Drive Through World

Two little girls pay out the window in Soho. NY Photographer Atisha Paulson's Drive Through World, Part of his series Shooting Soho.

An Intimate Setting, An Adolescent Portrait

Last night I ventured over to a lecture - one of a series- held by the Camera Club of New York at SVA. The photographer was Martine Fougeron. A graduate of the ICP, Fougeron began shooting her two sons- and 10 of their friends- when they were 13 and 14 at the inception of their teenage rebellion and continued through their high school graduation. As a result, she built a refined, intimate portfolio of their coming of age.

Fougeron did something socially difficult, seemlessly-- AKA she's Mom and her two sons are growing up, rebelling, figuring out girls- booze- smoking (they're French) - yet there isn't really evidence of this adverse relationship within the work, and where it is present is an illustration that is integral to the story. I also think she was able to minimize photographer interference in a context where it would typically be amplified to capture a story that ends up feeling true - and very relatable at that. Somewhere in the lecture introduction, Fougeron was compared to the likes of Jacques Henri-Lartigue and Larry Clark, a class of photographers who photographed within their immediate social surroundings. For Fourgeron, that was caring for her sons. And I think that's why these images come so naturally.

View Of The Street

Thanks to Michael Wolf's upcoming show "iseeyou," Google maps is crossing over into the art world. In his exhibit, Wolf makes a statement about urban life and our quickly depleting privacy given the advancement of technology. Part of the exhibition is comprised of a series called "Street View: A Series of Unfortunate Events." I always did wonder how Google managed to compile such a seemless view-- the company's automobile trolls the city streets with 9 mounted cameras, capable of capturing the world in 360 degrees.

Wolf switched out his camera for the screenshot tool on his computer and milled the streets of cities around the world, virtually speaking that is, to find an unexpected moment.

Darling Marcel

In case you have not already seen this video (and I understand it is an off chance at this point), please take a moment to do so. It is vry impt. Jenny Slate did an amazing job creating Marcel as quite a lovable character- and kudos to the director Dean Fleischer-Camp!

M. Hulot's Holiday

The first time I saw Jacques Tati's humorous (and one of his most famous) film Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, I fell in love. It was last summer. I fell in love with the visual satire (clumsy Hulot played by Tati himself), the romantically washed out black and whites, the minimal script, and the way it makes me want to skip town for the South of France (if only). Read: makes me feel happy.

On that note, let's reinforce that although how some learned photographers can become too technical for their own good--

(Think "this is no good, imperfect print quality!"- a theory that M. Tichy has completely blown out of the water.)

-- the end goal is nothing if not to stir up a little emotion.

Image Studies

Perhaps one of the most challenging aspects to starting a photo project is choosing the subject matter. Once a focal point is established, the project begins to develop cohesive property and a smooth flow, but until then it can be quite disconnected. Who hasn't encountered such frustration regardless of genre.

It is no wonder then that some of my favorite image blogs all share this quality - a tight focus. After years of daily posts, these blogs become an awesome image backlog of their subject matter. I would even go as far as saying that they will have become a database.

I think you will find that these two do a particularly good job at that - in the fashion blog category: Le Smoking (beautiful people smoking) and The Impossible Cool (title says it all). Neither contain any text apart from photo credits, but I think if they started referencing back and commenting they might kick it up a notch. Or maybe better left an open book. What do you think? Any others you have encountered?

Image source (all): Le Smoking