Rene Burri ‘Men On A Rooftop, Sao Paulo’ 1960
"This is the same problem I have with digital photography. The potential is always remarkable. But the medium never settles. Each year there is a better camera to buy and new software to download. The user never has time to become comfortable with the tool. Consequently too much of the work is merely about the technology. The HDR and QTVR fads are good examples. Instead of focusing on the subject, users obsess over RAW conversion, Photoshop plug-ins, and on and on. For good work to develop the technology needs to become as stable and functional as a typewriter."
— “Toy Fatigue”, Alec Soth (via tokyo-camera-style)
(via jesuisperdu)
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Design is largely code these days. It wasn’t print that died, it was the graphic design industry as we knew it. The idea of making a living out of forming and applying static shapes to cumbersome paper is almost absurd now and growing ever more so in my opinion.
If you go along to a potential client and say “I have this really exciting thing that I think will really help your brand to sell more stuff” then you show them a beautifully designed, beautifully printed, beautifully typeset and beautifully photographed/illustrated and laid out (and exquisitely bound) piece of graphic design work, they will say “Its a brochure… how is a brochure ever going to help my business?… no thanks”.
If you went in to that company and said “I have this really exciting thing that I think will really help your brand to sell more stuff” and then you start to demonstrate a mobile phone app that can utilise the inbuilt camera to identify product and drive customers to the nearest retail outlets or just order straight up online… they’ll be as excited about working with you as clients used to be years ago, about the idea of getting a graphic designer on board to make the brochures look amazing.
"— Messageboard post, Tim S. (via magnificentruin)
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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.
— Stephen Shore | VICE (via jennilee)
(via jesuisperdu)
- Work on one thing at a time until finished.
- Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”
- Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
- Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
- When you can’t create you can work.
- Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
- Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
- Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
- Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
- Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
- Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.
