YOU'RE THE STAR OF MY MOVIE

“To be different without being confusing, to be radical without promoting a scorched-earth policy, to be intellectual while remaining emotional and to be emotional without succumbing to sentimentality, to find a new form that is immediately negotiable—these would be the aims I’d shoot for, in our drear day.” – Jeffrey Eugenides to Jim Lewis, in [...]

“Try for a record of emotion rather than a piece of topography. Wait till the building makes you feel intensely, in some special part of it or other; then try and analyze what gives you that feeling, see if it is due to the isolation of some particular aspect or effect, and then see what [...]

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by building an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, such that when the external facts, which must terminate in a sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. –T.S. Elliot in “Hamlet and [...]

I saw this in the June issue of Harper’s and would like you to know I am gladly accepting patronage too.

I’m reading “How To Wreck A Nice Beach: The Vocoder From World War II to Hip-Hop”. The author, Dave Tomkins, speaks in tongues: a highly caffeinated, over-educated, culture-at-the-margins, A.D.D. kind of language… He gets a gold medal for knowing cool stuff. With that in mind I’ve been in a Miami Bass state of mind. Start [...]

Need career advice? I do. (I’m pretty sure Steve Jobs doesn’t read this blog which means everyone else should answer accordingly.) I took advantage of my proximity to the Brooklyn Public Library, checked out some books, and dove right into Charles Churchward’s “Herb Ritts: The Golden Hour” to see what I could learn from Herb. [...]

I love having the newspaper delivered. My favorite weekend activity is drinking coffee on the sofa with the dogs and the paper. This picture by Ayman Oghanna was on the front page of the New York Times this morning. Beautiful. I love the when art photography and photojournalism aren’t that far apart e.g. Luc Delahaye.

I’ve told people my lesson for photography—which I probably stole from you at one point. [...] Frame the picture. Make the greatest, most prefect composition you can… and then take a step forward. It skews it a bit and makes it more interesting. –Larry Clark, in conversation with Ralph Gibson, Interview Magazine, Oct 2010.

I just finished Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children.” She is a compelling storyteller and draws vivid, complex, and believable characters. There is some “what would this look like photographed?” language, but it rarely gets overly descriptive. The writing is mostly in service of the storytelling and you can read the whole thing in a couple [...]

I’m now reading: Freddie Young & Paul Petzold’s “The Work of the Motion Picture Cameraman.” It inspired me to post an exceprt from Dviga Vertov’s “Man With a Movie Camera.” Make some popcorn because it’s a stone cold classic. I must have watched it 20+ times in school. (This is the popper we use and [...]