On the Web: September 2007 Archives

Strictly No Photography is a photo-sharing site for photographs taken where you are not allowed to take them. From the inside of the Kremlin to Kensington palace, from art galleries to war zones. Here you can see everything you've ever wanted to see that you're not supposed to. There are pictures that range from the ordinary to the profound. Whatever the content or the quality though we think that each one stands as a little piece of art in itself, as a little expression of personal liberty.

There's a long and comprehensive review of the Hiroshi Sugimoto retrospective currently on view at the De Young Museum.

It is difficult to explain why Sugimoto's work is different than most photographers. I think the difference is that he leaves more space for the viewer. One of the things that I struck me when I was walking through the show at the De Young was that when I look at Sugimoto's wide range of work, he is somehow always reaching for the eternal in an inherently temporal medium.

Not sure if I've posted about Square America before, but a link on del.icio.us brought this vernacular photography site to my attention again. The images that triggered this post relate to a trove of photographs the site's owner bought that cataloged the life of a woman over the course of many years. Many are straight up portraits, some even from photobooths, but the first undated photo in the list is a particularly good street shot. And there's evidence that the typical early 21st century activity of shooting self-portraits in the bathroom mirror was trail blazed in the 1950s.

On a related note, last week Joerg kicked off some interesting commentary on his site about why this old-timey stuff gets so much attention while Flickr is looked down upon as a source of naive masterpieces. Alec Soth's posts (here and here and here) on the same subject are more exhaustive and I think that meme is probably gasping its last for a while.