i’d like to recommend the bbc series genius of photography. this six-part series takes on the history of photography, from the first photographic techniques (camera obscura), via the first commercially available cameras (kodak/eastman), and up to the massive digital photographic industry of today. it discusses important historical events and how photography relates to them, and it deals with whether and how we look at photography as an art form in itself.

 
 
 
 
 
 
the six parts are as follows:
 
1. fixing the shadows
Fixing the Shadows tells the story of the birth of photography itself and the profound question that it raised, and which has never been satisfactorily answered: what is photography for? Detailing the rival methods of the pioneers Henry Fox Talbot and Louis Daguerre for ‘fixing the shadows’, the programme examines how photography took its place alongside other new technologies like the railway and telegraph to transform our understanding of the modern world. It describes how pioneer photographers like the portraitist Nadar asserted the status of photography as an art only for this status to be transformed by the Kodak revolution, which put the camera into the hands of the masses who unlocked its potential for surreality, randomness and surprise. Finally it examines the case of Jacques-Henri Lartigue, the schoolboy photographer who demonstrated the true genius of photography in the hands of the amateur.
 
Includes interviews with Chuck Close and David Byrne.
 
2. documents for artists
In the decades following the First World War, photography was the central medium of the age. “Anyone who fails to understand photography”, said the Hungarian artist and photographer Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, “will be one of the illiterates of the future”. Precise, objective, rational and apparently machine-like, it was used to promote the radical utopia of the Soviet Union and to bring order and clarity to the chaos of Weimar Germany. But while some prized photography for its ability to objective documents others were using it to explore the irrational, the subjective and the surreal, photography’s natural language. The Genius of Photography – Documents for Artists examines in detail the work of some of the greatest and most influential modern photographers: Alexander Rodchenko, August Sander, Man Ray, Eugene Atget, Walker Evans and Bill Brandt. With contributions from Martin Parr, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joel Meyerowitz and Mark Haworth-Booth.
 
3. right time, right place
Being in the right place at the right time, the decisive moment, getting in close — in the popular imagination this is photography at its best, a medium that makes us eyewitnesses to the moments when history is made. But just how good is photography at making sense of what it records? Is getting in close always better than standing back, and just how decisive are the moments that photographers risk their necks to capture? Set against the backdrop of the Second World War and its aftermath, The Genius of Photography – Right Place, Right Time examines how photographers dealt with dramatic and tragic events like D-Day, the Holocaust and Hiroshima, and the questions their often extraordinary pictures raise about history as seen through the viewfinder. With contributions from Magnum legends Philip Jones Griffiths and Susan Meiselas, soldier-lensman Tony Vaccaro and broadcaster Jon Snow.
 
4. paper movies
The American photographer Garry Winogrand said that he took photographs to “see what the world looked like photographed”. Photographers have always had this as their mission statement, but the three decades from the late 1950’s onwards was the real golden age of the photographic journey. The Genius of Photography – Paper Movies relives the journeys that produced some of the most acclaimed paper movies. The programme takes a fascinating look at Robert Frank’s odyssey through 50s America, William Klein’s one-man assault on the sidewalks of New York, Garry Winogrand’s charting of the human comedy in Central Park Zoo, Tony Ray Jones’s dissection eccentricity at the English seaside, and finally, William Eggleston’s guide to Memphis and the American South. Episode four of the series also examines the arrival of colour as a credible medium for serious photographers, as controversial at the time as Dylan going electric.
 
Contributors include legendary photographers like William Klein, William Eggleston, Robert Adams, Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld, Joel Meyerowitz, Martin Parr and artist Ed Ruscha.
 
5. we are family
Having conquered the street and the road, photographers approached the final frontier: the family and the self. The Genius of Photography – We are Family is about what happens when photography translates personal relationships into photographic ones, when strangers, celebrities, lovers and children get fed to the camera. It’s also about what happens when photographers turn their cameras on themselves—what they choose to reveal, and just what they try to conceal.
 
The chronological heartland of the programme is the me decades of the 1970’s and the 1980’s. From Diane Arbus’s freaks (we meet Colin Wood, the manic boy clutching the hand grenade in Central Park) to Richard Avedon’s confrontations with celebrities like Marylin Monroe, from the confessional diaries of Larry Clark and Araki, to the uncomfortably intimate family portraits of Sally Mann and Richard Billingham, the series takes a photographic journey into some of the most intriguing ideas of the photographic self, including an unforgettable encounter as Nan Goldin photographs Joey the transsexual.
 
6. snap judgements
The final programme, The Genius of Photography – Snap Judgements, asks what a photograph is worth these days. One answer is $2.9m, the record-breaking price achieved by an Edward Steichen print auctioned at Sotheby’s in February 2006. The other answer is around 1/29th billionth of that figure based on the calculation that some 29 billion photographs will be taken in 2006 by phone cameras alone. Photography has never been so valuable and so ubiquitous. From America to China and on to Africa, the programme examines how the business of being a photographer has been changed by the market’s sudden interest in what was once the poor relation of the art world.
 
 

docuwiki.

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late night oslo, pentax me loaded with kodak 400 tmy, and ghosts.

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inside an abandoned old dance club/youth club in sandset, vesterålen. evidence showed that through the years this place have been re-occupied by loafers, new-agers and kids feeding an urge to smash things to bits. my parents told me they came there often when they were younger, to dance and meet friends.

the canon a-1 is described as ‘the ultimate reference camera in many minds for over a quarter of a century’. read more about the wonderful a-1 here. i recently got this baby so cheap it’s almost funny – and that included the 50mm 1.4 lens.

cheap film (kodak 200 ‘color plus’). great camera.

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another one from the olympus om-30. the battery for the light meter was dead so i exposed this roll using manual mode. another roll got entirely ruined because i had the camera mistakenly set to automatic.

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olympus om-30, borrowed from a friend. cheap centuria 100 film from konica. expensive opera house in oslo.

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polaroid supercolor 635cl, friday the 13th.

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so i went ahead and finally got me a lomo smena – the “true lomo” of lo-fi photography. most people seem to start off their lomo career with either this one, the lomo lc-a, or the holga. i’m pleased that my interest for lo-fi is still present. i’ve got nothing against digital photography at all, but since i’m a fan of plastic, mystery, luck and all things old and dirty, i find digital photography too easy and predictable to become really interesting. that and the fact that you have no film advance knob!

luckily, i have roll upon roll of cheap film just waiting to merge with the smena. stay tuned!

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an autumn day in two thousand and eight, holding the pentax me packed with some ilford xp2 super chromogenic film. this is also one of those b/w films that you develop in c-41 color chemicals. it’s got a bit more contrast and it’s much sharper than the kodak bw400 cn, but i like them both for their unique characteristics; the kodak has a warmth to it that the ilford doesn’t match, and the ilford is clearer and more detailed.

both of which the kodak t-max combines beautifully.

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miranda sensomat re and the 50mm auto miranda 1.8 on a cold, cold january day, with some kodak bw400 cn. i was eager to see the results from this monochrome (or chromogenic) film, as it’s made to be developed in standard c-41 color chemicals – for convenience i guess. and convenient it was. i handed in the roll at a photo store in town and half an hour later it was done.

i kind of like the tones and the latitude. not too detailed or sharp, but still decent. but i’ll take the t-max or the tri-x any day.

watch this space for some ilford xp2 super photos soon – that’s another one of those handy c-41 monochromogenic(!) films!

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børre, cigarette and tea (or coffee) on an autumn day, two thousand and eight.

miranda sensomat re and some expired fuji superia 400 x-tra.

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kodak 400tx (tmy) in the bronica on an autumn day, two thousand and eight.

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china lucky is a company who, in their own terms, are “the largest national photosensitive materials and magnetic recording media manufacturer in China”, which i do not doubt at all. this is probably the reason i’ve never heard of lucky film before.

“A 棟六樓的風景” by 2493™ from flickr

i’ve tried collecting as much information as i can about this product, but it’s hard. i know that kodak and lucky have joined forces, resulting in kodak aquiring 20 percent of lucky film co., ltd back in 2003. i’ve also learned people tend to either like or dislike this film – pretty much the way people like or dislike anything in this world, i guess. but i decided to give it a try, so i checked in at ebay.
then, after a little rattling around in there, i checked out from ebay, having just bought ten 120-rolls of 100asa black and white film and another ten 135-rolls, that literally cost me nothing. i can’t wait to try out this exotic new film.

“curves and lines” by 2493™ from flickr

you can read a small discussion on lucky’s b/w films here, and then you can check out a lucky film photography group or two on flickr.

stay tuned for lucky pictures!

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top : backseat polaroid shot from near the finnish border in finnmark.
bottom : wysiwyg, really.

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for those of you who haven’t yet had the pleasure: this is elliot erwitt. this guy is the perfect photographer. it seems he’ll never leave or enter anywhere without a camera in hand. erwitt is the reason i bring my camera(s) around at all times. i like his sense of timing (master of the “decisive moment“), his sense of humor, what he sees and what he’s looking for (or what i think he’s looking for), and the slightly surreal character of most of his work. in my opinion, elliot erwitt is street photography. the picture above is a perfect example of the wit and excellence of erwitt’s photographs.

when i first stumbled across mr. erwitt, in an article in a pretentious photo magazine, two things happened simultaneously:

one; it dawned on me that the sort of photography i was born to do was called ‘street photography’, and
two; because of erwitt’s genius i felt very small and insignificant and i just wanted to put all my cameras in a bag and donate them all to charity.

then i went ahead and read the words in the article too, and as i read the last part of the interview, i exhaled and i felt the comfort of a smile on my face:

reporter : if i asked you to choose one single image of yours that expresses everything you feel about life and the great conundrum of human existence – would you be able to do it?
erwitt : – you must be kidding! i am just a photographer and not jesus christ!

take a peek at the photographer pages on magnum photos’ websites if you want.

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top: beer-bench near latter, finnmark – kodak 400 tmy

middle: another chair photo, oslo – ilford xp2 super

bottom: benedicte doing her infamous cross-eye pose – ilford xp2 super

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taken in july. we had indecently long lunches. the old man didn’t seem to mind, though.

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1, 2, 3 : polaroiding in the botanical gardens, grønland, oslo.
4 : van parked by the old ringnes brewery

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so I went ahead and finally got myself a ‘professional’ medium format camera. i’ve been wanting one of those since i first saw the results from my trusty old holga about a year ago or so – the size of the negatives, the detail, the depth of the images, the format itself. i grew addicted.

now, to the camera in question.

the bronica etr-si is a 4.5 x 6 ” medium format camera. i got it (unbelievably cheap) from a professional photographer that has gone 100% digital (a decision i fully respect and understand), and inside the large, retro green bag he handed me i found two 120 film backs, a waist-level finder, the ae-II prism finder, a speed grip motor winder, two focusing screens (split-image and grid lines), a green filter (…) and two lenses – a 50mm 2.8 and a 100mm 4.0 macro.

i love this camera. the glass is perfect, the finders work like a dream, everything is in mint condition except a few scratches from regular use, and the results look brilliant (considering I’m still just a dedicated amateur photographer…)

i think (i think), that this is the last camera i’ll buy for some time. i’m very happy with all the stuff i’ve got right now, and I have to admit i only use 3 or 4 of my cameras on a regular base. i can’t help checking the markets around town when i’m there, but i no longer feel the urge to buy anything …
other than … the polaroid sx-70, if I were to stumble upon it somewhere!

photos coming soon! see you around.

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