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.