Craft – Page 2 – Visual Journalism

February 17, 2021

Why I Love Photography

Nice piece where Terry Fouche explains why he loves photography. This line resonated with me: A day will come when maybe I can’t pick up a camera anymore and when that day comes and people look at what I left behind, I want them to say this person loved people, this person honored people and we can see it in...

Advice & Learning/Craft/Photojournalism

February 14, 2021

What Inspires You?

Great thread started by Lewis Bush on what, outside of photography itself, inspires you. For me, it’s music and one painting. I want to make photos like that painting, lost in the moment, on the edge of the space.

Craft/Good Work/Thoughts & Theory

January 18, 2021

Accidental Art

Interesting look at how we have been interpreting news images in the same way as fine art over the last few years. Now I need to poke through the accidental Renaissance Reddit thread …

Craft/Photojournalism

January 2, 2021

Two Hundred Fifty Things a Photojournalist Should Know

In 2018, architectural critic and designer Michael Sorkin published a list of Two Hundred Fifty Things an Architect Should Know. Sorkin, who wrote for the Village Voice for many years, was an early victim of the pandemic. I heard excerpts of his list on a podcast one evening in the spring and it got me to noodling. Every few mornings,...

Advice & Learning/Business & Industry/Craft/Journalism/Photojournalism/Thoughts & Theory

August 12, 2020

Road Trip Portraits

I love this idea to do portraits through a truck’s windows. That Brian Bowen Smith ended up putting 11,000 miles on his 1958 Ford F100 while criss-crossing the country this summer … well, that just makes it so much cooler. Time to tune up my 66 Mustang, I think …

Craft/Good Work/Photojournalism

July 28, 2020

Control, Don’t Clean

My mentor and friend David Sutherland delivered the same message to first-year photography students at Syracuse University for four decades: Fill your frame. Control your backgrounds. Wait for moments. I still teach this mantra today (though I add a fourth: Care). My friend Stanley Leary has written about his mentor and friend, Don Rutledge, and the way he used backgrounds...

Advice & Learning/Craft/Photojournalism

March 19, 2020

Images With Value

What is the purpose of a photograph? In our field, we have several standard answers – to tell a story, to inform our community, to evoke a response. To me, I use a camera not to make pictures but to share ideas, to raise questions and, hopefully, to answer some. I make pictures of things I don’t understand or haven’t...

Advice & Learning/Craft/Photojournalism

February 16, 2020

Dorothea Lange and Her Role Developing Modern Photojournalism

Well worth reading: Alice Gregory at The New York Times’ Style Magazine takes a look at the role of Dorothea Lange in the growth of photojournalism as the Museum of Modern Art opens their second retrospective on her. Sigh … I may have to go to New York again … Her contemporary Ansel Adams called her pictures “both records of...

At Work/Craft/Good Work/Photojournalism

January 15, 2020

A Sense of Interiority

There are many great quotes in this interview with Dawoud Bey, but this resonated deeply with me: African-Americans in photographs have very often been viewed through a lens of social pathology. So, I wanted to respond to that kind of representation by making photographs that conveyed a deep, complex humanity. I want there to be real sense of interiority, to...

At Work/Craft/Good Work/Photojournalism

January 2, 2020

“That’s My Profession, To Look”

Robert Frank died in September of 2019 and he made The New York Times Magazine’s end of year retrospective, The Lives They Lived. This is an interesting look at his work, moving well past his seminal book, The Americans, and into some of the other work that helped pay the bills inlcuding promotional work for the Times. All these pictures...

Business & Industry/Craft/Good Work/Photojournalism

Category: Craft

Why I Love Photography

What Inspires You?

Accidental Art

Two Hundred Fifty Things a Photojournalist Should Know

Road Trip Portraits

Control, Don’t Clean

Images With Value

Dorothea Lange and Her Role Developing Modern Photojournalism

A Sense of Interiority

“That’s My Profession, To Look”