August 2009
55 posts
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Interview: Tod Papageorge by Richard B. Woodward →
Photos by Tod Papageorge
W Are the mistakes that your students are prone to now the same mistakes that students were prone to when you were teaching back in the late ‘60s?
TP No. I think now that, in general—and this includes a lot of what I see in Chelsea even more than what I see from students at Yale—there’s a failure to understand how much richer in surprise and creative possibility the...
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Review - Cy Twombly at MOMUK
Paintings by Cy Twombly
I’ve begun my dutiful pilgrimage through the storehouses of human culture by beginning at the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien. It’s a modernist building in gorgeous slate gray stone panels. Overall it looks like a badly cut chocolate cake. The main exhibition is a big retrospective of Cy Twombly.
I took some rough notes:
He has an amazing sense...
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Link: Helen Vendler - A Life of Learning (pdf) →
A lovely intellectual autobiography by Helen Vendler. She is unfailingly honest and touching. Here she is on her purpose:
Still, to clarify to oneself and then to others, in a reasonable and explicit way, the imaginative novelty of a poem and to give evidence of its technical skill isn’t an easy task. I’ve been brought to mute frustration by it when I know intuitively that something...
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New Work - An Architectural Survey of the Human... →
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Oh my god, oh my god. You’ve been pinching pennies for this all winter: the hottest new work from the depths of Dhaka. It’s here, in all its manic glory. Faces, millions of new faces.
I cut down from about 900 photos. As usual, I don’t know what’s it all really about but maybe it’s about this:
The pictures are a hedonistic...
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Aphorisms 13 - 22 August 2009
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Don’t wear your learning too lightly. It may fly off in violent conditions that are so common now.
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The world doesn’t have any compassion for the artist when he most needs it, but is too generous when he needs it least.
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Films are great. There’s money, women, power, fame, freedom, emotion. But, I can’t work the process of making sausages. You need a big factory and a lot of...
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The Rise and Fall of Annie Liebovitz →
Photo by Annie Liebovitz
The influence of celebrity culture is perversely powerful; perhaps more from the inside than the outside. This is exactly the type of photographer I have nightmares about becoming. Well, not really, I’d manage my money better and become filthy rich bitches! And I do want to give commercial work a go (just like I want to give all forms of photography, except concert and...
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Papageorge on Evans' Influence on Robert Frank →
Photo by Robert Frank
Papageorge is one of the good ones. He has a slight academic tic and gets lost in the extravagance of his rhetoric which just, won’t, let, you, breathe. But he has substantial and often unique things to say. Thankfully he doesn’t tend to the bilious prose of the academicians. It’s funny to think of him hanging out with Winogrand. Seems they’d be chalk and cheese, or jute...
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Aphorisms 12 - 19 August 2009
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The biggest problems in my psyche, women (they either don’t love me or they love me too much), my father (he doesn’t know how to show me that he loves me), and my ambition (the love isn’t reciprocal). How very unique!
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Art is built on the mundane foundation of discipline. The discipline to go out and work when you’re sick. When it’s raining. The discipline of skipping a...
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Shooting Notes - 18 August 2009 (with photos)
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A day of pleasurable failure. Yesterday was the heaviest night of rain that I’ve seen in Bangladesh. The streets were in a deep flood. Most of the short shooting night was spent carrying an umbrella around and trying to shoot one handed in the dark. Not much to write home about. 85 photos.
I leave on the the 20th, so it was great to...
Photo Note - Love Potions
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This group of young men are being sold snake oil. The shaman-salesman is selling love potions and they are listening intently, with groaning adolescent lust. In the gloom they exude the heated, rabid desire of the male virgin.
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Shooting Notes - 17 August 2009 (with photos)
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A night of focus. I went back to the welders in Mohammedpur to add to the photo note that I’d put up previously, and that was successful. I covered less ground, but took more time and it was ultimately a very productive night. I’m comfortable with how many photos I have for the night set. Worked from 7pm to 10:00pm. 265 photos.
Two...
Photo Note - The Schizophrenia of Little Bits of...
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The mental disorder of light continues.
The power of the photograph to slow things down is crucial in revelation. We’re being shown something that is beyond our humanity, that which we cannot see ourselves, that which transcends our senses. This very definition of magic is a...
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Helmut Newtown Interview with Frank Horvat →
Photo by Helmut Newton
Frank Horvat : I don’t know much about your life, but I remember the impression you made on me in the fifties, when we first met. You were a very regular guy, very disciplined. You did the work you were supposed to do, and you did it well. We used to hand jobs to each other, when one of us was too busy to accept them. Then, in the late sixties, you started...
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Thomas Ruff Interview with Daniel Birnbaum →
Photo by Thomas Ruff
No. Cologne was really developing more and more into a party town and a place where artists could show their work and make money. For most of us it was a kind of parallel universe that we looked on with some skepticism, because the galleries in Cologne in the mid- to late ’80s still showed very little interest in what we were doing. But one cannot really go out and...
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Essay - A Run-of-the-Mill Guide To Breakups
I wanted to write up some notes and procedures on how to break up a relationship. I’ve been through my fair share recently, and I think I can provide a thoroughly imaginative, yet mundane, step by step guide.
Make it dramatic!
Really you don’t get that many goes, and rarely do you get such a willing participant in a drama. Start failing your arms about, undo your pants, throw it at them. Make...
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Website Updates - 17 August 2009
I put up the Sightings of Some Silent, Guarded Emotions set of burqa pictures. Good reaction. Highest hit count ever. About an hours work to change all the pages and have the thumbnails in place and to do testing etc. That’s quite good, and will keep me from spending time trying to automate any part of the process of putting up a new set.
202 posts from the beginning with 98 in July and 40 in...
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Essay - What's Next? Hint: Don't Know
I don’t know what’s next. Not knowing, that gnawing ambiguity, is what I’m slowly, very slowly, coming to like. Soon, I’ll love it. A friend sent me an email the other day saying she loved the night work, but wondered how effective I’ll be in Europe. Rightly, her concern was that the light will be different, the photos less ‘archaic.’ I’m worried about that too. It may be more anodyne, less...
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Shooting Notes - 15 August 2009 (with photos)
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A productive day of shooting at night. My pants and shoes are caked in mud from the back street markets in Mohammedpur. But the diversity and depth and complexity of lighting was beautiful to see and work with. One situation with metal workers was especially productive (see the previous photo note). Worked from 8pm to...
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Aphorisms 11 - 15 August 2009 (200th Post)
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Photography is ultimately for those obsessed with control. But of course, it’s only ever pleasurable to try to overpower those who don’t want to be controlled. Enter, reality.
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The people I like the best are those that love me, and those that hate me. In both cases I get to talk passionately about myself.
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Cinema is directing, it’s getting everybody together and in line. Photos are...
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Photo Note - Light Has a Personality Disorder
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Sometimes you wander into something so wonderful, so full of possibility that all is forgotten, and you start shooting madly. You try not to think about that moment again because the urge to run home and have a look at the photos would be overpowering. You finally do get home, and you have a look, and it’s more...
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Shooting Notes - 14 August 2009 (with photos)
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A throwback to the good old days. Well to a week ago. I shot during the day in gay old Gulistan. The familiar crush of the crowds, the speeds, the heat. But not much was produced. 191 photos.
Old technical issues (friends really) came to visit. Focus was off at the start as I hadn’t shot people close up for a week. It came back quickly but...
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Essay - On Dancing
Shooting on the streets is a blood sport. It’s an orchestral piece with highs and lows, of stillness, silence, then intense, sub-second movements. Often you’re stalking the streets, your prey, ready to catch it, aggressive. Or else you are dancing, languid, flowing in and out of the crowd, lightly, oily. Snapping without an eye on you. You feel the throb, the flow, the shifts in the heaving...
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William Faulkner - Paris Review Interview (pdf) →
INTERVIEWER Is there any possible formula to follow in order to be a good novelist? FAULKNER Ninety-nine percent talent … ninety-nine percent discipline … ninety-nine percent work. He must never be satisfied with what he does. It never is as good as it can be done. Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or...
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Shooting Notes - 12 August 2009 (with photos)
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Jams, jams, jams. When I finally got anywhere last night I actually got some good work done. A varied day with some afternoon and some night shooting. The area behind Nilkhet market has some interesting light things going on. A solid day of working with 237 photos.
I was in more populated...
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Photo Note - Revelations (or Ouch!)
One of the beautiful things about being in a country like Bangladesh is that things are revealed. Well, more that they aren’t hidden. In the West our concern for safety, procedure, and sense of propriety means that many things are off limits, difficult to see. But here things spill out onto the streets. Like this building site, where a horrendously dangerous environment has been created right on...
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Photo Note - Showing Off Your Deformity
The strategic evolution of the begging economy in Dhaka is fascinating to watch. Since everybody has now seen Slumdog Millionaire with its depiction of the systematic disabling of perfectly healthy children to be used for begging by organised criminals, the fact that we can do this to each other should be no surprise. Actually, it is the ultimate form of a market economy where the biggest...
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Photo Note - The Sweat of 5 Men
Ah, sweat. I could write a volume on sweat. Dhaka is a town where sweat intermingles. You walk onto a bus with your shirt drenched with your own sweat, but soon, you’re squelching onto others, and you walk off the bus with the distinct smell and wetness of five other men. It’s pretty fucking gross. Your shirt dries hard. But another phenomenon caught my eye the other day: I couldn’t figure out...
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Shooting Notes - 11 August 2009 (with photos)
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Got into a little disagreement in a back alley with four burly Bangladeshis (oxymoronic, I know) late at night. Survived. A late start to some night shooting meant I didn’t have a lot of time. A fairly unremarkable night otherwise. Just in the churning out process at the moment. 170 photos. Worked outside from 8:30pm to 11pm.
The most...
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Aphorisms 10 - 12 August 2009
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This is the whole truth of creativity: everything is built on tiny little unimpressive pieces.
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Consistency is for the dumb, weak, and angry. Except when it’s not.
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An editing tip: can you think of something that would make it better? No? It’s in. Yes? It’s not good enough.
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I don’t want to treat the East as somewhere exotic. There are differences, but I want to show the smallest...
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Essay - The Antithetic Form, or 'Wow! Is That An...
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Even now, after the diarrhetic flow of images that all of us see all of the time, there are still pictures that shock us, that make us look without recognition. But it isn’t a really a matter of ‘even now’, but of ‘especially now’. The tropes for the mainstream stopped flowing and solidified a long time ago. And like solids, there is still some flow, some...
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Photo Note - Drunk on Poverty
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After seeing the extreme degradation that humanity is subjected to on the streets of Dhaka; after seeing the very hellish depths of human suffering, what you really want is a drink. No. Not a chance. It’s a Muslim country and unless you ferment your own, or live the heady life of an expat (instead of the ragged life of an unemployed try-hard) you’re out of luck. But strangely enough,...
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Photo Note - Pissing
I have been watching Bangladeshi men very closely whilst they’ve been pissing. In Islam, it is prohibited to pee standing up. Of course It’s best not to question these things, but the answer usually is that it’s dog-like or something. Really. In any case I often stare with a jealous look on my face as someone squats down on their haunches, and whilst fully panted somehow still manages to pee....
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Shooting Notes - 10 August 2009 (with photos)
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I high-tailed it back from the sticks so that I could get some work in. On the bus back I started taking some anti-landscapes (portrait aspect) out of the bus window and ended up taking 450 of them. Most were throwaways but it was exciting and some worked well in detail. After I got off the bus, I shot some more nightshots. Total 568 shots.
Lots of...
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Shooting Notes - 8 August 2009 (with photos)
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A good day split between afternoon Archiface shots which went very well because the light was spectacular and Nightshots later which also coughed up quite a number of usable pictures. 268 photos.
Technically things went beautifully in the afternoon. I totally weakened from my solid diet of rice and curries and had to have a pizza...
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Photo Note - 9 Heads (and Some Torso)
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I’ve thrown all restraint aside. I present, 9 heads of people you don’t know and will never meet. But look closely, you’ll see hairs, scars, smiles, beards that look like a shedding cat, shocking front teeth, innocence, jowls caked with fat, self-satisfaction, droopy thespian eyes,...
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Photo Note - Lightworks
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In the dark, photos are even more clearly meditations on how light works, how it behaves, how it emotes. With the smallest, deftest grains and sparks a whole universe is conjured. It always shocks to see how little you need to achieve a visual ecstasy.
In these pictures, something is ending.
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Shooting Notes - 7 August 2009 (with photos)
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After three painful days out with a fever, I finally made it out for a measly 100 shots. And they weren’t great shots either, but it was enough. It was a start. Worked from 12 to 3pm.
It was a Friday after a pretty significant religious day (called Shobobhor night where Muslims pray all night) and the roads and gathering places were deserted. It was eery to...
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Anthony Flint on Jane Jacobs' First Years in NY →
Within weeks of arriving, Jane realized that breaking into journalism was going to take time and that, in the meantime, she’d need to support herself. She began poring over employment agency listings looking for any clerical position she could find, and soon settled into a routine. Each morning she would walk from her apartment building, across the Brooklyn Bridge, and into lower Manhattan,...
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Bruce Handy on Mad Men and Matthew Weiner →
Photo by Annie Leibovitz
Not that the staff’s passion for minutiae stops at bird-dogging historical accuracy. I asked David Carbona, the show’s composer, about a lovely piece of music he used to score a small but key scene in the second-season opener (Episode 201, by the production’s accounting), in which Don, intoxicated for once by his wife, watches a mink-clad Betty descend a hotel’s grand...
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Tom Wood Interview (Issue Magazine) →
Photo by Tom Wood
The biggest fear is to be a flash in the pan. To get tired, or bored, or feel like photography isn’t really an important thing, or not important enough.
There is so much peace and permanence in hearing Tom Wood speak on his long monastic efforts at seeing. I’m pretty sure it hasn’t been easy for him. Time is never easy, things happen, you lose jobs,...
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Some Quotes from Seize The Day by Bellow
If you could only take pictures of things like this, and take them in this way:
The Ansonia, the neighbourhood’s great landmark, was built by Stanford White. It looks like a baroque palace from Prague or Munich enlarged a hundred times, with towers, domes, huge swells and bubbles of metal gone green from exposure, iron fretwork and festoons. Black television antennae are densely planted on...
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Photo Note - OLWA
I was despondent. I thought my musical life was on hold whilst I was in Bangladesh. I thought that until I ran into the OLWA (pronounced Hola!). These bitches rock it. Rapping on the streets of Dhaka they’re super-literate, talking about Marx and Engels and shit. I talked to Rani (pictured) who started telling me about how dnb really went subterranean and hella depressing in the late 90s and so...
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Larry Clark Interview (with Jutta Koether) →
Photo by Larry Clark
I’ve always respected Larry Clark and although I’ve always liked his work, I’ve never loved it. I can see how good he is at being there, at feeling, at telling the story, and even visually, but his story really isn’t my story. Everything I feel when I look at his photographs I feel at a distance. Also, It’s unfortunate that because of how teenage drug culture...
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New Work - Sightings of Some Guarded, Shapeless... →
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It has been a while coming, but part of the last month and half’s work has ended in a set of photos titled ‘Sightings of Some Guarded, Shapeless Emotions’. I think it’s all about desire, or the profane, or power, or who knows really?
(If you’re one of those people who can’t help but ask, ‘but what does it mean? What are you trying to...
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Birnbaum v. James Wood →
JW: … When Virginia Woolf read Chekhov she said something like, “The emphasis falls on such unexpected places so that you hardly realize that it is an emphasis at all.” And that’s what I very much love about Chekhov is this extraordinary subtlety and unpredictability. That the sentimental moment is always avoided, just at the last second. … RB: In the 19th century, was there that kind of...
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Shooting Notes - 3 August 2009 (with photos)
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I ended up being productive despite some heavy barriers. I was sick in a comic variety of ways but ended up shooting around New Market for 3 hours and shot 230 photos. There was more than the usual number good shots although it didn’t feel like that at the time.
The light environment around New Market ran counter to the painterly,...
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Photo Note - Work Gangs
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The night does not get cooler here. The heat persists. Their sweat runs. You can hear the chants of these work gangs as you walk past the hundreds of building sites that litter the city. They’re backs glistening, they look like dark machines, programmed for limited movement. They’re doing the strangest of tasks, breaking down bricks, or sifting piles of sand. They don’t...
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On Taking Art Slowly, Michael Kimmelman →
Photo by Valerio Mezzanotti
The young women were unusual for stopping. Most of the museum’s visitors passed through the gallery oblivious.
A few game tourists glanced vainly in guidebooks or hopefully at wall labels, as if learning that one or another of these sculptures came from Papua New Guinea or Hawaii or the Archipelago of Santa Cruz, or that a work was three centuries old or maybe four...
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What? Am I in the New York Times? →
Photo by Michel Euler
It was funny running into this picture after having taken 700 that are very much like it. For a moment I thought it was mine. But of course it isn’t mine, looking closer you can tell.
It’s strange, the constant fear you have as a photographer. The naive notion that anyone with a camera standing where you were could’ve taken the photo is an insidious...
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Shooting Notes - 2 August 2009 (with photos)
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Jolly good stuff tonight. The exploration of darkness continues but now with some solidifying of purpose. There are some hints towards what I want to achieve in the night. A restrained, painterly look is taking precedence. The subject remains: light. 229 photos.
I shot around some suburbs (slums really) and it felt like I was foraging around in people’s homes....