What Am I Doing Here and Why Am I Doing It?

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.…

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The One True Artist Statement (Tour of My Book)

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…

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Listening To You

[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…

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A 4×5 In My Pocket (a new strap, too!)

About fifteen years ago I switched from shooting 4x5 film to shooting small sensor digital. The switch was a big one—I had to give up resolution and important controls regarding what was in focus and the shape of things as projected on the film. But what I gained was mobility,…

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See Spot Go

[Originally published in an old blog on February 9, 2012] I’ve quit photography a few times, the first time in the 1980s. As the art on display got worse and worse, as the praise for the same works gushed and gushed, I thought, “Fuck it. This is a stupid way…

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Albuquerque: Petroglyphs and Shadows

In 2005 I found myself passing through Albuquerque and thought I'd stop by the Petroglyph National Monument. It's not very big. Maybe at one time it used to be out there, on its own in some pristine setting, but now it's butt-up against the sprawl of the ever-sprawling city, "adobe"…

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Making Zaido: An Interview with Yukari Chikura

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…

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Design by Ernst Reichl

Many years ago many of the camera manufacturers also had their own magazine. One of the less well known of these is Exakta Magazine, which highlighted the today equally obscure Exakta camera. To set itself off from the rest, Exakta Magazine hired several of the top graphic designers in the…

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