Blog About Photography

Urban­code is a local arts and lit­er­ary mag that just got started up here in the Dis­trict of Colum­bia. The pre­mière issue has just become avail­able, and a photo of mine appears on page 43. Down­load the issue and check it out.

Four and a half months later, it turns out that an MFA pro­gram isn’t in the cards for this year. I received strong words of encour­age­ment from a lot of great places and opted not to go to ICP in favor of hope­fully attend­ing a Uni­ver­sity pro­gram in the future. It was an inter­est­ing process and I learned quite a bit about what the pos­si­bil­i­ties are. So, we’ll put this to rest with one final look at the score­card (until next year):

This morn­ing I went with some friends to vol­un­teer at Poplar Springs Ani­mal Sanc­tu­ary, a 400 acre farm where ani­mals res­cued from slaugh­ter spend their time to hang­ing out, walk­ing around, eat­ing grass, rolling in mud, etc. It was a pretty great time. At one point, we were given the task of sort of round­ing up the cows and mov­ing them from one pas­ture to another. Most of the cows were com­pli­ant. Three were less inter­ested in accom­mo­dat­ing us. One of those three was fuck­ing enormous.

If you’re read­ing this, chances are you’re famil­iar with Joerg Col­berg. Any­one inter­ested in pho­tog­ra­phy who spends time on the inter­net will come across his blog Con­sci­en­tious, and prob­a­bly come across it rather quickly. Con­sci­en­tious is some­thing of a hub on the web for pho­tog­ra­phy related sites and blogs, serv­ing as some­thing like a mas­sive pho­tog­ra­phy index, updated sev­eral times every sin­gle day of the week. Imag­ine my sur­prise when I learned that he’s (also) an astrophysicist.

I asked Joerg some ques­tions and he was very kind to answer them. On Con­sci­en­tious, only the small­est bits of his per­sonal his­tory and world view trick­les out, and I found it fas­ci­nat­ing to hear what he had to say about things.

GW: You write arguablely the most read blog about pho­tog­ra­phy on the inter­net and you’re a tal­ented pho­tog­ra­pher in your own right. But photography’s not your day job. You’re an astro­physi­cist, which isn’t exactly some­thing a per­son can do in their spare time. How did you come to be a sci­en­tist and what attracted you to astro­physics? Is your inter­est in it as strong as your pas­sion for pho­tog­ra­phy? How do you find the time for two dif­fer­ent and highly involved pursuits?

JC: I fig­ured it would be eas­ier to get a Ph.D. in astro­physics and then do pho­tog­ra­phy “on the side” than the other way around! But seri­ously, after high school, I had to think about what I wanted to do, and I ended up study­ing physics, because I was inter­ested in astron­omy. Back then it did sound quite inter­est­ing. In the end, I had to get my Ph.D. to be able to work on what had always inter­ested me the most (com­puter sim­u­la­tions of the Uni­verse). After my Ph.D., I quit for a few years and worked in a cou­ple of more reg­u­lar jobs. But I found being a pro­gram­mer so intensely bor­ing that I tried to get back into sci­ence. While writ­ing com­puter pro­grammes isn’t exactly the most inter­est­ing thing I can think of, doing it to find out about Nature is just so much nicer than doing it so that some­one can sell that extra piece of soap. Money-​​wise, switch­ing back from a pro­gram­ming job at a soft­ware startup to acad­e­mia isn’t nec­es­sar­ily the smartest choice, of course, but then, to get the oblig­a­tory cliché out of the way, money can’t buy you happiness.

Whether my pas­sion for astro­physics and pho­tog­ra­phy is sim­i­larly strong I don’t really know — in the end, your day job tends to be very tedious (regard­less of what you do). There is a sim­i­lar pas­sion to do some­thing worth­while, though, some­thing that has a value that can­not be mea­sured directly. Cos­mol­ogy has a strong cul­tural com­po­nent — you can’t apply that knowl­edge of the ori­gins of the Uni­verse to sell­ing soap or build­ing bombs.

As for the find­ing time, that’s not very hard. If you have some­thing that is very dear to you you will always be able to find the time for it. Other peo­ple col­lect stamps or go to Nascar races. I look at photography.

GW: Is there a con­nec­tion between your work in that field with photography?

JC: No, not at all. I’m a the­o­rist. If I was an observer, then yes, I would be tak­ing pho­tos of the sky. But as a the­o­rist, I make a bunch of super­com­put­ers run my programmes.

GW: When did you become inter­ested in pho­tog­ra­phy? What inspired you to start tak­ing pic­tures? What inspired you to start blog­ging about it?

JC: My inter­est started very late in my life. Back in 1999, I spent a few months in Frank­furt, and I picked up a lit­tle cam­era and started tak­ing pho­tos. I got hooked when I real­ized I was able to take pho­tos that I actu­ally liked. The blog­ging is a bit unre­lated actu­ally, since ini­tially, it was sup­posed to be a blog about stuff that inter­ested me. But at some stage, maybe half a year after I had started it, I came across the Dues­sel­dorf School peo­ple, and I got very inter­ested in what they were doing. So I added the links to the blog, and since I got more and more drawn to pho­tog­ra­phy, the blog quickly mor­phed into what it is now.

GW: The themes in your work, specif­i­cally the work in the ‘projects’sec­tion of your site, are very cur­rent relat­ing to our polit­i­cal and social envi­ron­ment. You’re aes­thetic is sub­tle and sophis­ti­cated. On your blog, you give equal time and space to pho­tog­ra­phers of all kinds. Are your inter­ests really that broad or do you feel it’s your duty to con­nect your read­ers with work they might be inter­ested in?

JC: Pre­dict­ing the future is prob­a­bly the best way to make a com­plete fool of your­self. So I’m going to refrain from any such pre­dic­tions. But I think that there cur­rently is a trend emerg­ing, which hope­fully will not dis­ap­pear at some stage. Pho­tog­ra­phers and peo­ple inter­ested in pho­tog­ra­phy are now being able to con­nect to an extent that was sim­ply not pos­si­ble before. You have to real­ize that some­one like Alec shar­ing his thoughts and ideas that freely and directly is some­thing that is new.

It remains to be seen whether this will result in an expan­sion of the num­ber of peo­ple who shape pho­tog­ra­phy his­tory. I do hope that there will be more peo­ple and more places that shape pho­tog­ra­phy his­tory, and I think that’s already — albeit very slowly — hap­pen­ing. How­ever, I think the sub­jec­tiv­ity, that accord­ing to Mar­tin Parr is a big part of pho­tog­ra­phy his­tory, will not dis­ap­pear. BUT I think the over­all field will become wider, and it will be harder for pho­tog­ra­phers to just get for­got­ten — mak­ing pho­tog­ra­phy archives avail­able online will save a lot of good work from pho­tog­ra­phy obliv­ion, and hope­fully, a lot of under­rated or for­got­ten pho­tog­ra­phers will be redis­cov­ered (or actu­ally dis­cov­ered for the first time).

In a sense, remind­ing peo­ple of how sub­jec­tive the his­tory of pho­tog­ra­phy to some extent isn’t quite fair. Peo­ple like Stei­glitz, Ste­ichen or Szarkowski were active at times when pho­tog­ra­phy had a com­pletely dif­fer­ent sta­tus. So, yes, one could be unhappy about what they decided to show (and what to ignore), but while being sub­jec­tive they nev­er­the­less pushed pho­tog­ra­phy for­ward and made it more widely accepted.

I haven’t always been in love with Kate Binga­man, but man, oh man am I in love with her now.. When I saw the Ultra show at the Jen Bek­man Gallery a few months ago, I spent a few min­utes soak­ing up Bingaman’s instal­la­tion there, a then/​now com­par­i­son of prod­ucts at the time of their pur­chase and where they ended up a few months later. It was inter­est­ing but then I moved on. It wasn’t exactly a heav­ily intel­lec­tual piece.

Man. So I don’t even know where to begin with this. I just found her flickr stream and man, that lit­tle instal­la­tion at Jen Bek­man isn’t even the tip of the ice­berg. That was like… I mean, that’s just a drop in the bucket of the seem­ingly bot­tom­less reser­voir of cre­ativ­ity that is Kate Binga­man. She is draw­ing her daily pur­chases now, each draw­ing is quirky, funny, inter­est­ing. They’re incred­i­ble. Really amaz­ing. You can spend hours on her flickr. But, there’s more! Much much, more!

The flickr stream led me to her web­site, obses​sive​con​sump​tion​.com, which is like her hub. It of course, has her work arhchived and orga­nized for perusal. It also fea­tures a blog. And also, years of bank state­ments redrawn by her dis­tinc­tive hand, daily draw­ings, so much stuff.

Her pho­tog­ra­phy on consumption-​​related themes is engag­ing as well, and, of course, she has fully stocked store sell­ing her zine (monthly!), but­tons, han­kies, draw­ings, I mean every­thing you could imag­ine. Really, all I can think to say is that the whole thing is really fuck­ing rad.