LBM, by LBM, from LBM

I did a small favor for the people of Little Brown Mushroom and they sent me a small book in return. Also, an amazing laser print of what looks to be a giant piece of ham.

“Above the mountain,
The boy grows himself a beard,
This is his ladder.”
—Lester B. Morrison

Mike the Bike

RIP J.D. Salinger

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.

—J.D. Salinger

Relevant Photograph #MLK001

Cliché Indulgence #002 : Shadow Self-Portraits

If you don’t have a compulsion to put yourself in your photographs, well, maybe you should.  Add a little drama to your story. Show people that even if you are short on substance, you have a shape.

I should note that the last of these for images I cover at least 3 clichés. Find them all! It is like Highlights Magazine, but instead of innocent fun it is my creative shame we are hunting for!

All images ©2009 Ross Evertson

Explaining Can-Con

There is a big chunk of something stuck to the bottom of my glass
and I have been refilling it all day
and forgetting about it until I take a sip
but then I am upstairs
and just keep drinking
I have done this 3 times already
I have no idea what the chunk is

If this is not satisfactory, try Wikipedia.

Captions & Accountability

Ben Curtis/Associated Press

Errol Morris has a new post on NYT.com concerning the nature of photographic captions in his interview with war photographer Ben Curtis titled It Was All Started by a Mouse. It is typical war photo commentary fare, from the editorial process to photoshopping, etc.

Then Ben Curtis says

I’m looking at the Mickey Mouse picture again. A reader might infer from that, that a child had been killed in the attack and that this toy belonged to some child who is dead somewhere. Okay, you’re a reader, you can infer that if you want. But we’re not saying that. I’m not saying that. I’m saying it’s a child’s toy lying in the middle of a street after an air strike. That’s all I’m saying. If you want to infer from that what you want, that’s your prerogative, but you can’t then criticize us for that, you know?

It is disappointing, both that a war photographer thinks this way and is comfortable enough to say it in an interview with Errol Morris in the New York Times, and that Morris let’s him get away with it.

I find it surprising that any contemporary photographer can pretend photography, especially war photography, is objective. I don’t want to criticize Curtis for making the photograph (and not because he tells us that we cannot) but I want to chide him for taking the easy way out, while masking it as the high road.

Editorializing in war photography is just as unavoidable as it is in photography in any other form. It is admirable to attempt to be as objective as possible, but to suggest that photographers infer nothing with their images is disingenuous.

Though I am sure that I have no idea what it is like “in the shit,” it really doesn’t seem like ignoring the nature of photography to shirk accountability does much for your credibility.

On Outsourcing

Using the Amazon outsourcing service Mechanical Turk I hired workers to visit my website and describe my work. The results were then typeset and printed, including the unedited text of the responses, along with the associated, anonymous worker number.

The results were varied. Most read like book reports, struggling to fill the word quota. There is, though, some interesting insight—including the assumption of one that I am a woman.

See a bit more on the project here.

Statement: Larry Sultan (The Valley)

“The cast and crew have gathered in the front yard of a ranch-style house, a few blocks from where I went to high school in the San Fernando Valley. Women in six-inch heels sink into the lawn; men push around camera equipment, anxious about losing the light. They are preparing to film a scene in which four blond housewives in a convertible are pursued and overtaken by two men in an appliance-repair van. In the golden afternoon light the neighbors have come out to water their lawns and witness the scene.

It is common for adult-film companies to shoot in tract houses — the homes of dentists and attorneys and day traders whose family photographs can be seen in the background, and whose decorating tastes give the films their particular look. It’s as if one family went on vacation for a few days, leaving everything in the house intact, and another family, an odd assembly of unrelated adults, has temporarily taken up residence. While the film crew and talent are hard at work in the living room, I wander through the house peering into the lives of the people who live there. I feel like a forensic photographer searching out evidence.

In these films, lazy afternoons are interrupted not by noisy children but by the uncontrollable desires of delivery boys, baby sitters, coeds and cops. They crowd in the master bedrooms and spill out onto the patios and into the pools that look just like our neighbors’ pools, like our pool. And by photographing this I’m planted squarely in the terrain of my own ambivalence — that rich and fertile field that stretches out between fascination and repulsion, desire and loss. I’m home again.”

—Larry Sultan

R.I.P. Larry Sultan

Very few photographers I have ever seen speak had the ability to leave an audience with a greater appreciation of both the artist and the medium. Larry Sultan was one of just a few photographers I saw lecture over the years at Art Center that accomplished this. That is what these lectures should be—inspiring and informative—not about ego. I left the auditorium more enlightened and excited about the work that he had made, and reinvigorated regarding the work that I was making. Something rare, indeed.

Thanks, Larry.