SEE(K)

“If I take the easy way out, I fall. If I focus and trust, I ascend…”

In conjunction with a discussion about Cheryl Strayed’s new memoir, “Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail,” zocalopublicsquare.org asked me to write a short essay about how I seek solitude. While there is an appeal to spending time wandering forest trails or backcountry skiing, I need a more regular escape to healthy alone time, and I can find it in a place many people dread. Click over here to read more.

Erica McDonald and I have begun The Intuitive Document workshop in Brooklyn. Nine photographers traveled from Italy to work on the streets and study with us. They have a week to explore NYC with their cameras and bring back a fresh body of work. Our hosts Roberto and Laura will provide daily updates on the workshop blog. I’ll do my best to show some photos and give brief updates. This Saturday we’ll celebrate the students’ work with a festive slideshow and maybe a few beers.

We’re going to encourage the students to stretch and break their comfort zones, and photograph with newfound intensity. We encountered Angelica as she whirled with her hula hoop in a park off Broadway near the JMZ. Angelica showed no self-consciousness, just the confidence to be comfortable among a group of strangers with cameras fascinated by her ability.

Catching this energetic lady in a moment of repose at the end of our meeting, I imagined her offering us good luck as we embark on this wild week of creative adventure. Thank you, Angelica.

Sunday May 23 will find me in Williamsburg Brooklyn teaching a documentary photography workshop with my colleague Erica McDonald. We have ten students for a week of inspiration,  creative struggle and growth. We’re going to concentrate on encouraging our students to trust their intuition and embrace their personal vision.

We’ll have daily critiques, shoot-outs and lots of coffee to fuel long but exhilarating hours exploring this dynamic medium. There’s good food, too, as workshop HQ is on Broadway in Williamsburg, next door to Peter Luger’s and just a few doors up from Diner and Marlow & Sons. Bring on the grassfed cheeseburger please. With fries. Lots of fries.

Drop by. We’d love to see you.

Henry Wessel was featured in the 1975 exhibition, “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape.” Considered one of the most influential shows in modern photography, Wessel’s understated work was alongside pictures by Stephen Shore, the Bechers and Lewis Baltz.

A New York Times review by Michael Kimmelman of Wessel’s show at MOMA in 2007 explained a sliver of what New Topographics photographers were after.

“Following Walker Evans’s example, a postwar generation focused on what everybody in America during the 1950s, 60s and 70s actually saw in front of their faces or through their windshields or across their backyard fences, but didn’t bother to register or preferred not to – much less to think was worth photographing. These were run of the mill subjects, mostly, shot with deadpan acumen.. seemingly nowhere places, shown to be somewhere after all. In the populist spirit of Walt Whitman, but with a heavy dose of dry-eyed skepticism, they found a fresh kind of poetics in the American everyday… [Wessel] had a knack for seeing a compositional order where it didn’t obviously present itself – making pictures like visual haikus.”

There’s such good counsel in Wessel’s work about the photographic process, working and looking for the element of surprise as Kimmelman wrote, “without sentiment, but without condescension, either…” But the author also pointed out Wessel worked modestly, and that his self-effacing style sometimes led to boring images. But maybe that’s the point, too, that this expansive country, while filled with incredible subject matter, can sometimes be kind of plain. Time to look deeper.

I first saw Wessel’s work in Philip Gefter’s book “Photography After Frank,” a collection of essays originally published in the NY Times. Wessel speaks here, adding insights to his process.

“Part of it has to do with the discipline of being actively receptive… At the core of this receptivity that might be called soft eyes. It is a physical sensation. You are not looking for something. You are open, receptive. At some point you are in front of something that you cannot ignore.”

Marrying his images to his thoughts about his work made both get under my skin. It all just resonates. Commenting on a picture of a man watching birds take flight, Wessel said, “When I look at it now, I marvel at how much of the world is hidden in the flux of time.” Is that photography? Mining time to see what’s between the seconds?

And this is a treasure, “The process of photographing is a pleasure: eyes open, receptive, sensing, and at some point, connecting. It’s thrilling to be outside your mind, your eyes far ahead of your thoughts.”

Jorge Colombo uses an iPhone app called “Brushes” to make digital paintings reminiscent of the work of painter Edward Hopper. The New Yorker magazine’s website features Colombo in a blog called “Fingerpainting.”

Each post is an animated video of the steps Colombo takes while creating his pictures. It’s beautiful, inspiring work. Really fun to see.

Jorge Colombo | The New Yorker

Long drive to a shoot in Litchfield last week. Slippery, cold, and dreary, but the story was about some of the best chocolate in Connecticut, so it balanced out in the end.

Shooting graffiti artist John “Crash” Matos today. He went from tagging subway cars in The South Bronx to hanging out with Basquiat and Keith Haring and painting custom guitars for Eric Clapton.  The spray paint superhero also has his work in the collection at the Museum of Modern Art.

Here’s an interview with Paolo Ventura on his new book Winter Stories, in which a dying circus performer remembers everyday moments of his life. The astonishing photos show hand-built miniature scenes of mid-century Italy. I spent hours with the book, in awe of Ventura’s imagination and the execution of his ideas. Ventura spent more than a week assembling the miniature books in this picture. Does this shop have a first edition of The Americans or The Decisive Moment hidden in the shelves somewhere?

Libri E Stampi | Paolo Ventura

If you’re in need of some inspiration or ideas for a wish list, photo-eye magazine’s curated list of 2009′s top photo books is a good place to start. Twenty-seven prominent photographers, editors and critics comment on their top ten favorites of the year.

“Looking In,” the volume celebrating the 50-year anniversary of the publication of Robert Frank’s “The Americans,” was on nine of the the curators’ lists, essentially earning the top spot on the “master list.” I’d have to agree. It’s a seminal work, filled with historical and critical essays, contact sheets and hundreds of pictures. Essential reading.