Brad Troemel
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I don’t know much about him, but Brad Troemel is a 20 and I guess probably in school somewhere. I’ve followed his work on Flickr for a while now; it captured my interest right away because of its social themes and snapshot aesthetic. His magazine-like website is so packed with projects and images it suggests he’s constantly working and thinking about photography.
All of a sudden he’s all over the photosphere. On his blog Very Young Millionaire, Brad has started asking other photographers to write 100 words about a photograph of theirs he posts in an effort to encourage some discussion from what he sees as a prolific but largely silent generation of photographers. He is included in the sprawling Fjord project spearheaded by Grant Willing and Alana Celii, and he just posted an extensive interview with them on VYM about Fjord and a host of other topics.
Anyway, I guess my point is he’s advancing the cause, and I think that’s pretty rad.
October 10th, 2007 at 9:48 pm
thanks for posting a link to that guys website. i had never heard of him.
at first i was excited about all of his work, but then i realized, oh, just another ryan mcg, vice mag, cool kids, naked, blah blah blah blah.
i get transfixed by work like that because I feel like I am not as cool as he and his friends, but I wish i was.
then i realize it is all a bunch of cliches and i get over it. i still can’t help but feel jealous.
then again I guess it isn’t as bad as another alec soth derivative.
October 10th, 2007 at 10:21 pm
Thanks for such an honest comment, Ron. The idea you’re describing I think is an important part of this kind of work, for better or worse. Those same elements that seem to turn you off about this stuff is what draws me into it — getting to be one of the cool kids. i would love to make these kinds of pictures, but my life’s just not exciting enough.
October 30th, 2007 at 5:28 pm
ron, hey, don’t get so stumped on this. they’re just images. i shoot pictures of my friends and the idea is CERTAINLY not to impress or throw my own coolness in your face. i just hope i’ve captured a moment that speaks to me, and hopefully to you as the viewer. this is not a popularity conest. i mean, sure, there’s the cobra snake and all those young dudes who are working with a different idea in mind. don’t blame me for alex soth. wait, who is that? i don’t even know.
January 24th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
his stuff is good, because he picked interesting projects. you could sit and be jealous about some idea of people being cooler than you. but that’s not really the case. find an interesting subject, take a picture of it. if you think an urban landscape is interesting, someone else might too, i just don’t know who.
this style is pretty close to saturated, it’s interesting to see what will be next.
July 7th, 2008 at 11:04 pm
I know Brad Troemel personally. At first, he is capturing. He talks about his work and his ideas with such enthusiasm that after a while you see… very little human in him. Not that it matters much; these days, people get away with narcissism because thats the business. But don’t expect Brad’s work to change much over the years until he learns to face his own issues. But mostly, yeah, he is another cool kid to exploit the american apparael, vice magazine and art scene “lifestyle.” It’s all image.
July 8th, 2008 at 1:08 am
sour grapes!
October 9th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Photographer’s live in a truly unique time now. With all of the additional digital technology to enhance one’s own efforts, i.e. high speed broadband, laptops, apple vs. PC, Photoshop etc. anyone wth a decent eye and some good intuition has the ability to document images for posterity’s sake. I appreciated stumbling upon this interesting website, thanks and I’ll log in from time to time. I hope it’s OK to partake on the 100 word description on the other site.