Category: overnight notes

Hollis Frampton

Posted on Posted in A Symbol Life, book shelf, on photographers, overnight notes

Hollis William Frampton, Jr. (March 11, 1936 – March 30, 1984) Frampton died of cancer on March 30, 1984, a few weeks after his 48th birthday. I’ve missed him for over 38 years.

To begin your Frampton quest, get the October Files book. It is about him more than by him. Hollis in his voice if represented in “On The Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters” — going deeper into the media world with ever more Frampton, read “Buffalo Heads.”

an October Files Book.

a.co/0PTJVZL

  • A Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrative
  • Edward Muybridge: Fragments of a Tesseract
  • Film in the House of the Word
  • Incisions in History/Segments of Eternity
  • For a Metahistory of Film:Commonplace notes and Hypothesis
  • Notes on Composing in Film
  • Meditations Around Paul Strand
  • Impromptus on Edward Weston
  • The Withering Away of the State of the Art
  • A Stipulation of Terms from Maternal Hopi
  • Digressions on the Photographic Agony
  • A Lecture

Circles of Confusion: Film, Photography, Video: Texts, 1968–1980 (1983)

  • Goldensohn, Barry (1985), Memoir of Hollis Frampton, in Michelson, Annette, (ed.) Hollis Frampton: A Special Issue October, 32 MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts (pp. 7–16)
  • Jenkins, Bruce & Krane,Susan (1984), Hollis Frampton: Recollections-Recreations (p. 120) The MIT Press, Cambridge MA, ISBN 0-262-10030-4
  • Michelson, Annette, ed. (1985) Hollis Frampton: A Special Issue October, 32 MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusett

Hollis was of the time and mind when photography and film where becoming media. He along with the Buffalo Heads were preamble to Pictures Generation.

‘photographers are themselves, in a limited way, sensitive to light. it is their responsibility to extend the range and power of their sensibilities. ‘ hollis frampton

Saving Photography

Posted on Posted in overnight notes, the fora

Their first impulse is to denounce as not possible, not worth doing. by killing the young, they Stop them from taking their place. They lost their way so long ago, they don’t know where the path is.

They are stagnate. Small ponds do that.

/– / NEW ENLARGER — ART OF FOTO.. LFF. Heiland. https://heilandelectronic.de/enlarger

Sep, 2016.. A new 20×24 enlarger project announced — 2 years later it was delivered even though the forum experts offered this:

–“Without a glass carrier ? How do you expect to achieve any focus accuracy worthy of negatives this big in the first place? Same goes for wide-angle enlarging lenses. Other than the LED light source itself, why try to re-invent the wheel? Big horizontal process cameras could easily be retrofitted for this kind of application.

I once threw out something like that, superbly made, just to cannibalize the suite of Apo Nikkor lenses.” AND “Anything autofocus reminds me of power windows on cars …. sooner or later you’ll wish there was still a traditional hand-crank. And metal changes dimensionally, so fine tuning the focus would be essential, which they have allegedly provided.”

[ you can’t because I couldn’t. — if you can, then I won’t be as important to my imaginary friends as I want to be]

/–/ intrepid, camera [2014 ,LFF 11-Aug-2014, 13:59 ], enlarger]] https://intrepidcamera.co.uk

On one forum accepting to roll film the announcement is greeted with:

Counting the travelwide, ferrania, new55, P6 petzval, CL81, plus a few Lomography lenses and probably a lot that I don’t know about, that’s a lot of combined love for Film around the place, makes me all warm and fuzzy…

However, for those Large Format Folks came offers of help:

“the body seems rather deep.

My thoughts also. I don’t see any reason why the back part can’t be half as deep as it is.

Look at current designs, old designs, prototype over and over. It really does seem more like an early prototype than an actually useful camera. Goodluck nonetheless.

AND the best after months of comments:

“I do hope all the nay saying is not putting you off. Most of the blather about movements is posturing anyway. Not many folk use them even when they have an abundance of them. Your pricing is attractive. The camera looks good enough to use. You might want to work on the knobs a bit to make them look less crude. Apart from that, if it is quick to set up in the field and doesn’t weigh a lot it will be a fine outdoors camera. Make sure the materials can withstand the rain…”

/–/ cinestill  2013 first chatter on photrio ]] https://cinestillfilm.com

  • “All they’re doing is removing the remjet. I can do that myself.
  • Too expensive. Where can you process it
  • The colors won’t last. Hues will be wrong. Maybe okay for the ‘lomo’ crowd.

Of course cinestill is going strong — now providing 120 film, with 4×5 color negative expected to be coated in November. They are delivering enough product that Kodak 38 is surviving.

All of these companies are making product, even though the major forumatti of film didn’t think the products worth their interest. Probably partially explains why they, even with their years of ability, couldn’t develop the products they love to discount.

they start with a NO because they’re certain they KNOW more than you.

If at first they don’t succeed… they don’t want you to either. They don’t want to do it, and don’t like those who do, even tho too cowardly to say those words. instead, they say: but you can play [like permission to children]. or, ‘to each his own. no accounting for tastes [bad tastes]’ —

They never had a vision of the future so now they must cling to a fantasy past.

bookshelf: Critical Notes

Posted on Posted in A Symbol Life, book shelf, overnight notes

books I’ve taken from the shelf many times. Fewer times these days, this century. We’ve much more to read; work of equal depth as these early ones — these are things to read so that you’ve a foundation to react to this century’s writings.

They fear that writing, thinking will clarify their work, making it less creative. That they are also the ones who talk for years about techniques they have never done; they have a bucket list that could fill a pool. Hating art school goes along– too expensive; I already know how to use a camera.

By Non-photographers… does that make them useless, irrelevant — wrong?

  • Camera Lucida / Roland Barthes ::{1980] the “spectrum” He moves from the objective to the subjective. he book develops the twin concepts of studium and punctum: studium denoting the cultural, linguistic, and political interpretation of a photograph, punctum denoting the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within it.
  • On Photography / Susan Sontag. essays that appeared in the New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977. [1977] establish within people a “chronic voyeuristic relation to the world.” 1998 appraisal of the work, Michael Starenko, wrote in Afterimage that “On Photography has become so deeply absorbed into this discourse that Sontag’s claims about photography, as well as her mode of argument, have become part of the rhetorical ‘tool kit’ that photography theorists and critics carry around in their heads.”

By photographers.. are these more useful. Has writing ruined their photography. Why didn’t they just “let their photographs do the talking”

Minor White … reviewing
  • Photographers on Photography, Nathan Lyons,[Abbott, Adams, Bruguiere, Bullock, Callahan, Coburn, Demachy, Emerson, Frank, Lange, Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Robinson, Siegel, siskind, Henry Smith, Eugene Smith, Steichen, Stieglitz, Strand, Weston, White]
  • Circles of Confusion, Hollis Frampton. 1983
  • The Photographer’s Eye, John Szarkowski,1966. The Thing Itself, The Detail, The Frame, Time, and Vantage Point
    “This book is an investigation of what photographs look like, and of why they look that way. It is concerned with photographic style and with photographic tradition: with the sense of possibilities that a photographer today takes to his work.”
  • Looking at The Photographs / John Szarkowski, 1973. 100 Pictures from the Collection. [features Linda C, I was her first TA at SFAI. thanks Margery]

Words can’t take away from a worthwhile image anymore than they can bolster a worthless one. Fearing words is a crutch of someone unable to think. It is certainly not a requirement that a visualist also be an author, or philosopher. It is just unlikely that they are also unable to engage the history without using engaging their mind.

… an endless topic..