In deference to certain workplace environments, I've edited the quote (just below) to obscure an offensive word. Click on the link in the quote to see the word. The big boulder on Observatory hill, which is the largest of its kind in the immediate vicinity of Madison, is now out…
The standard advice to photographers is this: Avoid clichés. Don’t shoot what’s been shot so much before, don’t tread on the well-worn ground, turn your eye from that colorful sunset, delete those pretty clouds. Run away from clichés, they say. My advice is different. Don’t avoid that sunset—ponder it, feel…
In the past year and a half, I've occasionally received e-mails that my book, Computational Photography, had been added to this or that library. In all that was going on--not just COVID but three cross-country road trips, and a busy roster of photo projects in progress, I haven't paid much…
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.…
This is the one-hundred and seventeenth post on A Bigger Camera and yesterday I was injected with the Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine. Those two facts are intertwined. On July 22nd I published my first entry to this blog, reusing an old web domain I had that was sitting idle.…
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…
[Originally published on December 5, 2011] Filmmaker Ken Russell died last week. Most of his work will fade into obscurity save the film Tommy which is, of course, a music version of the album of the same name by The Who. Likewise, I think much of the work of The Who…
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…