with mustered musement and merriment, a dispensation: at its most elemental, photography serves to reify that which the photographer deems worthy. to make a photograph is to assert value, and it is this assertion of value, in the form of a representation, that is, first and foremost, (re)iterated through dissemination. Instagram facilitates both acts: the taking and the trajectory, framing both as, as simple and as swift and as seamless as swiping a few onscreen buttons. And, unlike other models of making [a pro camera, being an artist, etc] and shaking [a book, the newspaper, a gallery or museum for example] that may by convention be bound by cost, time, purpose, profession, skill, education, social standing and/or experience, Instagram offers a relatively unencumbered mechanism to readily participate in a radically differing vista: the quotidian. to peruse a nexus of Instagram connections and to contribute your own photographs to that well, is to play a part in the real time accumulation, a steadying (re)valuation, of some of what gets us, singularly and together, through each day: friends, family, pets, places and food; something beautiful, something funny, something seen, and something done. it is in this way that the common practice of judging the relative merit of an individual photograph falls flat in the face of the Instagram interface. for the import of Instagram is in the very fact of each photograph having been produced and of the near-instantaneous shared profusion of countless such photographs across a network of exchange in which the legal tender is ♥ and minds [ie comments] and the reward, irregardless of the likes, is a reinforced sense of identification. every photograph is a shiver not unlike your own.

i quit every other day and the other days i don’t even bother. i should’ve been a poet or a painter, or even smarter, taken those automotive repair classes in high school or got a good job at the shipyard like everyone else. maybe i should’ve went to a vocational cooking school, or better pestered my mother into buying me an electric guitar when i was twelve so i could run away at fifteen to a southern california suburb to star in an angry punk rock band. instead what i’ve got are cameras, film, a darkroom i can’t afford, chemicals and paper. yet even with all these riches i scarcely manage to fit any one thing worth your whiles to the confines of the material, never mind the unending erosion, for better or worse, of my very own wiles. it’s a feeble medium and it’s not keen to forgive. on my best days i think to tell the world important things, but let’s be honest, i cannot. it doesn’t work that way. it’s the cameras that do the telling and the most they ever tell me is what i’m in need of knowing. i scratch out the bits and pieces i remember and do what i can to smuggle them out to you. i try my best. i try to guess where you’ll be. i try to pronounce the languages you might speak. i try to carry on the mannerisms that might make your mind. i don’t know. the cameras don’t care what they do. the cameras don’t need to be used. there are long lonely days when i think the cameras are just fine by themselves as if maybe i should’ve been somebody else. like what i should’ve been is a clerk, a conductor, an electrician. some kind of catalyst. pure and invisible.

There is light. We neither see nor touch it.
In its empty clarities rests
what we touch and see.
I see with my fingertips
what my eyes touch:
                               shadows, the world.

With shadows I draw worlds,
I scatter worlds with shadows.
I hear the light beat on the other side.

- Octavio Paz

Fried­lan­der won’t admit an influ­ence, offer­ing a good pot of beans as inspi­ra­tion enough and my father always said you weren’t really poor until you drank off the soup and cooked the beans again. I make these every few weeks.

Rinse a pound of white beans, great north­ern or navy don’t mat­ter, and soak in water overnight. In the morn­ing drain the beans and put them in a stock­pot along with a large diced white onion, a minced clove of gar­lic, 2 bay leaves, and a ham bone. Fill the pot with water a few inches above the beans and tie together a hand­ful of pars­ley and as many sprigs of thyme as you can find and set in on top. Bring the pot to boil on high heat and care­fully skim off any foam and scum that forms up on the sur­face, then turn the heat down low and half-way cover with a lid. Sim­mer the beans slow for two or three hours – what you want is just the per­cep­tion of bub­bling. From time to time skim off any more scum that might rise to the sur­face and then give the pot a good stir. Once the beans are cooked through remove what’s left of the tied up herbs and the ham bone and stir in salt and pepper to taste. Should you have any leftover ham, cut that up and add that to the pot too and simmer another twenty minutes and then the beans will be done. Best if you wait a day or two to let everything marry. Invite friends over; the beans are fine with toasted bread and baked squash. Freezes well.
 

Clarence John Laugh­lin orga­nizes a lifetime of work — an excerpt:

GROUP A: STILL LIFES
This group, the ear­li­est on which I worked, was begun in 1935. I started with no for­mal train­ing at all as a painter or pho­tog­ra­pher, but with some back­ground as a writer, and a vast back­ground as a reader. Although this group orig­i­nated in a desire to develop fur­ther an inter­est in com­po­si­tion (incited by the dis­cov­ery of cer­tain art mag­a­zines in the 1930s) it even­tu­ally became involved in an urge to see how far my feel­ings about objects could become pro­jected through the cam­era; and in the dis­cov­ery of objects which could become the clues to changes in the nature of Amer­i­can cul­ture. Thus, here, as in much of my work, there is a pro­gres­sion from the semi-abstract to the poetic.

GROUP J: THE IMAGES OF THE LOST
Group J deals with the peo­ple rejected by our soci­ety; it is the first group pri­mar­ily devoted to human beings. But the peo­ple were very sel­dom pho­tographed where they were actu­ally found. Instead, a dif­fi­cult method was used: a spe­cial back­ground was selected for each per­son (often from places dis­cov­ered pre­vi­ously) with the inten­tion of mak­ing the back­ground work, not only in terms of design, but in terms of a sub­tle rev­e­la­tion of the over­all social sit­u­a­tion of the per­son. The peo­ple them­selves were not used as mod­els — they were not posed — nor were they used as “soci­o­log­i­cal doc­u­ments.” The attempt was to treat them as indi­vid­ual human beings. The over­all com­po­si­tion was deter­mined care­fully on the ground glass. But the expo­sure was not made till each per­son seemed to reveal him­self by some spon­ta­neous ges­ture or expression.

GROUP Q: NEW ANATOMIES
In this com­par­a­tively small group, which began in 1951, I have tried to show that the cam­era can explore the plas­tic poten­tial­i­ties of the human body in just as real a sense as, for instance, Picasso has done in some mar­velous draw­ings where he makes use of numer­ous kinds of dis­tor­tion in recre­at­ing the body; although in these pho­tos dis­tor­tion is not the method actu­ally used. Nev­er­the­less we are pre­sented with visions of the body which it would be impos­si­ble for the phys­i­cal eye directly to see. The pic­tures go com­pletely beyond the kind of “record­ing” func­tion usu­ally assigned to the cam­era, and instead of giv­ing us the results of direct vision, give us far more — the hyper-real vision cre­ated by the inner eye in man — the poetic, desir­ing, and dream­ing eye. Because of this, the erotic ele­ment becomes all the more intense. But due to the puri­tan­i­cal code dom­i­nat­ing this coun­try till recently, none of these pic­tures have ever been pub­lished or exhib­ited before. The basic quo­ta­tion for this series is from Hart Crane: “New thresh­olds, new anatomies!” And the last half of this quo­ta­tion is, lit­er­ally, the sub­ject for this group.

GROUP S: THE MAGIC OF THE OBJECT
It should be pointed out that Group S is the only one of the many groups I worked on which is entirely devoted to so-called com­mon­place objects. In this group I try to show how the pho­tog­ra­pher, like the painter and poet, can release a level of mean­ing from the most ordi­nary objects, which has noth­ing to do with their nat­u­ral­is­tic mean­ing. The pho­tog­ra­pher, of course, does this through intensely per­sonal vision (just as is true of the painter and the poet) and when this hap­pens, what the pho­tog­ra­pher is really deal­ing with is what the human mind has pro­jected into the object: the secret lan­guage of inan­i­mate objects, the hid­den images of man’s hopes and joys, his dreams and desires, by which he makes more human the inhu­man world around him. Although most of these pic­tures use the “found” object, all the objects are, in a deeper sense, “well arranged,” that is, light­ing, com­po­si­tion, and other fac­tors have been used, both con­sciously and com­pul­sively, to make more man­i­fest the hid­den mean­ings these objects have for the sen­si­bil­ity of the pho­tog­ra­pher. But, aside from all this, many of the objects in these pic­tures can be truly, con­sid­ered part of the iconog­ra­phy of our time.

to read the rest . . .

Read a recent interview conducted by Jacinda Russell about the cards I’ve made for the Postcard Collective’s quarterly exchanges. Spend some time on the site – you can view all the cards made by the participating artists and learn more about the Collective’s activities.
 

Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter [pdf]

by Geoff Ryman

Kwaidan

by Lafcadio Hearn

to plot those places
where i last remember you
time and time again
 

your feelings, your experiences, your ideas are an auspicious, even admirable place to begin, just know when you’ve finally reached an end none of that should matter anymore. what there will be is something you’ve never seen before and what that will be is the very thing you did not even know you most needed.
 

for those arriving here from the post at LPV Magazine or otherwise interested, you can view deeper selections of the accumulating forest fotografs. just use the arrows at the bottom of each page to navigate through the galleries.
 

 
I read that we’re all made of the same stuff: atoms, molecules and chemical compounds. That literally this could be that and that will become this. When they say all is one, they aren’t being kind. I know dead birds are a cliche, but figuratively it was on my doorstep and not many come knocking. When fitting energy to fate, and fate to phenomena, constellations are our only consolation.
  
made for a recent exchange for The Postcard Collective
 

– for Silvia Natalia Rivera

These rains,
I don’t know why they would make me love a dream I had, many years back,
containing a dream of yours
– your skull appeared to me

And it had an exalted presence;
it didn’t look at me — it looked at you.
And it drew near my skull, and I looked at you.
And when you were looking at me, my skull appeared to you;
it didn’t look at you.
It looked at me.

In the exalted night,
someone looked on;
and I dreamed your dream
– beneath a soundless rain,
you hid within your skull,
and I hid within you.

- Jaime Saenz

right hand: polophony
left hand: stewardesses
top row: typewriter
 

 
Kevin Slavin on how augmented reality research is too sight determined and not focused enough on what makes matter mean. Seeing is, in deed if not more, [yes i'm saying it] only the tip of an iceberg.
 

Art is not arbitrary. A fine painting is not there by accident; it is not arrived at by chance. We are sensitive to tonalities.

The smallest modification of tonality affects structure. Some things have to be rather large, but elegance is the presentation of things in their minimum dimensions.

- Frederick Sommer, from General Aesthetics, 1979

Twenty feet of wood lies on a sawhorse.
Fourteen feet of wood is now on the sawhorse,
while the other six feet is on the floor
in various sizes, like two feet or one foot, etc.

An eight-foot square section of floor
is covered with the linoleum paste.
One-foot tiles are fastened to it.
I like the trowel moving paste like molasses on marble.

Fifty feet of quarter-inch black wire with two light bulbs
is attached to the top of the wall
and hangs down and makes a pile on the floor.
Plug it in.

A twelve-foot by five-foot wall board is painted
flat peach all over with a roller.
Fittings of galvanized pipe are put together,
making nothing real but pipe fittings put together.

- Jim Dine

Richard Hugo grew up in the same small dark rundown towns as me, skirting the Puget Sound, humid and dank and mold ridden mud rainy. Every direction is blocked by an impassable wall of hundred foot pines cast green black upon hills, the sky a mass of low chilled clouds dropped ceiling overhead, and always in the distance, should the sky feel generous, sublime views of glacier hard mountains. Unless you should chance out over the ocean, gray flat and ineffable, it was a landscape without horizons.

There may be no more beautiful place to see or explore. Yet growing up there, the shape of that place manifested internally, discretely: economic hardship, stifling family secrets, deprivations and depressions, a festering sense of failure. Hugo, like myself, was eventually able to move on and out. Asked to teach poetry in Montana and then Iowa, he was able to find other views, a wider sky. Still he could never shake the narrow readings of the Sound. The hope of the hopeless a tight knot to undo.

Hugo talks about writing and then reads his poem Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg

Adam Gottschalk gives an extraordinary reading of the same poem, Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg

There was foot bridge near my work in Shinagawa that spanned an industrial canal flowing off from Tokyo bay. I’d wait there if I was early, nursing a can of Kirin from the convenience store and peering into the deep black water, soothed by the silver spines skipping across cresting waves of current.

One day as I approached the bridge I saw a young salaryman intently watching the water lost to his thoughts. The weird thing was that he was leaning against the opposite rail of the bridge from where I always stood. I remember thinking, why would he do that? It wasn’t as beautiful that direction, just a view of the factories, of the docks.

The moment I settled into my familiar place facing the bay, the light and space spread vista before me, I immediately realized what I previously never cared to noticed. I always looked to where the water was coming from, to where it had been, just as my thoughts are often on the things that have gone before, on what had already happened, on all that I’d done.

So I turned toward the other side, walked over to see how things might look from a perspective focused on the future, to place my weight on the far railing and gaze upon a current that was going somewhere, to imagine all that might still be done.

I couldn’t take it for more than a few seconds. Honestly, watching all that water flow out from me made me nauseous.
 

hey, is your power out?

yeah. my power’s out.

mine too. i’m just down the street.
i was in the base­ment when every­thing
went dark, thought it was a fuse.

yeah. i got no air con­di­tion­ing. no fan. no tv.

porch lights are on across the street,
so they’re alright.

yeah. all we got’s daylight.

i hope it doesn’t last long.
maybe i should call the elec­tric company.

at least it’s not like that one time.

this hap­pened before?

oh yeah. the whole thing was out.
from New York to California.

the whole country?

yeah every­thing.
coast to coast. out.

for four weeks.
 

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A little past two years since it’s public debut, the book form of Suginami is now available in a second edition. The new volume includes a project description, a dedication, an updated biography, re-tuned tonalities and a reduced price. It looks great.

In the intervening years, the work has found it’s way around. Virtually Suginami was recognized by Sheila Newbery in the aptly titled review Walks through Suginami and Stacy Oborn wrote a brief but brilliant essay for Hey, Hot Shot! I was also interviewed about the process of making the book and using a print on demand service. Since then the first edition of the book has traveled to Toronto for the Flash Forward Festival as a part of the indie Photobook Library and also toured the UK – first to Derby for Format 11, then to Newcastle for the North East Photography Network’s Photography Publishing Forum, and most recently to London for the Sony World Photography Festival. Finally, the book was and continues to be honored as a staff pick in the Blurb online bookstore. Closer to home the series was exhibited last September in Wittenberg University’s beautiful Anne Miller Gallery and currently the work can be seen through June at the Underdog Cafe in Yellow Springs [owned and operated by Kevin Miyazaki's brother Kurt]. In the fall Suginami will be exhibited at Earlham College in Indiana.

To commemorate the second edition I’m posting 32 photographs that didn’t make it into the finished edit. As the project came into focus, there was something in each of these images that didn’t quite mesh. Some are too tidy, others too messy, quite a few are too pretty, in several the composition is off, one is overexposed, and some felt too incongruous for inclusion, while others were just too similar. I’ll leave it to you to decipher which was rejected for whatever reason. Finally, there are some photographs presented above that were cut because they were simply too Japanesque. It was never my interest with Suginami to make exotic feeling images. My intention from the start was to make photographs of the neighborhood I called home.

Some of these outtakes pull at me, still struggling for a place in this series, perhaps to be printed and exhibited. Not sure how or when that will happen. In the mean time I figure it won’t hurt to share them. A gesture of thanks for your kinds words and support over the past two years.