There’s no wonder we’re struggling with authenticity. We’ve been dealt a line of crap so many times we

don’t believe as much of what we see and less of what we hear. What started as a 70’s T-shirt, “question authority”, has morphed into a societal mantra, “question reality.”

Undisputed credibility was considered the providence of photography, but genuineness is no longer that accessible; it’s not as easy to recognize when you’re being deceived into believing something. We settle for realism and hope we aren’t taken for too big a fool.

Mom used to tell me, “Never pretend to be someone you’re not”. That was 40 years ago. Today there are elementary lessons about judging accuracy from spin or truthfulness from propaganda. In the hierarchy of skill sets skepticism has move to the top tear. Photography’s relevance is shifting.

The medium that was used to prove reality is in the position to be a master deceiver; counterfeit authenticity. Photography is morphing further into illustrated reality. The “transparency” of the medium is nearly invisible.

I’m not sure all this matters except in a nostalgic sense. The savvy among us learn to read an agenda in symbolic moments. What matters is reciprocity.

We run from the loud broadcaster and tire of stoicism. The compelling is that which binds us.  It’s those 7 literary story plots that are common in our experiences and found in the moments available to capture.

“All of my work is about trying to find some element of what it feels like to be alive as a human being on this planet.” … “I’m always looking for moments of interaction, emotion and intimacy.” … “”it’s really little subtle moments of interaction that explains the connections we have”– Doug Menuez

There’s a small percentage of professionals who consistently embrace a viewpoint that extends reciprocity to me as an artist – Doug Menuez is one of those. In this video interview, Doug explains in clear language what is enduringly authentic about photography. He explains – beyond nostalgia and manipulation – what I believe is the timeless future of photography.

Doug was also a speaker at TEDx San Francisco in Nov. 2009. In his TED presentation he talks about his life as a photographer, how it has changed him and his project Fearless Genius about silicone valley.

Taking a photo allows ownership of the subject.  Many cultures fear loss of soul through photographs. In brutal frankness, photographers characteristically pinch intimacy and trigger vulnerability that only close examination bares. Anyone retouching a high resolution image can tell you they risk knowing way too much about their subject.

Seth Mydanshe in a post for the New York Times blog “Lens” introduces the documentary “Camera, Camera”.  I have yet to see the film but still it inspired this post.

["Camera, Camera" was directed by Malcolm Murray, written by Michael Meyer and produced by Josh Haner, who is a co-editor of the Lens blog and has photographed Laos for The Times.]

Yes. My photography is being deeply affected by the democratization of quality imagery but, wait, there’s more.  The “more” is a cultural affectation that has relatively little to do with me. It has to do with an extreme global loss of the objective observer.

[via Wikipedia] The ideal observer is one who causes no unnecessary perturbations to the system being observed. An observation made by such an observer is called an objective observation. In basic school education of physics and chemistry, we routinely assume that our observations are objective.

But reality seldom, if ever, provides us with ideals. The real observer always causes an unnecessary perturbation of some kind. Scientists must remain alert in their efforts to minimize the magnitudes of these perturbations. The extent to which they succeed determines the level of confidence they can claim in their results and, therefore, the certainty they can expect in their knowledge of things.

As a professional I’ve spent decades making photos and, with unmistakable irony, it took digital imaging for me to discover that I can’t make something better than what is there to take. In other words, the harder I try to make my own reality, the more I am disappointed with its legitimacy. The act of observing destroys what I hope to capture.

While I may want to disappear with a camera in my hand, the ubiquitous photographer is changing what there is to observe. The camera is coming between culture and the unperturbed experience. We are witnessing life through an abstract medium and mistaking it for truth. The souls I steal are now permanently altered no matter how light I tread.

I’ve been influenced by Usher Fellig (aka Weegee the Famous).  I had no idea. But I’m in good company from Diane Arbus to Cindy Sherman, and the rest of us.  It’s hard to peel away the nostalgia from his photos from mid 20^th century NYC, but as I try the feeling of intensity remains; as though one held a candle under humanity fluid and let it reduce.

Photographic creativity is unique in many ways but one in particular in which Weegee’s body of work describes well is it’s demand on speed.  How many photos does one have to take before all the choices we make when pointing a camera happen faster than the subject is moving?

“I think about my camera all the time … There are photographic fanatics, just as there are religious fanatics.  They buy a so-called candid camera … there are no such thing; it’s the photographer who has to be candid, not the camera.” – Weegee

The trigger finds emotion.  I know from years of feeling subjects through a lens that the emotional moment is telepathic. Loud emotions are easy; it’s the quiet ones that lay demands on skills.  It’s the empathy of the photographer that presses the button at exactly the right moment after finding the perfect composition dictated by circumstance.

“People are so wonderful that a photographer has only to wait for that breathless moment to capture what he wants on film.” – Weegee

“When you find yourself beginning to feel a bond between yourself and the people you photograph, when you laugh and cry with their laughter and tears, you will know you are on the right track.” – Weegee

Also easily captured are surface emotions, or non-emotions.  Saying cheese is the best way to make sure a camera fails to reveal anything you own. We learn to say “cheese” early and often.

“Press agents, seeing my camera, pointed out notables to me, but I refused to

Weegee

waste film or bulbs, as I don’t photograph society unless they have a fight and get arrested or they stand on their heads.” – Weegee

Finally, there is nothing like a life devoted to their art. A part time musician is just that – “part time”. A fine artist making it her day job or a commercial artist carving out a career is at a different level – they just are because they must. There art is front of mind all the time.

“I’m no part time dilettante photographer, unlike the bartenders, shoe salesmen, floorwalkers plumbers, barbers, grocery clerks and chiropractors whose great hobby is their camera. All their friends rave about what wonderful pictures they take. If they’re so good, why don’t they take pictures full—time, for a living, and make floor walking, chiropractics, etc., their hobby? But everyone wants to play it safe. They’re afraid to give up their pay checks and their security they might miss a meal.” – Weegee

Weegee’s World

Permission To Suck Manifesto Law #3.    There’s NO plan “B”. Quit moonlighting.  Put in the hours; work without a net.  If you have a plan “B” it’s too easy to bail, and you’ll want to.  Part timers can’t keep up with the guy who’s bustin’ it like a sex crazed school boy.

[via: Wikipedia]

Weegee was the pseudonym of Arthur Fellig (June 12, 1899 – December 26, 1968), an Austrian-born American photographer and photojournalist, known for his stark black and white street photography.

Weegee worked in the Lower East Side of New York City as a press photographer during the 30′s and 40′s, and he developed his signature style by following the city’s emergency services and documenting their activity. Much of his work depicted unflinchingly realistic scenes of urban life, crime, injury and death. Weegee published photographic books and also worked in cinema, initially making his own short films and later collaborating with film directors such as Jack Donohue and Stanley Kubrick.

Creativity is a near simultaneous encounter between our imagination, introspection and reality. The richness of imagination is fed through inspiration to encounter surroundings and cultivated with intense motivations. The value of our introspection is sustained by wisdom and experience; what is essentially you. Confrontation with reality is how creativity is birthed; it’s the final relationship with objectivity.

Artistic creativity is an act of intimacy or not;  it’s genuine art or it’s artifact.  Learn to manipulate tools and their crafty mechanisms so they become secondary or not.

Mechanization serving up uniformity, predictability, and orderliness (i.e. image capturing devices, signal processors, computers, or any fine apparatus) can either heighten the creative encounter or cheat it. Left to dominate with crafty mechanization and we cheat expressive intimacy.

Roughly, in the late ‘80’s, Mark Zimmer and Tom Hedges, founders of the Fractal Design Corporation, created Painter.  I recall passing photographs through a software “filter” to create a painting effect. Extending photography,  it instantly aped wrist skills without the hard work. Incredibly, Painter transformed every photograph into works of painted art.

Yet, it didn’t take long to realize painting filter presets produced artifacts, not art. Extraordinary turned less than ordinary within weeks as my employer’s entire creative department mastered the programmed keystrokes. What just happened? Amazement transformed into distaste within a few weeks.

Now the cheat is obvious, back then, not so much. We correctly felt the excitement in discovering a legitimate creative extension. What failed us was our loss of expressive intimacy; the new tool masked our art transforming it into a mechanistic artifact. There are no shortcuts.

Case in point: A camera is either an extension or protection from the creative encounter. Countless photographers feel defensive because they’ve cheated the encounter and lied to themselves and others about the intimacy of their works. Most recent democratization of the cheat is forcing photo artists and others to cope with the creative encounter that produces art rather than artifacts.

How many of us can say we are hiding behind the mastery of crafty mechanization?  Suddenly, there’s a need to pull up to the creative bar or be forced out of town. It takes courage to rediscover artistic expressive intimacy especially after producing artifacts for years.

There will be a day when “take a photo” means that we run home with electronic reality in a box so we can rummage through it at our leisure, try this focal length or that depth of field, and find the precise moment that we’ll label our still photographic masterpiece.  Editing is a big part of shooting yet something will remain uncaptured unless we learn to pay attention.

“He’s famous not for his flower pictures, but he is famous for his objectionable sexual representation” – Louise Bourgeois, Artist

That said Louise, it’s not hard to find the uniqueness of Mapplethorpe’s work whether it’s a flower, a penis or a portrait.  Along with other greats like Richard Avedon, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evens, Robert Frank, Irving Penn, Helmut Newton – Mapplethorpe is the reason good photographers shoot the way they do and that will remain so into the foreseeable future.

He’s right on the edge, bridging the gaps and exploring the paradox. The best description I’ve gathered from many sources is that R.M. civilized the shock of sex, violence and race – localized our fears, lust and hopes with ambiguous well crafted works.  He succeeded in such a powerful way that it’s spawned countless derivatives – my own work being no exception.

“It’s about ME trying to see things.  I’m amazed it shocked – I’ve been through the experience.”  – Robert Mapplethorpe

Shocked we were.  Controversy started in Washington DC when an ICA [Institute of Contemporary Art] funded Corcoran Gallery of Art exhibition was cancelled 10 days before a scheduled opening in 1989, thus thrusting Mapplethorpe’s work into Congressional Debates over what tax payer money should and should not support.  The controversy over censorship and the artistic freedom continues in Washington at the expense of NEA funding.

Biography [via Mapplethorpe Foundation Website]:

Robert and Patti at Coney Island

Robert Mapplethorpe was born in 1946 in Floral Park, Queens. Of his childhood he said, “I come from suburban America. It was a very safe environment and it was a good place to come from in that it was a good place to leave.”

In 1963, Mapplethorpe enrolled at Pratt Institute in nearby Brooklyn, where he studied drawing, painting, and sculpture. Influenced by artists such as Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp, he also experimented with various materials in mixed-media collages, including photographs cut from books and magazines. He acquired a Polaroid camera in 1970 and began producing his own images to incorporate into the collages, saying he felt “it was more honest.” That same year he and Patti Smith, whom he had met three years earlier, moved into the Chelsea Hotel.

Mapplethorpe quickly discovered the satisfaction of taking Polaroid photographs in their own right and indeed few Polaroids appear in his mixed-media works. His first solo gallery exhibition, “Polaroids,” took place at the Light Gallery in New York City in 1973. In 1976, he acquired a Hasselblad medium-format camera and took to shooting his circle of friends and acquaintances—artists, musicians, socialites, pornographic film stars, and members of the S & M underground. He also worked on commercial projects; he created album cover art for Patti Smith and Television, two of several musicians with whom he would eventually collaborate, and shot a series of portraits and party pictures for Interview Magazine.

In the late 70s, Mapplethorpe grew increasingly interested in documenting the New York S & M scene. The resulting photographs are shocking for their content and remarkable for their technical and formal mastery. Mapplethorpe told ARTnews in late 1988, “I don’t like that particular word ‘shocking.’ I’m looking for the unexpected. I’m looking for things I’ve never seen before … I was in a position to take those pictures. I felt an obligation to do them.” Meanwhile his career continued to flourish. In 1977, he participated in Documenta 6 in Kassel, West Germany and in 1978, the Robert Miller Gallery in New York City became his exclusive dealer.

Mapplethorpe met Lisa Lyon, the first World Women’s Bodybuilding Champion, in 1980. Over the next several years they collaborated on a series of portraits and figure studies, a film, and the book, Lady, Lisa Lyon. Throughout the 80s, Mapplethorpe produced a bevy of images that simultaneously challenge and adhere to classical aesthetic standards: stylized compositions of male and female nudes, delicate flower still lifes, and studio portraits of artists and celebrities, to name a few of his preferred genres. He introduced and refined different techniques and formats, including color 20″ x 24″ Polaroids, photogravures, platinum prints on paper and linen, Cibachome and dye transfer color prints. In 1986, he designed sets for Lucinda Childs’ dance performance, Portraits in Reflection, created a photogravure series for Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, and was commissioned by curator Richard Marshall to take portraits of New York artists for the series and book, 50 New York Artists.

That same year, in 1986, he was diagnosed with AIDS. Despite his illness, he accelerated his creative efforts, broadened the scope of his photographic inquiry, and accepted increasingly challenging commissions. The Whitney Museum of American Art mounted his first major American museum retrospective in 1988, one year before his death in 1989.

His vast, provocative, and powerful body of work has established him as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. Today Mapplethorpe is represented by galleries in North and South America and Europe and his work can be found in the collections of major Museums around the world. Beyond the art historical and social significance of his work, his legacy lives on through the work of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. He established the Foundation in 1988 to promote photography, support museums that exhibit photographic art, and to fund medical research in the fight against AIDS and HIV-related infection.

See More:

Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith short video

Photography of Robert Mapplethorpe 9 min. Video

Mapplethorpe Foundation Website

Read more:

“Just Kids” – Patti Smith:  Book Review

North light streams through a bank of windows. A lone figure, standing quiet in the middle of the large colorless room, surrounded by photographs from the last year of his life, he suddenly whispers, “What does it all mean?”

Ludicrous.  That doesn’t actually happen. Yet, stereotypes emerge from somewhere so what’s the origin of this scene? Quite simply: it’s the artistic search. Tell the story however you want, it comes out the same.  Artists chase personal expression but never quite pull it off, but never say die.

Listening to Ralph Gibson speak, and reviewing his work, something hit me. Yes, his work is simultaneously complex and simple. Its complexity is hidden by simplicity. His chosen frame is the disguise. But moreover, his work over five decades is astonishingly consistent in point of view and that, to me, is especially remarkable when bearing in mind that I consider changing my approach daily.

The strength of Ralph Gibson’s work comes from a unique viewpoint and not necessarily unique subjects, as with the work of countless others.  He knows himself well.

Ralph Gibson’s lesson to me is: viewpoint first.

Point of view is what it all means. Generate your own. Dominate your subject in the nicest possible way.

For five decades of photography visit: Ralph Gibson Photography Website

Ralph Gibson Biography [via Biography Page on RalphGibson.com]

Ralph Gibson studied photography while in the US Navy and then at the San Francisco Art Institute. He began his professional career as an assistant to Dorothea Lane and went on to work with Robert Frank on two films. Gibson has maintained a lifelong fascination with books and book-making. Since the appearance in 1970 of THE SOMNAMBULIST, his work has been steadily impelled towards the printed page. To date he has produced over 40 monographs , his most current projects being “State of the Axe”to be published by Yale University Press in Fall of 2008 and “NUDE” by Taschen, 2009. His photographs are included in over one hundred and fifty museum collections around the wrold, and have appeared in hundreds of exhibitions.

Gibson’s awards include fellowships from the John SImon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Leica Medal of Excellence and the Silver Plumb Award from the Landmarks Preservation Committee. He is an Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France, and holds honorary doctorates from the University of Maryland and Ohio Wesleyan University. In 2007 he received The Lucie Award for Fine Art Photography. He has worked exclusively with the Leica for almost 50 years.

” I have been a photographer all my life….and have made photographs of many things and for many reasons. But one thing that becomes more and more apparent is that I am simply only as good as my next photograph. That’s the one that counts the most….For this reason I find it a delight to face a new day, and to develop that new roll of film. It’s a great way to live.”

Photography at its root is honest.  Its analog legacy is documentary, authenticity, and accuracy.  Digitally transformed, the honesty of image capture is questionable.  Regarding truth, however, photography’s quality has remained unchanged.  Each capture is a story and the storyteller is the purveyor of truth.

Consider the photograph as a frame. It’s a rectangle into which the artist decides what is included.  Ideally, each element in the frame contributes; nothing is irrelevant.  What’s more, it’s the purposeful judgment at the decisive moment of capture that edits the story.  Conceivably, two inches to the left or 5 seconds later and the story has a different moral.

Artists can make pictures, but to take them with the purpose of supplying unfiltered truth is intuitive as though thought is bypassed and feelings drive the moment.  Realistically, however, a story remains the responsibility of the teller and not the medium, the context, or even the events themselves.  We decide where to point the camera.

Photographs can feel more truthful than documentary films because they have lesser opportunities for editing.   Yet in contrast, Robert Capa’s famous “Falling Soldier”, under scrutiny for fabrication, may be just as truthful regardless of a less than honest foundation.  Many great photographers fabricate images prior to capture or post capture so. in the end. truth rests with the photographer not the photograph.

Excusing context or assigning responsibility colors photographs as well.  Those with greater experiences gain a perspective that makes it harder for those without to relate; a soldier returning from war or the photographer covering events outside our routine experiences risk becoming isolated.  Consequently, a storyteller must create an honest yet accessible relationship with the viewer.  They must pry open the receptors of the viewer through emotional connections; make them relate to the un-relatable.

Content is king, yet what’s in front of the camera, how it’s framed, and the decisive moment of capture is what tells a story.  Editing can add power to the delivery while simultaneously altering content hence reducing the truth of a story in unskilled hands.  The compassion of a story teller and the way he seeks excellence rather than pursuing excellent results, is the ultimate truth and power of the photographic medium.  - Bruce DeBoer

[all photography copyright Ryan Lobo]

In his TED presentation, photographer Ryan Lobo shares this remarkable insight and relates a few stories.

via Ryan Lobo’s Portfolio Website:

Ryan Lobo has achieved worldwide visibility through his photography, films, exhibitions and editorial magazine work.  For the last 10 years, Ryan has traveled extensively all over the world to make pictures and films that reflect a high degree of humanism, empathy and sensitivity. He is recognized as one of India’s most respected and well-known photographers.

In 2001, Ryan co-founded Mad Monitor Productions, a film and photo production company based in Bangalore and Washington DC. His films have aired on the National Geographic Channel, National Geographic Channel International, Animal Planet, The Oprah Winfrey Show and PBS among many other networks and Mad Monitor productions” currently manages and produces film and photo expeditions internationally.

His images/writing have been featured in magazines like Outlook traveler, Marie Claire, Elle, Tehelka, Better photography, The Wall Street Journal, GEO magazine, Time Out, National Geographic Magazine, the Boston review, Chimurenga, Onzeweruld, the Wall Street Journal and Glamour magazine amongst others. His art prints have been exhibited all over India and in Europe and he is a photographer with “Tasveeer.”

Since picking up a camera 35 years ago, I’ve been framing images to move viewers.  A desire to convince them I was good at what I did remains an underlying yet significant motivation. What’s more, I’ll make the claim that most spectators do so in judgment before considering the content’s honesty – that is – if it exists.  I invite you to look at these 23 images differently.

There is an integrity and openness in this group of photographs that is unique and worth examining.  They were taken by a photographer who does not care what you think; he’s not spinning it for his reviewers.  He doesn’t care about anything except how the frame and capture makes him feel and what catches his eye.  His viewpoint embodies freshness.  He’s a chaste artist.

The “heads up” came from Nate Sheaffer who originally shared Adam’s work with me.  Following the slide show is the story written by Nate – enjoy.  - Bruce DeBoer

The Art of Adam Sheaffer – 23 Photographs

A few days after his third birthday my son, Adam, expressed a desire to take his own photographs. He had grown weary of being told to smile when and where, and had taken to giving raspberries and covering his face with his hands when anyone pointed a camera his direction. Suddenly, our oft-cherubic ham, turned into a wiggle-faced spam, unwilling to smile in what we considered a natural way.

Giving him my first digital camera, an HP PhotoSmart, started out as a bribe designed to keep his sticky fingers off my newer cameras while also teaching him to focus his energy to some purpose other than collecting cicada shells, cigarette butts, and dead leaves.

Don’t get me wrong – I love a good dead bug, cancer stick, or musty leaf collection as much as the next guy. It’s just that three and four year-olds have boundless capacity for distraction and the OCD tendencies commonplace with their development can make for very large bug/butt/leaf piles all over the house.

Concurrently, small children possess a short-circuiting toggle that inexplicably allows them to drill down deep into minutiae of a different stripe only seconds after finding the wing of a desiccated ladybug the most fascinating element the universe ever assembled. Among modest goals set when giving him the camera lived the hope he might start smiling again and possibly begin developing a contemplative hobby.

“The pictures you take might be something you’ll want to show your children one day, Adam.” I remember telling him, trying to spark interest in the idea of permanence.

“Do they last that long? Wait…, how many children will I have?”

After some discussion, he decided three was a good-sized family then started shooting everything in sight, finding his lap and toes nine hundred times out of the first thousand. The one hundred shots that weren’t his crumb covered jeans or dirt and cat hair crusted piggies rivaled the very best work I’ve done shooting tens of thousands of snapshots.

His first real subject was his sister, Liza. Our then 18 month-old daughter loved the camera when it was in Mommy, Daddy, or Grandma’s hands, but when the shiny, flashy box rested in front of Adam’s face while he screamed, “CHEESE…SAY CHEESE. LIZA!!!! SAY CHEESE, NOW!!!” her hatred of paparazzi was born.

Early pictures of her crying and running away struck me in a most profound way. I never saw the beauty of my daughter’s tear-contorted face before, having never thought to photograph my child so distraught. Adam not only saw her distress as something worth capturing and freezing in time, but he often used the terrorist device he’d found to create powerful pictures of Liza at her most vulnerable.

One portrait he made while she stood outside a glass door begging to be let in. He kept instructing her in a voice loud enough to travel through the glass and drown out her screaming, “just a little longer…I’m making your picture.”

Though the subject matter makes me want to run and find and hug and squeeze and comfort my wee daughter wherever she is, the photos depict her sadness in a way that is equal parts wonder and vulnerability.

Hundreds of photos of dusty, blank floor space describe a richer story than just how poorly I keep our home.

“Why so many shots of the den floor, Adam?”

“Dad! They’re not pictures of the floor!” His boisterously indignant correction made me take a step backward and do a quick calculation of exactly how much processed sugar he might have already ingested in the day.

“Well, buddy, um…what are we looking at here?”

“Cats.”

Scrolling through each shot, he pointed just off screen to either side of my computer, adding color to what exactly I should have been seeing.

“That was Betty running over there and that was Barney. This one is just Barney. This one is Barney again. That’s were Betty ran. Betty, again. Betty. Barney ran away for good, and there…that’s Betty’s tail!”

Many household items are favorites for Adam. He has composed thoughtful toy shopping cart and Hello Kitty hair band studies as well as cat toy and musical instrument concerts – all caught in odd positions I would never have considered worthy of a single click, let alone several dozen from as many angles. My son with his lowered perspective is fearless in his photography, where I am cowed by the need to make a picture look good long before my finger adds pressure to the button.

I intend to ask his help overcoming my fear, but probably not until I overcome my fear of not asking in the proper manner.  - Nate Sheaffer is a writer, artist & builder of stuff from North Carolina

Think out of the box. We don’t want ordinary. Push it to the limit. Create something extraordinary. Differentiate yourself. All instill fear of somehow not measuring up.  It’s also meaningless if read a la carte.

Via a video posted on the Chase Jarvis blog:

“No one want (sic) ordinary photographers anymore. No one wants regular photographers. They want someone that can bring some kind of special lens or special expertise to the conversation.”

No doubt we’re on target when we say these things but what the hell do they really mean? Different than what, the current trend? Where’s the limit that I’m pushing?

We all hear “No one wants ordinary” at the ignorance of anything that follows. If you read any of the comments that follow the Jarvis post, they were all focused on this frustration as if to scream, “Ordinary! Don’t call me ordinary, I hate all that fringe shit”.

Keep reading folks. Hidden in plain sight is the more meaningful segment of the quote:

“You have convictions, you have ideas. They may not be perfect, but just get them out there. Give them a shot.”

This means to find what’s inside and do whatever you must to get it out. If successful there is no way you can be ordinary.  Regardless of what you read and hear today, I guarantee that commercial artists of any generation have not subscribed to “they want ordinary”.  - by Bruce DeBoer

Today (11/26) is a good day to take off; Thursday is a day I typically post but this one will probably not get much traffic so I hadn’t scheduled anything.  Nonetheless, it’s a day of reflection; one where we count our blessings.  A friend of mine passed along the name of a photographer and a collection of his images recently that seemed fitting for a day of appreciation.  Happy Thanksgiving everyone.  I hope AP doesn’t mind that I did this.

Photographers learn early to capture contrast.  Most serious photographers – pre digital – started seeing frames in black and white so the word “contrast” is etched into our professional consciousness.  Yet, contrast is more importantly seen as paradox.  In this group of images we are confronted with some of the most profound examples.

Horror.  Beauty. Culture. Destruction. Precision. Chaos. Danger. Security. Humanity. Brutality. These men appear super human then again fragile.  Clearly the photographer was in tune to all paradox at the moments he captured because he’s not only trained to see it and feel it, but moreover, his simple attendance is it.

Photographer Collection: David Guttenfelder in Afghanistan

David Guttenfelder is AP’s chief Asia photographer based in New Delhi and a recipient of the top still photography award in the National Press Photographers Association, the 2006 Best of Photojournalism Award for Large Markets.

Via DenverPost.com Media Center:

For the past seven years, David Guttenfelder has witnessed and documented the changing landscape of Afghanistan. Although mostly embedded with coalition troops, he has also covered the presidential elections, bodybuilders in Kabul, the state of Afghan prisons and daily life in the country. Guttenfelder is the chief Asia photographer for The Associated Press and over the past seven years has offered the general public a close-up, intimate look at the lives of troops fighting in the mountains and remote regions of Afghanistan.