photography
The walls are reserved for the sun
ƒ/8 and be there
What the painting was not about
Amassing the archive
The Factory Photographs
Homes at Night
A Dialogue by Todd HidoYour series Homes at Night is one of my favorites. We never see human silhouettes or the homes’ inhabitants. Why is it important to you that the houses appear on their own?
Because of the very simple fact that if it is an empty shell, the viewer can place their own memories within it or create a narrative that would otherwise be blocked by the reality of what is actually inside.
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A Gallery by Nick TrombleyInstagram
A Profile by Nick TrombleyDelight is constraints, joyfully embraced
An Article by Craig ModAnd what is delight? For me, delight is born from a tool’s intuitiveness. Things just working without much thought or fiddling. Delight is a simple menu system you almost never have to use. Delight is a well-balanced weight on the shoulder, in the hand. Delight is the just-right tension on the aperture ring between stops. Delight is a single battery lasting all day. Delight is being able to knock out a 10,000 iso image and know it'll be usable. Delight is extracting gorgeous details from the cloak of shadows. Delight is firing off a number of shots without having to wait for the buffer to catch up. Delight is constraints, joyfully embraced.
The Helsinki Bus Station Theory
An Article by Arno Rafael MinkkinenStay on the bus. Stay on the f*cking bus.
Why? Because if you do, in time you will begin to see a difference.
The buses that move out of Helsinki stay on the same line but only for a while, maybe a kilometer or two. Then they begin to separate, each number heading off to its own unique destination. Bus 33 suddenly goes north, bus 19 southwest.
...It’s the separation that makes all the difference, and once you start to see that difference in your work from the work you so admire (that’s why you chose that platform after all), it’s time to look for your breakthrough.
Suddenly your work starts to get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it.
Your vision takes off.
ImageQuilts
A Tool by Edward TufteBe A (Re)Visitor
An Article by Rob WalkerI was thinking about this not long ago while reading in Petapixel an essay by a photographer named Scott Reither, “Long Form Study: Why Photographers Should Repeatedly Revisit A Scene.” In it, he described photographing one particular stretch of beach, over and over, throughout his career.
Of course that landscape has changed over time, and of course he’s had moments when he felt he’d captured the same territory so many times there was nothing left to see.
But there was always something more to see — maybe because of a change in Reither’s life, rather than in the physical environment.
Long Form Study: Why Photographers Should Repeatedly Revisit a Scene
An Article by Scott ReitherI learned years ago how important it is to shoot the same subject and location over and over again.
The practice teaches a photographer how to form deeper relationships with the subject, and better understand how the primary subject interacts with secondary elements – like the way high tide may introduce a stunning new reflection, or how a blaze of stars in a dark sky might be the missing element that lifts the image to new heights.
Revisiting a subject also serves as valuable “practice.” You cannot develop your skills in anything without a healthy (or obsessive) amount of practice. It always surprises me to find out aspiring photographers think that they can simply photograph their two-week vacations once or twice a year and come home with compelling imagery! It doesn’t work that way.
August short No. 2: Glass
An Article by Riccardo MoriGlass looks and feels perfectly tailored to my photo sharing needs and expectations. For me it’s even better than pre-Facebook Instagram in the sense that it pushes me to select and share what I think are good photos (same as it happens with Flickr), rather than making me obsess with getting ‘the Instagram shot’ at all costs every day or multiple times in a day. It doesn’t cheapen photography like Instagram has done for years.
That’s why I hope Glass’s founders/developers will resist feature creep. Resist user objections like: I don’t think Glass is offering that much for the subscription price they’re asking. There are a lot of people who will gladly pay for having a cleaner, simpler, focused experience.
Cameras and lenses
An Article by Bartosz CiechanowskiPictures have always been a meaningful part of the human experience. From the first cave drawings, to sketches and paintings, to modern photography, we’ve mastered the art of recording what we see.
Cameras and the lenses inside them may seem a little mystifying. In this blog post I’d like to explain not only how they work, but also how adjusting a few tunable parameters can produce fairly different results.
The art of taking
A Quote"By making it possible for the photographer to observe his work and his subject simultaneously, and by removing most of the manipulative barriers between the photographer and the photograph, it is hoped that many of the satisfactions of working in the early arts can be brought to a new group of photographers. The process must be concealed from—non-existent for—the photographer, who by definition need think of the art in taking and not in making photographs. In short, all that should be necessary to get a good picture is to take a good picture, and our task is to make that possible."
— Edwin H. Land, co-founder of Polaroid
Ideas of permanence
A Fragment by John PawsonOne of the interesting aspects of photography is the way it loosens our instinct to draw distinctions between the permanent and the temporary. In these enduringly fixed compositions, the detail of a mark scratched into the surface of a wall carries no greater weight of reality than the frozen swirl of light on plaster or the calligraphic-like shadows of chair backs cast across a floor.
- async
butdoesitfloat
A BlogKoya Bound
A Book by Craig ModKoya-san — home to esoteric Buddhism — is the name of a sacred basin eight hundred meters high and surrounded by eight mountains. It is roughly one hundred kilometers of trails north from the Kumano Hongu Taisha shrine in Wakayama, Japan. Though the name of the basin is often incorrectly translated as Mt. Koya in English, Mt. Koya is only one of the eight peaks, and is remote from the central cluster of temples.
We walked towards Koya-san, but we did not touch Mt. Koya.
A Search for Structure
Apologia
A ChapterGrain Shapes and Other Metallurgical Applications of Topology
An EssayStructure, Substructure, and Superstructure
An EssayThe Interpretation of Microstructures of Metallic Artifacts
An EssayMatter versus Materials: A Historical View
An EssayIconography
It is understandable that those students who must work from reproductions of works of art are usually more interested in iconography than in the more subtle questions of technique and quality, but it is regrettable that technical ignorance should so frequently prevent art historians from considering the whole experience of the artist.
Understanding technique
Technique is an essential aspect of any work of art from a trivial trinket to the greatest painting, and some specialized study of it is essential to full appreciation.
Though museum labels and catalogs refer to materials and processes — “bronze,” “fresco,” “parcel gilt,” “tempera,” “lacquer on wood,” and so on — they usually display only superficial attention to the essential details of the artist’s technique.
Bells
Most Japanese bells when hung still have on them one or more rough lines obviously arising in horizontal mold joints. These lines are not removed in fettling the bell, and they seem to be regarded not as defects but rather as a reminder of the reality of the founder’s interaction with his materials. One is reminded of the ceramics that are most treasured in Japan which usually have some unexpected tool marks or irregularity resulting from a kiln mishap.
Nearer to the surface
If in the following I overemphasize the Orient, this is simply because in the Far East the properties of materials are a little nearer to the surface, a little more consciously a part of what the artist is trying to show. The naturalistic aspects of Oriental philosophy encourage a sensitivity to the quality of materials — or is it the inverse, that an early enjoyment of stone, wood, clay, and fiber gave rise to the philosopher’s perception of the soul in all natural things comparable to man himself? Westerners tend to override materials, usually in ignorance, but sometimes proudly as a tour de force.
The drop press
The virtue of thin sheet metal in giving the greatest glitter for a grain of gold was exploited in the earliest days of metallurgy. However, before the days of rolled sheet and drawn wire, most metal objects were made by hammering and were basically three-dimensional in form.
[In contrast] look at the simple drop press — it’s unmodulated blow striking in a single direction symbolizes much of nineteenth-century mechanized production. To make multiple stampings, stacks of very thin metal sheets were superimposed under the hammer, and the final profile with moderately high relief was gradually achieved as finished sheets were removed from the bottom and new ones added at the top.
When the drop press was used to shape large areas of thin sheet metal, the aesthetic qualities of the surface became divorced from the underlying substance, and decoration became independent of the body needed to support it. In any object there is a natural relationship between the surface and the bulk, that is, between its one-, two-, and three-dimensional aspects. The fakery involved in applying gold or silver playing on a solid copper object is quite different from the deception of an ornately stamped piece of thin sheet brass. Compare a magnificent ormolu furniture fitting or even a gilded plaster picture frame with a cheap lamp base embossed in thin sheet brass. In the former, the surface is simply and honestly applied for its optical effect alone; in the latter the fakery is fundamental for it is dimensionally misleading.
Big things and little things
It is hardly possible that human beings could have decided logically that they needed to develop language in order to communicate with each other before they had experienced pleasurable interactive communal activities like singing and dancing. Aesthetic curiosity has been central to both genetic and cultural evolution.
All big things grow from little things, but new little things will be destroyed by their environment unless they are cherished for reasons more like love than purpose.
What's the difference?
I well remember an occasion in 1962 when in a remote Iranian village I asked a blacksmith famous for his superior penknives to tell me the difference between iron and steel. “What’s the difference?” he replied. “What’s the difference between an oak tree and a willow — they have different natures and one must adapt to them.” He did not accept the suggestion that some material absorbed from the fire’s charcoal might have something to do with it, and he would not have understood a word of any lecture I could have given him on diffusion, crystal structure, and phase transformations; yet he could make a good knife and I could not.
The scale of human experience
It is the scale of human experience, from which thought and imagination take off, and to which they must return.
The edifice from which they came
A list of types of bricks used in the Hagia Sophia may help one to build an interesting brick wall, but it poorly suggests the great edifice from which they came.
The interplay of pattern and texture
Some of the more enjoyable surfaces (for example, the grain of a fine mahogany table top or a Japanese sword) have an interplay between pattern and texture which, though two-dimensional, suggests the unseen internal three-dimensional array.
Resonances
The resonances arising in workmanship are often very subtle. The fact that the material itself guides the tool differently in different processes of working introduces changes in the overall relationship of curvatures. The smooth curves of surfaces approaching the edge of a jade axe that come about from innumerable abrasive particles moving against a slightly yielding and mechanically unconstrained backing would seem incongruous if other surfaces or outlines were present that had come from cleavage or from the geometric motions of a machine. These could be produced easily enough, but the eye would not establish larger resonances among them.
Fine arts and decorative arts
The fine arts are conscious and essentially individual in tradition.
The quantitative and economic aspects of the decorative arts, on the other hand, make them intrinsically repetitive. Because of this, their aesthetic qualities have a very intimate relationship to the technology of materials, and their design is thereby basically affected.
In addition to the qualitative need for repetitive detail in design, the decorative arts have a quantitative requirement, namely the imperative of covering large areas or making large numbers of individual objects.
Replication
Consider also the development of mass-production methods involving the casting of molten metals. Though the finest castings were made individually by the lost-wax process, the majority of casting from the earliest days have been designed expressly to facilitate molding. As with punches and dies, most foundry processes have the characteristic that the careful work of the master designer is involved only once, whereafter replication takes over.
Reproduction
The success of a mechanic’s, or a machine’s, reproduction of a thing depends on his, or its, sensitivity to whatever qualities are important, just as the skill of the designer lies in the proper appreciation of surface qualities in terms of structure and shape variation that come from the intended means of production.
The inner nature of material
The work of an artist in getting the details that he wants is greatly facilitated if he selects a material whose inner nature makes it want to take the desired shape.
The idea grows as they work
As they work, the experience of the material under the artist's fingers subtly interacts with the idea in their mind to give the finished work some quality that was rarely fully anticipated. A few artists seem to have such a feeling for their materials that the prevision needs little modification; most say that the idea grows as they work experimentally.
True artistry
The best of all examples of a satisfactory art form based upon the inner nature of a metal is provided by Japanese swords.
Our perception of beauty seems to involve the interaction of several patterns having origin and significance at many different levels of space, time, matter, and spirit. In the Japanese sword blade there is heterogeneity in both the macrostructure and the microstructure. The manner of forging, the heat treatment, and the final polishing operation are all uniquely Japanese techniques, and all make necessary contributions to the final quality of the blades. The shape along would be simplistic form; the forged texture of the steel without heat treatment would at best faintly echo the beauty of grained wood; the outlines of the quench-hardened zone at the edge would be sharp and uninteresting if it depended only on the control of cooling rate during quenching; and the polish would be uniform glitter if the metal were homogeneous. With true artistry all these are made to interact.
Simple variations of the parts
Symmetry, indeed, has been grossly overemphasized in both art and science: its main value is in giving meaning to its absence, dissymmetry, without which there could be no hierarchy.
The eye is repulsed by complexity if no order is detected, but it can be delighted by repetition, translation, rotation, reflection, magnification, and other simple variations of the parts.