On the surface, the 365 photgraphs that accumulated daily during last year exhibit a sense of repetition, familiarity, continuity (cf. 02011, 02012 and 02013). As in the previous years, blur (49), light (82), leaves (40), texture (38), shadows (34) and reflections (33) are all present. Many were greyscale (170).
Below the surface there has been a change of pace as the daily practice grows more habitual. The contradictions of the digital present, the inevitable everything of ubiquitous imagery and the more hesitant, folded, reticulated images on expired film, exposure, finding light and shadow, composition, the present moment. The sympathetic magic that every photograph, no matter how disposable holds over time.
An employee of the Russian Space Training Center near Noginsk, Russia, hung the space suits of Russia’s Anatoly Ivanishin, NASA flight engineer Kathleen Rubins, and Takuya Onishi of Japan after their training on July 2. Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press
This near-infrared, color view from Cassini shows the sun glinting off of Titan’s north polar seas. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/University of Idaho)
Of the thirty ancient living things that Sussman has photographed, two have since died. “One was a thirteen-thousand-year-old ‘underground forest’ outside a botanical garden in Pretoria,” she said. “Apparently, they changed the traffic pattern and just bulldozed right over it. The other was a thirty-five-hundred-year-old tree just outside Orlando, Florida—actually, the original tourist attraction before Disney. Meth heads snuck into it to do meth, and they accidentally burned it down.
Umpire Decision Review System (DRS), a suite of technologies which assist - or rather, overrule - the umpire adjudicating some of sports greatest unknowables, the LBW, and the snick. Of course, these technologies, intended to increase accuracy, only inflamed controversy as their own accuracy was questioned as much as the human umpires. LBW is, after all, an epistemological problem - the question of whether a ball which strikes the batsman would have struck the wicket were the batsman not there is a question for Plato, not for machines.
Photos are lies because art is a lie. Art is artifice. Art makes things as they are not—occasionally in the service of greater truths […] To get a “true” photo, you need to remove artifice. This means removing art. Art’s opposite is bulk surveillance. Drones, CCTV, ultra-fast-ultra-high-res DSLR, our fingers stroking our iPhones or tapping at Google Glass. Omnipresent cameras suction up reality without curation. We’re at the finest time in history to see stars, or anyone, photographed looking like hell.
Seeing machines is an expansive definition of photography. It is intended to encompass the myriad ways that not only humans use technology to “see” the world, but the ways machines see the world for other machines. Seeing machines includes familiar photographic devices and categories like viewfinder cameras and photosensitive films and papers, but quickly moves far beyond that. It embraces everything from iPhones to airport security backscatter-imaging devices, from electro-optical reconnaissance satellites in low-earth orbit, to QR code readers at supermarket checkouts, from border checkpoint facial-recognition surveillance cameras to privatized networks of Automated License Plate Recognition systems, and from military wide-area-airborne-surveillance systems, to the roving cameras on board legions of Google’s Street View” cars.
21st Century “photography” has come to encompass so many different kinds of technologies, imaging apparatuses, and practices that the kinds of things we easily recognize as photography (cameras, film, prints, etc.) now actually constitute an exception to the rule. I proposed a much broader definition – seeing machines. The point of having such an expanded definition is to help us notice and recognize the myriad ways in which imaging systems (including traditional cameras), and the images they produce, are both ubiquitous, and actively sculpting the world in ways that were unimaginable just a few decades ago.
Photography has become so fundamental to the way we see that “photography” and “seeing” are becoming more and more synonymous. The ubiquity of photography is, perhaps ironically, a challenge to curators, practitioners, and critics. Why look at any particular image, when they are literally everywhere? Perhaps “photography” has become so all-pervasive that it no longer makes sense to think about it as a discreet practice or field of inquiry. In other words, perhaps “photography,” as a meaningful cultural trope, is over.
Writing from photographs seems as though it should produce the same effect, sharpening the way we convert experiences and events into prose. I suspect that it also changes not only what we write but how we write it. It’s no coincidence that the rise of the selfie coincides with the age of autobiography.
What if a future decentralized social networking platform allowed everyone to connect their capture node, for the use of any other artist, or just a chosen circle of friends? We already use Google Street View for location scouting. What if it enabled us to change to any angle and scrub back and forth in time as well, and from any “open” node near it, side to side, and from drones above, not just from a single Google car that passed by once? This is the Constant Moment. This is as close to a time machine as we’re likely to get. Great technological leaps will be required to fulfill the furthest reaches of the Constant Moment. Massive gains in the quality of search and organization, not to mention cost of storage, and resolution. Perhaps even some form of a neural interface. But it’s clear to me this is a “when,” not an “if,” and artists need to begin anticipating this future, to inspire and guide the technologists, and to keep up with the military dreamers (it’s been said that in childhood development the destructive urge precedes the creative one by months, as blocks get knocked down long before they get stacked.) To the photographer that still thinks photography mostly means being physically present, crouched behind their Leica, finger poised to capture the classic vision of the Decisive Moment, this coming Constant Moment might be terrifyingly sacrilegious, or perhaps just terrifying, like an insect eye dispassionately staring.
Women are seated with a book at a table, filmed in austere black and white against a black background. They have chosen what to read and how to dress. When the camera begins recording, they introduce themselves, and begin reading. Under the table, outside of the subject’s control, an unseen assistant distracts them with a vibrator. The subjects stop reading when they’re too distracted or fatigued to continue, at which point they restate their name, and what they’ve just read. The pieces vary in length based on the response time of the subjects.
Photography does not lend itself to defamiliarization easily, thus making it the unlikeliest of all art forms. As it happens, the challenge plays out on both sides of the process, for photographers and viewers. What happened to be in front of a camera lens can be found depicted in the resulting photograph. However, given the process itself and its myriad of choices, the photograph is little more than a manipulated two-dimensional representation of what previously existed in four dimensions (three spatial, one – often forgotten – time).
In the same way that the transition from film to digital is now taken for granted, the shift from cameras to networked devices with lenses should be obvious. While we’ve long obsessed over the size of the film and image sensors, today we mainly view photos on networked screens—often tiny ones, regardless of how the image was captured—and networked photography provides access to forms of data that go beyond pixels. This information, like location, weather, or even radiation levels, can transform an otherwise innocuous photo of an empty field near Fukushima into an entirely different object. If you begin considering emerging self-metrics that measure, for example, your routes through cities, fitness level, social status, and state of mind (think Foursquare, Nike+, Facebook, and Twitter), you realize that there is a compelling universe of information waiting to be pinned to the back of each image. Once you start thinking of a photograph in those holistic terms, the data quality of stand-alone cameras, no matter how vast their bounty of pixels, seems strangely impoverished. They no longer capture the whole picture.
The images were rampantly blurred, grainy, scratched, and often just muddled shades of gray. The compositions were negligible, if they could be called compositions at all. Moriyama’s pictorial choices seemed to have been made completely at random, and the reproductions often included the sprocket holes at the negatives’ edges, like a film gone completely off its track. With thirty-five years’ hindsight, it’s easy to see the book as the spiritual godfather of the garage-band aesthetic that dominated commercial design in the eighties and nineties, typified by Raygun magazine and 4AD Records. The visual aesthetic of punk owes Moriyama a debt, as does every art school naïf who has ever taken it upon himself to boil his negatives; piss in the developer tray; mangle, staple, and tear at his prints; or otherwise molest the mechanics of the medium to achieve what by now are fairly standard results.
“Perhaps true, total photography […] is a pile of fragments of private images, against the creased background of massacres and coronations.” —Italo Calvino
For the last three (solar) years i’ve taken at least one photo per day, every day, in an ongoing series of small acts of deliberate persistence. After more than 1000 days patterns emerge, inspiration ebbs and returns, the pile of fragments grows. While i’ve never made a deliberate attempt to narrow the focus or or create further constraints than ‘one photo per day’ it’s inevitable that subjective and analytic patterns become visible.
I’ve begun to see this daily practice as a point of departure, a habit to maintain focus (or resemble it) curiosity and ambiguity. Some of the more persistent photos from 02013 were sliced from moments of distraction, accident or circumstance during which suggestions and new directions may emerge.
In a sequence, each image absorbs metadata, footnotes, contextual bleed (images within images) it becomes dislocated with images rendered from the middle ground between mechanical/chemical and electronic/networked where each image is no more than a scratched line across spacetime. fleeting. crystalised. repeated.
“When I’m dreaming back like that I begins to see we’re only all telescopes.” —James Joyce
Every year hundreds of Photobook Lists are published. They now come in a wide variety of sizes, designs, and quality, offering something for all. A healthy Photo List collectible market has developed, and indie stores selling Photobook Lists are popping up all over. We’re living during a true Photobook List renaissance. The unlisted number of Photobook Lists is not just astonishing. It’s probably beyond listing.
In recording Antonino’s descent into a psycho-pathology of everyday life driven by the camera, Calvino shows how photography could lead, through an obsession with capturing the real, toward the unhinging of the mind from that very reality. It is, paradoxically, the compulsion to document that dooms photography to transgress the limits of the visible, opening up a terrain that belongs to the imagination rather than to empirical certitude. In his tribute to Barthes, Calvino described the capacity of language to speak about things “that are not”: this was its fundamental difference from photography. Yet, in this story, Antonino takes photography close to the inwardness of the imagination unshackled from the real, and to the irreducible logic of memory, dream, and fantasy. This is also the domain of fiction and, dare one say, of art. It is the rigorous unruliness of fiction— rather than the discursiveness of theory, or the objectivity of history—that becomes the mode in which Calvino fathoms the meaning and possibilities of photography. It is fiction that rescues photography from the risk-averse middle path of empiricism by toppling the eye, and the eye’s mind, into the abyss of the invisible.
It is not widely known that Tarkovsky, whose films often seem to be composed as a montage of still photos, in a period effectively took photos with a Polaroid camera. These photos, taken at home and in Italy, in spite of all their technical imperfections bear witness to the same way of seeing and visual world as the great films.
Caffenol Recipes that are proven to work can be found here. If not stated differently, the temperature of the solution should be 20 degrees Celsius or 68 degrees Fahrenheit. For all other temperatures, please adjust the developing time accordingly. If you have never used caffenol before, I suggest that you start with films that are proven to deliver decent results, for example the 400 ISO films Ilford HP5 Plus, or Kodak TMAX 400. Slow films that work are Ilford FP4 (ISO 125) and Ilford PanF (ISO 50). Developing times and links to example pictures can be found in the Film Development Chart.
Despite its status as the largest invertebrate on the planet, no one had ever seen, much less photographed, a live giant squid in its habitat until 2004. On September 30, at precisely 9:15 A.M., near Japan’s Ogasawara Islands, a 26-foot-long giant squid attacked a baitline that Dr. Tsunemi Kubodera and his research team had rigged with a strobe and a digital camera, timed to snap an image every 30 seconds. Within days, cephalogeeks all over the Web were posting links to astonishing photographs of the animal vrooming up out of the deep and grabbing the bait “in much the same way that pythons rapidly envelop their prey within [their] coils…immediately after striking,” as the researchers put it.
When personal photography was first becoming popular, it was mostly used for experimentation and artistic expression, like portraiture. Over time, as costs decreased and fidelity increased, photos gained a second function: they became a system for people to store their memories. And only very recently have we begun to experience the third major function of photography, and I think it’s far more important than the other two: photos for individual communication.
The three tanks (Developer, Stop bath, and Fixer) are placed in a tempered water bath. An inexpensive plastic dishwashing tub seems to work very well for this purpose. Each tank contains one liter of solution. Actually, the tanks are capable of handling a slightly larger amount of solution, but one liter is sufficient to completely cover the films. Plain water can be used in the center tank, instead of acid stop bath, if an alkaline processing regime is being used. The center tank can also serve as a water pre-soak bath, if desired. A pre-soak is not an absolute necessity, since there is no danger of the films adhering to one another with this method. Also, Ilford does not recommend the use of a pre-soak. It seems that they have incorporated a wetting agent into the emulsion, or the coating of their films. They claim that pre-soaking may remove the wetting agent, possibly causing uneven development.
The Zone System and in general every rule that matches the dynamic range of the capture medium and the maximum contrast of the scene tries to get two results: correlating the minimum and maximum points of subject contrast with the dynamic range/contrast index of the recording material and to record the maximum number of tones between these extremes. When working with black-and-white materials (Leica Monochrom and black-and-white silver emulsions) a third parameter is required: the spectral sensitivity of the material must equal the spectral sensitivity of the eye. This introduces a subjective factor, because every human will have a different perception of the brightness of colors.
The full gamut of photographic printing processes may be little-known to contemporary photographers, who have been educated largely within the mainstream of the silver-gelatine tradition. My intention here is to help restore some of the ‘lost’ options by providing you with a handy reference list of the better-known alternative processes and an outline of their characteristics and working methods, without any detailed formulae or procedures. This should enable you to decide if 'there might be anything in it for you’. If so, then the texts listed in my bibliography should provide you with an entry into the practice
