Publication: The Big Issue North

One of my Tbilisi photos was picked up for publication in The Big Issue North.  The image appears to have been found in the OCA Flickr group by the college's PR and Communications director.  No remuneration apart from bragging rights.  

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Looking and Seeing: Assignment: Front, Side and Back Light

Side light adds a bit of depth to the sign. 

Because of the lack of contrast, front light typically flattens a subject.  The only shape or form is often the outer line, but nothing within.  Side lighting is most often used in portrait photography as it provides more contrast and thereby greater volume to the subject.  Back lighting is often the most dramatic, but also the most difficult to photograph as one must often expose for great contrast.  The assignment description is quite loose here and allows for exploring these individually or together.  No specific number of images are prescribed.

Looking and Seeing: Assignment: Light as Light:

Section Five:  Light, Texture and Pattern

Assignment:  Light as Light:  As with the color exercise, the purpose here is simply to raise awareness of light.  The authors suggest not shooting for aesthetic effect but simply to capture perceptions of light.  When you begin, set your intention, synchronize with reality, and be sensitive to flashes of perception.  Fill the frame with the flash, and try as best as possible to reproduce that flash with the camera.  They suggest doing this assignment in the early or late part of the day as the low angle of the sun produces more noticeable light.  They note that light always comes as some form of color, and that shooting light also requires shooting shadow.  The two always manifest together and they explain that this really a question of foreground/background. 

Looking and Seeing: Assignment: Color

21 April
I started reading the book when I was in Japan, but didn’t have much chance to shoot.  I then tried picking up the book and shooting exercises a few weeks later in Tbilisi, but it was difficult to stay focused on the assignments when I had only a few days to explore the city.  Now that I’m back in Dubai and with no projects on the horizon, I’d like to complete this text and the exercises.  So this afternoon I reviewed my notes and set out on the first assignment, color.  I did so in my immediate neighborhood on SZR, but venturing a little bit further afield than usual.  I followed the suggested procedure by setting my intent (seeing for color), synchronizing my experience (mindfulness of the body in space and the experience of the phenomenal world), and being sensitive to flashes of perception.  What I found was restlessness - wanting to find images - and a repeated interest in objects rather than color.  It wasn’t until about 45 minutes to an hour into my 90 minute walk that I found I had forgotten about finding images.  I was simply engaged in my experience of walking and looking.  I will try again Friday and Saturday.  I haven’t yet looked at my images.  I plan to hold them until next week so as not to get caught up in creating images but focusing more on the process of being with the camera.

Book review: Abuthina, J. (2015). Dubai: Behind the Scenes; Memories of Satwa; The Best of Dubai Shop Names.

• Abuthina, J. (2015). Dubai: Behind the Scenes. Dubai: Inside Dubai.
• Abuthina, J. (2015). Memories of Satwa. Dubai: Inside Dubai.
• Abuthina, J. (2015). The Best of Dubai Shop Names. Dubai: Inside Dubai.

I don’t usually rush out to buy books, but I was eager to see these.  I take the same kind of photos of the same places as the photographer whose work is presented here, Mr Jalal Abuthina, though so far as I know I haven’t yet run into him in any of the neighborhoods in which we work.  Two of the three books feature Forwards and Introductions, but are of such a general nature as to be unhelpful in learning much about Abuthina’s approach, method, philosophy, or the history of the work presented.  A more informative profile of the photographer can be found at The National, a leading UAE newspaper, or at the photographer’s website.  From these we learn that Abuthina has been active for a little over a decade, though many of the images in these books appear to be of more recent vintage.  The Burj Khalifa, a building that was completed only in 2008, for example, features in the background of several of the Satwa photos.  I’ve also taken images of some of the same graffiti, which doesn’t typically remain for very long in Dubai.

Notes: McQuade & Hall. Looking and Seeing: An Introduction to Nalanda Miksang Contemplative Photography: Preface, Sections 1 and 2

McQuade & Hall. Looking and Seeing: An Introduction to Nalanda Miksang Contemplative Photography (Way of Seeing Book 1). Drala Publishing, 2015

“John McQuade is one of the founders of Miksang Contemplative Photography, which he has presented for thirty years. He is the most senior teacher of the Nalanda Miksang school. John is a long time meditator, meditation instructor, and Shambhala Training director in the Shambhala tradition. He practices Daoist Qi-gong and writes on the contemplative arts. He holds an M.A in Phenomenology and a PhD in Social and Political Thought.

Miriam Hall is a contemplative arts teacher who lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and travels internationally to teach Nalanda Miksang, Shambhala Art, and contemplative writing. She is the second most senior teacher under John McQuade in the Nalanda Miksang School. She has been teaching these practices for over ten years...."

For a text explicating an alternative means of image making, the pedestrian cover image is unlikely to to inspire many to inquire further.

Jörg M. Colberg: Why does it always have to be about something?

Here's a bit of commentary on the mundanity of contemporary photography projects and the tyranny of aboutness.  Colberg makes the obvious point that any collection is going to be about something, but seems to have tired of collections of less than stellar images held together by little more than a (perhaps hackneyed) theme.  On the one hand, he seems to be advocating for more spontaneity, on the other for greater attention to image making.

What struck me was:

I want to get the task to unpack what might be going on, instead of having it handed.

Which seems to call for not necessarily superbly crafted images, but images that - singly or as a group - ask for deeper or repeated inspection.  Perhaps what he tires of is the obvious, and longs for is a bit more mystery.

http://cphmag.com/aboutness/

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Shooting at the Steps: Tbilisi

I had about half an hour to kill before the English-speaking guide would be ready for my tour of the national treasures, so I wandered back to the park at Liberty Square, parked myself in front of the steps leading down to a pedestrian underpass, and shot at most everything that went by.  It was an exercise in little more than passing time resulting in 50+ images more to process.  Individually they are not much to look at, so I put them together in the hopes they might be in the composite.  What I discovered that day is that almost no one objects to a camera pointed at them on the street.  One person said, "Why?," in passing, but the only ones who stopped were those who wanted to pose. 

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Review: Workshop: Shoot the Street With David Nightingale (08 April 2016

The instructor asked me at the end of the evening, “Was today useful for you?”  I answered in the affirmative, even though I had some reservations. I was tired and it didn’t seem appropriate to get into a discussion as there were a number of other students still in the classroom who might want to say their farewells or ask a follow-up question.

Book review: Nagar, T. (2012). Any camera anywhere: The new street photographer's manifesto

Nagar, T. (2012). Any camera anywhere: The new street photographer's manifesto. Lewes: Ilex.

Think of this book as Street Photography for Dummies. It provides a suitable introduction for those with no background, or those who have just started and may be curious about some of the problems they have encountered in their practice.  Anyone interested in topics of art, aesthetics, history, or philosophy should look elsewhere.

As befitting an introductory text, it has been designed for the least informed audience.  Each page is a self-contained topic, with little chunks of text and lots of images.  It's like a book made from a slide show.  Fortunately, page design and image selection is quite good, so even if you don't get much from the text, it looks good and has quite a high quotient of interesting images.  Topics covered include practical matters of practice, such as how to dress and behave when photographing strangers on the street, camera selection, subject matter, location, and composition, among others.  By far the best section is the gallery of photographers that makes up the last quarter of the book.

Regarding the manifesto, it is fairly well summarized in the title:  any camera, anywhere.  Nagar subscribes to a democratic conception of street photography in which no special technology is required and in which all subjects are image worthy, though at one point she makes the rather exaggerated claim of street photography being a way of life.  I wonder what that might entail?

Tanya Nagar is a 20-something, London-based amateur photographer.  You can read an interview with her here.

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First publication?

As a result of my last blog post about making a photobook, I've been contacted regarding the use of my images for an upcoming book project on Dubai neighborhoods.  This is the first expression of commercial interest in my images and right now I'm feeling very good about my myself and my work. Let's see how this develops.  

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Making a Photobook in the UAE: Zno (formerly Artisan)

The Zno (Artisan) book left, Riot right

Last month I curated a collection of images of Dubai neighborhoods to test the work of online photobook service Artisan, which has since changed name to Zno.  They currently offer a $5.00 trial on a 6x8 (grammatically misnomered) lay-flat book of 20 pages, a similar size to what I ordered previously from competing services.  For more about those, see this blog post.

Zno provides an online design application that was fairly easy to use, but may require a little tinkering if you have unusual needs. As with my last experiment, I used a plain background and only one image per page.  Unfortunately, I didn’t discover until near the end how to format all pages with one command, and so manually resized all 20 images. This was not a huge inconvenience, but if you are doing a large project, or one using multiple images per page, be prepared to spend a little time getting things set up.  I did not try Zno’s help services, so cannot comment on their speediness or usefulness in assisting with these kinds of issues.  Upload of 22 images at 300 dpi (20 interior pages + front and back covers) was relatively quick and easy, and moving images around within the design software quite effortless.  My project was submitted 20 March, I received confirmation of shipment the next day, and DHL delivered the package a week later on 27 March.  With $5.00 shipping, the book came to $10.00 total.  Normal pricing for this product appears to be $35.00 (shipping included).

Exhibit Review: The Traveling Museum of the Caucasus

During my one-week stay in Tbilisi, I had the great fortune to attend a temporary exhibit (now closed) at the Museum of Georgia featuring the photographic work of Alexander Roinashvili, a 19th century ethnographer popularly known as Georgia’s first photographer.  He was, it seems, interested mostly in the documentary function of the camera, which he carried across Georgia recording the folk ways of the country’s many villages, towns and cities.  He worked in a variety of genres to document all manner of life, from landscape to portrait to still life.  He was as well a collector of artifacts, amassing a huge collection of tools, weapons, clothing, furniture, and other items of everyday life, many of which were on display at last month’s exhibit, along with a selection of photos, largely landscapes and portraits.  While the collection on display was quite impressive, I was somewhat disappointed in the relative lack of images compared to artifacts, but otherwise thrilled to learned about such an important, resourceful, and dedicated photographer.  A two-volume set of images has been published in Georgia, and before better sense prevailed I almost bought one. For those that might be interested in exploring, two useful web links are provided below.

Seven Days in Tbilisi

27 March 

Tbilisi was intended as a week of photography.  I believe the idea was to engage in intensive shooting over the course of five or six days to deepen my practice and strengthen stamina and commitment.  I had my idea, made my reservations, but the trip was weeks away and I got involved in other things.

Then, it seems, I was in Tbilisi.