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 2 years 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 2 years 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 2 years 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 2 years 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 2 years ago

1

Looking too much at the work of others is like looking at their genitals, it passes the time, but is essentially bad for your self esteem.

2

There is a natural tendency within me to flee stasis. The funny thing is that because the deeper self won’t allow it, the shallower part of me often dreams about it, desires it. It has been a recurring plan of mine to be ‘forgotten about’. I meant that I wanted to be one of those people you just didn’t hear about for 15 years and then met for 10 minutes and nothing much had happened to them. But I realise now that I didn’t want others to forget me, I wanted to forget myself. In life, there is a deep, counter-vailing desire to not exist. I think the reason I hate Buddhism so much is because they are too obvious in stating that fact. That nibbana is what we all really want, an absence of everything, especially of the pain, and constant effort of living. Perhaps this is what Winogrand means when he tells us how he feels like he doesn’t exist on a good day of shooting.

3

All criticisms are correct. All solutions are incorrect. But since we live tenuously, we must prefer the solutions. Political systems are a constant effort in finding bearable incorrect solutions.

4

Like walking is a constant state of rescuing yourself from falling, life is a constant attempt at not dying. Death being the natural tendency of all living things (by definition!). We must always, with every breath, with every morsel of hard won food, with every disease fought, lift ourselves from death. To love life one must love effort. There is no greater truth. The lovely thing is that we have, through survival of the keenest, gotten very, very good at convincing ourselves that life is worth it. The best of us have slowly fallen in love with the world and each other. The worst of us have imagined a world far worse than this one.

• genitals
• aphorisms

Posted 2 years ago

Eugene Atget, St. Cloud, 1922

1

The overriding sense in Atget is that one is walking alone. There’s loneliness, but also an emotional tautness that can only come when no one else is around.

2

Seeing Atget is not to see Paris, but to be in it. In all it’s glorious boredom and buttoned down emotion.

3

Atget really just wanted a video camera.

4

Atget is so loveable because he was a lightweight. His camera only said what it saw. It didn’t spew forth Baudrillard.

5

Atget was democratic (although he was an aesthetic Marxist).

• eugene atget
• aphorisms

Posted 2 years ago

1

Look very closely at what the others are doing, and then make absolutely sure that you do something different. Preferably something that will make them laugh at you.

2

Talking about yourself is really quite like pissing on yourself.  In the end, you’re going to have to clean up.

3

If someone asks you what camera you use, ask them what hammer they use.

4

The act itself is it. There really isn’t anything else. It’s all right to only like it at the start, over time you will come to love it. As a caveat: love only comes about through work.

5

But what if I’m not interested in poor or black people? What do I photograph then?

6

Editing is choosing what you want to see.  It is seeing again, seeing more slowly, seeing more selectively. When you’re taking the photo, you have minimal choice.

7

A face is is a face is a face, is a collection of pixels.

• aphorisms
• writing

Posted 2 years ago

1

Often what is only half seen, darkly, is clearer and more transparent to the heart than a ‘better’ photo. I’m thinking again of Winogrand’s picture from a car in Utah, 1964. The trick is that you aren’t making photos, you are making emotions in someone else’s chest and the photo is a tool (the camera is even further removed). The apocalyptic death of a beast under fractured light with a gathering darkness would have been destroyed by a better picture. Who cares about technique? What happened to the beast?

2

Why have so many photographers wanted to see in black and white? Is it hubris? Is it the need for power? Tradition? Romanticism? Or did they just forget the settings? Cameras can be very confusing.

3

Who was the greatest? Surely it’s Winogrand. I want every picture of his to be my picture. When he succeeded, he was infallible, we was unnatural. And even as he failed at the end, Sophoclean, he failed with a magic Dionysian dignity. The thing to admire most was his graphic sense.

4

They will always think it’s easy. It’s just operating a machine. And such an easy machine. Just one button really. Make sure you thank them, they’ve just handed you your freedom.

5

What separates you from everyone else on Flickr? Nothing. Stop caring.

6

I can’t think when I’m shooting. This can be distilled to: stop seeing psychoanalysts and forget yourself.

7

Fuck light.

8

Photography is the constant breaking of the fourth wall. As if one of the audience had run on stage. The actors take it in stride, the show cannot help but go on.

• theory
• writing
• aphorisms

Posted 2 years ago

1

As a photographer I’m not interested in what people say about themselves. There are better arts for capturing that kind of thing. I want to collect the things people don’t say about themselves, can’t say, or didn’t know they wanted to say.

2

Photography at heart is about angles. Looking at a scene from 10 meters to the right often changes it entirely. The light is now elegiac, instead of exuberant. The composition plainer. The contrast grayer. The people hidden rather than revealed. Everything changes according to your positioning in space. Meaning is created by your positioning. So move about! Dance!

3

One cares for his subjects by creating a real picture, not by respecting their wishes, not by making them comfortable, nor by leaving them alone. Be prepared to get punched in the face, just make sure you turn the camera away.

This may be distilled to: Your face is less important than your camera.

4

I wanted to not change anything about my photos. For good reason: so that I could shoot even faster, even more. But I’m learning from Kertesz that cropping is a guilty pleasure. But, for god-sake, don’t tell anyone that you are doing it.

5

When shooting someone in the street, treat them like a cobra. Transfix them with your eyes and flute, or ignore them completely. Either way, hope they don’t see the machine in your hand.

6

Hold it still, still, still! Figure out how to freeze your hand although the rest of your body is moving. Socrates would stop in the middle of a stride for hours to think things through. You think through your camera. Also, shoot high speed. So what you get some noise? Noise is real. Keep the shutter speed above 200.

7

You can’t slow down, really look, and respect each individual image, until you figure out that nearly all of your pictures are shit. Cherish the good ones though, otherwise you may think that you are shit. And that’s the end.

8

Look at great photos to see how you should select, not to figure out how to shoot. How could you ever replicate all of the shooting conditions, including the photographer’s heart?

9

Beware of woman. They can drain out all of your sadness to the point where you have nothing to say about the world.

• theory
• writing
• aphorisms

Posted 2 years ago