2021 Archives - Page 2 of 3 - s2z Photography Blog

New Photobook progress report

My current Photobook’s silver gelatin contact prints are taking a bit longer to print than I initially imagined. After about 20 plus hours I’m at the half way mark. Just over 20 prints.

In the interim, between dealing with other aspects of my life, I have been considering the text component of the book. These ideas sometimes come to me while in my darkroom.

notebook notes from my darkroom workbook

So using a pencil, I scrawl them down in a notebook that lives beside my enlarger. After I finish up, I digitise them and then add them to my notes both Apple note and Voodoo Pad . I then digitally transcribe them to make searching them easier later. Some ideas include the idea of the flaneur and by extension ‘The Situationists’ and the idea of the derive. Society of the spectacle by Guy Debord is proving especially fruitful.

I actually ran out of silver gelatin paper and had to wait till the shops opened to buy some more. Adding another delay.

Weekend Notes?

Here’s a few web links:-

http://daywreckers.com (an old school link blog)
https://www.habatat.com/artists/ (modern digital? artists?)
https://urbanmaoism.neocities.org/index.html (just weird)
https://same.energy/ (visual search engine)(very cool)
https://dietz.ee (art prints)
https://hubertfischer.com [books! Hubert & Fischer is a design studio with offices in New York and Berlin with a global client base]
https://shutdown.gallery (gallery? Where?)(Based on the idea to use limitation as a creative tool instead of declaring it as constraint, SHUTDOWN.gallery aims to rethink existing concepts and to reestablish focus in a world of distraction. Every week, there will be a new exhibition with an artist whose work moves the world of art and design and thus maintains the fertile environment of constant change.)(is the site broken?)

More thoughts on Blogging

Short form blogging as a form of note taking, thinking out loud, and public learning has taken off quietly in the last few years. I have spent some time recently reading about and trying to setup my own disparate set of tools to do this as well.

It’s all a bit too technical right now. Some options I’ve considered are, Notion as a webpage, Voodoopad as a self constructed wiki, some suggest simply writing a html page and updating as I see fit, this is the least technical option for me and may yet take shape. At the moment I’m dropping most snippets of text, some pdfs and images into Apple’s notes app. From a search and retrieve perspective this is fine, however a digital garden is more than that. [See the links below for more on the ideas and approach to digital gardening.]

For now I have rejigged my WordPress blog in an attempt to better reflect this approach, adding a menu option in the main menu at the top for a links page. Also adding content to my about page that explains a bit about digtial gardens. I also moved categories to my sidebar to make the interconnections between my words/posts and other media seem more obvious.

Moving forward I will try to add as much link rich information as I can in each post. This will allow for some non-linear reading. In the meantime my motley collection of links can be found on pinboard.in/u/:s2art, there is a social element there and it has a small annual fee attached, as well as a taxonomic tool for tags and organisation.

Here’s a list of articles that have been sitting in my open tabs in my browser for over a week now that have me thinking abot this idea of a digital garden.

How Blog Broke the Web, Amy Hoy
Building a Digital Garden, by Tom Critchlow
My blog is a digital garden, not a blog, by Joel Hooks
The Garden and the stream, by Mike Caulfield.
A GitHub reference point for all things digital gardening. by Maggie Appleton

Research Note 20210703

bendigo art gallery's header image — Bendigo Art Gallery’s header image for the Mary Quant Exhibition

A visit to Bendigo Art Gallery for the Mary Quant exhibition yielded these notes:-

New Photobook?

I have begun a new book idea.

It is going to be a small book, physically and in the number of copies I make. Three and an artists proof.

It will be approximately 42 small silver Gelatin contact prints. Tipped into a 110 gsm cartridge paper book.

Some working titles include:-

[sub] urban gothic,
The map is not the territory
“…looking back…”
Forty two
42
“… the sum or the parts…”
The path of least resistance is rarely the path of wisdom.

The images are drawn from my archive stretching back to 1989. All shot on medium format film. The whole process has been enlightening and made possible in part by Gary’s interview . We collaborated on part 1 and I deep dived into my archive to consider some responses to his questions. Part 2 is going to be forthcoming.

Reflecting

Reasons to be elsewhere #20210612

news photo by the guardian depicting Chinese mission staff face-off with police, London. Peter Johns, 1967 — Chinese mission staff face-off with police, London. Peter Johns, 1967. Courtesy, Guardian News & Media Archive.

The Photographer’s Gallery in London is exhibiting parts of the Archive of The Guardian Newspaper to, “…delve into the legendary Guardian picture library, to explore photojournalism across the 20th Century and the various ways in which a liberal press employs images to elaborate themes such as feminism, nationalism, post-colonialism, racism, industrial relations, immigration, class and the climate crisis.”

Sadly any travel is still off the cards for the foreseeable future. Who said the tyranny of distance was dead?

View Spikes?

A huge spike in traffic is always welcome, even if short-lived.

Photography & Blogging?

screen grab of final blogposts from blogger — a screen grab of the last few entries over at blogspot.com

Photography and blogging have become my two of my most pleasurable passions; well photography has been that way since 1987.

My history of blogging is not as long as some. I have been blogging using text, photography and on occasion video since the early 2000s.

As I contemplate my final days as a middle aged man, I have been looking back over my digital footprint; consisting of some blogging and lots of photography. My time also includes some micro-blogging and photography since 2004. I have been interested in all things web since my introduction to it in 1995. I have jumped and hopped from blogging service to service. The one constant? My photography.

I have used many blogging platforms and tools. I started writing blog style entries on my own website in October 2003, [A caveat these links may be broken.]

Then I blogged on blogspot from 2004 to 2010 with the lofty claim; “an online experiment in content publishing using only a mobile phone”.

I hosted a Movable type blog for a while on a server I was gifted, from August 2006, to May 2011. [Archived partially here, also many broken links] The server eventually fell over. At some point I had started using Tumblr.com around 2007 .

Next I moved to a free WordPress account for a while 2015-2018. Then it was back to blogspot [2019-2020], and now finally here on my self hosted site.

Elsewhere online?

Sunshine Circa 1999 — Kororoit creek in Sunshine in the late 1990s

I have been interviewed by Gary over at Thought Factory, this is part one of a series of interviews Gary is undertaking. He is interviewing me and several photographers around Australia.

I was fortunate to have an extended discussion with Gary recently which was helped cement some ideas that I had not had the opportunity to contemplate before. I also created an album on flickr that demonstrates where I began with my photography.