again, thank you for the feedback. I suppose my concern is more of a james joyce approach to documentary photography as opposed to photography-for-copy advertising, I maybe should have said that up-front. Not everyone liked finnegan's wake. These are more or less experiments to some degree. Its a document of a several block radius of a city over the course of a year. Some of it is going to be bland, I suppose. Perhaps it would only hold a limited regional interest.
And, I do enjoy taking photos a great deal otherwise I wouldnt still be doing it. The project, in fact, was born out of a great need to remain visually active with limited time. Chris, I appreciate the pointers. The rembrandt lighting. I agree about that, I was a painting major at the art academy of cincinnati and have a bookshelf crammed full of rembrandt, caravaggio, odd nerdrum, leonardo, the wyeths etc. new masters and old. I have made a consistent study of chiaroscuro in my drawing and painting. In terms of lighting, I should mention that the vast majority of these are being done at midday during my lunch hour. I try to cover as much ground as I can in that hour. Midday sun forces me at times into alleys where the light can be a little better. I also look for areas where the ground is in shadow, but the light reflected off of the skyscrapers is coming in and bouncing around causing some three-point effects. I cant always lurk in alleyways with my camera. Security guards tend to get a little crappy about that. So, yes. I do realize a lot of photographers will simply not work with natural light at this time of day for this very reason. On the other hand, it is also the busiest time of day in terms of pedestrian traffic and variety of people.
I dont know. I mean, I will say that the compositions are about divided equally between planned and unplanned.Usually if I want someone looking directly into the camera, I will just ask them if I can take their picture. Most of the time though, I am trying to catch people unaware. Right now, I am almost exclusively using a 30mm which does require me to get a lot closer to people.
I don't know, I dont think it is fair of me to ask for feedback, and then feel compelled to defend aesthetic decisions that I am making (one of which could be the challenges involved with shooting when the sun is at its highest point in the sky) so I am not going to do that. I basically just wanted to hear from people what they thought in terms of whether the images were well-executed, compelling in any way. Primarily, this is because, as this project winds down, I am beginning to look to shop it around for display galleries, possible partial publication, etc. Intended for the Fine Art crowd. That is where I received my training and where I continue to work in terms of my visual endeavors. From what I am hearing, however, it seems I still have quite a lot of work to do in terms of my technique, which I am the first to admit. However, it may be useful for the purpose of critique to clarify what I am attempting to do and whether or not I am succeeding in doing it. So I will just take a second to clarify that.
Yes this is something related to street photography, I suppose. In terms of 'decisive moments,' as much as I am enamored of HCB and the school/discipline of photographers that came after him, I am not trying to copy him or emulate him so much as use the technique that he pioneered as a point of departure to create partial narratives, or even what I would call 'abbreviations' -- like hearing part of someone's conversation on the street, only to be interrupted by a loud car stereo followed by someone asking you for spare change. etc. More akin to a literary cut-up than having an entire pictorial narrative in a single frame. Schizophrenic, I suppose would be a good way to describe it. Now, it occurs to me that some of the photos just aren't very good by any standard you chose to apply to them, whether it has some heady concept behind it or not. And, like I said, I have been at this for 8 months, I'd like to think that I do understand exposure and composition somewhat. I did drop out of art school, but I'd like to think I picked something up there. I also realize that a vast majority of these are going to have to be nixed -- I have 4 more months in the project and need to select only 365 images. The photostream is there as whiteboard more or less. There are certain things I want the viewer to consider simply by the fact that it is in the frame (basically, something I have been calling the politics of the picture plane. What's in-frame? What dominates, what is simply filler, what is noise, what is a countervailing force to the dominant element, how does this create compositional tension? For lack of a better term, 'politics'). For instance, I think there is one where it is a blank wall and the tip of someone's nose and their hand holding a cell phone are the only thing in frame on the far right.Literally, the image is a blank wall and a partial man. Flat, featureless. Call it commentary on contemporary existence perhaps, instead of compositional error. Boring as hell isn't it? Well, that is exactly what I was trying to convey. Nobody will ever select that image as a postcard or an ad for the new android device (which is why I consider it to be in the tradition of anti-graphic photography). Why then do we select it as a modus operandi for our society? A bunch of zombies looking at complacently staring at cell phones. So, some of the thematic concerns, the aesthetic concerns and I suppose, trying to ask am I doing anything in that direction insofar as the visual information in the frames is concerned?
