Thoughts On Recent Blog Posts
Final Photographic Products, Documenting Outdoor Activities and Finding the Extraordinary in the Everyday.
Conscientious' Photography: An Insecure Craft
An interesting piece from Conscientious’ JM Colberg ruminating on the current state of photography.
Something I’ve always struggled with in my practice is the need for there to be an end product to a project, usually a photobook or exhibition. Below are a couple of paragraphs taken from the article highlighting this problem.
It’s just a very curious situation: almost everything that makes photography photography — its endless possibilities, its limitless reproducibility — is being dismissed by the medium’s own most serious practitioners. Consequently, real advances in image making now happen outside of the narrow confines of photoland. Many social-media influencers are more adept at creating new images than artists who somehow can’t untether themselves from an art world that only produces benefits for a small number of photographers.
You would imagine that the world of the photobook is in a better shape. But the same problems play out there, albeit in slightly modified form: the elitism, the catering to the wealthy and subsequent production of luxury items, the endless repetition of utterly tired conventions. When it’s not an exhibition in some white space (ideally in one of the centers of the art world), photographers want an expensively produced photobook that they then end up selling to their friends and other photographers.
Reading this post helped solidify some of my thoughts on my current project, subscribe below to receive the next article focusing on this development.
Brendan Davis’ Outdoor Series
Following this interesting interview with Brendan on A Photo Editor where he discusses how running affects his photographic practice, I had a browse around his website and discovered a couple of intriguing series.
All of Brendan’s Projects can be found here.
Two series that interested me for my current practice were his Black Stone Bike Works, and Run to Save the Boundary Waters.
Black Stone Bike Works documents an unorthodox bike shop in the South Side of Chicago.
Run to Save the Boundary Waters documents runner Alex Falconer to draw attention to mine developments in Patagonia.
Rob Walker’s Finding the Extraordinary in the Everyday
Plenty of excellent thoughts from Rob Walker’s excellent substack, on finding the extraordinary in the everyday.