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Argentina and Travel Photography versus Home

April 10, 2023 (updated April 10, 2023)

Argentina, and Travel Photography Versus Home

I’m sitting on a sleepless 11-hour flight back from Argentina in the middle of the night. Clearly the most fun 10 days I’ve had, especially when considering sharing it with my son, but also one of the most exhausting stretches of my life.

We spent 4 days touring Patagonia with a bus of 14 family members from 4 generations, and the rest in Buenos Aires, culminating in an 8-hour bat mitzvah with basically a full circus of performers. The well-off live good lives here.

It was basically what you’d expect, stunningly beautiful, urban planning in some neighborhoods that I saw that blew NY out of the water, steak every night, Malbec, late dinners, keeping Avery up at family events till 1:30 in the morning, stacks of inflated cash that we got as good rates from uncle Carlos, the peso going down in value 7% in the week that we were there and seeing the harm it was causing as fancy meals basically cost $25 a person.

Patagonia.

The plan is to make a family book of the trip for the family and Avery and his one year old cousin Niko to look at when they get older, written in their perspective.

But, I’ll be honest, I always internally cringe when people tell me to take amazing photos when traveling, or how excited I must be to photograph. And the cringing is not on purpose, I love the sentiment, but that feeling is just not for me, at this point in my life. 

Friedlander Inspired.

Some get so inspired by photography when they travel and spend time in a place, but I can’t do work that I enjoy on an artistic level when I’m not home, at least when considering the brainpower and opportunity that I have now.

Home is where I get lost in my mind and can think creatively. Probably if I was able to travel solo and spend a lot of time getting to know a place, I’d feel completely different. But I often have to remind myself to take photos when traveling because I’m trying to stay in the moment, to use my memory instead of the camera and to slow the week down, if that makes sense.

A few times, Sara asked me to take out the camera to take a photo, and while most of the time I say yes, occasionally I would ask her to do it because I wanted to experience the place without a camera.

Similarly at home, I use photography to stay in the moment and slow life down. On one hand, they’re opposites, but philosophically, it’s the same idea.

But anyway, in the process of the survey challenge and thinking about my photography as I recover from the last few months and get excited about being home, I want us to think about the salon as not just a place to talk about photographs, instead it’s a place to talk about places, feelings, and ideas. And to use photographs to illustrate these thoughts.

And, with the exception of a few Friedlander inspired tree photographs, even though these photos seem pretty, and they are interesting and meaningful for my family, they’re the opposite of the photography that I try to do here.

Photography, in the sense that I’m describing, is something that I do for clarity of mind, and to focus attention. And I just didn’t have the time or mental space to be able to create photographs in this environment that live up to that feeling. 

I’m still sharing them in this piece because they’re beautiful and fun to share with the story, and a big part of why photography is wonderful.

Or I guess in the spirit of what I just mentioned, talking about ideas instead of photographs, perhaps the heart of the story of the trip was the family – A Jewish family that was split up during the war, half getting into NYC and half into Buenos Aires, and losing touch for 30 years until one Argentinean family member traveled to NY and contacted every Abe Lerner in the phone book.

And the Irish/Italian mutt (me) with two psychiatrist parents, one bipolar and one on the spectrum of something, whose religion and culture and larger family (in later years) had dwindled. And so he subconsciously searched for someone with a strong family culture. And on the upper west side of NY, that was the Jewish culture. 

My first girlfriend married a rabbi, if that tells you a bit about me.

And now both families are great friends. My wife lived in Argentina for over a month one trip and we hope to host their kids for similar amounts of time in the future.

And yes, it’s family, it’s blood, it’s making up for the horrors of the war and giving a big fucking middle finger to all the atrocities with fun and dancing and singing and love, with excessiveness in the face of difficulty. And her family down there is wonderful, they made me feel like I had known them forever. But family in this case is also a key for experiences.

And hopefully, it can be similar here. As we create this family of dysfunctional photographers, this unique culture here, we get to share our experiences and insights with each other. And that’s the spice of things.

It’s not really about photography. It’s about culture and ideas, and maybe we can even think about it in the context of this challenge, surveying our lives and where we come from, or where we ended up.

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“This goddamn tree, man. It’s a real eye-sore, a monstrosity of mundanity. It’s like staring into the abyss of banality and realizing that nothingness is staring right back at you. But, somehow, that’s what makes it so goddamn fascinating, so damn powerful. It’s like a symbol of the everyday drudgery we all have to endure, a reminder that life is full of inescapable boredom and routine. And yet, there’s a strange beauty to it, a haunting quality that grips you like a vice and won’t let go. You can’t help but feel drawn into the abyss, seduced by the sheer banality of it all. It’s like staring into the void and finding a kind of solace in the emptiness, a strange kind of comfort in the absence of meaning. This tree, man. It’s a real mind-fuck.”

Now not to beat a dead horse, in the future I’ll just use this to help stimulate ideas in my own writing, but I tried inputting this article above and asked ChatGPT, this question (because it has apparently read lots of my writing in its training, it can write like me).

It sort of reiterated a lot of what I already wrote above, but it helps clarify the ideas well and I think is well worth reading. There are some points here that if I wasn’t still fully back in the swing of things, I would have taken some more time to clarify in the piece.  

Can you think of anything to add that might improve this article, in the style of James Maher the photographer?

“In this article, it would be interesting to explore how the process of creating a family book can bring people together, both in the present and in the future. The act of collecting and curating images and memories from a shared experience can help to create and strengthen bonds between family members. By involving Avery and Niko in the process, they will have the opportunity to learn about their family history and develop an appreciation for their heritage.

Moreover, the article could also emphasize the importance of balancing the desire to document life’s moments with the need to stay present and engaged. For instance, James Maher could share some tips on how to approach photography mindfully, without losing the essence of the moment. Encouraging others to adopt a similar approach may allow readers to develop a deeper connection with their surroundings and the people they travel with.

Additionally, it would be interesting to dive deeper into the concept of the “salon” as a space for discussion and connection, not just about photographs, but about life experiences and shared interests. This idea can be expanded upon by providing examples of conversation topics, activities, or even prompts that can help facilitate meaningful discussions within this space. By fostering a sense of community among the “family of dysfunctional photographers,” the salon can become a platform for personal growth, inspiration, and connection.

Lastly, incorporating the unique stories and perspectives of the different family members in the article can add depth and richness to the narrative. By highlighting their individual journeys and the ways in which they contribute to the family’s collective story, the article can help readers gain a better understanding of the power of photography in preserving memories and connecting generations.

Overall, by adding these elements, the article can provide a more comprehensive and engaging exploration of the relationship between photography, family, and the art of staying present.”

Dreamlike Challenge, Part 1

March 1, 2023 (updated March 1, 2023)

Kimberly Manson

Dreamlike Challenge, Part 1

I haven’t been quite sure how to explain what I’ve thought about this challenge, or my experience viewing all your dreamlike photos over the last few months.

And that’s all my fault, because you all did a wonderful job as you’ll see from the photos below.

But seeing a variety of similar and disjointed dreamlike photos just did not inspire me in the same way that the other challenges have done, and I’ve been trying to figure out why.

And I’m thinking it’s because this turned out to be a technical challenge. I hate technical challenges for this Salon, I really want to push things conceptually, and when I wrote it, Dreamlike felt like it was a conceptual challenge. 

But really, this challenge was about how to shoot in a way that feels mysterious, that has mood and feeling, that alludes to something lurking beneath the surface. It had conceptual elements to it, but it was mostly technical.

And in this case, I think it may be good that we did this and think about it this way, because the next step for everyone is to figure out how to integrate this type of photo into your larger projects and ideas to create the feelings that you want to create.

A smattering of dreamlike photos from a variety of photographers all seems to blend into each other, whereas integrating these photos into your projects will have a profound effect on them, so please think about how you can keep this going.

I’m going to pull out 12 random photos from the first half of the group and just put them together to create an interesting feel – just an experiment in the different in seeing them presented that way. And I will do another one for the part 2 post as well.

 

It’s cool to see what can be done from the set, and I think these fit relatively well together even though they are so varied in look. But at the same time, this also lacks some feeling, because it’s not me.

It’s when we figure out how to put ourselves and our dreams into our larger projects and bodies of work, is when this type of work will truly shine.

Here’s the first half of the photos submitted.

Thoughts?

Challenge #12: Survey

February 22, 2023 (updated September 12, 2023)

Challenge #12: Survey

Well it’s been long awaited, submit up to 10 images (but can be less) that fit the idea of what a survey is. 

This can be a survey of a place, a survey of a culture, a survey of a person or family, a survey of an idea or feeling. 

Survey is meant to be extremely broad in what it can be about content wise. The idea of the word survey is more about how you present something versus what you are surveying. The order of the photos, the type of the photos you put together, how you lead the viewer along and show the idea you want to show. The sequencing is extremely important.

**Because of the importance of the order and sequence, please make sure to get the naming conventions and sizing conventions correct below. And please don’t submit just for the sake of submitting something. This challenge was meant to have the most thought put into it, so I’d rather some of you skip it than submit something you didn’t have much time to think about.

This will be shared in different ways and will be worked into a zine or two over the winter.

Submission Details

Title: Survey Challenge

Deadline: October 15th

Upload Link: https://www.dropbox.com/request/FgFbzQ9RnhJcaPj7kVkz

File Naming: firstname-lastname-#.jpg. So it would be james-maher-1.jpg.

Color Space: sRGB

Size (Hi-Res): 11-inches (3300 pixels) for the long edge.

Uploading details: Up to 10 photos.

Series of 6: Challenge Results, Part 2

December 28, 2022 (updated January 10, 2023)

Tom Jefferies

Series of 6: Challenge Results, Part 2

Here is the second half of the challenge results.

I’m going to keep the commentary to a minimum for this. For practical reasons, I wasn’t able to include the text for the projects, it was too much with the amount of people who submitted, but also I think it helps to see these unencumbered and all together.

Going through like this, it’s easy to see which sets feel consistent and some that don’t fit as well together or pull you into the set as much as others.

There are many situations where disparate images, color & B&W, different looks and aspect ratios can fit well together, but you can see here that in general, the sets with a consistent look and feel to them, it helps the viewing experience significantly.

This is ultimately just a start, but I want this challenge to underpin a lot of what we do here going forward. Sequencing, series, it’s the art form within the art form and there is so much power behind it.

Great work everyone!

Series of 6: Challenge Results, Part 1

December 23, 2022 (updated December 23, 2022)

Jessica Margo.

Series of 6: Challenge Results, Part 1

Happy Holidays everyone!

Here is the first half of the challenge results – the second half I will post next week.

I’m going to keep the commentary to a minimum for this. For practical reasons, I wasn’t able to include the text for the projects, it was too much with the amount of people who submitted and the time creating the name plates you’ll see below, but also I think it helps to see these unencumbered and all together.

Going through like this, it’s easy to see which sets feel consistent and some that don’t fit as well together or pull you into the set as much as others.

There are many situations where disparate images, color & B&W, different looks and aspect ratios can fit well together, but you can see here that in general, the sets with a consistent look and feel to them, it helps the viewing experience significantly.

This is ultimately just a start, but I want this challenge to underpin a lot of what we do here going forward. Sequencing, series, it’s the art form within the art form and there is so much power behind it.

Great work everyone!

Challenge: Dreamlike, Part 2

December 16, 2022 (updated February 6, 2023)

Dreamlike Challenge

Deadline: February 20th.

Upload Link: https://www.dropbox.com/request/oVAnEGzfuxDqYfsr44rC

Submit: Up to 5 photos, but please don’t share 5 photos just because you can. If you only have 1 or 2 that you like then share those only. I’d rather see less good work than too much mediocre work. And please share these either as a series or individually.

*Please try to get these details correct, especially the naming, as it makes my life much easier, and just message me with any questions.

File Naming: Firstname-Lastname-1.jpg (2, 3, etc.). This is especially important if you want to share them in a specific order, so this will be the order of the series. 

Sizing: Same as for uploading to website. 1000 pixels long, jpeg, 72DPI, 65% quality.

A Dystopian Nightmare with Vin

To many this might feel like a nightmare, traversing the city on a cold, blustery winter day. Just warm enough for a nagging light rain, but a fierce enough wind that it finally destroyed my nice photography umbrella.

But these are my favorite days. Staring down at the soggy train floor, this is when the city is at its best. On one of the busiest tourist days of the year, a Friday the week before Christmas, the city was empty. The air was fresh. And the train was empty, I got to sit back and stare out the window. And nod off occasionally.

There’s actually no place I feel calmer and more disconnected.

Since high school, I’ve always slept like a baby on the subway. One time, I suddenly woke up passed out on an old lady’s shoulder. ‘You looked comfortable, so I let you sleep.’ It was a great sleep.

Another time, I dreamt I was smacked in the face. Really, I had fallen fast asleep standing on the way to school in rush hour traffic, and smacked my face into the subway pole. Everyone was looking, so I closed my eyes and went back to sleep.

(All photos from today, taken with the Ricoh GRIIIx / 40mm version.)

The goal of the day was to take some dreamlike photos. I was hoping for a sunny day to help me focus more on the content of a dreamlike photo, instead of everything inherently looking dreamlike. But I shouldn’t complain, it was a perfect day, and particularly because it scared the tourists away. And hopefully, there will be a sunny day next week.

But it was emptiness that I was looking for.

I made last minute plans to meet Vin to see the Eggleston exhibit before it closed over the weekend. Of course I didn’t take any photos at the actual exhibit.

I delivered some Cactus Jelly to share with Vin, a delicious holiday gift from John Gearon and the desert of Arizona. At lunch, I tried to photograph it like Eggleston might.

It was pretty astounding to see the Eggleston prints, my first time. The quality of those pictures, that large, the color. They’re perfect prints.

There are many photographers who are doing more interesting work these days, especially with decades of progression. But it’s hard to deny that Eggleston is a damn amazing photographer. And he found a way to show an area that he felt was quiet and boring in such interesting ways. There is feeling in those photos.

Since the exhibit was near the High Line, I wanted to wander over there to photograph after. I’ve always hated and been fascinated with the High Line and Hudson Yards.

The neighborhood is the epitome of a bad dream coming true. A dystopian city nightmare, a neighborhood for people who don’t actually want to live in the city.

Honestly, it’s shocking how much of the design is reminiscent of prisons, only with nicer materials. And nicer clothes.

Each building has a gym. Chelsea Market and Little Spain act as the commissaries. It often feels like looking into little prison cells of luxury.

There’s no interaction with the city. The neighborhood is so far removed, but just close enough to Times Square to be filled with hoards of tourists gawking through the windows at the rich lions.

You walk outside surrounded by people consuming, shopping, gawking. There’s no place to escape, except on the rainy days. There’s no quiet corner to interact with regulars.

Anyway, that was a long introduction to the dreamlike challenge. But frankly, there’s not much to really say about it. I’m in the weeds of this challenge with you.

Photos will be due at the end of February, so we have time to focus on this after the holidays. We’re going to get a dreamlike photo book talk and general hangout around it, and I’ll have the recap post for the series of six challenge up over the holidays.

But push yourselves, and I want to see new photos.

You can create dreamlike photos through feeling, emptiness, loneliness, intimacy, warmth, color, blur, quietness, loudness, anger. Blur and trees are the most common thing I’m seeing right now, and that’s great. Keep that going. But that’s also going to get old, fast.

Most importantly, don’t forget that you have to photograph something. There has to be something present in the photos, as slight as that something may be. Something intriguing in some way. A blurred photo of nothing is still a photo of nothing. There has to be something, anything. Unless nothing is the subject, ha!

Share a few dreamlike photos together in a story, or for an idea. Combine the last challenge with this one.

In this case, this post is the dream of a dystopian neighborhood for the rich, glass prisons in the sky.

Series of 6, Trivia, AI, Celebrity Stylists, and Backs of Heads

November 15, 2022 (updated November 15, 2022)

Series of 6

***Series of 6 Challenge images due Sunday, Dec 11th. I’ll put the info on the Challenge Tab this week and send an email about it.

I think this has been the toughest challenge to wrap my brain around. There are so many ways to take it but I also think there are some boundaries as well.

On one hand, I think it’s a pitfall to make the images match too much, such as six different views of similar things. Why share six when one will do the trick? In a large project sure, but each image is valuable real estate with only six.

There’s also the pitfall of making the idea too simple, such as six images based on the color yellow, or something like that. As we’ve said before, I’d rather you fail with something difficult than succeed with something too easy.

On the flip side though, it’s really easy to overthink things, to think you need to have a formed idea that you can explain, a story, something very concrete.

Some of the best projects don’t have any answers or ways to explain the photographs, but they do a wonderful job of bringing out questions and mystery in your head, allowing your mind to wander.

They create the boundaries of a world and lead you down a path, yet it’s a path of your choosing.

On this note, I recently scanned a good portion of favorite photos from my book collection. I didn’t have the energy to do the city books yet, so these are all the more suburban side of things.

My goal was to put together images from this archive into different sets of six, but to try to have the connections between the images not be so concrete. 

I don’t know how effective these are, it was a quick experiment and these are possibly on the border of being too loose, but the goal here was mainly to get your mind to wander and fill in the blanks between the images.

What do you think of these?

Trivia, AI, Celebrity Stylists, and Backs of Heads

Last Tuesday night, I shot an event from 5-10pm called The Dozen at some concert hall on the Westside. It was a trivia/reality show through Barstool Sports with 6 trivia teams and a crowd of mostly 25-year-old sports fans in hoodies. The show had a bit of a MTV’s Jackass quality to it.

Anyway, they paid me extra to get the photos to them by the next day. But after I agreed I got another job, which I couldn’t refuse, starting the next morning, from 9am-6pm.

Enter Imagen AI – a company that my photographer buddy Scott Wyden Kivowitz went to work at last year. I gave it a try a week before and it was incredible. I wouldn’t recommend it for personal work, but for jobs it is the craziest thing.

I uploaded 4,000 of my edited raw files from past events, and it took a day to process them and build an AI profile for my events.

So at 11:30 at night, I uploaded the 600+ photos to the server, and 10 minutes later the edits were available to download. For 7 cents an image, it will edit, straighten and crop your images for you, an amazing deal.

And the exciting thing is how well it works. Of course, with most of the edits you have to tweak a little, but it often gets damn close, especially in the crop. I was able to tweak the top 180 photos in less than half the normal time (and then you upload the tweaks to the server so your AI profile learns and improves over time). The photos were ready by 2:30am, although I didn’t send them until 7 so the client would think I worked longer through the night on them.

And I was able to do the job the next day, fairly functionally. Otherwise, I would have been up all night. 3+ extra hours of sleep because of AI.

While that first event was a 10/10 on the masculine scale, the next day I had to photograph an influencer event at a fancy salon in Chelsea held by the haircare product and hairdryer company, Sally Beauty. 

Editors, bloggers, and writers would come in and have champagne, a 30-minute shampoo and head massage, and then a styling by a celebrity stylist, 2 of whom had been on one of those hair styling reality shows.

It was fun and relaxed thankfully, cool people, but tough in that I had to capture photos for the influencers to want to use, photographs of all the products being used, there were mirrors everywhere so I had to make sure I wasn’t in the photos nor any other clutter, and that the hair looked amazing.

And I had to be present consistently while not being annoying, pleasant enough to be around, and not awkward, but somewhat of a fly on the wall. It’s a complicated dance.

Anyway, I got the idea to shoot the back of their heads in this way from Mimi Plumb’s books. Nobody shoots the back of a head the way she does, and it was a fun inspiration.

Nothing too fancy, I might not have captured these without that inspiration.

Anyway the point to this random story, besides the Imagen-AI shoutout, and the random humor of the events, is just that the more you immerse yourself in other people’s work, the more it’s going to influence you in ways that will surprise you.

Let yourself be influenced. Let yourself copy. Copy the ideas you like best all together into your own creation.

Now finally, here’s my work in progress, series of 6, for Manual. It’s a mix of some old photos with the new ones to create the feel I’m going for, but will try to shoot more over the next month to get some more new photos to replace.

Manual

October 28, 2022 (updated October 28, 2022)

Manual

I’m going to keep this post fairly short, but I want to share what I’ve been planning for my next project for next year.

And this post is related to last week’s post about finding inspiration in other photographers, so make sure to check that out if you haven’t read it.

In the past, I’ve always grown ideas organically and followed what the photos told me, but now I want to try the other way of doing things and really think up and plan an idea before I go out to work on it.

The title is inspired by Alec Soth’s Broken Manual, which was produced to feel like an ad-hoc manual for how to disappear. 

I like the idea of a manual, so in this case, it would be a loose manual to cities with both photographs, studies, and quotes. It would explore the biology of cities, the structure, the communities, transportation, etc. A wide study.

When building this idea, I went through a portion of photobooks to scan and I picked out photos that inspired me for the project. Most of them weren’t taken in cities actually, but each gives me some idea for content, structure, or feel that I would want to translate.

So anyway, the six photos I’ve been building for this series challenge is photographs from other photographers to build up the spirit for the idea before I start making plans to actually shoot it. I’m currently envisioning a loose structure with both B&W and color and a variety of formats.

And I’m also including a few general quotes as well.

“When we started living in cities, we did something that had never happened before in the history of life,” West says. “We broke away from the equations of biology, all of which are sublinear. Every other creature gets slower as it gets bigger. That’s why the elephant plods along. But in cities, the opposite happens. As cities get bigger, everything starts accelerating. There is no equivalent for this in nature. It would be like finding an elephant that’s proportionally faster than a mouse.”

“Kempes and West have discovered two such laws. The first pertains to how cities consume energy: in cities, energy per capita, (measured in terms of infrastructure — gas stations, roads, electrical lines), decreases in proportion with city population size, on average, with an exponent of about 0.15. A similar law appears in the biological world: “the energy required to support a unit mass of tissue decreases systematically as the quarter-power of body mass.” Both cities and organisms in this sense produce economies of scale: as they increase in size, they use resources more efficiently.

Yet cities exhibit another scaling law that looks very different from the biological world. The increased connectivity of cities, Kempes and West explain, gives rise to a “super-linear scaling of socio-economic activities.” As cities increase in size, so too do per capita wages, patent production, and GDP, along with crime, inequality, and disease — all at a universal rate, raised, on average, to an exponent of 1.15.”

“Unlike companies, which are managed in a top-down fashion by a team of highly paid executives, cities are unruly places, largely immune to the desires of politicians and planners. “Think about how powerless a mayor is,” West says. “They can’t tell people where to live or what to do or who to talk to. Cities can’t be managed, and that’s what keeps them so vibrant. They’re just these insane masses of people, bumping into each other and maybe sharing an idea or two. It’s the freedom of the city that keeps it alive.”
“when people come together, they become much more productive.
 
Because you can take the same person, and if you just move them to a city that’s twice as big, then all of a sudden they’ll do 15 percent more of everything that we can measure.
 
Nobody moves to New York to save money on their gas bill.” Why, then, do we put up with the indignities of the city? Why do we accept the failing schools and overpriced apartments, the bedbugs and the traffic?
 
In essence, they arrive at the sensible conclusion that cities are valuable because they facilitate human interactions, as people crammed into a few square miles exchange ideas and start collaborations. “If you ask people why they move to the city, they always give the same reasons,” West says. “They’ve come to get a job or follow their friends or to be at the center of a scene. That’s why we pay the high rent. Cities are all about the people, not the infrastructure.”
“[Jane Jacobs] saw the city not as a mass of buildings but rather as a vessel of empty spaces, in which people interacted with other people. The city wasn’t a skyline — it was a dance.
 
All successful cities are a little uncomfortable.”

City Links!

  1. A Physicist Solves the City.
  2. The Surprising Math of Cities and Corporations.
  3. The Simplicity and Complexity of Cities (PDF Page 66).

The Art in Listening

October 22, 2022 (updated October 22, 2022)

Mary Bradley

The Art in Listening

If you ask my wife, Sara, if I’m qualified to write a post about listening, she will give you a definitive no.

But let’s give it a shot anyway.

If you’re typically logging into the site for the primary purpose of posting your photos and getting feedback, I think you’re looking at this place from the wrong angle.

And my goal over time is to help us all shift together to see things from a different angle.

Posting photos is the easy part. You throw some stuff up to see what sticks in the minds of others.

Marina Napoleoni

But the hard part is the listening. The hard part is learning to talk about photographs. The hard part is learning to understand what photos can do, how different photographers utilize them, how to relate to different photographs yourself, and how to understand the intentions and motivations of photographers.

The way to improve is to look at photographs. Really look at them. The more you don’t understand them, the more you should enquire (60% of the time you still won’t understand them anyway, but that’s not the point). It’s the attempt that counts.

The more you do this, the more you will pick up the traits and skills of the photographers you love.

If you don’t spend the effort and time to try to assess and understand photography, at some point you’re probably going to plateau in your own work. And to do this you need to push yourself.

The best writers read. The best photographers look at pictures.

Jessica Margo

If you’re having a hard time understanding someone’s work, ask questions. Do your best to learn why someone is shooting what they shoot. What’s their purpose?

Don’t be afraid. You don’t have to talk about triangles or lighting or the way the eyes move through a photograph, although you can. 

But you should do your best to try to understand what everyone is photographing and help them understand what you find interesting about it, or what you would like to see that might make the work more interesting. The content is the most interesting thing to talk about anyway.

You will find that you’ll end up understanding your own work better as well by doing this.

And for the Salon, this is the ultimate what-goes-around-comes-around place. The more you’re able to give to others, the more they’re going to be able to reciprocate in understanding you and your work.

And a big aspect of this also comes from comfort. We’re working to get the regular hangouts going now so we can all get more comfortable with each other, because that’s a key to be able to comfortably speak out minds. It’s a tough place to get to online, but it’s an important and hopefully achievable goal.

And don’t be afraid to write about your decisions and your thoughts behind your photos so we can understand your thought process as well.

Vin Sharma

Ask questions.

Ask questions.

Ask questions.

When I was talking with Taisuke over the last few years, there were certain plateaus in both his shooting and in my ability to help him and give him advice. But it was questions that broke through that. And it took time to find the right questions.

And I wonder if it took him time to be able to fully embrace those questions.

His fascinating quotes were responses to questions over many emails. It was such a fun and rewarding conversation to have.

To have a small part in helping motivate him to find the right way to unleash such an interesting story was an extremely fulfilling and educational experience, and it has helped us get to know each other better.

Stephen Greenberg

Now if I gave you one year and you could either spend every day shooting or every other day shooting and every other day looking at photobooks or helping other photographers think about their work, which situation do you think would be best for becoming a better photographer and creating better work?

I believe your work would be much stronger with the latter, despite half the time shooting.

A big percentage of the time, you’re going to try to think of a good question or insight to say, and there will be nothing. We all want to help each other of course. That happens to me all the time.

Shilpa Harolikar

That’s fine, don’t overthink it. There are a lot of great and bad photographs on here for which I wish I had something insightful to say about them, but I can’t think of anything. So I move on. Do what you can and work to improve.

In a similar way to thinking about the series challenge, try not to overthink things. Not every photo or series has to tell a story. You could find a wonderful thread of images in your portfolio where there is no rhyme or reason or way to talk about them concretely, and it still could be a gorgeous set that is evocative and powerful.

So just let loose and have some fun, in all aspects of the site.

Update from Taisuke

 
Hi, James
 
I returned from Osaka.
 
It was a good opportunity to hear the feedback of many people at this phase of the project.
 
Two of the viewers shed tears. 
 
A young woman who had taken a leave of absence due to an adjustment disorder at work, a woman whose parents were opposed to what she wanted to do as she looked for a job, and a man who had dedicated the same period of his life to his work, told me their stories.
 
With this display of exhibition, viewers did not look at one photo carefully and moved on to the next, so the impression they received from the story was stronger than the emotion that welled up from the image of the photo.
Still, if this becomes a book, I think the emotions will be more greatly affected.
 
Many people are impressed with the photo of me bathing in the sink.
 
So you brought that photo to the end! I admire you.
 
 
I noticed that I have been working for about 30 years, almost all of the Heisei Era in the Japanese calendar.
 
Do you know the Japanese calendar?
 
Heisei is the era of the previous Emperor Akihito.

The change in the social structure of Japan during this period was from quantity to quality, from standard to variety.
 
I will intend to do a detailed study of the changes during this time, and also refer to Ken’s comment about eudaimonia. 
 
It has a scientific consideration of psychological well-being, development and aging, family life, and work/life relationships.
 
Finally, my son came to see. I was apprehensive about showing my family, but he said it was very nice. I was very happy about that.
 
Thank you, James!
 
Taisuke
 

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