Blog About Photography

© Greg Wasserstrom

I’ve finally got­ten my selec­tion for Fjord straight­ened out, I think. Go check out the project if you haven’t looked in a while — it gets bet­ter with every update. I was really giv­ing it all an in depth look the other night and was reminded of what a won­der­ful project it is. It’s really, really rad to have all these peo­ple grouped together in one place; Fjord really pro­vides a snap­shot of this moment in the devel­op­ment of fine art pho­tog­ra­phy. Priceless!

Well, so I’m a lit­tle late to game writ­ing about Fjord, but I have to check in on this one because I’m so excited to be a part of it. Fjord is a book project spear­headed by Grant Will­ing and Alana Celii, which they describe this way:

The dras­tic shift in the way work is being pre­sented today has become espe­cially notice­able in the more tech­no­log­i­cally adept gen­er­a­tion. Fjord’s goal is to bring together a col­lec­tion of notable pho­tog­ra­phers from the inter­net and show­case their work in book form. This tran­si­tion from inter­net to book will allow a dif­fer­ent audi­ence to expe­ri­ence the work thus bring­ing emerg­ing artists into the public’s view.

As we all know, pho­tog­ra­phy lends itself rather well to inter­net and, as a result, there’s a rather vibrant com­mu­nity of young pho­tog­ra­phers here. There’s no argu­ing the fact that our dia­logue is hav­ing an impact on they way images are cre­ated. Fjord will be a beau­ti­ful cat­a­log of this tran­si­tional moment. Though we are con­tem­po­raries, I have viewed many of these artists as men­tors as my pas­sion for pho­tog­ra­phy has grown over the past few years. I’m exceed­ingly proud to be included with them in these pages!

Be sure to peruse the gallery. There are famil­iar names in there and also less famil­iar ones, but all the work is absolutely wonderful!

Lastly, get­tingFjord to book­shelves is a is a grass­roots effort. If you can help us pro­mote the book in any way pos­si­bly, from send­ing some cash to link­ing to the web­site to sim­ply dis­trib­ut­ing some post­cards, we’d really appre­ci­ate it. Any extra dol­lars you might have can be sent to Alana thru pay­pal at sail­bel­lyup at gmail dot com.

© Alec Soth

What a pleas­ing end to today. I’ve been apply­ing to jobs in New York non-​​stop over the week­end and all day again today. Try­ing to find work and an apart­ment in a city I don’t live in yet has been stress­ful to say the least. I got a treat in the mail though. My copy of Alec Soth’s Nia­gara arrived from Ger­many today — I fol­lowed a hot tip from some help­ful com­menters to get a copy of this thing because it went out of print prob­a­bly the day I ordered it from Ama­zon the first time.

As far as the job thing goes, my best lead so far is with a com­pany that makes school por­traits! This might not be glam­orous work but it actu­ally sounds pretty great to me. I love things bizarre, campy and awk­ward and school por­traits are all three. I’ve also applied to sev­eral journalism-​​oriented jobs because on paper I’m prob­a­bly more qual­i­fied to do some­thing like that than take pic­tures for money. In any event, I’m still at the begin­ning of this process so we’ll see what turns up.

So any­way, that’s what’s going on over here. If any­body out there wants to employ me just give a holler.

I just learned from Muse-​​ings that Alec Soth’s Dog Days: Bogota is being pub­lished. Not only is this my favorite of Alec’s projects, but it’s the only one I will have the oppor­tu­nity to own now that both Sleep­ing by the Mis­sis­sippi and Nia­gra have both gone out of print. I have already pre-​​ordered a copy of Dog Days on Ama­zon because I learned the heard way that it’s impor­tant to get your hands on one of these books as soon as humanly pos­si­bly. I ordered a copy of Nia­gra from Ama­zon before they stopped pub­lish­ing it, but I guess the demand for it was so high they weren’t able to ship it to me before new ones were made. I then got a mes­sage from them say­ing I was hosed, there are none left.

But not with Dog Days, oh no sir. You can take that to the bank.

This is kind of lay­ing say­ing you get Play­boy for the arti­cles, but I have a seri­ous pas­sion for cat­a­log essays. I love them for the pretty much the same rea­son I love the cir­cle of pho­tog­ra­phy blogs we are all read­ing so avidly — at their best, essays pro­vide invalu­able insight into the cre­ative dia­log artists par­tic­i­pate in (a cou­ple of months ago, read­ing once sen­tence about the work of Stephen Shore had a sub­stan­tial impact on the fun­da­men­tal way I approach photography).

The art mar­ket, of course, dri­ves the pro­duc­tion of books and essays and things. I moved to slowly on Alec Soth’s Sleep­ing by the Mis­sis­sippi for exam­ple, which has a woder­ful essay by Anne Wilkes Tucker, and it went out of print. As soon as I found out it was no longer avail­able, I ordered Nia­gra that very day. That book too, has gone out of print, and I’m still wait­ing for my copy to arrive.

I while back, I scanned and posted James Agee’s essay from Helen Levitt’s 1946 book A Way of See­ing. John Szarkowski has said this essay is one of the best ever writ­ten about pho­tog­ra­phy and the book has long been out of print. Start­ing as soon as I have a lit­tle more time, I’m going to start scan­ning essays and putting them online, and I encour­age oth­ers to do the same. I’m going to do my best to col­lect and orga­nize them and keep them in a cen­tral place.

I’m declar­ing this a life-​​long project. Or at least a project for the long term. I’m not going to start furi­ously check­ing out books or any­thing and I intend to approach this in a very leisurely way. But this is a call to action: I think that all you col­lec­tors of cat­a­logs and mono­graphs out there should scan your par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing and out of print essays and post them on your blogs. If you don’t have a blog, send it to me and I’ll post it. Also, if you know where essays have been posted pre­vi­ously, please leave a link the comments.

Seri­ously. Do it. It’ll be awesome.

UPDATE: I have added a page called Essay Col­lec­tion. Cur­rently it has two items, but it’s going to grow explo­sively, I’m sure.