This is likely to change over time as my ideas and thinking changes. But right now it is what it is.
“You have to look hard to see.”
– David Hockney
There are many ways of understanding why art is important. Understanding what art is for is one great way of understanding why art is so important.
Shooting The Past is a podcast presented by Presented by historian Dr Clare Wright that takes a fascinating look at Australia’s past through remarkable and intriguing photographs.
Also of interest is a talk, “‘A picture tells a thousand words’: but whose?”, that the CCP held to accompany an exhibition titled “An unorthodox flow of images” that was held in 2017. The talk’s main guest was Dr Clare Wright, and is followed by discussions by a number of other guests about their favourite work from the exhibition. The talk raises some interesting ideas that the guests have about photography and is well worth a listen.
The web can be a great place to find inspiration in the form of great art and artists but the signal to noise ratio, or the amount of quality information versus the amount of trash, can be quite high and it takes a lot of time to trawl through the trash to find the gems. I have way too much free time on my hands and have dug through the trash and found some great free art magazines.
Browsing the web for inspiration is like dumpster diving, you have to trawl through a bunch of trash to find the good stuff.
Jesse Marlow is one of my favourite contemporary street photographers words can’t do justice to his extraordinary photos. Point your browser at Jesse’s brilliant Instagram feed for more awesome photos.
This video exemplifies the karaoke culture that we live in. A karaoke culture is a culture where where we imitate and copy each other, it’s a culture in which showboating is encouraged and rewarded by likes and comments. A karaoke culture is perpetuated by social media and is toxic to authenticity and originality. Is this the sort of culture we want to create and live in?
“Civilizations aren’t remembered by their business people, bankers, or lawyers. They’re remembered by their arts.”
– Eli Broad
Chase Jarvis’ dirtiest secret in photography video is one of the better videos I have seen for a while. In the video Chase raises the idea that the best ideas and inspiration come from outside of the photography industry. I couldn’t agree more.
A lot of problems that we encounter as photographers don’t have anything to do with photography which is why we need to look outside of the photography industry for inspiration and solutions. It’s naive to only look to the photography industry for inspiration and solutions to every problem we have. One such problem that can’t be solved by the photography industry is the anxiety that we might feel when shooting on the streets. We get anxious that people will get angry at us or cast dirty looks in our direction.
Pull My Daisy (1959) is a short film that typifies the Beat Generation. Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Daisy was adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of his play, Beat Generation; Kerouac also provided improvised narration. It starred poets Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso, artists Larry Rivers (Milo) and Alice Neel (bishop’s mother), musician David Amram, actors Richard Bellamy (Bishop) and Delphine Seyrig (Milo’s wife), dancer Sally Gross (bishop’s sister), and Pablo Frank, Robert Frank’s then-young son.