Printing James Dean
Magnum Photos recently posted this on Instagram:
Random photo-related musings along with my joys and woes as a photographer trying to manage teaching, making photos, family, and life.
Magnum Photos recently posted this on Instagram:
Posted by Steve Stenzel at 8:31 PM 0 comments
It was a hot start to the Fall 2023 semester last week. My first day of class at Concordia University was the last in a 5-day stretch of 90+ degree days, so I wore shorts to the first day for the first time ever:
Posted by Steve Stenzel at 7:37 PM 0 comments
Labels: Concordia University, Teaching, University of Minnesota
This was found in the window to the Digital Media Art's Printshop at Hamline University:
Posted by Steve Stenzel at 5:11 PM 0 comments
Labels: Funny, Hamline University
My wife and I got back a week ago from a 10-day anniversary trip to Italy! On the day we left Florence for the coast, we bought early morning tickets for the world famous Uffizi Gallery. Here are some photos:
Posted by Steve Stenzel at 8:34 PM 0 comments
There's a good chance this story isn't 100% historial fact, but it's still a good reminder to those in the arts:
Posted by Steve Stenzel at 10:12 AM 0 comments
Labels: Painting
Last month, my boys and I took my Mom up to Ely and then farther north along the north shore of Lake Superior than she'd ever been before. Here are a few Holga shots from the trip.
[click each image for a larger version]
Posted by Steve Stenzel at 10:47 AM 0 comments
Labels: Holga, Prettiness
The start of Chapter 3 in "Mathew Brady: Portraits of a Nation" mentions something that I've pondered a lot. And it shares 3 points that I have brought up in my photography classes for years: the inital importance of early photographs can't be comprehended today; photography was a subtle way to level out different classes of people; and because photography was considered to be more of a "truthful" science, it took a lot of work for it to be accepted as "art:"
Americans in the 1840s and '50s embraced the new and growing art of photography. The availability of images from the most distant places on earth made the world a more knowable place, a revolution in human knowledge comparable to the invention of moveable type or the Internet. But of more immediate personal value was the possibility of having images of yourself and the people you loved fixed forever in a form you could possess and pass on. Suddenly a kind of immortality previously available only to the rich, who could aford to have their portraits paint, or to those with the means to commission a miniature from an itinerant painter, was now within the reach of almost everyone. Even if you could afford a painted portrait, the result would be another person's impression or interpretation of what you looked like. This new medium, it was generally agreed, portrayed you as you really were. At a time when children often did not survive childhood and might be remembered only by a posthumous photo taken of them in burial clothes, or when a son who went out west in search of gold had little hope of communicating with the family he had left behind, or they with him, or a husband went to sea leaving a wife and family whose images he might gaze upon and who themselves could not know when or if he would return, the small daguerreotypes that people in the 1840s and '50s rushed to have made had a value that we can only guess at today.
Photography was also among the first examples (along with the telegraph and the railway) of a phenomenon that has become almost commonplace in our time - an advance in technology that transforms rapidly from a state of inconceivable mystery or even magic to something that everyone would and must have access to. In his 1853 dictionary, Noah Webster ended a brief description of the daguerreotype process with "and then the images appear as by enchantment." Photography was at first as surprising as the possibility of wireless telephone communication seemed to us two decades ago, and then as urgent a necessary as the smartphone today.
Posted by Steve Stenzel at 11:17 AM 0 comments
Labels: Book, History, Mathew Brady, Quote
I posted last summer about the sudden loss of John Marshall, the head of the Photography Department at CVA when I was a student there. This past weekend, his wife hosted a memorial event for him at their home in Red Wing:
Posted by Steve Stenzel at 4:03 PM 0 comments
Labels: CVA, Of Local Interest
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