1

Cinema is the greatest art form of the last century BECAUSE it has had the greatest constraints.

2

How you tell an idiot filmmaker: he isn’t talking about what’s actually on screen, he’s talking about follow focus’s and file formats. Another way to tell an idiot film maker: he isn’t talking about what’s on screen, but about other idiot filmmakers.

3

Bresson called his actors Models. Ozu did a single line of dialog in 72 takes. They realised that acting must be obliterated. What is left is only the person who has chosen to call themselves an actor.

4

Film is so hard to make that the unambitious consider it enough to have made one at all. But the demands of significant art remains, what are you saying that has never been said before, and why hasn’t it been said in this way? Only people with small penises point out that origniality is an impossible task. They’re missing the point.

5

If you haven’t seen it, heard it or felt it then don’t write it, it’s certain to be second rate.

6

Resolution (both camera and narrative) is the haven of the uncreative.

7

Oh, you want a happy ending? Die.

• aphorisms

Posted 6 months ago

1

I have grown disinterested in facts, events, and happenings. I want to catch the inbetweens, the unnoticed, the unobserved. The feeling just before or after something happens is far more interesting to me then the climactic spike. And I distrust the effectiveness of words, of language to do justice to the complexity of reality. It is often the visual, the atmospheric aural, the passing of time that gets closest to the truth. More often then not, words are merely a disingenuous cover. Of course, sometimes they are the truth, but often, that’s when they are overlooked.

2

Stories are for children. But we are all children.

3

Although film looks like reality, it is not. Look outside the frame that it’s in and see that it is not. Although the two are not the same, the way we deal with both is very similar. We try to impute logical cause and effect flows on both reality and film. But significant human progress comes from mysteries, from questions we cannot answer, from breakdowns in logic. And so the highest ambition in film art must be to confound perception and thought, to reject the causual flow to whisper at unknowables. But that doesn’t give you license to confuse the watcher’s being, their sense of rhythm.

4

Characters should always be saying what they don’t mean.

5

Characters should rarely know what they are doing or why.

6

Characters should distrust themselves.

7

The narrator is the enemy.

8

Suspense comes from the the breaking or at least blurring of the causal flow. But the audience has to care first. And the audience cares for themselves. Hitchcock knew this well.

• aphorisms

Posted 6 months ago

1

Don’t wear your learning too lightly. It may fly off in violent conditions that are so common now.

2

The world doesn’t have any compassion for the artist when he most needs it, but is too generous when he needs it least.

3

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 hands.

4

I believe in home schooling. For adults.

5

The worst thing is to be beaten comprehensively by yourself. Look at that poor soul, Robert Frank. Under-perform first up!

6

Everything has been done forever. Drawings begat pictures. Poetry begat prose. Theater begat cinema. Nothing is the ‘new’ art. Only the newest. And that’s not much to crow about.

7

Harold Bloom is no more a man. He has turned himself into a great, grieving mound of tears. He needed to for his criticism. What a good critic he is.

8

Nobody likes the age that they are in. The ones that fit want to have lived in an age before, and the ones that don’t want to live in a future that they’ve created.

9

Another thing that religion gives us: many reasons to despise and belittle ourselves. A necessary human trait for the best of us. You want to start out unworthy. Tommy Wilhelm is a good, but failed, test case. So is Marmeladov, that wily ascetic.

10

If you can’t convincingly argue for the opposite view of a position that you hold then you don’t really understand what’s going on. Some tests: argue both sides of why male gang rape is ok; next: rape of a female by a male; next, child rape. Of course, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a position. That would just be immature.

• aphorisms

Posted 11 months ago

1

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!

2

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 party. Of saying no to pussy. And the toughest: the discipline of working when you’re bored of it.

3

Study sado-masochistic erotica. Watch their faces. When you’re working, make yours and your subjects faces, like theirs.

4

Start working before you know what you’re working on.

5

There’s something deeply unsatisfying about being just a consumer. It feels like you’re doing something but you really aren’t.

6

What disturbs me most about myself is I think about my career as a photographer more than what I want to photograph. The only saving grace is that I don’t dream about cameras.

7

Both you and the critic are fighting for space in the work. Leave the cunt only enough room to breathe. No more, no less. Boring artists give up everything, bad artists give up nothing.

8

That all is relative, is a simple, childish observation. Maturity is creating and coming to believe in necessary lies to overcome relativity. Of course, maturity is not necessary. And if you are going to be childish, at least play once in while.

9

Going to school to learn if you like something is impossible. What they teach you is not the same as the thing itself. If you must go to school, go do something you already like; something where you already know everything. Go and do something in which you cannot be hurt.

10

Tension in a photograph is really about expectation. Something is about to happen. Of course it never does, so the tension is always jarringly imminent. Or the action has just happened. Now the tension is in waiting for an explanation. But there never is one.

11

It’s easier to take an interesting picture in the dark because then you can’t see anything. It’s harder to fuck it up.

• aphorisms

Posted 11 months ago

1

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.

2

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.

3

Cinema is directing, it’s getting everybody together and in line. Photos are acting, it’s about becoming alone.

4

You can always tell a photographer from his shoes. They are indistinguishable from those of a hobo.

5

As a photographer you are the loser kid left out of the game. Now you can either muscle in, or make dark witticisms from the side. Either way you’ll never go back for ice cream afterwards.

6

Being a photographer is like running the 100 meters to the adulation of the crowd then finding out you’re actually in a marathon. Fuck.

7

A revelation: I like who I am. I couldn’t have predicted that in my teens. I’m growing less angry at the world. The corollary could be that those who are angry at world, just don’t like themselves.

8

Suddenly, when you’re least aware, when you have the least amount of control, you do good work. It’s not your head that takes photographs, but your eyes and some muscles.

• aphorisms

Posted 11 months ago

1

This is the whole truth of creativity: everything is built on tiny little unimpressive pieces.

2

Consistency is for the dumb, weak, and angry. Except when it’s not.

3

An editing tip: can you think of something that would make it better? No? It’s in. Yes? It’s not good enough.

4

I don’t want to treat the East as somewhere exotic. There are differences, but I want to show the smallest differences I can find, so that people barely notice.

5

Looking at art is like eating. You can gorge, but it’ll make you sick and disinterested. In the end you’ll throw up and make a mess.

6

The secret is to be slower than everybody else.

7

It’s important to create a pipeline for work that respects how things are really created. It begins as a germ of an idea, and through various experiments and failures and successes grows to be something presentable. In your process create space to make and show the small pieces. It will all gather pace and size as it rolls down hill.

8

Really the thing you have to do before anything else is the thing that you don’t know how to do.

• aphorisms

Posted 11 months ago

A picture of my Grandmother

1

Reading about the art world is like reverse-therapy. But you still have to pay.

2

It helps if you are short sighted.

3

Photography that says too much about how the world should be is like the country bumpkin who smears the food all over his face. There’s nothing wrong with it ethically, it’s just a little inappropriate.

4

Is the most artistic thing you could be doing today being a government bank regulator? Yes. It probably is. How conceptual!

5

As a photographer, give up any desire, hopes and dreams to be successful. Of course, money and prestige aren’t success.

6

The greatest freedom that exists, is the freedom to not earn any money.

7

Pictures are poetry, and cinema is prose. Cats are dogs. And dogs are toothbrushes. Kind of.

8

Everything must now be told as a cruel joke. People expect to learn through humour. Smirk.

9

Be unsentimental. Nothing has produced more bad art than ‘feelings’. The very worst art has been produced by ‘social feelings’.

10

Bad art is unfailingly made by uninteresting people. That doesn’t work the other way around though.

• aphorisms

Posted 1 year ago

Walker Evans by Leo Rubinfien (link)

Walker Evans

An excellent article on Walker Evans. I knew he was a curmudgeon in life, but not that he was in his art. I took some notes, wrote some aphorisms as I was reading this:

1

His method was gathered from Flaubert. A meticulous hard gaze at the subject. A slow stocktake of what is there. But his meaning came from Baudelaire, the ‘spleen’, the distaste of what exists. Although, really it comes from a sadness in a culture where he is alien. Where he is uncomfortable, unloved, and unsuccessful.

2

He looked closely, and with hatred.

3

The second vainest man at his high school, he deplored what he couldn’t have. He railed against the poor, who have an authenticity, a care-freeness, and he railed against the rich, who have ease, culture, and respect. He was however, only the second vainest.

3

The spurned lover of life he was Miss Havisham with a camera.

4

Society always later misunderstands its artists for saints. And misunderstands its philosophers later as misanthropes. Society is right of course. During their lives, it is the other way around.

5

His revelation, that even a non style is a style, is a person, is the photographer. Austere, haughty, cold, calculating, hidden. He printed himself into books.

6

He always arrived late to the party. The beer was drunk and all the girls had paired off and were making noises in the bedrooms. He kicks down the mailbox and drives home longing and mournful. Is it him?

7

Using his hatred, his distaste as a great shield he walked off into America like Achillies. His heel was that he loved life.

8

Why don’t people realise that one must bite hardest at the hands that feeds it? Of course with soft, regretful eyes.

9

A physician, he burrowed through to the cause, rather than be distracted with symptoms. An axe murder he did harm.

10

By removing himself from the picture. He thought he could avoid success. He nearly did.

11

Walker Evans was a bright, sharp, piece of trash.

How awesome is AmericansuburbX? Really awesome. It has great taste. And with that taste it’s collecting articles and interviews which are interesting.

• walker evans
• aphorisms

Posted 1 year ago

Permalink

1

Without a camera you must be the most thoughtful, well read, cultured person you know. With a camera, you’re a dumb, pointing, drooling hick.

2

Photographers are like ex-girlfriends, thoughtful and calm one moment, and full of violent reactive action the next.

3

Photography is diarrhoea.

4

Photography says far less than words ever can. It is more ambiguous, more uncertain, and far more insecure. It can’t get inside someone’s head, build complex theories, or directly quote others. Thank god for photography.

5

For a photographer, settling somewhere is to be dying there.

6

To those who are ruing this modern age of technical ease, image clarity and anodyne detail: you’re still a mess, start snapping.

7

The best training for a photographer is the Karate Kid.

8

In a picture, how can you tell if someone is knifing someone or pulling a knife out? You can’t. Don’t get knifed with a photographer around. Call your local film school.

• aphorisms

Posted 1 year ago

1

I’m an architectural photographer. Of the human face.

2

A photographer is a passive aggressive, he desperately wants to show the world with its pants down, but must wait for the world to undo the buttons.

3

Randomness is a better guide for what you should do with your day than what you think you should do. I don’t mean the shallow randomness of the dice. I mean the intense randomness of doing exactly what you really want to do.

4

I’d like to go back to the seventh grade and start again. I feel that I’m now emotionally ready for high school.

5

Photography is an attempt at stopping time so that we can fulfil our natural desire to stare. But there is an inkling that we are staring at our navels.

6

Pictures aren’t printed on paper, they are printed on mirrors.

7

I don’t believe in participation. I don’t like it. But I do believe in understanding. Of course, to really understand something, you have to participate.

8

The role of the burqa in Islamic countries is deplorable. It dehumanises these women and makes them into shapeless objects. I want to fuck them with their burqas on. By denying something so essential as a human face, a body, it takes away all power from these women and trivialises their autonomy.

• aphorisms

Posted 1 year ago