On Craft, Again
There are times I wish I could fit more discussions about the craft of both photojournalism and its underlying photography into my courses. Alas, with only three semesters to prepare my students for a lifetime of visual storytelling, it gets left on the side. At least one of my professors will be aghast when I admit I don’t teach printing at any level. The darkrooms are long gone and the Epson and Canon printers lie dormant for so much of the year, rarely misting paper with ink.
But over on the New York Times’ Lens blog is a small post about a new book about the work of Paul Caponigro, one of the masters of our visual art. He’s not so much a storyteller in the journalistic sense, but his work does force you to pause and contemplate, to dwell and decipher. The craftsmanship is superb, the vision stunning at times in the complexity he brings to the simplicity of the world around him.
Too bad we can only view these wonderful images at about 400-600 pixels wide on a computer screen. I bet the actual prints are TRULY stunning.
While newspaper reproduction can be dicy at times, you still would experience more impact by seeing these in the broadsheet newspaper format. Perhaps there is a future for the printed product if it is used to display mediums which can benefit from the space — like photography.
Getting the old-school word editors to relinquish their control of the format, well, that’s another story …