Tag: time

Nostalgia, photography and pablum

Because it is summer, my recent blog entries have been shorter (and I am hoping sweeter.) This week I am writing something equally short but maybe not so sweet. I will be exploring a weird convergence of marketing, nostalgia and photography that I recently came across. What I read got me pretty agitated, but I wanted to “sit on my anger” for a few weeks, to see if my initial reaction was still appropriate. Now I can say that what I thought back when I first saw the offending passage is what I still think, a few weeks later. Read More

Skimming, silence (a video)

In Trang An, Vietnam (in Ninh Binh Province) I enjoyed an amazingly peaceful rowboat ride. I took my camera along with me, so I could share the experience. Read More

The making of a grumpy old photographer

When I was first starting out as a photographer, I spent a lot of time with a few “grumpy old photographers.” Since I was the “young whippersnapper” back then, I was the butt of many of their jabs and barbed comments. I generally took it all in stride because I knew what I was learning from them was incredibly valuable. I also secretly hoped that I would survive long enough in the business of publication photography to become a “grumpy old photographer” too. As I have slowly earned the designation of “older,” I often wondered what was going to make me as “grumpy” as those guys. That finally happened recently and it surprised me when it did. Read More

Akka (the movie)

My daughter and my niece spent the summer of 2010 volunteering at the Parikrma school in Bangalore, India. This short movie explores their experience living and working in India. Read More

Going pro vs doing photography for love, not money

I make my living as a professional photographer. I initially believed that the designation “professional” meant that my photographs were so good that people would part with their hard-earned money to own, publish or see my work. Digital photography has prompted me to rethink that idea a good bit. Today, millions of new images are created weekly and the perceived value of those images is spiraling downward. A couple recent e-mails from student and the democratization of photography caused by the digital imaging have contributed to that reconsideration. The thought process that I went through as I pondered this question is the heart of this week’s blog entry. Read More

Akka (a video)

The word “Akka” rings through the halls of the Parikrma schools in Bangalore, India. It pours out of the mouths of Indian school kids as it is directed at their female teachers. Read More

A hierarchy of memory

I generally write (blog) as way to organize the jumble of activity in my head. I am writing this particular entry after six weeks in India (and what seems like an equally long flight to get home.) The flight was not really six weeks of course, but the intensity of how experienced the two flights left me thinking about how we initially encounter and later remember experiences. Photographs often facilitate this process. Some discussions with family in India prompted me to think further about the intertwined relationship between images, family stories and memory. Read More