Three More Good Machines — P#5 (by adnanchowdhury)


Posted 7 months ago

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Nosaj Thing- Coat Of Arms (via StrangeAppeal)

The Flying Lotus stuff is evolving fast out in LA


Posted 2 years ago

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Antony - I Was Young When I Left Home

I was young when I left home

And I’ve been a ramblin around

And I never wrote a letter to my home

To my home Lord

Lord to my home

And I never wrote a letter to my home

It was just the other day

I was bringing home my pain

When I met an old friend I used to know

Said your momma’s dead and gone

Baby sister’s all gone wrong

And your daddy needs you home right away

Not a shirt on my back

Not a penny on my name

But I can’t go home this way

This way Lord

Lord this way

But I can’t go home this way

If you miss the train I’m on

Count the days and I’m gone

You will hear the whistle blow a hundred miles

Hundred miles a sunny day

Lord, lord, lord

You’ll hear that whistle blow a hundred miles

And I’m playing on the church

More clothes on my back

On those trussles trombone Jim McKay (?)

When I pay the debt I owe

To the commissary store

I will pawn my watch and chain and go home

Go home

Lord, lord, lord

I will pawn my watch and chain and go home

Used to tell my ma sometimes

When I see them riding blind

Gonna make me a home out in the wind

In the wind Lord

Lord in the wind

Gonna make me a home out in the wind

But I don’t like it in the wind

Wanna go back home again

But I can’t go back home this way

This way

Oh, this way

But I can’t back home this way

I was young when I left home

And I’ve been a rambling around

And I never wrote a letter to my home

To my home

Lord, lord, lord

And I never wrote a letter to my home


Posted 2 years ago

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Mark Cohen Photographer Video

This is by far the funniest shooting style I’ve seen. It’s like he walked out of a Pink Panther film. Sneaking up and scaring the guy next to the ladder, the camp walk away from the old guy near the wall, talking a photo of the ladies leg. Sheer hilarity.

The key take away is the audacity. He does seem to choose more powerless subjects. Women, old people. I guess that’s the dirty secret of close street photographers. He’s very similar to the work of Bruce Gilden but I like his non-grotesque aesthetics better.

He moves fast, unlike Winogrand. This is such great, important stuff to see.

He seems to rarely look through the finder. But perhaps the range finder viewfinder is so much larger that you can be a little further away.

I envy black and white photographers being able to work in a far wider range of light. And obviously with the flash he increases the possibilities even further.


Posted 2 years ago

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Todd Hido Interview Video

Oh man, I can’t wait till I’m making books of my own. I so want to make a book. Put a photo in a book and it really doesn’t matter how bad the photo is, presto!, it’ll look great!

This is another video that goes to prove the the most talented artists are also the most unhipster. It’s like hipsterism is some kind of creative AIDS. It weakens the body’s ability to fight. It’s most likely because it takes so much effort being a hipster. Being a hipster is a full time job. It seems I’ve gotten distracted.

Anyway, enjoy the video, it’s about a white photographer who asks models to come in for mediocre clothed shots in hotel rooms, and creeps around outside people’s houses at night taking photos surreptitiously.

His house night work is amazing though, and so is some of the landscape work. Go to his website here.


Posted 2 years ago

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Diane Arbus - Part 4

  • There were days that I just couldn’t do it. And then there were days I could. And then having done it a little I could do it more.
  • They were very much like sculptures in a funny way.
  • You can’t get that close to somebody and not say a word, although I have done that.
  • I have this funny thing where I’m never afraid when I’m looking into the ground glass. This person could be approaching with a gun or something like that and I’d have my eyes glued to the finder and it wasn’t like I was really vulnerable.
  • There’s a kind of power thing about the camera. I mean, everyone knows that you’ve got some edge. You’re carrying some slight magic which does something to them. It fixes them in a way.
  • I used to think that I was shy and I got incredibly persistent in the shyness. I remember enjoying immensely the situation of being put off and having to wait. I still do. I guess I use the waiting time for a kind of nervousness. For getting calm or I don’t know, just waiting. It isn’t such a productive time, it’s a really boring time. … I learned to love that experience, because whilst I was bored I was also entranced. I mean, it was boring, but it was also mysterious. People would pass. And also, I had a sense of what to photograph, but I couldn’t actually photograph. Which I think is quite enjoyable sometimes. The Chinese have a theory that you pass through boredom into fascination and I think it’s true.
  • I would never choose a subject for what it means to me or what I think about it. You just choose a subject and what you feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold if you just plain choose a subject and do it enough.
  • Szarkowski: So much of photography has been concerned, perhaps especially in recent decades with making the photograph look good. Almost with a kind of visual athletics perhaps. With formal games that can be played so well, so enchantingly, so fascinatingly with photography. Or with more peripheral problems, such as, how to make photography look like other fine arts. Diane was a, Edward Steichen said once that photography was born perfect and Diane knew that. She knew that at it’s absolutely simplest, most primitive, most direct, unembellished way the problem for the photographer was simply to understand absolutely and with precision, sensitivity, and with complete clarity what it was that was out there that you were looking at. What were the secret meanings that exists wherever, wherever one looks. If one looks with enough intelligence, and enough with, and precise enough intuitions. The influence that she’s had has been simply enormous because all of us when we first looked at Diane’s pictures, it was almost as though, it was almost as though we were starting again as if we were back in the days of the daguerreotype, back in the days of Matthew Brady. It was a new fresh, unused medium again. All the fanciness had been stripped away. All that was left was the marvellous, clear, errorless experience of life. Absolutely without any interposition of concern for affect, in a sense, without any concern for art. That’s not, of course, that’s not really true. She was always an artist and she knew she was an artist. Her way of being an artist, was to conceal that fact as fully as she could, from us when we looked at the pictures.
  • The thing that’s important to know is that you never know. You’re always sort of feeling your way. One thing that struck me very early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or vice a versa, what comes out is not what you put in. I’ve never taken a photograph that I’ve intended. They are always better or worse.
  • For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture and more complicated. I do have a feeling for the print. But I don’t have a holy feeling for it. I really think that what it is is what it’s about. I mean it has to be of something. And what it is of is always more remarkable than what it is.
  • I do believe I have some slight corner on something about the quality of things. I mean it’s very subtle, and a little embarrassing to me. But I really believe that there are things that nobody would see unless I photographed them.

Her thoughts are so opposed to those of Winogrand. Her pictures are exactly the same.


Posted 2 years ago

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Godard 'interviews' Woody Allen (link)

This is far more about Godard than it ever is about Woody Allen. Takes effort but is hilarious. Seeing the panicked looks of incomprehension on Allen’s face is to die for. He always recovers though. “I’d rather struggle with film rather than struggle with other things.” I feel much more informed about the damaging affects of TV rays after this.


Posted 2 years ago

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WIlliam Klein [part 1]

  • “You read [negatives] left to right like a text. It’s the diary of the photographer. You see what he sees through the viewfinder, his hesitations, his hits, his misses.”
  • “250, that’s a large body of work. The life of a photographer, even of a great photographer, is 2 seconds.”
  • “An accident makes the picture. A few steps away, almost a picture.”
  • “But there’s a limit. Both for me, and for them. The surprise the joke wears thin. ‘Hey, what’s this for anyhow? Enough already, this guys is out of his mind.’ ”
  • “Tokyo, 1961. A troup of modern dancers that I bring into the traffic of Ginza. They come towards me, twisting convulsively. My Leica becomes a movie camera. Shot after shot as fast as I can. … I walk backwards, they advance, spastic, and impenetrable, like Japanese should be. … We provoke each other.”
  • “Then he starts to ham it up. Too much. Not as good.”
  • “He makes his report, I make mine.”
  • “On the right, someone watches me, suspicious. I walk away. A few steps and we’re in Chekov. … Not a photograph, more a reflex at detail. A second later, she’s still there, but everything has changed, everything has come together. The light, the staircase, the actors, the pretty girl looking at the camera, this is a photograph.”
  • “And as usual someone watching me. And then another picture, the man’s gone, it’s over.”
  • “Only one photo and that’s it. Not so bad though. One’s enough.”

Posted 2 years ago

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  • His paintings sucked.
  • “I painted on the photo” Sacrebleu!
  • “I hated the fashion world. I hated the fashion people. I hated everybody! Except the girls. I never came on to the girls because I was super faithful to my wife … all the time.’
  • Wow, his Broadway by Night actually looks great! Unlike the work of most photographer cum multimedia producers.
  • “Fuck’em all. I don’t want to talk about the philosophy of photography.”


Posted 2 years ago

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‘This lifetime of persecution that I gave to myself.’

Don McCullin (Part 2 of 2) (via morninglory908)


Posted 2 years ago

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© Adnan Chowdhury 2011