Spaces.
by RKT

Comment:
I can come back to this. And I will. Coming back is the best part, when there's substance to be weighed.

ETA: Something nearly divine.

Message edited by author 2015-03-24 15:21:39.

Laid to Rest
by insteps

Comment:
I voted but never got any comments done. This was my equal favourite. I loved the implied ceremonial of it. A gently sad but beautiful image and in spite of the careful laying out, I was pretty well convinced that it was as found. Thank you.

MB1A2710
by chalice

Comment:
It's a Day in the Life, starting after midnight and ending with a suggestion of a day's work done. In between, you have engaged the starter, released the handbrake, fuelled up, and tooled around the neighbourhood ticking a few boxes and stealing a few horses. It works; it's interesting, entertaining and well worth more than the one run through, too. Loved the odd points-of-view, especially the fridge one (this is the first time I have ever smiled at the fridge POV kind of photograph).

The individual photographs are also very interesting as stand alone images. Nice work all round Jeff.

When viewing the essay on your linked website/blog, I also quickly scrolled top-to-bottom and back a few times, and there's a day there in the advancing & receding light and the changing mood. An implied diurnal device! I reckon that was your intention at least as a subconscious impulse, and it works beautifully!

Thank you.

three stories
by jmritz

Comment:
You do more with less than any photographer I have ever known. Your stuff always seems like the sketches of a great artist. You'll scoff at the comparison ΓΆ€“ probably laugh out loud ΓΆ€“ but your photographs remind me of Picasso's single line drawings (contour drawings?), where everything is about capturing the essence of a thing with the maximum economy, and fuck the details, which are irrelevant or even worse obscuring. If that comparison's too rich for you, then how about gestural drawings? Would you buy that? Your photographs are gestural drawings. Can't deny me that one, John.

We naturally deplore the relative scarcity of your signature titles in this essay. I know you had no choice in this context, but your titles are actually my favourite pleasure at DPC. Not kidding.

Thank you.

a
by daisydavid

Comment:
I hope this essay does not mean what it feels like.

If it does, I don't think I can make a coherent statement about it. So I will have to assume it does not.

But I can't now. If you hadn't pierced it through its autumn with that picture of yourself, looking like a distinguished actor's bio picture in a Shakespearean programme, I'd paradoxically have been able to convince myself that you were only playing. If that picture had been treated like all the rest, I'd have been OK. But it wasn't; it was a fixed point, a pivot, and everything else was receding from it. Receding backwards, receding forwards.

Crikey. I'm done, for now. And it's that bloody Any Winehouse's fault as much as yours.

Can't even manage my customary thank you.

r
by daisydavid

Comment:
G'day.

1.children
by mariuca

Comment:

Originally posted by posthumous: one more thing, capturing in-between moments, moments without "moment", you show a respect and empathy missing from a typical National Geographic photo essay of a foreign locale. You are, in fact, undermining their foreign-ness to accentuate their human-ness.

I was going to post a luke-warm review of this essay until I read the quoted comment from Don. It made me look again, and reconsider my position by opening my eyes to what I'd missed or under-estimated. He's right about your reverence for the subjects, such that they aren't subjects at all but extensions of yourself. The idea of moments without "moment" is a perfect characterisation of this essay. You have honored these children by inviting them across to your side of the lens, and yourself to theirs. Hence the anti-NatGeo tribute. It's indeed the work of a humanist first and photographer only second. Thank you.

Cochin 0001
by salmiakki

Comment:
Drat! I knew there was a drawback to my taking my commenting on these essays one day at a time; it means that I have to agree with the bloke who agreed with Don. Third banana I am. Nevertheless, my comments, or really it's my purloining of their comments, are no less sincere for that. Hear, hear! and thank you.

1
by markwiley

Comment:
You said in a follow-up post that your essay was "woefully short on thoughts". But you were wrong because it certainly isn't.

If I were the editor of a photo magazine and this came across my desk my immediate thought would have been "Comfortably Numb", and I'd have given that title and these pictures to my best scribe and said to give me 500 words on that theme to do justice to these pictures, and keep your sentences short (not like this one).

I'd have said to the writer, "You are one of hundreds, of thousands, serving your daily sentence on mass commuter transit, and yet you are alone. You are wrapped in an invisible cloak, and insulated from emotion, from expression, from any apparent animating influence at all. You are insulated even from yourself." It's a very sci-fi concept, the suppression, the spiritual abdication, of any visible sense of self as a means of coping with distopia.

Some words already written on the subject by Pink Floyd:
"There is no pain, you are receding
A distant ship smoke on the horizon
You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move but I can't hear what you're saying
...
This is not how I am
I have become comfortably numb"

So, enough of that stuff: the essay is coherent and consistent and anything but woefully short on thoughts.

But what of the photographs? They are perfect technically and look like film photography, when different things mattered. By that I mean they are technically accomplished without shouting about it, which is the opposite of much contemporary digital photography. In your pictures the "Wow" is whispered, and all the better and more profound for that restraint.

And there's not a clunker among them either; not one that would know the cruel cut of my editor's red wax pencil. I tried, went three times through: could not make a single deletion. Every single image contains its own essay. To continue the musical allusion, it's like a great album where every track is good both alone and as an essential brick in the wall, too. It's astounding consistency; either you had thousands to choose from, or you're bloody supernatural.

Mark, I loved the pictures, loved the essay, and loved the time as a fantasy editor that you gave me.

Thank you.


Message edited by author 2015-03-04 06:23:52.

Importance of the First Impression
by posthumous

Comment:
It's not what I expected. Or, more accurately, it is what I expected, which was something unexpected.

For me the greatest pleasure of poetry is in the prospecting; plucking out the little sparkles of precious stones studded through the vein of the thing. I'm not a scholar of the structure of poetry, nor of the conventions of verse and their corresponding unconventions. But I do love couplets and phrases and allusions that make me feel that I've felt this feeling before, when I know I have not.

Exquisite examples here: crows like "little geishas in black kimonos"; Manet "paints his own light on the flowers"; and even "In spite of the white hat worn by the New Rome". These are not the only reasons I (infrequently) read poetry, but they are the reasons that leave indelible marks on me. I feel uncomfortable that I'm often indifferent to the bigger picture. I like bites of it, but seldom can I manage a meal. I think I get distracted by the resonance of those scattered snapshots, and you know how I feel about snapshots: they may be modest but they mean the most and they last forever.

So I won't attempt to judge nor even measure the piece as a whole. It made sense; it was interesting and illuminating. I was informed and entertained by it. The pictures were crafted very effectively with the words. But I'm taking the gemstones home for my treasure box. I'm a collector, you see, so I can't help it.

Thank you.

ETA: I think the title of the piece is surpassing wise. The conjunction of Manet, and the mirror device, with the emergence of photography is a very heady brew. A further thank you.

Message edited by author 2015-03-03 07:36:28.