I Am Still Alive

Print by Tiina Itkonen found on Scott David Herman’s fantastic art crawl/blog.

This candid interview with photographer William Eggleston was conducted by film director Michael Almereyda on the occasion of the opening of Eggleston’s retrospective William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

I’m stoked that museums like the Whitney and the Guggenheim are consistently putting together videos to support shows. I also dig that they tend to be interview-based and let the artists themselves speak for their own work.

Chris Steele-Perkins:

“This is a picture of sumo, but not of the obvious kind. My caption in my book is minimal – Retirement ceremony for sumotori Sentoryu. The red and the gold screen indicate it is Japan, but that is it. Sentoryu is in a suit and coming to the end of a long ceremony where his peers pay their respects to him and each snips a small piece of his hair from his head. This was also done by members of his family. The final cut that takes off the distinctive top-knot worn by sumotori is made by the oyakata, the owner of Sentoryu’s fighting stable. It is the offical end of his career.

In the photograph this ritual is over and he has come back to the stage after having his head shaved and changing into a western suit. He wipes his head and his eyes, it has been an emotional experience. He is no longer Sentoryu (fighting war dragon) but Henry Miller, a black american from St Louis who had spent 15 years wrestling in Japan.”

The context and for this photograph by Chris Steele-Perkins is so telling and adds so much to an understanding of and appreciation for the image that it’s suprising to find that Steele-Perkins’ book has “minimal” captioning.

I am not sure I ever really understood the “let the work speak for itself” maxim that you run into often in art and photography. It’s likely safer to be elusive and I’ve had the pleasure of hearing over-wrought qualifications for questionable work lots of times. But if you are aiming to tell stories, I reckon, you should use all the tools you got to get those stories across as fully as possible – particularly if you have images with culturally specific contexts and nuanced emotional content.

I’d take the paragraphs above over just “Retirement ceremony for sumotori Sentoryu” any day.

Dean Allen found the name for it – Chimping. I got a kick out of this video describing chimping.

Chimping is a term used in digital photography (especially when using a digital single-lens reflex camera) to describe the habit of checking every photo on the on-camera display (LCD) immediately after capture.
From Wikipedia

Lots of beautiful photographs on the rest of Kropilak’s site

Rian Dundon’s photos of kids in China.

This is a scan of a (digitally restored) hardcopy of a picture taken by the French army and purchased in Tahiti of the French nuclear test codenamed Licorne, which was fired on July 3rd, 1970.

It intervenes when a photo is being taken, without the photographer being able to detect anything. The manipulation is only visible on the photo afterwards.

...Hence visual information can be smuggled unnoticed into the images of others.

But I suppose this is what the world would look like if we could see the residue of everyone who’s ever passed through – a vast, multi-limbed creature made of tens of thousands of human bodies, winding its way through streets and buildings, looking for some place to go.