If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it. Albert Einstein It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all. Edward de Bono I have been thinking… I know a number of you [...]
Kia ora tatou: I have been thinking. Last weekend I was out with a couple of good friends, making photographs. We were bouncing our way along an icy track when an image, an arrangement of relationships, of time and space, caught my attention and asked me to make it (that is the way it happens, [...]
So many people dislike themselves so thoroughly that they never see any reproduction of themselves that suits. None of us is born with the right face. It’s a tough job being a portrait photographer. – Imogen Cunningham A portrait! What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound. – Charles Baudelaire [...]
Disclaimer: the opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the writer. But they might be… To apply HDR processing to a photograph is like putting on makeup. It’s very easy to go too far, to put on too much. ~the BlorkBlog There are three possible parts to a date, of which at [...]
I have a very good memory, but it’s short. Thank god for photography. – John E. Burkowski There is one other quality specific to the medium: its unique relationship with reality, a relationship which has little to do with ‘truth’, visual or otherwise, but everything to do with the emotional charge generated by the photograph’s [...]
Kia ora tatou: I have a belief that in helping one person I help many, however undetectable that may seem. For that reason I mentor a few people, not as a kind of photographic personal trainer, but as a kaiako,a guide. Knowledge and awareness should be shared. I received this from Jenny, whom I have [...]
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art. – Tom Stoppard, “Artist Descending a Staircase” “I didn’t expect you to understand me,” he answered. “With your cold American intelligence you can only adopt the critical attitude. Emerson and all that [...]
Yesterday I had the fortune, if you could call it that, to visit the heart of the red zone in the central city. I was there with my friend and fellow artist and analogue photographer Paul Johns to recover his work from the badly damaged building he lives in on Manchester street, unfortunately this time [...]
Kia ora tatou: This short, terse and nasty e-mail arrived in my inbox late last week. Fortunately I was on the Road, and only having a BlackBerry gave me the perfect excuse for avoiding it. So I did. Now, however, having returned home, it simply will not go away. The person who sent it to [...]
Kia ora tatou: They say there are six degrees of separation. In New Zealand that number is smaller, and in Christchurch, smaller still. We all sensed we were going to discover we knew somebody who didn’t survive February 22′s earthquake. All of us within the Christchurch photographic community will probably have met Stephen at one [...]
I love teaching. It always seems to me that I get as much from my students as I hope I am giving them. Inevitably, as I drive way home, I begin to think about the questions they have asked me and what they have to tell me about my own perceptions of a medium which [...]
The greatest journey is the journey within -Rainer Maria Rilke Photography, like life, is a journey. Like all journeys it begins one day, and we set off, confident and enthused, certain of our destination. Because we know our destination, we are sure we know all the steps necessary to reach it. We are, after all, [...]
“…within five years Flickr will emerge as one of the major sources for licensing imagery… the other point about Flickr, is I can’t tell you how bad the most of the pictures are. I mean, we see this in the site up there (at Musee de L’Elysee) the noise of this contemporary photography is relentless [...]
Kia ora tatou: Colour is something we all take for granted. But we shouldn’t. As photographers and artists we ignore it at our peril. Colour is more than illustration or decoration. And we need to develop our own dialogue with it, as photographers and it is human beings. In this essay I want to do [...]
Carving is easy. You just go down to the skin and stop. Michelangelo Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something. Frank Zappa An opinion piece. The other day a thought wandered through the vast unoccupied gulf between my ears. Actually, it was more of a [...]
