'Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits'

I started reading this biography on a trip this past winter:

I saved a few quotes from it. Here are 2 from the introduction that I particularly like:

Most of Lange's photography was optimistic, even utopian, not despite but precisely through its frequent depictions of sadness and deprivation. By showing her subjects as worthier than their conditions, she called attention to the incompleteness of American democracy. And by showing her subjects as worthier than their conditions, she simultaneously asserted that greater democracy was possible.

And here's a bit about "documetary" photography and representation:

The camera's capacity to replicate what the eye can see made it appear, originally, to be the ultimate documentary tool. It seemed to be a machine for exact replication, its products machine-made, until the myriad means of constructing photographs were widely understood. Invented just as art steered toward expressing a subjective vision, an individual inner consciousness, the camera seemed limited to representing that which is visible to the naked eye. Honoré Daumier said that "photography described everything and explained nothing." Photographers engaged in some self-delusion along these lines; Walker Evans called documentary "a stark record ... [of] actuality untouched." Lange did not fuss about exact representation in her photography. Her experience as a portrait photographer left her at ease in retouching an errant hand or shadow, in asking her subjects to move to a different spot or position. Like an historian, she wanted her photographs to emphasize what she saw as the main point and to prevent her viewers from being distracted by details. In her portrait studio she wanted to reveal the inner, not the outer, life and character of her subjects, and she continued the search for hidden truths in her documentary work.

Photography as "Mirrors" or "Windows"

I've been reading "Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists" these last few weeks. I found an interesting thought from John Szarkowski:

What makes this more interesting for me is that my "Faribault County" work from 20 years ago would fit as a "window," but my more recent "4 a.m." work is definitely a "mirror." I don't know what that means, but it's made me stop and think about my own art making...

Color Naming Book from 1955

I found this in one of the classrooms where I teach at the University of Minnesota:

Figure out your Munsell notation (something I became VERY familiar with
teaching Color Theory at CVA) and then turn to the correct page in this book.


Follow the Munsell chroma and value notation to get the "name" of the color


PAGES of color names!


Close-up of names.

Being so wrapped up in "true" Munsell color notation while teaching at the College of Visual Arts, I never thought about what you would "name" any of the given colors in his system. But this book does that... to an extreme measure!

Thoughts on the Power of Early Photography (From a Mathew Brady Bio)

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.

Wilson also makes an interesting point 2 paragraphs later in the same chapter:

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.

This book was published nearly a decade ago, so you might change that last sentence to THREE decades ago as Wilson writes about "wireless telephones." But the point still stands.

Catalog from "The Shape of Things" at the Praxis Photo Center

Sorry, this post has been stuck as a "draft" for about 10 months. Here are a few images from Vol. 2 of "The Shape of Things" exhibition catalog:

[click any image to enlarge]

A more legible juror's statement.


A spread I liked.


My image on the left.

Here's more general info on catalogs from exhibitions at Praxis Photo Center. And here are links to the catalog shown above in softcover and hardcover.

In case you missed it, here are some photos from the opening reception of "The Shape of Things" in September of 2021 as well as some exhibition images.

"Out of the Frame" Exhibition Catalog

I recieved a package in the mail from Scotland 2 months ago:

[click any image to enlarge]

It was the catalog for the "Out of the Frame" exhibition at the Glasgow Gallery of Photography. Here are a few snapshots of the catalog that I took at the U earlier this week:

The page with my 2 photographs.

Here's a bit more about the "Out of the Frame" exhibition if you're interested.

"Open Call" Catalog

The PhotoPlace Gallery's Open Call 2021 catalog has been put together online. Here are a few screenshots of it:

The cover.


The title page.


My image on page 48.

Catalog from the "Making Strange" Exhibition

Here are some images from the "Making Strange" catalog from the Praxis Photo Arts Center last fall:

An example of a spread in the catalog.

Here are some images of the exhibition, and here's when I appeared on their Facebook page (had I known that was going to happen, I would have dressed up a LITTLE).

"The Dawn of the Color Photograph"

I've been checking out photo-related books from my local library over the last 14 months. I recently learned about Albert Kahn and his undertaking of hired photographers in the book "The Dawn of the Color Photograph: Albert Kahn's Archives of the Planet" by David Okuefuna.

I had never heard of Kahn or his contribution to the world just after the advent of color photography. Here's a bit about Kahn and this book from BookForum.com:

In 1909, two years after the Lumière brothers invented the Autochrome process, French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn initiated a twenty-two-year project (brought to an end by his ruin in the Great Depression) to photograph the world in color. Known as the Archives de la Planète, this astounding body of work, some seventy-two thousand images, captured life in more than fifty countries, many during moments of profound upheaval. Kahn’s hired photographers sat with French soldiers in the trenches, walked through a Smyrna razed in the Greco-Turkish War, and witnessed Emir Faisal’s campaign to free Arabia from Ottoman control. But the archive is particularly remarkable for its documentation of lands and peoples once little seen by Western eyes. The collection boasts what may be the earliest color photographs of the Taj Mahal and the Egyptian pyramids, as well as striking portraits of Kurdish women in northern Iraq, dancers from the Khmer ballet in Angkor, and itinerant Mongolian hunters on the steppes near the Russian border. But does the past change when we see it in color? In many instances, the vivid palette brings the images closer to our present moment, making the world—and the distance of history—frighteningly small.

His goal wasn't to have his photographers make "art," but more to simply "document" the world. As the book states, the images his photographers produced "were not works of reportage or ethnography, nor an attempt to produce works of art. The aim was simply to record human beings in all their diversity, living humble lives worthy of respect."

Here's a bit about some of Kahn's project from 2007 on BBC Two:

Direct link: youtu.be/nWeU5OexIls

Capturing the Light: Regarding "The Pencil of Nature"

Here's an interesting 2 paragraphs from Capturing the Light as the authors wrote about Talbot and The Pencil of Nature:

In developing the calotype, he had turned to photographing various locations in and around this home at Lacock and then, with the assistance of his Dutch valet Nicolaas Henneman, whom he trained himself, taking the process on the road nad photographing the picturesque architecture of Oxford and Paris. He executed a few portraits and group shots, but, typical of Talbot's reserved nature, it was the landscape and cityscape that attracted his interest. In 1844 he set to work on disseminating the details of the calotype process, by devising a book, to be published in serial form as six individual booklets or fascicles, each containing actual photographic prints from his own calotype negatives. This series was called The Pencil of Nature and its purpose was twofold: first to bring the calotype to the public attention by showing that photographs could be published in book form; and second, to set out and describe the various modes in which Talbot believed that photography in the long term would prove most useful. These included views of architecture; landscapes; still lifes; the cataloguing of scientific objects; genre scenes; and the copying of works of art. He did not include portraiture, no doubt thinking in terms of the scientific rather than personal or recreational use of his process. Perhaps he wished to elevate the calotype above portraiture, which to him seemed the realm of the everyday, jobbing photographer and not that of the artist. Or perhaps Talbot himself had privately recognized that the better results in portraiture were achieved by the daguerreotype, and that it was sensible therefore not to engage in direct competition with it in this respect.

In order to provide the great quantity of pictures that he intended to include in The Pencil of Nature, Talbot worked closely with Henneman, whom he had not promoted to full-time photographer. They set up a printing studio at Reading, about halfway between Lacock and London. Known as the Reading Establishment, it was able to turn out dozens, if not hundreds, of prints every day (certainly in sunny weather) and had no problems producing the images needed for Talbot's book. Sadly though, the series was not a success and in April 1846 Talbot had to abandon it after only six issues, despite a small review in The Times 'earnestly commend[ing] this work to notice of the public'. What remains of The Pencil of Nature, however, is a thing of exquisite beauty. The cover for each fascicle was an intricate image by Owen Jones, an influential designer whose interest in Arabic geometric designs was beautifully combined with neo-Gothic fonts and flourishes to create the distinctive look of the series. Overall it contained twenty-four Talbot calotypes, many of which now are iconic in the history of early photography. The few surviving copies of the entire series today are, of course, worth many thousands of pounds.

Throughout the Capuring the Light, I was struck many times with how insignificant certain "discoveries" or ideas were 170-180 years ago that today we can look back upon and know that those discoveries set us up for where we currently are. Many were brushed under the rug at the time. But I suppose you know what they say about hindsight...

Here's my modern edition of The Pencil of Nature that I just had to purchase:

Then & Now: 25 Years of MCAD MFA

I was recently featured in the Minneapolis College of Art and Design's (MCAD) MFA 25th Anniversary Catalog. I graduated from the MCAD MFA program in 2005. Here are a few photos I made of the catalog:

[click each image to enlarge]

A detail inside the cover. My name is in the middle surrounded by some quality human beings.


Our graduating class had 2 people featured: Bethany Kalk and this spread of my "then & now" images.

Thanks for featuring me, MCAD MFA! I miss those years cranking out work in graduate school...

New Photo Book

Two weeks ago, I stepped foot inside of my local St. Paul Public Library for the first time since early March. (Thanks COVID.) I walked back to the photo section and found a book about Mathew Brady right next to "Capturing the Light" which I read a few months ago:

I brought it home:

I'm 4 chapters in, and I actually took it to both of my photography classes to read a bit from it because it related directly to our discussion.

I think I've read more photo books this year than in the last many years combined: that started with "Chase the Light" (which was still the best one [most entertaining]), and then "L. J. M. Daguerre: The Worlds First Photographer and Inventor of the Daguerreotype" (which I shared parts of here and here), and also "Speculating Daguerre".

So far, this book by Robert Wilson is a bit dry, and there isn't much known about Brady's life, so there's not the personal details like those from "Chase the Light" that I enjoyed so much about Talbot and Daguerre. But it was a nice continuation from the historically earlier books that I read this past winter.

Overdue Photobooks

I checked out a few photo-related books earlier this year: 2 from my local public library in January, and 1 through inter-library loan at Hamline University in February. Well, then COVID-19 hit, and everything shut down. Just earlier this month (AUGUST!), I got notice that they were all finally due:

My 2 public library books.


The rare Daguerre book via inter-library loan.

They've all been returned, so all is right with the world again.

Here's more on one of those books from my first "monthly challenge" of the year.

Photography: "an invention of the Devil"

Here's another quote that I enjoyed from L. J. M. Daguerre: The Worlds First Photographer and Inventor of the Daguerreotype:

Click to enlarge

Here's the intro to that book if you're interested.

"Bare Men:" the Catalog

I recently got notification of "Bare Men: the Group Show" had a digital catalog ready to download. Here are a few images from it:

The cover.


About the exhibit.


The curator's statement.


Part of the exhibition, with mine 3rd from the right on the bottom. Click here for a larger view.


A spread from near the end of the 131 page exhibition catalog.

Everyone who was part of the exhibition had their piece featured on a page, and the last few spreads were different views of the entire exhibition (like the image above). Here's the catalog if you're interested. And here are some more views of the exhibition.

Monthly Challenge 2 of 12: a "4 a.m." Portfolio Book

For my February challenge, I created my first portfolio book. I've created my own self-published photo books a few times in the past, but they were never created with the intention of being a "portfolio." I received a coupon code to make a photo book through Saal-Digital (and they asked that I share my experience). So I got to work and downloaded their book-making software.

[click each image to enlarge]

Inside their software. Pretty simple and relatively intuitive.


Previewing the book as it's nearly complete.

Note that once you pick a book style and start adding photos and pages, it continually updates the price in the lower right: $142.59 right now (which was great because I had a $150 coupon code). My book ended up being 40 pages with a total of 51 images. About my only issue with the software was that it didn't have (or I couldn't find) a "fit frame to object" -like option when inserting images. I was constantly re-working their frames until they were about the proportions of my photographs. (I got an email from someone at Saal asking how I was doing and if I had any questions, and I asked about that, but got no response.)

The software - along with the saved project - is small. Once I completed my order, it then sent the design and the files along, and that took just a few minutes as it uploaded the full size image files from my computer:

It was shipped, and actually came a few days before expected. It was just over a week before I got my book. Here are some photos of my new "4 a.m." portfolio book:

[click each image to enlarge]

The cover is under 1/4" plexiglass, so here's a close-up of that detail.


Another image to show the thickness of the plexiglass cover.


The first spread: a full bleed on the left (that's just the edges
of the cover peaking around) and some small borders on the right.


Some full bleed Minneapolis bridges.


Some of my 4 a.m. "mini mural project" from a few years ago. Click here for more on that.


Three 4 a.m. images from my mini-photo residency this past spring.




Two more recent images to close out the book.

Notice from those photos above that it's nearly a true "lay flat" design - there's no forcing pages open or losing detail in the gutter. And the pages are very thick and glossy. The book is quite a presence as one flips through it. The print quality is what I had hoped (and I had high hopes) - no complaints there. As mentioned above, the book contains 40 pages and 51 of my "4 a.m." pieces from the last 6 years, arranged (loosely) in chronological order.

Nice work, Saal-Digital! Thanks for helping me with my February "monthly challenge."