Dispersion
by RKT

Comment:
Always distilling things to their essence, you are. It's a much more difficult thing to do, with verity, than it seems. It's not just a question of little vignettes (I mean the literal kind, not the photographer kind) and maudlin details. The skill, the fine judgement, is what to include and what to exclude to reveal the real thing. To capture the essence.

You've always done that, with windows, with cars, and with family life. Knowing what to say best by instinctively knowing what need not be said, or depicted.

This essay is in that same rare vein. Complete yet spare, bereft, and yet only gently sentimental. The sentiment is no less palpable for that light touch, and paradoxically actually feels deeper and more durable because of it.

Thank you.

oh dear
by jmritz

Comment:
John, I love your stuff better than anyone's at DPC. Artist with camera, camera as charcoal. You and Jan Blessing stand alone (well, together alone) in that rare genre.

And the titles; your titles are the most breathtakingly economical poetry, and lose nothing in the enforced brevity. I'd renew my membership just for your titles.

So, here my immediate thought, in each case:

My heart plunges, and rises. A photograph with its own tremolo arm.

Oh, where are the snows of yesteryear?

I will be there. You just wait; I will be.

A soul falls, swoops, screaming and sparking.

Where now are the empty footsteps, the invisible shadows? What, am I alone?

Good Grief! What a picture, what a composition, what a sublime orchestration of tones and shapes and a single breath. Not a pixel too much or too few. Bloody miraculous.

Small smile at Winogrand. Big smile back, I imagine.

Thank God you made a noise.

Dorothea Lange's picture, from a different point-of-view.

Yes. No. Maybe. You can't say no, even crucified and all.

O say can you see?

Hey Joe.

Hey Joe ... That's probably it, the reason we connect; we two are of an age, teenagers in the 60s. Not much stuck to us after that.

Thank you.

Message edited by author 2015-05-03 09:49:38.

Girlhood - 1
by LevT

Comment:
Complex ideas, simply explained. Must be your profession showing through!

I remember the Durex girl, interrogating you so dispassionately. All are good and interesting photographs, especially when overlapping and blended like this (those transitions Don refers to). But No 6 is a wonderful single image as well. Thank you!

Girlhood - 6
by LevT

Comment:
Da!

!.travel-to-Oaxaca
by mariuca

Comment:
I've slowly lost interest in photography and instead re-engaged with photographs. Photography is in many ways a faux-art; an artist can take photographs but very few photographers can make art. The paradox is that the more overtly artistic the enthusiast photographer tries to be, very often the less substantial and interesting the product becomes. It is artistically diminished by the process; by the enthusiast photographer looking at the wrong things, and then compounding the missed opportunity by screwing around with what they do see.

Here with this essay we have an artist first and always ΓΆ€“ I refer to you ΓΆ€“ and these are the photographs that an artist would take. A painter, especially so. Thus they probably don't much impress the enthusiast photographer (with the possible exception of No 8). But they record and celebrate the things that excite fellow artists, and also inform all of us with an interest in things beyond our own fence. It's the authenticity that matters with this stuff. May I quote J Keats? "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, ΓΆ€“ that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

The Secrecy of Shadows
by insteps

Comment:
More radical than the earlier essay 'Indifferent Sun'. This time the images seem like they are a deck of cards used for prophesy, like tarot cards. Probably prompted by the crop and the framing, but there's still something more symbolic in this set than was the case in 'Indifferent Sun.' Tarot-style cards was the very first thought I had this time; never occurred to me last time.

Some images have a strange ambivalence, where looked at one way the darkness is background, and then another way it's reversed and the light is the background. I think some are very interesting exercises in perception and negative space. The truck is a great example, with the 'city skyline' above it. But there's some element of that flip-flop perception in nearly all of them.

Always absorbing, and the interest rises with the increasing uncertainty. The last 3 are my favourites. No, last 4. Actually, it's the last 6. But to tell the whole truth and nothing but, the only ones that don't stab me with a sharp thrill are 3 & 6; the two featuring human figures. The rest is PMD (Photos of Mass Delight). Thank you.

Oldies but Goodies
by herfotoman

Comment:
This is an interesting idea. I preferred it as a slideshow, mostly because I don't care so much about the better quality images ... "Never mind the quality, feel the width!".

As a slideshow it has a dimension not evident in the individual images. That is a feeling that the colour shots are people who have aged to bear a close resemblance to their departed grandparents, seen in the old, heavily-cropped B&W shots. They do look like each other; the family resemblance is there, but they're not exactly the same. Once you start think that anarchic thought, it's irresistible: you can spot small but conclusive differences in every 'pair', proving that it's really cleverly-matched pictures of people and their grandparents.

Absorbing & thoughtful essay.

_1--
by 2mccs

Comment:
Ha! We did almost the same thing, in almost the same way. Both eschewed our usual moody and uncertain B&W for more offhand conventional snaps, and both for the same reason. I enjoyed your essay for the same reasons that Sarah did: it's unexpected, and rubs against the grain of the popular conception of the location and society. Yours is the more ambitious - the more profound - of the two essays for that reason. It's awfully beautiful, and beautifully awful. Thank you.

ETA: yours is better also because it works as well, perhaps better, without words. Mine does not. So I bow before you a second time.

Message edited by author 2015-04-30 13:03:15.

grand illusions
by jagar

Comment:
This is my top pick; of all the many terrific pictures in this challenge, this is the one I'd most like to have taken myself.

On the superficial level, it employs most of my favourite things: B&W, deep contrast, mad vignette, grain. Plus some smaller sly pleasures ... the cloud poking in like the finger of God, and the shadowed profile at lower right, snooping on the conversation.

Scrape a layer deeper and the subtler delights include great blocks of shape and tone that introduce a nearly abstract motif. You could view it from far, far away and it'd still be interesting because of the purely graphic characteristics.

It's also something of an anti-photography photograph in the absence of any faces. We expect faces, expressions (think of selfies, and those pouty-face things). Instead we're left to draw those identities ourselves. We get to choose who the players are, and what's happening.

What I choose to see is two older couples sitting on a bench in an art gallery (apparently a cold art gallery), looking at a gigantic and brutal floor-to-ceiling modern artwork. And they are all glancing sideways at each other, hoping that someone will soon suggest moving to the gallery cafe for a cup of tea.

But I could be wrong of course. Maybe there is no gallery. No tea either. That's the great thing about good art; you imagine what it means, what it is, and you could be wrong. Imagine a world where all the art was so simple and unequivocal that the viewer could NOT be wrong. I wouldn't want to live there.

I offer you the first ever Order of the Blue Thumb, and my thanks for this thrilling photograph.

fleeting
by jmritz

Comment:
This is a wonderful photograph.

Viewed objectively, it looks like a hurried snapshot. But why view it objectively? Objectivity in art is a desensitiser; you prevent yourself from seeing the wood because you're too busy counting the trees, ticking the boxes, judging the work by some dispassionate external criteria of what's 'good'. All that leaden stuff about tilted horizons, tonal range, sharpness, etc, will take the resolutely objective viewer away from this picture, rather than toward it. And when that happens, the resultant 'failure' of the work is the viewer's fault, and not the artist's.

Instead get inside the picture and find out how it feels. It feels different, original, daring. And it's not as snapshotish as it first seems, either. The doors of the Lexus echo the great soaring arches and sweeping curves of modern architecture. I mean public buildings; nobody constructs buildings like that with their own money. Ordinary people, real people, grapple with that extravagant vanity ... just as we see with this lady, struggling to make it fit her, or her fit it. Struggling to make sense of it.

I'm being wildly fanciful of course, but wildly fanciful is what makes art of life, and life of art. This is both: life, and art.

Please accept the Curse of the Red Thumb, and my thanks for an original, interesting photograph.