Blog About Photography

I’m not entirely sure how I came across this but the Checker­board Film Foun­da­tion has been mak­ing doc­u­men­taries about artists, com­posers and writ­ers for 30 years. They pro­duced a doc­u­men­tary on John Szarkowski in 1998. There is also another film called Szarkowski on Eugene Atget and one called Szarkowski on Szarkowski. They’re all avail­able for sale on DVD for the bar­gain price of $45. I searched Google Video and YouTube for all or part of these guys to no avail. Please let me know if you’ve seen any of them, I emailed and asked if there was a stu­dent rate.

Read more: John Szarkowski

© Chris­t­ian Patterson

I’m a big fan of Christian’s work and was thrilled to see some of his new work along­side his inter­view in Mak­ing Room. Chris­t­ian talks in some depth about his ongo­ing project “Out There,” an explo­ration of the land­scape con­nected with a series of mur­ders com­mit­ted by a Nebraska teenager in the 1950s.

When I started fol­low­ing my map, I found things that I never imag­ined I would find nearly fifty years after the mur­ders took place. There are very few things that remain, and they are very hard to find, but I found some very inter­est­ing things that will show up in the pho­tographs. My research and imag­i­na­tion are help­ing me to fill in the blanks.

I had sort of assumed that “Out There” was sort of just what it sounded like — I had no idea that Chris­t­ian had plot­ted out a very spe­cific course based on the route the killer and his girl­friend took while on the lamb. I can’t really over­state power this con­cept lends to what are already incred­i­bly rich images — one in par­tic­u­lar reminds me of a famous Robert Frost poem. I’m sure you know the one.

This is incred­i­bly dorky but I’m post­ing it any­way. There’s got to be at least one other per­son out there who will care about this and that’s good enough for me. I have a Mac­book Pro and those of you out there with the same com­puter now how ridicu­lously huge the power adapter is for this thing. It’s like lug­ging around a brick. If you’re any­thing like me, you’ll be happy to know that Apple just redesigned this thing and made it much, much smaller. Lucky for me, I have two of the old ones.

I’ve been plan­ning to move to New York as soon as grad­u­a­tion rolls around and start my life. I’ve been look­ing for­ward to this for about two years and now grad­u­a­tion is jsut a cou­ple weeks away. I have an oppor­tu­nity to spend a month or two trav­el­ing across Europe. As soon as I found out, I fig­ured I would just put New York off for a cou­ple of months or what­ever and do it because it would be an amaz­ing time. That was like three days ago, and now I’m begin­ning to think I don’t really want to go!

Europe’s not going any­where and I’m dying to, you know, get it going, not that I have any par­tic­u­lar plan for that per se. I think it would be a ter­rific time to see all these amaz­ing places I’ve never seen and take a mil­lion pic­tures and meet tons of peo­ple, etc., but I’ve got myself going in a cer­tain direc­tion and I don’t really feel like chang­ing it at the moment — espe­cially after my week­end in the city last month. I’m sure a trip like this would be for­ma­tive, etc., but mostly it would be fuck­ing around.

So, I’m decid­ing this in the next week or so. I’d love for you guys to weigh in.