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Challenge #10 – Identity

March 24, 2022 (updated June 2, 2022)

Quick Challenge Details

1. Upload up to five photos for the Identity Challenge.

File Naming: Firstname-Lastname-1.jpg (2, 3, etc.)

Sizing: Same as for posting to the site.

Upload Link: https://www.dropbox.com/request/CMJmjfeorUFAGlDgZ0Xl

Deadline: Sunday, June 12th

Challenge #10 - Identity

In the previous Home challenge, we explored our own identity through our surroundings, but in this challenge, we’re going to flip that around.

We’re going to explore the identity of others.

A lot of why we do street photography is because we like people, we like culture, we like telling stories with our cameras. The camera is a tool, a key that lets us into other worlds.

Last Spring we did a general portrait challenge which many of you did extremely well on. But I want to take it further this time around.

I want to explore the issue of identity in others. And this could be with strangers or people you know. It could be with friends or family as well.

Part of the goal of this prompt is to get you all more used to the idea of talking to people when you photograph them. And this challenge should hopefully be a segue to that.

You can tell people that you are doing a project for a class on the idea of identity. Then ask them how they see their identity. How do they identify? What does identity mean to them? Or your own way to ask this type of question.

Framing it as part of a project will help people understand and it’ll be a good way to break the ice.

If it’s possible and makes sense in the situation, try to take their portrait after, or while they’re talking about their thoughts on identity. This will warm them up and give you a chance to create a natural and intimate portrait.

And if you don’t feel comfortable talk about this yet with people, just work on taking portraits that show some intimacy. Asking about identity is not a necessity, just a prompt.

You might ask them how they would like to be portrayed along with their answers. How would they like to look in the photo?

A portrait can be a collaboration in this way.

If you want to read more about portraits, here is the post about them from last year. And here are the results from last years challenge to give you some inspiration. I can’t believe it’s been a year.

In addition to portraits, look and see if you can capture other images that show the idea of identity – maybe through scenery, candid moments, details. What types of photos can you capture that could make you think about someone’s identity.

These challenges are of course optional and you don’t have to do the portrait part if you don’t want to.

I also want you to think of the idea of ethics and the power we have with a camera to portray people how we want. And this power can be used in a good way but also in a misguided way.

We’re going to schedule a hangout soon to talk about this challenge and also to talk more about the issues of ethics in photography and street photography. Ethics will be a theme over the next few months.

And now that it’s getting warm, I also want you all to continue to think about your projects if you have one. It’s a good time to get some inspiration to continue and share those.

Now let’s break out of our winter bubbles!

Plant a Seed

March 12, 2022 (updated March 12, 2022)

Vin Sharma

Plant a Seed

Most of us are coming out of winter, cozy, confined, self-reflective, and everything enhanced by this awful pandemic.

The Home challenge embraced these things, and I hope you all continue to use the skills learned during this challenge no matter what we’re focusing on.

But the weather is warming, the pandemic is in a lull, and things are going to start changing all around us.

Rona Schwarz

I find late winter and early Spring a tough time mentally for photography. Things feel even tougher on the heels of this surgery. Everything feels slow. I feel less confident stopping and talking to people. My stamina is less (especially now), my hand-eye coordination even feels slower.

And the interesting thing is that most of these things are in my head. It really only takes like a week of shooting in good weather to start feeling in a groove again. But for that month while you’re transitioning it’s tough.

Marina Napoleoni

It only takes talking to a few people to start feeling more confident in that. Once the endorphins start flowing you start to get addicted to it again. The walks start getting longer and longer. The good photos start to trickle in and then they flow.

Even the inspiration for books and photography as a whole starts to grow. And hopefully, we can all start to inspire each other even more. For everyone’s sake here, I ask that if you’re able to right now, give yourself a little push.

Andrew Miller

Fight through the pain, as I need to tell myself now. (I know, I know, don’t push myself too much).

Next week is going to be the new challenge and we’re going to focus on getting back out there again.

Sometimes it’s important to embrace the darkness and sometimes you need to fight to bring out the light. Darkness can envelop you quickly and easily, but the light builds up slowly. It takes nurturing.

Mary Rogers

It’s like tending to a garden and planting the seeds. The seeds you plant today will turn into flowers before you know it.

Think about what you want to create this year. Create a plan for how much you want to shoot. Put it on a sticky note to remind yourself. Step back and think about the type of work you want to do. Do you have a project you want to build? What photos do you want to get for it?

Envision the work that you’ll create this year if you put in the effort.

Hopefully, inspirational and enthusiastic James is back – I’m working to plant the seeds for that as well. When it’s easy, it’s easy. But when it’s tough, it has to be built back up.

So let’s all inspire each other. And thank you for inspiring me.

Photo Links!

  1. Teju Cole: Smell the ink and drift away: why I find solace in photobooks
  2. Graciela Iturbide: “Photography is a Living Matter”

How Are You Feeling?

February 5, 2022 (updated February 5, 2022)

How Are You Feeling?

I want to first say that the work everyone’s been doing has been incredible in sharing who you are, where you are, and opening up. I love the intimacy, the memorabilia, the writing, the old photos, the stories.

Thanks for everyone checking up on me after that last anxiety set of images. That was so heartwarming of you all. These friendships are wonderful and I think there’s something about the people who are willing to sign up for a place like this that lends itself to caring and kindness.

Keep opening up. Who are you? What makes you tick? How are you feeling?

It’s scary to show how things really are, but it’s interesting to think about how you may be perceived through your photos.

We see perfect photos and perfect lives every day, one after the other on Instagram, and you know they’re probably only showing a side of themselves and to the whole story. Which is fine of course, there’s nothing wrong with that. Seeing just the happy is okay.

But when you see these photos, do you envy these people? I’d argue in some ways, or you envy the perceived lifestyle, but not the reality. You look at the photos with suspicion, they’re probably holding something back.

However, when people open up and show those real moments, you feel a kinship with them. You relate to them. And these real moments don’t have to be hard. They can totally be happy, or neutral. But you can tell when something is real and when something is glammed up.

How am I feeling?

I’m not feeling like writing this right now, but at the same time it’s flowing and I’m also feeling inspired by the words, if that makes sense. I went from uninspired to inspired from the beginning to the end of the piece.

I feel like putting my head in the sand, locking myself in a hotel room for three days watching documentaries, drinking tea or something harder, stretching, turning off my mind, and just floating through February, then picking up the pieces in March to have a wonderful Spring and Summer.

Grinding for two years, I feel ground.

But I’m actually doing alright for those concerned. It looks like all my pressing issues are figured out and can be dealt with in the next 4-6 weeks, my kid it seems can be vaccinated at the end of Feb. I’m getting there and ready to party in Spring.

Now I’m guessing you’re curious about these photos.

My goal was, without moving from my chair and desk while writing this, I aimed to see if I could take my phone and capture these feelings as much as possible. The photos in this post are all from this, taken while I was writing this piece.

So how are you feeling?

And how do you show that? I don’t know – you tell us, you show us how to do it. Just think about how you’re feeling, stop yourself when you’re feeling something, and just take a photo, any photo. Think about photos that could be a metaphor for how you’re feeling.

And use writing as well – combine photos with writing to help us further understand the idea.

The Home challenge is about a wide variety of things, and this is only one small angle, but it’s one that I’d like some of you to further explore, if you feel comfortable doing so.

Photo Links!

  1. The Kept and the Killed: Of the 270,000 photographs commissioned by the US Farm Security Administration to document the Great Depression, more than a third were “killed.”
  2. Why British Vogue’s ‘celebration’ of the African model fell short.
  3. My Cousin Bill: A Conversation with William Eggleston.

New Years Salon Resolutions

January 8, 2022 (updated January 8, 2022)

Emily Passino, Love Circle

New Years Salon Resolutions

Happy New Year all!

While the past year for the Salon was about building this place and building a base of knowledge, the plan is for this year to be more about building relationships and getting to know each other better.

We have this virtual wall to deal with, but it’s been great to see that breaking down over time and I’m confident we can accelerate that this year.

We’re going to work on getting more regular hangouts within the groups and just more regular talks. I think the friendships made here are the most important element of this place and the more we can foster those, the more everything else will fall into place.

The other focus will be consistency. Consistency, whenever possible, is the key to photography, and I think this is similar for the Salon.

While we build out consistency on the Salon’s end, we’d love it if you’d be able to work on the consistency on your end as much as possible, both with your work and with the site. And we realize that this sometimes might not mesh with the responsibilities of everyday life, but as best you can.

Larry Felton, Albany

This is a time for us all to grow these relationships, have fun with each other, and help each other out.

We’ll schedule a posting and engagement hangout soon, but we’d love it if you could check into the site even when you don’t have anything to post. Check in for inspiration and to give others comments. Work on putting yourself out there more, helping out, and it will all start to come around back to you and all of us.

Building relationships over the web feels very strange at first, but by the end of 2022, I’m hopeful that this will all feel second nature. It already has started to. And long term, we want a good mix of building these relationships through the hangouts, on the site, and eventually whenever this pandemic finally subsides, in person.

Now one important thing that has been growing behind the scenes this year, and ramping up in the second half, has been an inspiring group of people working to make this place what it is. We’re going to highlight all of them soon so you can get to know them better, but for today, I want to give a better introduction to Emily Passino and Larry Felton, two amazing people who have been bedrocks in creating the structure and spirit of this place from the very beginning. Emily is the moderator of group Levitt and Larry of group Koudelka, the two initial beta groups.

So much of how this place has grown (and will grow this year) is due to them.

I asked both Emily and Larry a few questions to answer so we can get to know them better. Here’s what they wrote!

Emily Passino


“I learned about photography growing up, with my dad and his darkroom and his strong opinions. 

For years photography was catch-as-catch-can, with no formal intentions, or education, or understanding of much of anything. About 15 years ago, though, I happened to attend a talk on street photography at a local art gallery, where two things happened. First, I saw classic examples of this genre and was totally intrigued.  Second, a friend who was also there invited me to join a small informal group of photographers, who were lively and talented and generous and knowledgeable.

These days, in addition to the Photo Salon, I am active in three local photography groups – the group mentioned above; a collective of street photographers; and a smaller group with diverse styles.  Before COVID, I led a regular “photo dialogue” workshop for a community group (people with early Alzheimer’s). 

My professional life was rich and demanding so that photography was limited to odd bursts of energy in between everything else.  For 30+ years, I was an internal management consultant for the State of Tennessee, advising cabinet/senior leadership on strategy, process improvement, performance measures, employee engagement and other jargon-y sounding things.  But the truth is, this gave me a chance to work on issues that mattered, with people who cared, at all levels, all across the state. I learned the complexities involved with prisons, state parks, highway patrol, child protection, the environment, public health, mental health – even licensing engineers and barbers, and empowering housekeeping staff.  It was all very fascinating and felt worthwhile.

As I got closer to retirement (and coincidentally all 3 offspring were out on their own, another angle of the rich and full life in the previous decades), I started making time for photography workshops and classes and more regular visits to galleries and museums.

Which brings me to the Salon, and the Love Circle Project. 

With the Salon, the project I’m working on is evolving, but it is based around a small, odd word-of-mouth park in my neighborhood, which has both panoramic views of the city, and an assortment of undisguised, unappealing water and renewable energy utilities. I originally went there to get a long view of downtown. After the first visit, which was in winter, I made a point of trying to visit Love Circle in other seasons.  I was surprised that people were seemingly just hanging out there, despite the bizarre mechanical “stuff” all over the hill. And NOBODY seemed to take notice of the pumping stations, and mechanical “stuff” all over the hill.

Looking back through the photos I had collected from these visits last year, I saw an assortment of people, views, activities – not yet adding up to anything, but with potential.  I’m now spending more time, more regularly, “experiencing” Love Circle.  I’ve been able to strike up a few conversations, to attend to the sounds and feeling of the place, and just more intentionally observe it.  Love Circle itself might turn out to be “the” project, or it might fit into other concepts I’ve been exploring, such as where and how people seek “refuge from daily life.”

Favorite photographers:  Graciella Iturbide, Sally Mann, William Eggleston, Garry Winogrand, Dayanita Singh, Jeremiah Ariaz, Carrie Weems, Mark Steinmetz – in the random order they came to my mind.

Tidbit: The other interest my father shared with me was learning how to fly a small Cessna airplane, so I have a handful of solo flights in my past.”

Larry Felton

“After going to college for engineering, I’ve worked in the semiconductor industry for thirty years.  My jobs have always required long trips overseas, so I took up photography as something to do on weekends when I was stuck in a hotel somewhere in Europe or Asia.  I started with travel photography, but somewhere along the line, I stumbled across street photography and was immediately hooked.  I’d shoot mostly while I traveled because I could never find anything interesting here at home in Albany, NY. 

For most of the last ten years, I’ve worked for a Japanese company, so I’ve spent many of those weekends away from home in Tokyo.  Of course, Tokyo is a spectacular city for street photography; I would regularly shoot the same streets that Daido Moriyama still shoots today.  The problem was that I was taking the same pictures everyone else was taking.  There wasn’t much of me in the pictures.

While there in Tokyo, I came across the Japanese aesthetic wabi-sabi, which is the experience of finding beauty in the impermanent, imperfect, and incomplete.   Things I’ve experienced that might evoke wabi-sabi include an exclusive sushi restaurant serving sake out of chipped, mismatched cups, an eight-seat jazz bar that plays only vinyl records made before 1960, and handmade quilts airing over balcony railings of run-down houses in old Tokyo.  A couple of years ago, I decided to spend my time shooting in Japan focusing on wabi-sabi.  Shooting it took me to different parts of Tokyo, away from the crowds in Shinjuku and Ginza.  I’d be doing something different than most foreigners in Japan.

Then Covid hit, and I haven’t been back to Japan since March of 2020.  Finding myself stranded in Albany, I decided to make the best of it and started to shoot things I found in here that evoked wabi-sabi for me; around the same time, James started Close to Home.  Over the last twenty months, I’ve started to see Albany through different eyes.  I’m not shooting wabi-sabi exactly.  That is impossible because I am not Japanese, and Albany is not Japan.  But with those ideas in mind, I’ve finally made some pictures that are truly mine.  I’ve realized that I need to be in a place that is part of me to do my best work. 

As I’ve shifted my focus to shooting in a small town, I’ve begun to look at work from photographers the usual image of street photography.  The work that most strongly influences me now is from photographers like Todd Hido, Alec Soth and William Eggleston, people that have found worthy subjects outside big cities.

Like so many others, the experience of the last couple of years has led me to reassess what I want to be doing with my time.  In my case, it led me to decide to retire.  One consequence of that decision is I won’t be traveling to Tokyo as often.  From here on out, I’ll be shooting mostly in Albany.”

Photo Links!

  1. Taking pictures of breastfeeding mothers in public to be made illegal in England and Wales
  2. These Photos Of America’s Best Diners Are Americana Without The Nostalgia
  3. The Imaginary Worlds of In-Game Photography

Light and Dark Challenge

January 1, 2022 (updated January 1, 2022)

Light and Dark Challenge

Happy New Year! May 2022 please be a better year than 2021.

I’m going to have a New Year post next week, so I’ll keep this short. But congratulations, the work here is extremely interesting and beautiful.

I chose around 120 photographs and ordered them into three groups. There wasn’t much rhyme or reason to the ordering except splitting up the color – I just tried to place photos that would fit well together and flow with each other.

I think there’s a lot we can take from this into the Home challenge as well. Great work!

Challenge #9 and Zine: Home

December 23, 2021 (updated February 19, 2022)

Quick Challenge Details

Vin Sharma

1. Upload up to six hi-res photos for the Home Challenge and Zine. And don’t forget some verticals! Also feel free to add two additional photos to this that include photos of chairs, couches, or front doors.

Also, if you feel like it will add to any of your photos, please add corresponding text for them. I’m not sure how or if this will be used, but it will be good to have the options. Not all photos need captions, only if you feel it’s necessary.

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

File Naming: Firstname-Lastname-1.jpg (2, 3, etc.)

Captions: Upload a text or word document (Firstname-Lastname). If this doesn’t work for any reason just email the text to me at [email protected].

Hi-Res Sizing: size to 11 inches long edge, 80% quality), 300 DPI.

Upload Link: https://www.dropbox.com/request/qDGZN2DjI0Kbq8SjW0XO

Deadline: Saturday, March 5th

Challenge #9 and Zine: Home

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all of you!

I’ll have the challenge #8 photos posted soon, but I wanted to get this out early should people want to work on it over their break. We’re going to keep this challenge going through February and then never photograph the home again!

I’m just kidding about that, but with winter (for most of us) and Omicron, it seems time that we can bring a lot of what we’ve learned together for this.

Peter Weeks

The challenge is titled Home, but the idea of home here is very broad. And we’re going to turn the work here into the next zine.

Please share your progress along the way. I’ve been noticing that many people will not post the photos at all or wait till the deadline to do it, but this doesn’t help us learn from each other. Post your photos and we’ll have hangouts to talk about ideas for the challenge. And make sure to take some verticals!

Home can be your actual home, your block, your neighborhood, someone else’s home. It could be something that makes you think about home. It just has to be something familiar to you, a part of your everyday world.

Regina Melo

This is a chance to self-reflect. You can photograph indoors or outdoors, your neighbors, streets, trees, your family, friends, details of your home, hobbies, heirlooms, an old chair, your mess, your underwear drawer, abstract photography, photographs of trees, what you’re watching on television, important moments, trips to the supermarket, everyday routines – whatever you think fits. Annoy your significant other. Go through your old family photographs. And keep in mind, what seems routine to you might actually be fascinating to someone else.

An important word for this challenge is soulful. How do we take all of this content and make it soulful?

I was just having an interesting conversation with Andrew Bukata about this, about struggling to figure out how to bring this dynamic to your work. It’s not my strong suit, and it’s a topic we need to talk about much more.

How do you create a soulful photo? Is there a soulful aesthetic? Is it just about being more open and honest in our work? Maybe it’s about not being afraid to share certain aspects of your life with others.

Emily Passino

Being soulful isn’t just about taking moody and dark images. Capture the happy as much as the tough. As we’ve been working on, photograph your feelings.

How do we capture our ‘boring’ homes, our regular routines, and show them in interesting and powerful ways? And are we open enough to share the stuff that isn’t boring?

We can combine multiple challenges into this one, light and dark, capturing the mundane, showing emotion in the inanimate, self-portraits, portraits, even the dreamlike challenge would be some good inspiration. And we can take photos of other things that are self-portraits in meaning.

Merle Litowitz

This challenge is about photographing yourself and your life, your surroundings, your world. This is a chance to be intimate, open, and honest.

This is a chance for us to get to know you better. Work on being soulful and open.

Slow and Steady

December 4, 2021 (updated December 9, 2021)

This Friday, Dec 10th - submission deadline for holiday show and challenge #8.

Regina mentioned in a comment recently about me showing some examples and ideas for challenge #8. I’m sorry I haven’t had the time to do this with the zine and all the other Salon stuff, but in the future we’ll do more to talk about the challenges as they’re going on. That’s important and I have a lot to say about it, but will do it this time during the recap post.

This year was a lot about building out the Salon and its features and next year will be about refining it and how we use it – focusing on what we’ve built and getting into a regular groove. And I want to spend more time next year focusing on sharing your work in these posts and such.

Please take the challenge in any direction you feel. This is a challenge is about interpretation and photos that mean something to you. Challenge submission page.

For the end-of-year show,  upload up to three favorite photos taken this year as a part of the Salon, or if you are a newer member, or been in lockdown, share previous work you’ve taken outside of the Salon during this year.

I’m only going to pick one from each person, so if there’s one you definitely want to show, just upload one. And the show will be up for one month.

Keep in mind the photo sizing for the challenge and holiday show are different. For the holiday show, size the photos to jpg, 65% quality, 1900 pixels wide. Color space srgb. Name them “Firstname-Lastname-1.jpg”.

Upload here: https://www.dropbox.com/request/lMVarLootjMUN2PNaMnf

Mango’s artwork

LOT Zine

I’m assuming most of you got the Lot Zine by now. I hope you enjoy it! Here is a link to download the PDF of it, BUT if you purchased it please wait to have your first viewing be of that version.

I’m very curious to see what you think about it. We’ll have a photobook type hangout scheduled soon where we’ll go over it and talk about ideas for the future as well.

This was a massive time crunch, so creating a template, ordering multiple test copies, dealing with the quirks of on-demand printing, and figuring out everything for the first time was a lot at once. In further versions, it’ll be nice to have more time on the content versus tweaking the layout so much.

One of the biggest issues was the gutter of a thick magazine like this, and I think future versions will have fewer pages. Everything’s a tradeoff, and having a lot of large double-paged photos despite the gutter was a tough one to reconcile, but I think it was worth it. Especially with John Vachon’s work, I hated putting it on the gutter, but his photos were rife with small details that needed to be seen.

The double pages let you get lost in the photo, the details become clearer, and they break the pace up nicely. You just have to run with the imperfections though. And that being said, I wish I could have done a little less of them. A reason why they were even more necessary this time was that there were only a few vertical photos uploaded, and we needed something to break up the pages of all square photos.

Probably 98% of submissions were horizontal, so in the future try to give a little more thought to creating some vertical compositions. It will help a lot with the magazine experience, and it’s good in general to switch it up.

Greene Street

Rejection

As I mentioned last week, not everyone got photos in, while others got multiple. It’s just not possible, nor beneficial to make sure everyone gets a photo in every issue, but I did try my best to balance that with the storytelling. And attention will be paid to making sure everyone gets photos into these regularly.

You know by now that I want to keep competition out of this place as much as is possible, but for something like this, it’s necessary to some extent. And I think when done delicately and in the right amount, rejection is a beneficial thing.

We all need it to some level, it pushes us, changes our thinking, lights a fire. An artist’s life is like a potted plant, where the soil is all the rejection necessary to make a flower.

The initial hurt can be tough, but I promise it gets easier. Just barrel down, focus in, and think about what fun you’re going to have next.

Greene Street

Slow and Steady

Finally, I’m sorry for the constant motivational speaking, but one of my main goals with this Salon is to help you figure out how to keep up with your photography as regularly and steadily as possible.

A lot of people take a break during the down periods, and sometimes that’s necessary, but it can be the most important time mentally to embrace your art. There’s nothing like a good walk on a terrible day, after you get yourself out the door that is.

It’s important to understand that this is a slow and steady process. And it’s why I think ideas and projects can be so important. A project doesn’t have to be all-consuming with your photography, but something that you can do steadily and fall back on when you’re not feeling so into things.

When I feel unmotivated, getting out the door with the camera can feel overwhelming. But if I have something I’m working on, it feels much less daunting to say, ‘Hey let me pop down to the Speedway for a bit, or head over to Greene Street.’ 

Once you get to this point, you don’t need inspiration, you don’t need an idea, you just need to get out the door and head over to a place. It takes a lot of the planning, second-guessing, and over-thinking out of the equation. If need be, just pick an area and keep exploring it.

Now make sure you have some warm clothes so photographing this winter can be fun!

Greene Street

Photo Links!

  1. Photo-Eye – Photographers’ Favorite Photo Books of 2021
  2. Ernest C. Withers’ Images of Black Life in the American South
  3. Ten Hilarious Winners of the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards (I didn’t know this was a thing).
  4. Bug photographer draws fire for doping his tiny subjects.

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