Redmond O'Hanlon's basic writing strategy is to put himself in some remote and dangerous place and to write about how he overcame obstacle after obstacle to his very survival and found his way back. This is a strategy that will be familiar to many artists. Bill Bryson thinks the world…
Most of my photobook, Computational Photography, is made up of photographs. Shocker, I know! There are sixteen photo projects and along with each project is an essay. But not your normal essays, though they started out familiar enough. The original idea for the texts was that I would write a…
In 1966 Ed Ruscha published the accordion-style Every Building On the Sunset Strip which would become one of his most well-known and cited works. Despite it not even being Ruscha's first photobook, Sunset Strip is sometimes called "the first photobook," a testament to the persistence of its influence and charm.…
You don't need me to tell you about the dumbness--and if you care at all about the arts, the embarrassing dumbness--of the artist statement. It is said that artist statements originated somewhere in the early 1990s but I remember them earlier than that. I've never seen a good one and…
Forty-eight years ago John Szarkowski, the director of the Museum of Modern Art's photography department -- a department that more or less was leading the world in taking photography seriously as an art -- published a book entitled Looking at Photographs. In his book he shared one hundred images from…
The photobook Zaido by Yukari Chikura was published last year and has been featured in nearly every "top ten" list. The book is now listed as "out of print" by Steidl, the publisher, although stock remains at booksellers. You can see my review of Zaido here. I chatted with the…
My idea--I'm a genius at marketing my work, it should be obvious by now-- was to send a free copy of Computational Photography each month, given postage-free* to a reader drawn randomly from my subscriber list. I mean, I would ask them first if they even wanted a copy of…
Computational Photography, as it developed, became less and less like a regular photobook and more and more like an art project in itself. In a regular photobook you'd start off with an introductory text, followed by an essay from a curator or scholar associated with the kind of work that…
After going through William Frej's exciting photobook, Maya Ruins Revisited (see my review here), that excitement carried on and I wanted to dig deeper. Do you want more, too? The first place to start is the most obvious: One essay in Frej's book offers a good summary of what is…
Rephotography—projects that seek out the tripod holes of past photographers to reshoot the same images of the same thing, in the same place, maybe at the same time—have their fascinations but, in the end, impart lessons on the same general theme: Man is bad. Man is bad because man tears…