believermag:

This interview with photographer Jessica Eaton was conducted by Otino Corsano. The process behind photograph 108_06 (pictured above) is discussed. Last week, we featured three of her images on The Believer Logger.

[…]

BLVR: What influences your abstract aesthetic?

JE: I think “abstract” is a weird word to apply to photography; de- or re-contextualized might be better. You’re recording light and light is. With analogue photography, there’s a fundamental connection to – maybe not “reality,” but physical phenomenon right? The pictures are of something that very much exists.. Regardless of how we perceive reality, light is. It’s outside of ourselves, and it is.

[…]

JE: Yes, you can blame a young electronica band member for using work they do not own the rights to. Obviously, when you post work on the Internet you lose some control, and I have to accept this. At the same time, I think there is a lot of education going on about acceptable use of images. Being able to share images so readily as the Internet affords is relatively new. If anything, this has brought me more opportunity than it has problems. Anyway, a 600-pixel jpeg is a far cry from my exhibition prints. They almost aren’t even the same thing.

(Source: believermag)

VICE interview with Stephen Shore

There’s a recurring theme in The Nature of Photographs. You advocate developing a closer relationship with all of our senses—paying more attention to how they work and training ourselves to better monitor what they’re trying to tell us. Your best pictures are examples of just that.
A photograph can do many things at once. I can be exploring culture or I can be making decisions about what street to photograph to give a taste of this town or this age. At the same time, I can explore the medium formally, explore how the structure of a picture may give a taste of an age, how perception works, and how a photograph plays with it. I can also explore what you were saying, that sometimes the most mundane subject matter is the most telling because what gives the picture charge isn’t the cultural charge of the content as much as the awareness of the senses and the awareness of perception giving it a kind of visual resonance. It’s like those days or moments when maybe your mind gets a little quieter and space becomes more tangible, textures and colors become more vivid.

Do you think the brain switches between different states of optical perception, like a camera?
Yes, it’s one of the things I learned from the process of photography. Let me give an example. I think it’s absolutely typical that you could leave your house and have a certain walk to a café every day and not really pay attention to what’s around you, but if you put a camera on your shoulder, all of a sudden you do. What can I learn from that? To address it in a different way, when I was photographing the Yankees I would see these people who were performing mind-boggling feats of attention. I’ve been going to baseball games since I was six, but from the stands there’s no way to experience what a major-league fastball looks like from the batter’s perspective. At spring training in Fort Lauderdale, I was able to stand essentially where the umpire was and watch these pitches being thrown. That anyone can even hit a fastball is an amazing feat of attention and coordination. But if you talk to them, they’ll say that when they’re really in the flow of it, they’re watching the rotation of the stitches on the ball. Yet these same people who are able to perform this so well would at four in the afternoon go to a bar called Trader Jack’s and try to pick up young girls and forget the state of mind that they had achieved that even allowed them to see the ball. They weren’t carrying the lesson of that into the rest of their lives. I wonder why we don’t go through our lives paying closer attention, and what would accrue from doing that.

(via Stephen Shore | VICE)

ALEC SOTH

What are some of your current obsessions. Ping Pong

Tell us a story from your childhood.  Both Henry and I lived in the countryside. We were socially awkward and lonely and slept with our dogs (we both happened to have Great Danes). We were 14-years-old and best friends. Henry called our experiments adventures. Once we bribed the janitor to let us into the tunnels beneath the school. But the adventure I remember most was at my house. My parents were gone for the night. Henry and I decided to explore the dark woods behind the barn. We reached the end of the forest near the lake when the flashlight went dead. Total dark. The path was immediately lost. Our only choice was to take each other’s hand and venture into the dense web of the woods. By the end we were on our hands and knees. Our arms were bloody from thorns, but we still held onto each other.

What are some of your daydreams?  Living inside of a helium balloon.

What is something you recently heard or saw that has stuck with you.  In between each frame of film in a movie there is darkness. If you added up all of this up, you spend about twenty minutes per film staring at a dark screen.

What are three things on your to do list?

Make a great book
Go back to Bogota
Get the dog groomed

Thank you so much Alec!

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(picture by Lola Reboud)

PS. I used to be a dog groomer and wish that I could groom Alec’s dog. That would be amazing!

Website / Little Brown Mushroom  /  Blog / I like this video alot / ACO post

(via P E R S O N : A COLLECTION OF)

LAURA HENNO is a French photographer whose work primarily explores teenagers or very young people lost in their musings or suddenly immobilised by something out of our perception. In fact each photograph is carefully staged and generates its own fictional space both tangible and intangible.

The notions of uncertainty and doubt predominate in my work. There’s always something indiscernible, which hovers over my characters. The young people I photograph appear as characters from a narrative but we will never know anything about their history, about what they’re looking at or what they’re looking for. My photographs are reminiscent of different codes like film or painting, which also contributes to the feeling of ‘in between’ that characterizes my work. – LAURA HENNO for Wallpaper in 2007

(via We Find Wildness)