“People, for many years, going all the way back to my deceased parents, have often asked and questioned me why I spent so much time studying theology, if I always had the intention of being a photographer. What is the connection, what is the purpose?”
[...]
“My photographs may be my answers, responses, or questions to these questions. Going just to study photography would not provide the right questions. I needed much more.”
Winogrand’s is the work of a serious artist (though he’d cleanly deny it) dedicated to seeing his project through to completion, even if, in his own case, it wasn’t exactly clear what the project was, or how it might end. Hard work would figure it out. Hard work would leave behind the four foot high piles of prints, the hundreds of thousands of negatives.
Winogrand’s alertness, easily misread as impatience or distraction, was most likely a state of hyper awareness, in which any small flash of visual stimuli might lead to something both wonderful and surprising, and you better be ready to capture it so Let’s Do This. And yet, while Winogrand emerged from the darkroom with photographs that delineate the attentions of a man clearly focused on incongruities writ large; hypocrisies of a nation; the impossibilities of connection; illuminating the surface tension between us all that keeps us apart; it’s easy to imagine him saying, “yeah, but it’s just a picture of a guy on the street.”
Winogrand’s omnivorousness for the image is what drove his greatest successes, like the couple with the chimps. Which is not to say that anyone with eagerness and the right equipment will become a great photographer. But I think Winogrand’s spirit lies less with the academics, and more with the kid who just got his older brother’s hand-me-down Canon Rebel and is about to stumble across a copy of The Animals in the school library during study hall.
Life of Noemi
ABOVE AND BELOW, from (“Life of Noemi“)
© Eric Setiawan, 2009
We don’t take pictures because we want to know what we’re seeing now… we already know that. We take pictures because it makes us feel good to know that years later, when nostalgia for that moment comes around, we’ll be ready.
— Seth Godin
“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’”
— Martin Luther King, Jr. (via)
Nina Katchadourian
TOP TO BOTTOM, from (“Sorted Books Project“)
© Nina Katchadourian
The Sorted Books project began in 1993 years ago and is ongoing. The project has taken place in many different places over the years, ranging form private homes to specialized public book collections. The process is the same in every case: culling through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom. The final results are shown either as photographs of the book clusters or as the actual stacks themselves, shown on the shelves of the library they were drawn from. Taken as a whole, the clusters from each sorting aim to examine that particular library’s focus, idiosyncrasies, and inconsistencies — a cross-section of that library’s holdings. At present, the Sorted Books project comprises more than 130 book clusters.
Waiting For The Bus
TOP TO BOTTOM, from (“Waiting For The Bus“)
© Eric Setiawan, 2009
If you’re curious, yes, I changed the previous title, “Between Bandung & Bekasi“, because I realize that this is not a story about my trip (from Bandung to Bekasi and back again) but more about the people (including me) waiting for the bus. This series is special because I’ve been doing this — the waiting and the trip — to see my wife and daughter in Bekasi every week for the past six months. I hate to wait though, especially when there’s no bus schedule and it’s raining.
Looks like somebody forgot about us
Standing on the corner
Waiting for a bus
Say hey mister driver man
Don’t be slow
‘Cause I got somewhere I got to go— Waiting For The Bus by Violent Femmes
Ch’ng Yaohong
TOP TO BOTTOM, from (“We Don’t Live Here Anymore“)
© Ch’ng Yaohong
Yaohong is a Singaporean photographer (and also a web designer, programmer, blogger, doodler) famous for his Asian Photography Blog but he also takes interesting pictures. I especially love this series, “We Don’t Live Here Anymore“, about his old house.
In December 2008, my family moved out of our house. It was more of a necessity forced by life’s circumstances. The place contained many memories, eight years worth of tears and joys in a tumultuous period of my life. The project revolved around the bits and pieces of us left behind. After our departure, would the walls still remember us?
Unfortunately, this work-in-progress can never be revisited.
Rania Matar
TOP TO BOTTOM (“Family Moments (2002-2005)“)
© Rania Matar
These are photographs of my children: my children living their lives and just being themselves; my children who live in a world of their own, a world where time doesn’t matter and where the simplest thing can be a source of joy. They are happy and unselfconscious, with minds open to the wonders of the world. These photographs document the magical world of their childhood expressed in the simple moments of their daily life, the moments that happen in every family and that often pass by quickly and unnoticed, the sad moments, the happy moments and the normal nothing-is-happening moments, because the magic is always there.
I photograph them living their lives, playing, dressing up, blowing bubbles, running around naked, painting their bodies, being hurt, laughing, crying and just being children. I photograph them to freeze these magic instants and make them eternal through a collection of images which provide a truthful and intimate documentary of their childhood before they turn into adults and the magic is gone. They are the unselfconscious models fully focused on their own self and their own world. No multi-tasking, no rushing and no time constraint. This is for the world of adults. Time stops as I photograph them or maybe it flies or maybe it just doesn’t matter.
Zubin Pastakia
TOP TO BOTTOM, from (“The Cinemas Project“)
© Zubin Pastakia
This series visually traces the lives of Bombay’s single-screen cinema halls.
On the one hand, this collection of images is a repository of the architectural form and detail of these buildings that range from the classic to the idiosyncratic. These halls seem to exist today in defiance of the generic aesthetic and cultural experience of the city’s new multiplexes.
To look at these halls merely nostalgically, however, would be to deny their existence as lived spaces whose contours have been shaped and inscribed over time by interactions with both audiences and inhabitants. As sites of escape, anonymity, mystery, fantasy and residence, the relationship that many of these halls share with the city changed significantly as colonial Bombay metamorphosed into post-industrial Mumbai.
Between Bandung & Bekasi
I will start to compile and organize a new series in 2010. This is something I’ve been doing for months and will be doing for a while longer.
Making trips from Bandung to Bekasi and back, every week.
But this is not a journal of the trip though. This is a story of people stranded together on the street side while waiting for arrival of the bus. And you know that waiting can be a pain, especially when it’s way too long. Lucky for me, I have my camera. Snaps away. More pictures to come later.