Back from Niagara Falls and Buffalo. Can I just say what assholes the Customs agents at the border are. These are the folks assigned to “guard” our borders? We are all in serious trouble. When you have 95% of travel over the Rainbow Bridge for visiting the falls, having some smart ass 19 year old ask which restaurant they ate at isn’t really checking out their story. And we wonder just how much farther the bottom can be. How the mighty have fallen.
Copyright Scott Lessing Hubener
Another pic from some documentary work of the rural WNC area. I’ve amassed quite a few images which is turning into a project. There is more to be done if I intend to communicate a cogent series and comprehensive body, but its coming together and coalescing.
The I-26 corridor through WNC and eastern Tennessee is an artery that cuts through the heart of the region. There are many cultural, environmental, commercial, socioeconomic and religious motifs that symbolize the area and are connected, affected and represented by the corridor. More to come as this project comes along.
Copyright Scott Lessing Hubener
It just keeps getting worse. The Madoff case just keeps unraveling. One investor is now dead from suicide and scores of nonprofits are teetering on bankruptcy. The latest being the Ellie Wiesel Foundation having lost almost all of its assets in the scheme. While many are blaming the SEC for not catching this much sooner in its so called investigations, lest we forget that Madoff is the real perpetrator and criminal here. This is already the biggest case of fraud ever and I’m sure will be remembered in infamy through history. I’m completely baffled how someone could do this to innocent people and on such a scale. Its pure evil.
Copyright Scott Lessing Hubener
This past weekend my daughter and a couple friends went to the Asheville Nature Center. It was so much fun to see the kids respond to the animals and get excited about seeing them so close up. I always enjoy visiting zoos or nature centers and have found there are so many interesting things all around. I could have spent the whole time just watching these otters playing in their pool. They didn’t have a care in the world.
Copyright Scott Lessing Hubener
Copyright Scott Lessing Hubener
Its the most wonderful time of the year.
Copyright Scott Lessing Hubener
Portrait of Susan Collard of Asheville Contemporary Dance Theatre for Verve Magazine. Fun shoot and Susan is an incredible dancer, teacher, director and more.
Copyright Scott Lessing Hubener
James Agee’s intro to the great Helen Levitt book, A Way of Seeing is one of the most concise photography-related essays. Although written in the 1940s, the essay has the poignancy and relevancy as if it were written today. I’d suggest getting a hold of the book for the essay as well as Levitt’s compelling photographs. But I’ve written a few of the quotes below to give you a tiny, tiny taste.
“Well used, the camera is unique in its power to develop and to delight our ability to see. Ill or indifferently used, it is unique in its power to defile and to destroy that ability. The camera is just a machine, which records with impressive and as a rule very cruel faithfulness, precisely what is in the eye, mind, spirit, and skill of its operator to make it recorded. Since relatively few of its operators are notably well endowed in any of these respects, save perhaps in technical skill, the results are, generally, disheartening.”
“The artist’s task is not to alter the world as the eye sees it into a world of aesthetic reality, but to perceive the aesthetic reality within the actual world, and to make an undisturbed and faithful record of the instant in which this movement of creativeness achieves its most expressive crystallization.”
“The kind of beauty he records may be so monumentally static, as it is in much of the work of Mathew Brady, Eugene Atget, and Walker Evans, that the undeveloped eye is too casual and wandering to recognize it. Or it may be so filled with movement, so fluid and so transient, as it is in much of the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson and of Miss Levitt, that the undeveloped eye is too slow and too generalized to for-see and to isolate the most illumination moment. It would be mistaken to suppose that any of the best photography is come at by intellect ion; it is, like all art, essentially the result of an intuitive process, drawing on all that the artist is rather than on anything he thinks, far less theorizes about.”
1923-2008
Copyright Scott Lessing Hubener
Some photos from last week in the mountains around Mars Hill, NC.
These recent photos got me thinking more about the New Topographics movement. As these are sans people and document man’s impact and presence on nature, there is some influence there. But I look at way more Walker Evans than Shore or Adams, not that I don’t enjoy their work, however. I love Evans quote about his style of working in the documentary approach that the author appears to not be present, as if the photo almost somehow took itself. How brilliant that is and difficult to achieve.
I’ve included some crops below of some of the photos. The blog size for photos makes it difficult to discern all of the detail in the image. A 16″ print is more conducive to viewing, so I’ve cropped in to allow you to see some interesting details in the subject that might not be viewable from the original thumb. Its interesting for me to see a cropped photo, especially ones as exaggerated as these as I don’t typically crop my photos. Not because I don’t believe in it as a credible thing to do, but rather its just not my working style. Of course, I could make a whole series of extremely cropped photos that create an entirely new framing and composition.
The bird flying into the shot above the horse was just one of those moment that make you so excited to be there. It totally made the shot for me. Same with the cow or whatever it is. He disappeared right after I took the shot back into the barn. He was in the perfect place too for that one instant though.
Copyright Scott Lessing Hubener
Copyright Scott Lessing Hubener
I’ve been enjoying reading William Albert Allard’s The Photographic Essay. It is possibly one of the finest if not the finest book of a working photographer. Although it is not new, it was published in 1989, the information is as valuable today as it was then and the candidness makes it so special. The writing gives descriptive detail into the working methods and approaches by one of photojournalisms finest practitioners. There are so many quotes that leave me shaking my head in agreement and feeling like, yes, this is what I’m talking about. Finding this treasure comes at a time where it is so invaluable; its like a boost of support and encouragement.
There are so many great quotes from the book that I’ve attempted to list some of them here:
“I was really more inspired, in terms of color, by painters: the Impressionists, Edward Hopper, Matisse.”
“By and large approaching people doesn’t really get any easier. You just have to make yourself do it. It doesn’t get any easier to go into town where you’re a complete stranger, knowing that the only way you can do good work is to establish a rapport. In fact, it gets a little harder.”
“The advertising business is so literal-minded that no matter what you show them, if the job’s supposed to have kittens in it and you don’t have any goddamn kittens in your portfolio, you’re not going to get the job.”
“There’s all kinds of communication you can have with your subject, whether you speak the language or not. It’s one thing to expect your subject to be receptive, but you have to be receptive to them.”
“Photographing people requires a willingness to be rejected. Even so, I think the best approach is to be honest and direct. That doesn’t mean to show all your cards right away, and give up at the first sign of resistance. You can’t afford to do that. There really aren’t any formulas for how to approach a human subject.”
