A Plain View is a new-ish body of large format photography from skateboarder cum actor cum photographer Jason Lee, shot over 3 months (25 days of shooting) on a 5000 mile tour of Texas. If information in Will Gillham’s Afterword, “On the other side of everywhere else,” is correct (and I have no reason to …
Author Archives: James Cockroft
Jacob Aue Sobol – ‘With And Without You’
With And Without You is a retrospective/best of book of photographs by Jacob Aue Sobol, featuring selections from four published projects—Sabine, The Gomez Brito Family, I, Tokyo, By the River of Kings, and Arrivals and Departures—and three unpublished (at time of publication) projects—Home, America, and Road of Bones. If you can’t find (or afford) the published projects, and want to see …
Vacation, Shmaycation… but at least it was foggy for part of the drive home.
Once the heat of the Texas summer finally broke, I needed a break. I felt a little bit stressed and really rather depressed, and I made plans to drive up to visit Mom in Northwest Arkansas, rest some, sit on the deck and look out at the trees, the valley, the picturesque little farm down …
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Mary Ellen Mark – ‘on the Portrait and the Moment’
Mary Ellen Mark on the Portrait and the Moment is the most recent (last?) volume in Aperture’s Photography Workshop Series, and was published in 2015, shortly before Mark’s death. As with other volumes in the series, it’s full of wisdom, acquired through decades of professional photographic practice, and for under $30, probably about as close as I’m …
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Larry Fink – ‘on Composition and Improvisation’
Larry Fink on Composition and Improviation is the second (I think) volume in Aperture’s Photography Workshop Series,* the second one I acquired, and didn’t initially find much it in to apply to my own practice. But after spending a few months with it, I find some of his ways of looking keep popping into my head …
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of books, ice cream, and calculus
I took a trip to Arkansas a couple of weeks ago, ostensibly as a vacation (though my employer had better ideas), and while there, something interesting happened…
Stephen Shore – ‘Stereographs: New York, 1974’
In 1974, Stephen Shore, always ready to explore new photographic tools and techniques, acquired a Stereo Realist camera and began exploring “the puzzle of how to most effectively translate the real world into a successful “3-D” image given the particulars of the technology. ‘I was interested in seeking out situations in which the camera was doing …
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