Misc.: November 2005 Archives
Well, I got a slew of suggestions for what to read next. The list below was culled from the comments, but I must specifically thank Pim Milo from Holland for emailing me what must be the definitive photography bibliography containing over 500 titles. Whoa.
River of Shadows by Rebecca Solnit. (About Muybridge.)
Another Way of Telling by John Berger
Looking at Photographs by John Szarkowski
Reflex: A Vik Muniz Primerby Vik Muniz
The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer
Cruel and Tender by Emma Dexter, Thomas Weski - 2003 show at Tate Modern
Arresting Images by Steven C. Dubin
Autobiography by Helmut Newton
The Photograph as Contemporary Art by Charlotte Cotton
The Photography Reader, edited by Liz Wells
Towards a Philosophy of Photography by Vilem Flusser
By Geoffrey Batchen:
Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance - recent show at ICP
Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography
Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History
Veronica's Revenge by Elizabeth Janus (this collection was recently auctioned off)
Photography After Photography - GB+ Arts
Feels like I've got to digest Batchen's work, a sizeable chunk of Szarkowski and some history from Beumont Newhall (which no one suggested but was on my list already.)
Stacy asked about my opinions of Sontag and Barthes, mentioned in the previous post. I haven't had time to elaborate, but the short answer is I had exactly the opposite reaction. Too much of Barthes in college, I think. Perhaps something is lost in translation, but I find Barthes' thinking to be a bit convoluted and ends in a "huh?" Sontag is more accessible, made for good subay reading.
For a long time the advancement of photographic art was intimately tied to developments in the underlying technology of capturing an image. Doesn't seem to be the case anymore, with most effort going into digitally replicating the analog (film) photo experience. Then along come a couple of new developments in camera technology that appear to actually add someting new.
The first is the light field or plenoptic camera. A honeycomb of tiny lenses is placed in front of a digital camera's aperture. The light from each lens is recorded in such a way as to be able to reconstruct where its charateristics at a range of focusing distances and in doing so allow for the digital recontruction of varying depths of field. I've read a couple of sites' explanation of how this works, but I took Physics for English Majors and it just doesn't click with me. But I saw the sample images and I can't wait to see this trickle into commercially available cameras. I would assume high end medium format first, then DSLRs in about 5-7 years. But that's just an uneducated guess.
The second is Clifford Ross' 9"x18" view camera. Ross's homemade camera harkens back to the days when painters crushed and mixed their own paint ingredients. The camera has been dubbed the "gigapixel camera", but there is nothing digital about the camera itself. (Ross does scan in the resulting images for enlargement). The thing is said to pick out individual roof shingles at 4000 feet. An interview with Clifford Ross about the camera (scroll down.)
