TIME image tumbled by lapuravidagallery
Dean Kaufman, "Fly"
This is my favorite series of the past few months. These photos remind me of the look you get using a Kisekae—they're very, very soft. The flat processing creates a literally hazy mood, which is almost enough to make you forget how painful an experience flying can be.
A gift especially for you
An artist statement which appears to be written by a live, warm, human being. We knew it was possible!
I took this picture at the childhood home of Hank Williams, Sr. This was his boyhood bed, though the curtains were posthumously donated to the home (it's now a little museum/shrine). The curtains were handmade and show the lyrics and music to the song "Your Cheatin' Heart." There's a really wonderful lady who tends to the home and the souvenirs and things. Also, once a year out back, they have a concert of people singing like Hank Sr.
Some amateur photoblogs
A highly readable type of photography blog comes from Asia, in the form of amateur photography blogs. Many of the ones I've found are hosted on free services, with default layouts that make for a breath of fresh air. Although Google Reader has a built-in translation function—you do use Google Reader, right?—the thoughts contained in the writing become pretty obscure by the end.
Still, these blogs are notable for the highly personal images which come across them.
Not me
某姑娘
NERORISM
肉博 @_@
睡在布边边
hibernating little V*
I haven't seen any American blogs of this type. Then again, I have barely been posting photos here myself...
Moriyama-san and amateurism
Tensions everywhere we look! Amateur vs. professional, serious vs. light, digital vs. analog!
In the end, I may be considered a "professional photographer" only if that category includes blurred images.
another blogger-style re-blog
Mu Ge + happy links
I thought of posting a small screed about why I don't read i heart photograph. Then I thought better of it. So here's some stuff I like, photographs by Mu Ge from the series The Yangtse River Side and a bunch of links to things which I have enjoyed over the past couple of months.
Jin & Jam by Hellen Jo
Maya Lin
My favorite albums of the year
Eddy Current Suppression Ring
S.C.U.M.
Shaq's twitter
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