My favorite photographers are Alec Soth, Zoe Strauss, Stephen Shore, Peter Sutherland, Ari Marcopolous and my Janky friends like Douglas McCulloh (more on him later), Brianna Bakke, Mark Price, Son Cleva and Ashira Siegel, but those are the first people that pop into my head and I love hundreds, thousands of photographers. I am addicted to photography.
In particular, I like street photographers, vernacular photography, life-streaming, photos that are a little off, a little bit wrong. I like photog Ken Miller’s term of “Photography of the Moment” indicating a casual snapshot professionally considered.
After saying artists’ names I will say that I am striving for their greatness. I think I achieve it sometimes. And I love taking photos. For years I did medium format photography and then large format and polaroid work. For the past 8 months my iPhone has been my primary picture-taker, and if that’s too hip, done or too unprofessional I’ll accept that and keep shooting. But the phone died and I don’t know if it can be revived or if I can justify spending $400-600 on another one while I’m traveling. I went the other way: I just bought a Vivitar BV50, a $3 plastic automatic camera at a Berlin flea market. There’s a half-shot roll in there and I’m excited to develop it, which brings me back to Alec Soth and a 2007 post from his old blog where he says, “It seems unfair that an anonymous police photographer can be as good as Avedon and Arbus.” It doesn’t seem unfair to me: I love the democratic tool of the camera. Artist Harrell Fletcher has a great quote: “When I had the camera in my hands the world became a more visually interesting place, or I guess the world didn’t change but I became more sensitive to what was interesting to me.” He no longer is primarily a photographer, and I love his notion that he is “pointing to things that I think are interesting so that other people will notice and appreciate them too.”
While I’m on quotes I must mention my photographer friend and mentor Douglas McCulloh’s beta website Photo Quotations, a lovingly-curated collection of inspiring quotes from photographers throughout history. To whit, photographer Thomas Demand’s statement: “…the chances of making it as an artist are so small, I’d advise anyone to do something they are really passionate about, rather than speculating about what other people might be interested in. That way, if you don’t make it, which is quite likely, you at least know you were working on something that meant something to you.”
I think that’s good advice for anything you do.
