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Books On My Desk: Buried Things in the Sand, Buried Things in Your Mind

Egypt and the Holy Land in Historic Photographs. 77 Views by Francis Frith.Introduction by Julia Van Haaften, Selection and Commentary by Jon E Manic WhitePublished by Dover Publications, 1980 Frith was an English photographer in the 1850s who made images of the Middle East, scenic views of the day that, a hundred and seventy-five years later, are so much more than that. This thin Dover…

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Owlscapes

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What Do We Call AI-Photography?

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 death and those who see its technological rebirth. AI-photography…

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Landscape Words and a Fellow Traveler Teaches

From Here to the Horizon: Photographs in Honor of Barry LopezPublished in 2023 by the Sheldon Museum of Art (at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln) and the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment Review written during the rainstorms of early 2023. I’m writing this review by headlamp, the vignetted illumination giving a backlit glow to each of the images of the book. I feel that I am in a…

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The Many Images of The Black and White Forest

Now that the photography portion of my project, The Black and White Forest, is done all I have to do is sift through the thousands of images to find a few that are worthy of being the Chosen Ones. I hate this part. Stanley Kubrick once called the process of making a film a “slog” and at this point in any project I know what he meant. The first cut is easy—just delete anything that is obviously…

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Creative Destruction of the Creatives

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 in the clouds where vast computing power roams amongst vast data sets. We are starting to see it…

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Random Frame (Barry Lyndon)

When I was a teenager I had the flu and I woke up during the night, right about two in the morning, and I went downstairs to watch a little TV. I thought I’d sit there for a bit and then go back to bed. My brother, whose bedroom was on the lower floor, couldn’t sleep either, and he came out to join me. On the TV—this was back in the early days of cable—was a movie with people in period costume,…

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Raw Footage: Mojave Desert, April 2023

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To the Top of Cima Dome

The hike up to the peak of Cima Dome is not long from the off-road trail that runs along the side of Tuetonia Peak but it is misleading. I parked my FJ Cruiser in a small campground turnout and looked up at the smooth arc of the Dome’s volcanic bulge and thought “That’s not far.” Somehow, in the years spent making photographs in the Mojave National Preserve, first as part of a national park…

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Random Frame (2001: A Space Odyssey)

Stanley Kubrick was a photographer first and then a filmmaker but he was always a photographer. He worked for Look Magazine, like Life, but not nearly as famous or remembered today, and he started making images for them while still a teenager. It shows in all of his films. When I was first becoming interested in films I naively assumed that all directors were like Kubrick, that all were…

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Books On My Desk: Kodachrome Himalayas and the Great Digital Convergence

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 for American Places—this is a later incarnation. Part travel picture book, part…

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First Owlscape

Starting last spring I began a project to photograph a family of owls that live near my house on Montara Mountain. I had photographed them before, in 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic but those were just fun shots, messing around, more interested in the owls than in the photographs. The year after we couldn’t find the owls. The next before had been right next to the trail and offered an…

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Books On My Desk: Robert Adams’ Photographs (not in the way you think I mean) and Bruce Conner’s Attic

Books On My Desk is written so I can get the books off of my desk. Companion to The Robert and Kerstin Adams Photography Collection At the Denver Art MuseumPublished by the Denver Art Museum in 2022 This is an unusual book for an unusual show. It’s a book (and show) of a collection—but this is not a collection, at least not if you mean “Collection” with a capital “C.” The images were not…

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New Project: San Pedro Mountain Road (again)

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New Project: Obsidian Dome

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Books On My Desk: Art's Struggle and the Oldest American Book

I get knocked down, but I get up again. Just up from a bout of food poisoning (not recommended) followed by days without internet due to the wind knocking down all manner of trees in our little seaside town with its Wild West infrastructure. Here, I continue on in my seemingly Quixotic quest to clear my desk of photography books. Art In the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy…

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Looking Around In Infrared

When I received my converted Fuji XT3 back at Christmas, transformed into an infrared camera, the first thing I did was to walk around the neighborhood with it looking at the world in this new light. What first strikes you, looking through through the viewfinder, are the classic telltale signs of an infrared image—that white vegetation and those dark, dark skies. The sky goes dark with an…