Jeff Curto's Camera Position

When’s the last time you printed a photograph of your best friend, your child or your parents? Now that the holiday season is concluded, we all likely have a lot of photographs of friends and family and places we visited. Make sure you spend some time printing those photographs of the things that matter to you so you can share and preserve those memories. It turns out that the “small stuff” is really the “big stuff.”

Photographer Jerry Uelsmann once said something like, “while you can memorize the dictionary, it doesn’t mean you have anything to say afterwards.” The idea of course is that craft is not content. While the mechanics of photography can be a point of refuge for many image makers, photography’s power exists in an image’s message.Ansel Adams said that there is nothing worse than a sharp photograph of a fuzzy idea. Jerry Uelsmann said that while you can memorize the dictionary, it doesn’t mean you have anything to say. * Fire & Ice – Poem by Robert Frost, Photographs and Video by Jeff Curto  * Society for Photographic Education National Conference Information

At what point do photographers manipulate their images? Does it happen when we choose a camera, lens and field of view or does it happen afterwards, in post-production? When it comes to manipulating your photographs, is there such a thing as “too much”? This episode of Camera Position looks at one photographer’s confession of “over cooking” his images. * Outdoor Photographer Magazine Article: Digital Pitfalls, a Cautionary Tale  

As the greatest photographer of Modernist architecture, Julius  Shulman’s images stand as icons of the  architectural boom in mid-20th Century America. This podcast is a quick and enthusiastic review of a wonderful movie entitled Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman, which is available as a DVD or as streaming video at the locations linked below. You’ll learn a lot about photography, modernist architecture and Shulman’s great spirit. * Website for the film – Visual Acoustics – The Modernism of Julius Shulman * Stream film via Netflix * Stream film via iTunes Trailer for the film:

A photographic project is a wonderful thing, but a single image is powerful too in a wide variety of ways. Single photographs can be fulfilling all by themselves and they can also be harbingers of bodies of work yet to come. * JM Colberg’s Conscientious Blog Post: The Single Photograph * Jeff’s Italy Photography Workshops: Full for 2013, but email me for advanced notice on 2014 workshops!  

How much do you know about the subjects you photograph? Granted, you may just be encountering them for the first time when you first make pictures, but for a body of work, knowing the “backstory” about a subject and what makes it significant can be an important part of investing yourself in the image.

In their book The Color of Hay, photographer Kathleen Laraia McLaughlin and her author husband H. Woods McLaughlin take us to a little known part of the world and show it to us with extraordinary grace and care. Many of my photo book recommendations have been old classics, but this one is what you might call a new classic; the McLaughlins show us the Maramures, an isolated region on the northern fringe of Transylvania, bordering the southern frontier of the Ukraine. The book website: www.colorofhay.com Kathleen’s website: www.klmphoto.com

Turn it upside-down! Turning your photographs upside-down is a great way to help you evaluate the composition of your photographs by helping to remove the importance of the subject of the photograph and concentrate more on its structure.  

Although I have been giving assignments to students for years and years, I sometimes forget that I can give myself an assignment, too. So, this summer, I gave myself the task of photographing a stretch of lakeshore 150 feet long and 10 feet in either direction from where the water meets the land. It was a successful exercise and taught me a lot about looking and seeing. [nggallery id=1]  

Feeding yourself with as many photographs as you can possibly see is one of the great ways to stay fresh in photography. The more you see, the more full your visual history becomes and the more you can take with you to make your own new statements about the world. Links for this podcast: * Greg Hull’s Photo Blog “Plain Photography“ * LensCulture * FlakPhoto * Conscientious * F-Stop Magazine * Fraction Magazine

What happens when you give your viewer some visual tension? What does that visual tension feel like when it gets resolved in the viewer’s mind? By having a quick listen to an edited version of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, we get a sense of what it means to create tension in your work. I worked with my Italy workshoppers this summer on the idea of creating tension and resolution as they edited their images and told stories about the places and things we saw. Here are their results. Tuscany Workshop Slideshows: * Amanda Dussault * Ruth Guthrie * Keith Guthrie Venice Workshop Slideshows: * Amanda Dussault & Amanda’s Faces * Ann Marie Barry * Lewis Dunn

“Chance favors the prepared mind.” This great quotation by the important 19th century chemist Louis Pasteur is a springboard for some thoughts on preparedness for photography, both physically and intellectually. In the podcast, I mention the great Alinari Archives in Florence, Italy and its online resource of amazing images of one of my favorite places to visit and photograph.

A pair of emails from podcast listeners provided the impetus for this episode and its brief discussion of “a real time for things.” Kristian wrote, “But when looking back at the time (especially after a by a PhD degree and two years of intensive R&D work) I realize the most important thing to learn, is how to learn and how to take your skill set and apply it in new ways to form something new” Jim wrote, “It’s interesting, years ago I took photographs with more concern over the mechanics of it. After many years, I came back to it and now I see things better than before and I am more concerned with the artistic aspects. Makes me wonder if there isn’t a real time for things…”      

In my fifth and final piece of conversation with Mary Virginia Swanson, we talk about the relative importance of story and narrative in photographic work. * Mary Virginia Swanson’s website * Publish Your Photography Book – a book about making books from M.V. Swanson and Darius Himes * Todd Hido – Pier 24 in San Francisco – at Stephen Wirtz Gallery * Photobook Dummy Award * Indie Photobook Library

The 4th part of my conversation with Mary Virginia Swanson, where we discuss public art, galleries and work for the wall, image size and the life of images that aren’t meant for traditional display. Links to resources mentioned on this podcast: * Mary Virginia Swanson’s website * Martha Madigan * Chuck Close – Magnolia Editions Tapestries * Susan kae Grant – Parkland Station installation * Rebecca Cummins – Pilchuck Glass School * Doug Aitken – Installation * Richard Serra * David Taylor – Working The Line