New Year

Check out the happy new year post by Magnum. It contains pictures of new year eve parties in Wales, shot by Bruce Gilden! Now that's a christmas present!

Interview and some pictures with Tom Wood

Includes an essay. Everything is here. It's just a must see. Tom Wood has been for decades documenting daily life in Liverpool, and according to the essay, not getting much recognition to start with. I've heard of him many times referenced as an influence.





Happy new year, by the way!

Merry Christmas...

We are all getting older, fatter and uglier. Some people die and others get sick. Christmas is the time to remind ourselves of how much things can change in a year. And it's usually easier to see how they go wrong if as me you return home only for this time of year. Plus listening to depressive Sibelius christmas carrols doesn't help a lot. So welcome to the time dedicated to think about those you miss, those that departed, those you met again and ponder over and over what the next year will bring as it's getting closer and your pockets are emptier and your belly -filled with vodka and beer- brings you the least glamorous of thoughts.



So, I wish you´re visited by the three ghosts of Dickens and they make you think, overthink, separate the body from the soul, as time for that we don't have everyday. Not at least with this great moody dark nights. Merry christmas. I hope you make up with your past and future, and most importantly, with yourself.

Picture by Raoul Gatepin, who told me to post one of his pictures with my wishes.

Music. If you click on the play button on this page you can listen to "On hanget korkeat, nietokset". My favourite Sibelius carrol.

Spotlight... Igor Moukhin

I´m a big fan of Igor Moukhin´s photography and I casually discovered him through his Flickr page. The reason behind why I like the images seems to be that in a way they are pure photography for me. They are direct, playful and not charged with cliches and artifacts. There´s a certain naturality in them. Igor somehow manages to shoot like a witness of life, that every so often strikes the right key. There is that casual feel about them that I love...











And I have a bad feeling that I´m misrepresenting him when I´m choosing images to show here. I´d rather go and give a visit at his webpages. Ok, back to topic. There´s even an article written about Igor over here with a lot more information in it that I could ever give. For example, I already forgot to say that he´s Russian. And that he´s been documenting the life of his country since the 1980´s. Non stop. I´ll quote: "Born in Moscow in 1961 and Moscow-based ever since, Moukhin was an original member (1989-91) of the influential group Immediate Photography, founded by his contemporary, the artist, teacher, and curator Alexei Shulgin." So yeah, he´s not some random guy you bump into in flickr it seems.











That´s the sort of stuff that makes me want to go out and take pictures. The sense of freedom and immediacy of the 35mm camera. No bullshit. Just reality hitting straight from the world into the film plane. Anywhere, anytime. It´s a pity I don´t have more to say really. I´ve been thinking about posting this for maybe two or three weeks now, and I just don´t have any words to add. Just a few images and reminding that I already used one of his images to start a post about tilted photographs.

Life: largest zombie walk of Wales

"Some may argue the sight of zombies roaming the streets of Cardiff after dark is a common sight." - BBC News.





I ended up at the largest zombie walk of Wales last week with Anthony. I really enjoyed getting my face painted and walk around snapping pictures. Late at night I met David and Nicola as well and we went to drink to The Great Western. It's an amazing place to take pictures. There were some zombies there. There were zombies in McDonalds too. They were everywhere.

Picture by me.

Brains

"You mustn't know too much," he says, describing how he captures "the decisive moment" on film. "There's nothing to know. Cats know more than human beings on the subject. Cats sniffle: sniff-sniff. Intuition. People use brains too much. Brains are not used for making love."

Henri Cartier Bresson when interviewed by David Friend.

That does sound to me as the closes you can get to create a novel image. Forget thinking too much and explore the medium. When you explore you make mistakes, and some of them are by far more interesting than the average good shot. It's all about the interesting mistakes and the things that are a bit different. Once you have localized those best mistakes you can follow them, and create a new imaginery out of those new sets of ideas. Bad pictures don't follow the rules, great pictures break them.

"Being a (good) photographer is about taking good pictures, IMO. The bad ones don't matter; you learn from them and edit them out. If you don't allow yourself to risk taking a bad picture, your photographs will be staid, safe, boring. Simply trying not to fail is no way to succeed. It sounds suspiciously like a way of finding comfort by lowering the bar."

I read that here. Makes sense. Unless you make a living out of a formula. Shoot, get it wrong, explore. Later you'll have time to edit out and develop. My next toast will be to anarchy.

The so called tilt

This stunning shot by Igor Moukhin has an equally stunning comment by a viewer in flickr. The text, in its original form says:

The horizon is slanted and that is a NO NO for good photography.
By the way, the lady was shot in a very unfavorable pose. I am sure she
did not like it.

Don't know. If that's a reason to bin the picture, I'm a bit shocked. All that surreality in a single stroke, even the dynamism given by the slight slant of what would be an ordinary line in the image. As usually, after reading such a thing I decided to straighten another picture taken by Garry Winogrand. Lets go for it...


Before



After




I don't know about you, but the straight image leaves me a bit cold. Yes, anybody could have shot that. Some woman inside a phone booth. One leg up, a bit sexy maybe.

Lets see the original again...





Isn't there something interesting about it? It's sort of 'cheekily wrong' but at the same time it draws you into completely new parts of the image which follow with different ideas. First, I notice the legs a lot more than I did before. The woman suddenly looks as if she's really locked inside the booth. Her legs are the only close-to-vertical pillar that draws my eyes in the image. She's more separated from her context than in the straight image. If that was a real hill you could think that she's standing on the wall of the phone booth. All the people in the background are walking uphill as well and we have that face on the top left corner. If the shot was straight we would have seen too much of the sidewalk on the right, even more people. And I like all those diagonals of the booth, a bit of which covers the face of the girl. Just lovely. The straight one is just boring in comparison.

The whole thing is that the image itself is self contained. When we walk around we can tilt our head in any direction and still everything looks at level with the horizon. I guess that it's not only due to our vestibular system in action, probably we have learned to normalize our horizon when seeing. Photography allows you to put a frame around an image, for the first time creating a tilt that can not be normalized as it's inside a square. This is a whole new world of visual experiences that can be explored. The hard thing is to create an image that in the reference coordinates of the image is balanced and natural, even if it does not agree with the references of the real world. Somewhere the tilted image (relative to world coordinates) has to be 'anchored' well enough for it to not result disturbing.

- What's with the tilt in your pictures?
- What tilt?

Rock on.