We need a name for this new thing, this new way of generating photo-realistic images. That name sure isn’t “photography.” There is a great outcry amongst the Twittering masses over this question, every photographer now a philosopher, ontology replacing cryptocurrency as the consuming topic of both those who sense photography’s…
There is nothing that computers can do that humans can’t do themselves, with pencil and paper, if only we were given enough time. At a low enough level computation is mind-numbingly dumb. There’s no ghost-in-the-machine hiding down there. But there is a ghost. It is hiding somewhere high above, up…
The stack grows a little shorter. Travels Across the Roof of the World: A Himalayan Memoir by William and Anne Frej.Additional texts by Edwin Bernbaum, Michael Tobias, and Jane Gray Morrison.Published in 2022 by George F. Thompson Publishing in Association with the Center for Places. You may remember The Center…
When I make images there is usually a long lag before I share the picture. My recent Hotel Rooms, for example were photographed in September and October of last year, photoshopped in November (essentially correcting the geometry of the images), and then printed in December. That’s extraordinarily rapid. It can…
You've seen the video of NASA's Perseverance, landing on Mars. The thing is the size of a small car, parachuted into the Martian atmosphere, then falling toward the surface, the fall then arrested by on-board jets which slowed the spacecraft to hover a few dozen feet off the ground as…
Say you were dumb, I mean really dumb, computer dumb, literally dumb as a rock, albeit one with some lines scratched into it. And say I showed you ten pictures of dogs--and I told you they were all dogs--and ten pictures of cats--and I told you those were all cats--and…
My iPhone doesn't have a camera. Like all iPhone 12s (the iPhone 12 Pro Max, to say its full name, just this once), it has three cameras. Each of its three lenses has its own sensor chip behind it and the sensor chips aren't all the same. That makes it…
During the early years of the Depression one began to notice, here and there, young men with what appeared to be leather-cased opera glasses slung about their necks. They were the pioneers of the camera craze who had discovered that the Leicas and other tiny German cameras, which took postage-stamp-size…
(This is part of series looking back at posts I wrote a decade ago.) Originally published on November 26, 2011 as "What Audacity Looks Like." Sometimes I get a little jealous of other fields, outside of art, outside of photography. I look at what science and technology have achieved--and continue…
(This is part of series looking back at posts I wrote a decade ago.) Originally published on November 2, 2011 as Chuck Close eyes the money, Steve Jobs envisions art’s importance Chuck Close wants his money. At least from works sold in California. In 1977 California passed the first and…