Man In The White Suit

Some general things from around the web, with links to film of varying tenuousness…

1) From Jerry Nevin’s “Readings” Page this interview with Garry Winogrand.

2) From O.C. Garza’s site, his recollections of being taught by Winogrand.

Winogrand is fascinating to me because of his ideas about context (it doesn’t really matter) and his ambivalence to directing the viewer (see the first link particularly).

I have these ideas at the forefront of my mind recently because of a comment I saw on flickr, along the lines of someone liking a picture because compositional rules were broken “consciously” and not in “blissful ignorance”. I can’t help thinking that the first, and most appropriate reaction to an image should be “Do I like it?” Whether the author of it intended the outcome or not seems entirely irrelevant, and to only like those where the outcome is a result of conscious decision seems to me the worst sort of unthinking snobbery.  Winogrand’s conception of the photograph as something that exists separately to photographer, subject &c fits my current ideas, although he goes somewhat further than me.
Anyway, with spleen venting over, I have two things for you from Alec Soth’s Blog;

1) Why Bother?

In which the author muses on vernacular and found photography, and wonders if he’ll do anything with that impact - the comment thread after the article being almost as revealing as the article itself.

2) Photography Careers

Ever wanted to make money from your hobby? This guide will show you how.

Something that I realised shortly after seeing my first medium format negative, is that if there’s anything better than film, it’s BIGGER film. The formats above 120 roll film fascinate me, and I once had the privilege of chatting to someone who routinely (or as routinely as one can do such a thing) shot 10×8 transparencies. I was in Adorama trying to decide whether to buy a Nikon F90x or not (I did), and she was buying 10×8 darkslides. It was quite a long chat, because the darkslides were in that bit of the stockroom that exists in all such places, a place everyone sort of remembers, but can never find again, or at least not within half an hour.

Rather typically I forgot to ask for contact details, or offer my own, sadly.

In any case, I wanted to offer a couple of links related to large format and view cameras that have crossed my path recently.

The first is this post at Mrs. Deane’s blog, concerning

“some tests with the 8×10 camera and a collection of superheavy portrait lenses we collected for the sole reason that they were cheap, fast and no one else seemed to want them at the time.”

That sentence alone confirms them as our kind of people, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Secondly, this short series of youtube videos, showing an interview with Alec Soth in which he talks about how he works, and the way he uses his large format camera in portraiture.

It all seems a bit distancing to me (although for Soth, that’s part of what he’s trying to convey),
and if I’m absolutely honest, rather a faff. But then, 10×8 transparencies…