We interrupt our regular weekend silence to bring you this utterly unreal short film of Guillaume Nery base jumping at Dean’s Blue Hole, filmed on breath hold (!!!) by Julie Gautier. It is nothing short of an effing beautiful production.
Seriously, watch it. It’s worth 4 minutes and 18 seconds of your life.
Fuck, wow.
I haven’t stopped blogging or taking pictures. I’ve just moved house and aside from the computers, cameras, etc being in pieces, I also haven’t had any internet at home.
Which is killing me.
No internet and no editing ability are bearable seperately, but I’m not dealing well with them in tandem.
To combat my withdrawal, I’ve been cooking to throw my restless energy into something painful. It’s something I loathe doing, so things are getting pretty desperate!
However, the technology has been coming together, so hopefully, our ISP will be nice and come through quickly as well.
More to come shortly!
Try everything. Photojournalism, fashion, portraiture, nudes, whatever. You won’t know what kind of photographer you are until you try it. During one summer vacation (in college) I worked for a born-again tabletop photographer. All day long we’d photograph socks and listen to Christian radio. That summer I learned I was neither a studio photographer nor a born-again Christian. Another year I worked for a small suburban newspaper chain and was surprised to learn that I enjoyed assignment photography. Fun is important. You should like the process and the subject. If you are bored or unhappy with your subject it will show up in the pictures. If in your heart of hearts you want to take pictures of kitties, take pictures of kitties.
This one hit the www hard when it was first published. If you haven’t already wandered over to the Magnum Blog for a read (and a bloody good one it is), you can access the article or download the PDF here.
Don’t become a photographer unless its what you ‘have’ to do. It can’t be the easy option. If you become a photographer you will do a lot of walking so buy good shoes.
Japanese Photography
Mariko Takeuchi’s essay on Japanese photography at Lens Culture: Read here
Touching Strangers
While we’re on the subject of reading, head on over to Conscientious to for Jim Colberg’s interview with Richard Renaldi about his fascinating project, Touching Strangers.
An old friend sent me a scan of a letter i’d written her, a decade ago now. I had forgotten there were pictures taken, back then.
Photos in question were some portraits of our mutual friend, shot on a roll of Kodak black and white film (T-Max?). The lab had developed the initial set perfectly, but pretty much bleached the re-prints i went back for a couple of weeks later, damning what i had thought was an achievement of technical understanding. These i eventually sent to S, recipient of disgusted letter scrap above.
10 years on, we’re a CEO-in-training and a Steve-McCurry wannabe, come some way.
Then she calls one night, a continent away, with “I was cleaning stuff out, and i find these letters, omigod…”
And for those few minutes, we were excited teenagers again.
