been kinda busy…
sorry that i haven’t really posted in a while. i’ve been kinda busy lately. see picture below:
i promise to post more once i regain my energy.
-30-
here’s a few pics from the very last issue of its 68-year life, a beautiful rural pennsylvania thanksgiving spread shot by roland bello:
friggin beautiful spread. so classy. it’s simple, as if you just happened upon this little buffet. very random, but not. i especially like the quad detail photos of the plates. it’s could be a pretty version of what william eggleston might have done.
so this is the way they’re going out, huh? a bit anticlimactic. and to continue the thought i had from a few posts back, i wonder what the gourmet staff would have pulled off had they been able to plan for a finale. not saying that the work in this issue isn’t good, just seems very down-to-business. not very celebratory. very abrupt. if they were going to end their 68 years right, they should have gone out with a bang like hunter s. thompson did, when his ashes were fired from a cannon.
strewn throughout this last issue are ads for gourmet subscriptions: ”12 issues just $15″. maybe they should have upped the price a bit. maybe those few little extra pennies from raised subscription fees could have made their books look better and pushed them just past the axe.
funny little tidbit about my efforts to get a copy of this final issue… i guess it came out on newsstands on oct 20th. i spent several hours running from newsstands to bookstores to supermarkets throughout san francisco looking for a copy of this final issue. seemed that others had the same idea i had. i finally found a few copies at a crappy barnes and noble in the city of colma, where the dead outnumber the living 1,000 to 1.
oh well. sorry to see you go gourmet. i was just getting to know you.
prof. scorsese
once in a while i’ll watch this scene and just giggle like a little girl. the single best one-camera steadicam scene ever shot in the history of filmmaking. 3 minutes, from the car keys to henny youngman, with everything in between. hundreds of extras, all timed to hit their marks perfectly. just thinking about the coordination involved in producing this scene makes me dizzy.
really great stuff
miki johnson, the social butterfly of the photo set, just posted this on her facebook, of some really cool rock portraits:
http://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/lists/2009/10/ten-killer-rock-n-roll-photographs.html
you know what i really like about these? it’s that with the exception of the albert watson shot of mick, they’re all super simple images. no fancy lighting, no big studios, no big productions. just great immediate moments. simple, honest and unmolested.
a very poor decision
condé nast is shuttering gourmet magazine because a bunch of ivy league consultants told them to.
in all fairness, that’s what mckinsey does, so it’s not really their fault. condé nast asked them for their opinion, and they gave it to them.
maybe the condé nast roster has no need for two similar culinary mags. and according to this explanation by condé nast chief charles townsend, bon appétit is much stronger by the books.
fine, i get it. business is business. and if you had to make a decision based off of numbers, then you cut gourmet. my rationale would be to cut details instead, because that’s an unnecessary magazine all together.
it just seems so absolutely knee-jerk to ditch the 69-year-old gastronomical institution. perhaps you make cuts elsewhere. maybe you get rid of golf world. or maybe they should have pulled back on anna wintour’s fur coat budget.
it also seems to me that killing the magazine is a big waste of a brand. why not sell it to someone else and let them try to keep it going? condé nast would at least reap the immediate benefits of some capital from the sale. not sure whether they ever floated that balloon. i tried googling “condé nast gourmet sale” and nothing came up.
well, below are a few pages from the october 2009 issue, an piece about a restaurant in louisville, ky. beautiful photography by john kernick. too bad the final issue of gourmet (november) is already on its way to print. i would have loved to see what ruth reichl and her team would have done with their final issue if they had time to plan for it.
pretty cool
i’ve seen this kind of stuff done very well, and i’ve seen it done horribly. this falls under the former.
interesting, if futile
this in the nytimes today, about how the french and british are contemplating legislative action to control digitally altered photos in ads:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/28/business/media/28brush.html?ref=media
kinda thinking this is a bit futile. yeah this would be nice, since it would in theory force us to move back to keeping image-making in the camera. too many photoshop assembly jobs these days. and quite frankly, i’m somewhat offended by the practice of hiring photographers to scavenger hunt with a camera, solely to provide glorified stock imagery for a photoshop tech to randomly assemble the pieces into a fictionalized scene imagined by a team of ad creatives.
but isn’t that kind of photography just another form of illustration anyway? what’s the difference between hiring an illustrator with a pencil/mouse and hiring a photographer with a camera? i guess not much really.
when i think about it, shooting everything “in the can” (camera) is really just a form of antiquated purist nostalgia. kinda like shooting film these days. (don’t get me wrong. i love film. i love black hassy borders. and i love 4×5 notches. i think that’s one of the many reasons why i love dan winters’ work. but even he’s starting to shoot digi these days.)
in the nytimes piece, british parliament member jo swinson opines: “When teenagers and women look at these pictures in magazines, they end up feeling unhappy with themselves.”
yeah, true. but teenagers really don’t need help feeling unhappy with themselves. their zits, raging hormones, bad taste in music and cheap fashion sense are forwarding their ennui as it is.
besides, teenagers might be more aware about digitally altered truths than we are. while we grownups feign intellectual chatter about woody allen or the latest errol morris doc, teenagers are groping each other in front of the most recent michael bay abomination in all it’s CGI glory. and if you were to ask said teenagers about whether there’s digital manipulation in movies, they would dismiss you as some old fool who just discovered facebook. no doubt these teenagers are savvy enough to know the difference in still photography as well.
so maybe this anglo/franco alliance against photoshopping the hell out of kate winslet is really just them thinking aloud. when it comes down to it, not much will come from this. well, perhaps a few lawmakers in europe will get re-elected for their grandstanding efforts.
squares
so wardrobe stylist rachel esterline turned me onto this iphone app for photo:
it’s billed as a polaroid emulator for the iphone camera. i’m kinda digging it. no, i’m REALLY digging it.
i’ve always had a thing for shooting in squares. my mind sees differently when composing in squares. that’s why i’ve been devoted to hassys for just about my entire photo life thus far.
up until recently, i was a bit schizophrenic when it came to picture-taking. when i would shoot with a 35mm-style camera (horizontal aspect), i would default to photojournalism. but when i would switch to a square camera, something just clicked. i became a different photographer. i’m sure it had something to do with jiggling my mind around a bit, forcing my eyes to confront the change.
i’m sure it has absolutely nothing to do with the years and years of television that i watched growing up. years and years of looking at a flickering horizontal screen. nah, that had no effect on me whatsoever…
nevertheless, it’s taken me about 4 years to break myself of this habit. i think i’m about 95% cured.
well, when i started taking with the iphone, i initially approached it from a “purist” point of view. or at least as much as one can be a “purist” while using a cameraphone. i didn’t want to crop, i didn’t want to do too much manipulation beyond basic toning. if it wasn’t full frame, it was crap.
so this shakeitphoto app is me sorta breaking my own rules. well, but only sorta, since i’m now forcing myself to shoot iphone pics with square in mind. i’m such a rebel.
here are some pics con shakeitphoto:
more navel-gazing…
these thoughts from stephen mayes kinda sums up a lot of how i feel about my former photo life:
http://www.jenshaas.com/blog/2009/05/26/world-press-photo-470214-pictures-later/
i would always ask myself this question back when i was a photojournalist: ”was i shooting for the general public? or was i shooting for photo judges?” and to be honest, it was sometimes tough to admit the truth to myself.
i guess we all sometimes get caught up in the buzz of peer recognition and glory. as photographer/artists, we’re naturally an egotistical bunch. perhaps the approval we seek trail back to when we were schoolkids trying to please our moms with our fingerpaintings. so now all grown up, we seek affirmation from our peers thru contests, grants, magazine covers.
i remember this one moment back when i was shooting conflict photography, when i was sent to pakistan to cover the brouhaha the weeks right after 9/11. i was part of a scrum of journos sent to a refugee camp near the town of quetta right on the border of afghanistan. afghan families were fleeing the fighting in and around kandahar, and after days and nights of nomadic wandering through the desert, would find themselves huddled inside 6×9-foot white tents with the letters “UNHCR” scrawled on the side. the desert wind would cut thru these tents, scattering fine sand particles everywhere. hungry babies crying, dirt in your eyes, all your earthly belongings piled into the back of an old repurposed soviet-era truck…
so imagine, if you will, you’re one of these said afghan refugees sitting inside your new 6×9 white tent of a home. all of a sudden a gaggle of foreign journalists come tumbling out of an air-conditioned bus, making a beeline straight to you, and start snapping away as if you were the beckhams, tripping over themselves, inches away from your face with their overused 16-35mm dummy-wides. but even worse, there doing that to your womenfolk, your kids, your mother.
i remember standing back, watching this scene play itself out. there was the big international award-winning photog shooting for time mag, the big international pulitzer-prize winning photog for The Newspaper of Record, the big international wire photographer with her war scarf. all of them just piled on top of this shocked afghan family.
this scene sure was a recipe for a nod in the world press book. maybe POYi.
and i had this realization… was this really it? ever since i was in photoj school, i had dreamt of shooting international war coverage alongside my idols. and here it was, that moment. but it was thoroughly unsatisfying, if not downright troubling.
yeah, i know, there’s pressures from the editor, from your competition, to get THE picture. there’s reputations to live up to. and if you’re a freelancer, future assignments depend on what you deliver now, not to mention the numerous new clients to be had if you were to win an award or two. a picture in a photo annual equals money in the bank.
funny thing that was mentioned in that stephen mayes piece about photog copying each other stylistically and content-wise. i guess it can be translated to the broader field of photography-at-large. so much fashion involved in photograph — the fashion of the ring flash, the fashion of the so-called “dave hill effect”, the fashion of the POYi winners circa 1999, the fashion of the hand-of-god toning (1970s and 2000s), the fashion of the tilt-shift…
so cliquey, this photography thing.
