Category: Photography
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Finishing
I enjoy finishing things, which perhaps makes me better suited to art practice than many (leaving aside questions of talent, skill or ideas). But it never ceases to amaze me just how long finishing takes, or how boring it is. I’m driven by the desire to just get rid of the bloody thing, and it’s […]
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Read This if You Want to Take Great Photographs of People/Places
There are two kinds of books about photography. Serious books about artists (monographs, retrospectives, histories or collections of a genre) and how-to guides (how to use your DSLR, how to take black and white photography, how to take stunning portraits, etc.). The first kind assume you’re a consumer of art. They introduce you to new […]
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A good surface is full of clues
I read Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi this summer (buy from Amazon). I’m exploring photobooks and this is one that comes up again and again as a must-read. I was predisposed to Soth’s work because i know him first as a blogger and YouTuber, which I imagine he might find amusing. It’s a mix […]
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Flattening the Picture
I’ve been taking photos of woodland damage caused by larch felling and subsequent storms. This landscape would often be captured with a romantic view. In fact, the place I’m photographing is cultivated as a picturesque landscape. I didn’t want to make images of beautiful decay, so I thought I’d try something more confrontational. I thought […]
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Process Saves Us From The Poverty Of Our Intentions
This is a quote, attributed to sculptor sculptor Elizabeth King, that Seth Godin uses to introduce his book The Practice: Shipping Creative Work. I read this two ways. Firstly, that process is what distinguishes pros from amateurs – ‘doing the work’. But also that sometimes our intentions feel poor. We don’t quite know what we […]
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Photography is dead. Long live photography
It might just be a symptom of accelerating culture, but it seems the lifespan of technologies shrinks ever more. Painting lasted a few thousand years before being ‘obsoleted’ by photography. Photography has only just made it into the Museum of Modern Art, and been declared dead. The main threats being: I feel like photography has […]
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Rebus
From Wikipedia: A rebus (/ˈriːbəs/) is a puzzle device that combines the use of illustrated pictures with individual letters to depict words or phrases. For example: the word “been” might be depicted by a rebus showing an illustrated bumblebee next to a plus sign (+) and the letter “n”. It was a favourite form of heraldic expression used in the Middle Ages to […]
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Objects that appear so simple, coherent, and inevitable
I’m taking photos of stuff I find left in public space. So far it’s mostly a lot of flytipping, but maybe it will turn into something more interesting. This is an IKEA tabletop (Linnmon, £15). I passed by it about a week ago, and for some reason didn’t take a photo. I wish I had. […]
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Engross, prejudice, and intimidate
This post from Ian Leslie’s Ruffian newsletter rang a bell for me. He’s talking about the nature of creative influence, and here adds a thought about why great influences can be so blocking: I recently (re-)read U and I, Nicolson Baker’s book about his obsession with John Updike, writer and man. … U and I is essentially […]
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Bookbinding
It’s easy to get a zine printed, bound and trimmed to a very high quality. I wanted to do something interesting with the covers, so I decided to have just the inside pages printed, and supplied to me flat, unbound. I sourced paper separately for the covers and produced the artwork with a laser cutter. […]
Andrew Sleigh 