Category: Photography

There is a block of woods in the Winston-Salem warehouse district. I call it the fairy woods. On this particular afternoon the light was blasting through there beautifully.

This image is from an 8×10 paper negative. Paper negatives at this size record tons of detail and this image is one you could walk into. Until today, I’ve been working on it as an 8×10 contact print. It’s beautiful and precious at that scale, but it’s the kind of print that’s best explored with a magnifying glass.

It’s even better at twice that size. At 16×20 it feels more welcoming, maybe because it’s closer to human scale. Sometimes bigger is better.

Also, see the way the bokeh gets all squished in the corners and the bright brights glow? I live for those delicious artifacts! Have a look at these detail views.

French sculptor Paul-Albert Bartholomé (1848-1928) on the (then) current mania for “artistic” manipulation in photography:

I am irritated by most of the photographs in which the authors have intervened to create works that are no longer photographs and are not drawings. They suggest to me only imperfect imitations of etchings or reproductions of paintings. . . . I do not mean to say that one cannot produce fine works with photography, but one should stick to composition, to selection, to the variety of lightings, to his own preferences in arrangement, and I assure you, that if he lets it go at that, then gradually the machine and the light will give him results entirely personal. Think, compose, prepare your subject in all possible ways, use feeling, then open the objective [lens] and put your hands in your pockets, or else have someone put handcuffs on you.

Found in Steichen, the Master Prints 1895-1914. Quoted by George Benson, in “Pictorial Photography: A Series of Interviews,” Camera Work (New York), no 24 (October 1908).

Emphasis mine.

All of these photographs were found in the course of other activities. None of it is set up. The world is endlessly giving. All you have to do is pay attention.

Signs of Life has the heart of a zine and the jacket of a library book. Here, I (mis)use digital printing technology to present everyday images from my life. It is possibly the most neatly presented zine in the world, unless the book-making robot goofs and glues pages together willy-nilly or sticks a bit of fuzz under the cover. It’s been known to happen.

Signs of Life is a 6 by 9 inch linen-wrapped hardbound book containing 72 black and white images. It is printed in one pass of black ink on 148 pages of 60-pound cream paper. The cover is grey and the title and author are stamped in white on the spine. Each copy is signed and numbered on the title page.

Want one? It’s available in the shop.

When I make my cyanotype photogram “astrofauxtographs,” I often think about the achingly beautiful images made by space probes, such as this one taken of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, by the Cassini spacecraft.

I know they’re meant to be scientific documents. And if you dig through NASA’s photo archive you’ll see plenty of unspectacular photographs with loads of useful data. They’re the result of a specific observation of a subject from a certain angle.

Generally, they don’t sing. But sometimes, they do.

What a universe we live in!

“Dark Moon, Dramatic Plume” Image courtesy of NASA. https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/15473/dark-moon-dramatic-plume/

Quiet Campus is a double-sided, eight-page zine full of photographs that I’ve been making while working at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA).

I’m a UNCSA staffer, so I’m on campus year-round. During the normal ebb and flow of the education cycle, I see our spaces both bursting with life and peacefully empty. These photographs are from quiet moments. They represent pretty well how our campus looks right now during the Covid-19 pandemic.

But here’s the beautiful part. If you look carefully, you can see signs of artists’ work. We’ll be back there soon enough to fill the space with life and make new marks. Until then, please enjoy this gift.

Quiet Campus is dedicated to all of the UNCSA students, and especially the class of 2020. This is where you created what you are today.

Want a copy? You have two options.

1. Download (10.1MB PDF file) and print it yourself. Print double-sided if you can, but if not, the outer and inner sides can become two separate books. Then follow these super-easy instructions for folding and cutting/tearing to turn your sheet into a book.
2. Don’t feel crafty? No problem! Send me a SASE with a little note letting me know how you are doing and reminding me which zine you want. Please send it to Tim Bowman, UNCSA School of Filmmaking, 1533 South Main Street, Winston-Salem, NC 27127-2738.

This is a free cultural work. (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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“Most people probably find it strange, what I do. Taking photos of strangers.
Some would probably argue that you exploit these people when you take their photo and put it on Instagram. I don’t know if I think it’s okay, myself. In a way, it’s not okay.

But I feel it’s necessary for someone to document the realities.”

Malek Bigum, from his Ilford #MyFilmStory.

That’s an interesting, thorny question. How should we balance privacy with historical documentation? I won’t even try to answer, because in the very next quote Bigum explains his stance against manufactured perfection in a way that is, for me, absolute perfection.

See it for yourself.

John Riddy makes quiet, exquisitely composed photographs of everyday places. In this video he talks about the thought processes that happen while he makes his work.

I recognize something in his photographs that I’m looking for in my own. Hearing him talk about his approach helps me clarify mine. He treats the space in a photograph like “curtains on a stage” and considers spaces that do not normally attract our attention. The idea of recording a novelty because of it’s attention-grabbing nature is completely absent in his work.

Here’s a quote where Riddy explains how he places his camera.

I start to move the camera around on the tripod. I find this point of stillness in relation to what I’m photographing that seems to be absolutely and completely right. There’s only one place for the lens to go.

Or maybe it’s just better to watch him explain it.

Thank you to Tate for your excellent TateShots series!

Filmmaker Wim Wenders, a fellow Polaroid lover, speaks frankly about Polaroids and photography in the 21st century in this article from The Guardian. In 2017 he collected his remaining Polaroids and mounted an exhibition, Instant Stories.

So Instant Stories is also an elegy for the Polaroid itself, and all it stood for. “At the time, it was part of everyday life, another thing you used for living – like food and air and the stinky cars we were driving and the cigarettes everyone was smoking. Today, making a Polaroid is just a process.”

He sighs and rubs his eyes. “The culture has changed. It has all gone. I really don’t know why we stick to the word photography any more. There should be a different term, but nobody cared about finding it.”

Wenders, too, now regards photography as a thing of the past. “It’s not just the meaning of the image that has changed – the act of looking does not have the same meaning. Now, it’s about showing, sending and maybe remembering. It is no longer essentially about the image. The image for me was always linked to the idea of uniqueness, to a frame and to composition. You produced something that was, in itself, a singular moment. As such, it had a certain sacredness. That whole notion is gone.”

Want to hear about it in his own words? Watch this.