thechrisproject photography

I don’t remember when I first saw Chris’ work on flickr (his website is here), but I remember how quickly I became a fan of it. I was attracted to his style, but I also found it amazing how prolific and yet very coherent it seemed to me.

You’ve said that you bought a camera in 2006.  Had you been making photographs before then?

No I hadn’t taken any pictures prior to 2006.
In fact I felt a dislike for the whole photographic process.

Why did you feel a dislike for the photographic process?  Do you still have any dislike for it?

 I disliked the barrier the act of photography can impose
the necessity to photograph to remember syndrome
I tend to stick to mainly landscapes now

I think photography is, for many people, just a way to remember.  So why do you photograph now?

I started out as a landscape junkie and have been moving away from it in the past year.  One thing that some of your landscapes remind me of is the concept of “peopled landscapes,” a term coined by Michael David Murphy.

One person I currently admire a lot doing that kind of work is Hin Chua.

Thanks for the interesting web site suggestions.
Never considered the concept of “peopled landscapes” before.
I photograph now to see if I can get any better.

What do you look for when you are taking a picture?

I try to make the mundane took interesting
and generally fail

I’ve seen a lot of photos of the interesting looking mundane, so at least you’ve got a good goal. How have you developed your idea of what looks interesting?

My idea of what looks interesting changes from day to day, so I guess it’s far from fully developed.

How has it developed over the past year or so?

My idea of what looks interesting is still changing on a weekly basis.
I’m bored by what I shot last week.
I have a long way to go to reach any sort of plateau.

July 24 at the Haggarty Museum in Milwaukee - Stephen Shore speaks at 6pm about his exhibition opening that day and continuing until September 28th.

Until September 1st Gilbert and Geroge at the Milwaukee Art Museum
Related video via Conscientious

Until September 15th, Lee Freidlander’s work will be at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Review at The Online Photographer

August 14th, 6pm,  John Shimon and Julie Lindemann speak at the opening of Unmasked and Anonymous: Shimon and Lindemann Consider Portraiture, which runs until November 30th.

October 30th 6:15pm, Jen Davis speaks at  the Milwaukee Art Museum.  Jen’s work is featurd in Unmasked and Anonymous.  I’ve seen Jen’s work at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and enjoyed it a lot.

What has digital done new? Make uglier versions of captured light than we could before? Perhaps, but it’s lowered the barrier of entry for photography, and I personally think that’s a great thing. I wouldn’t be here without that. But what I’ve really been wanting is some new, original paradigms in cameras, and I don’t feel like there’s been much of that yet. But imagine if you could shoot 8 stops faster because the sensor could render that light level without noise? Imagine being able to select the aperture or focal point after taking the picture. Or being able to apply polarization after taking the picture. How about a rock-solid body/mirror/viewfinder with replaceable CPU and sensor?

I feel like digital cameras have just been mimicking and barely keeping up with film technology as far as image quality and enjoyability go. They excel in some areas, like high ISO (and they’re getting better and better there), and they definitely have a convenience factor that can’t be denied. But they have yet to totally eclipse film in a number of areas.

Here’s what I’d really like to see in the next three years: a DSLR with a back that looks like an iPhone, complete with touchscreen and 3G internet connection. I think this would be a godsend for photojournalists and other people working on tight deadlines. Imagine a great interface for weeding down a large set of pictures and performing simple corrections like white balance, curves, and sharpening on the camera. Think Lightroom or Aperture Lite, running on an iPhone taped to the back of a camera. And that’s not even forward-thinking technology, that’s just combining some existing thing together.

Mike Johnston (do I quote him too much?) said this a few days ago:

I’ve opined elsewhere that one of the great disappointments of the digital age thus far is that, after all the creative furor of its cradle period, digital has settled right back down to where camera design was in 1990—to a norm of Wunderplastik SLRs and dinky point-and-shoots, the exceptions being few and far between (some of the exceptions being the same exceptions that existed then, at least in terms of form—even down to a virtual replica M6, only digital this time). I was expecting, and certainly hoping, that digital would open up whole new vistas in camera design, and create whole new categories of cameras. Some of them I’ve even defined myself (the “DMD,” I mean), to little effect. That very much appeared to be starting to happen back in the early part of this decade. But then it fizzled. The market might or might not be infinite in its wisdom, but it sure as hell is conservative!

Anyway, I hope to see some great improvements in the digital camera market. I hope to see them at least cover some ground that film has already covered. Let’s see a decent digital rangefinder that’s under $4k! I want my Canonet in digital form!

Here’s a picture that has nothing to do with any of this:

Ben Roberts recently published a promo book via Blurb called One More Night about London’s electro-indie scene. I was curious about the project and process and Ben agreed to do an email interview with me about it.

First question: did you get your copy of the book yet?

Yes. Hardback. Pages look good and I’m happy with the layout. Not happy with the quality of the hardback covering, so will be getting some softback copies instead. Does the title come up in full on the softback or has it been cropped off so that the letters aren’t complete?

I’m pretty sure the letters are cut off a little bit, but I assumed it was supposed to be like that. I’ll double check at home when I have a copy in front of me.

You told me earlier that, ” the project came about fairly organically. I shot a few club nights as a favour for a friend who is a promoter - I was surprised that I quite enjoyed doing it (as it’s not the kind of photography that I usually do, or that I am ‘into’ as such)… some of the images got seen by other people and I started picking up a few paid gigs to shoot for different venues.”

When in this process did you think that this might make a good full-fledged project?

After a couple of gigs when I realised that I had a handful of decent portraits. I don’t consider this to be a particularly profound, meaningful project by the way. My main intention when shooting it was to make a promotional book to give to clients to show what I can do if sent on assignment. So i have no lofty ambitions for the work that I have shot. That being said, I think it’s a kind of fun set of images.

When you were initially shooting for your promoter friends, what kind of stuff were you looking for?

The brief was actually pretty good - they wanted more atmosphere stuff as opposed to the normal club shots of hot chicks (okay I took some photographs of hot chicks…) and drunk idiots gimping at the camera. So i could pretty much just shoot whatever I wanted. They also wanted quirky shots - so the details that I shot like the microphones, tangled leads, and interiors - all went down well.

It’s nice to have that kind of latitude with an assignment.

You said that this wasn’t a profound project, but what made you decide to use it for a promo book? Is it because it seems more widely palatable? Have you done other promo books before?

Yeah I kind of figured like it was fairly easy to digest. Of course live music photography has been done a thousand times, as has nightclub photography. However I just thought that maybe I could offer an interpretation that was more visually interesting, diverse and dynamic than the average feature that you might see in a music magazine. That being said, there are a couple of magazines out there that do push the boat a bit with their photography and are willing to be a bit more adventurous. Hopefully this promo book will appeal to them. And it is my first promo book.

Was this book largely a solo effort? Did you enlist others to help with editing, sequencing, or layout of the book?

Yeah, solo effort. Although at various times I invited friends to come shooting/drinking with me if I was going to a club I had neveer been to before. I always had permission to shoot in the venues and never turned up cold. This way I could talk to people about what I was doing and basically have credentials for being there.

Probably about 50% of the shoots were commissions, but for fairly low returns.

Spread from the book

The full bleed photos across the gutter and the single color make for a very bold looking book. Especially coupled with the (unintentionally?) cut off text crowded on the cover. The majority of photo books I normally see are centered images on white pages with big margins. How did you come up with the visual theme?

Yeah the cut off text was unintentional. I’ve only got a hardback copy at the moment - it’s not perfect, it’s a new product from blurb and I don’t think they have perfected it yet - it’s an ‘image wrap’ book - but I lost some of my front over and also had a ‘bubbling’ effect where the vacuum wrap hadn’t fixed itself properly to the paper on the cover. I’ll be ordering paperbacks from now on to avoid this defect.

To a certain extent, the design was born of economics. as I mentioned before, I wanted the book to be a promo - something to leave with selected clients instead of a business card or postcard. The 7×7 square format book offered by blurb was the cheapest - but I didn’t want to crop any of my images. It was time consuming - but I ended up making my own layouts. This meant cutting all my images into two sections in photoshop, and then positioning them over the gutter.

As for the single colour, I think this has worked really well for some images but is perhaps not so successful for others. In some cases I have just made a bad decision in colour selection. In other cases I have chosen the right colour but have perhaps not quite been accurate enough in matching the tone in the actual image. I may end up making a second edition with better colour selections, but i think in general it works for this project, which is really about colour and movement.

How was working with Blurb? Did you give them fully completed spreads, or did you have to work with a desktop or web-based program of theirs to do the layouts?

With blurb you download their own desktop publishing programme. It’s easy to use and has limited features - it’s not like using quark or indesign - but you do have the capability to avoid the various set templates that exist on the programme, and design pages from scratch which is what I ended up doing.

Once you have designed the book, you upload it to the blurb server and away you go.

Because of the design that I chose, resizing and dividing the images proved to be really time consuming. At one point I realised that I would have to go out and shoot a couple more nights just to get some images that were weighted more to the right hand side of the image in composition so that I could finish the book while being rigorous to the design.

I’ve had two photos selected by the juror of this year’s PhotoMidwest 7 State Competition, Lisa Hostetler of the Milwaukee Art Museum. I read on Paul Sparks’ blog that there were about 520 images submitted and 50 chosen, so I’m happy to be included. There’s an opening reception Friday, September 26th.

Here are the two photographs chosen:

I’ll have an interview with photographer Ben Roberts about his One More Night project soon, so stay tuned.

I had two photographs in last year’s CoPA exhibit, which was the first year of this annual exhibition. Entry information here.

Cara Phillips has a very interesting blog and she’s posted two entries filled with scores of women photographers for us to check out.  I like this portrait by Judith Joy Ross.

One idea the director of the Film Festival had was to do a time lapse of the Orpheum filling up. I did a rough draft of the video and uploaded it to Flickr, which just recently introduced videos. There has been a lot of anti-video sentiment amongst current Flickr users. If it’s there, I might as well use it. The groups I had planned on adding it to are not currently accepting videos.

Last weekend I had a fun filled Saturday. At 3pm I took a walk with Hanson. More photos and the story at dane101.

Saturday night was a derby night. The big news was that the fire marshal decided a few days before the bout that the capacity of the venue was going to be 40% lower than previously thought. A lot of people didn’t get in. More photos, again, at dane101.

This year I got the honor of being the Wisconsin Film Festival’s official documentarian.  It was a great opportunity, a lot of fun, and a lot of work.  Hauling a tripod and a few bags of gear up and down State Street a half dozen times a day gets a little grueling.  It was challenging to me to shoot the same type of thing over and over again and make it interesting each time.  I got some shots that I’m really proud of, and a lot of shots that I think are a good record of what went on and what the energy of the event was like.  I have close to 3000 to sort through.  Editing is a big job here.

One shot that I was asked to try was a time lapse of the gorgeous Orphuem Theater filling up.  We picked a movie that had sold a ton of tickets.  I set up my camera with a very wide lens at the front of the house hooked up to a laptop running the Canon EOS Utility software, which will take a picture every X seconds for you.  I took a picture every 5 seconds while the theater went from about 4 people to nearly 1300.  They were still letting people in when I took it down so the show could get started.

In the next week or two I’ll be editing the photos, delivering them to the festival organizers, and posting a few on Flickr and here.  Here are two that I put up on dane101.com last week.  The first is the Orphuem and the second is the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art’s lecture hall, where movies were playing during the festival.

“I don’t like explosions. I don’t mind progress. But digital photography has made every man, woman, child and chimpanzee a photographer of sorts and consequently has numbed down the general quality of photographs.”Of course digital photography is essential for economy and for speedy results (news - fashion photography - advertising and the like) but it also is too damned easy and doubtful for archiving as technology and conservation methods always change. Silver halide is still the most reliable material but regretfully on the way out.”

I saw this photo of Eliott Erwitt on The Online Photographer a while ago.

I consider Erwitt to be a master photographer. I think the shirt is hyperbolic, but his words above ring somewhat true with me. But I think the idea that photography has a general quality that is subject to being numbed down is flawed. Recently, also on The Online Photographer, Mike Johnston said this:

Show me an artist who doesn’t loathe or dismiss whole categories of artistic endeavor and I’ll show you an artist who isn’t committed to his own art.

It made me think about Erwitt’s position in a different light.

This interview with Ralph Gibson has some interesting thoughts on digital as well. Ralph is still a film guy, through and through. But it sounds like he keeps up on digital things and uses them a lot when appropriate. That’s what I appreciate about his take on digital: it’s not fanatical. Not that I don’t have a certain amount of respect for the fanatics.

Ralph:

Ralph: I have. And I’ve gone to InkjetMall.com (Cone Editions). I’m pretty much abreast of what’s going on. And I have used those inks, and they’re great. It’s just that they’re not better or worse than photographs. They coexist. They’re not photographs. They’re another kind of very beautiful print.

The whole interview is worth reading. I have an immense amount of respect for Mr. Gibson. I saw a number of photographs last year.

As for me, I got back into photography because of digital. The low cost per photograph allowed me to shoot a lot and learn quickly. Though the last camera I bought was a film rangefinder, which I love.