First, Get Good Advice

Posted on Posted in art school, The Gallery, visual mindTagged , ,

Ask a guide who knows how to get where you are going. Easy enough. How do you know where you want to go? Compare and contrast destinations. These are two people providing answers to the same question. One person, Martin Parr is an established photographer known primarily to street photographers. The other, Marina Abromavitch was a major founder of a manner and means of expression. She is a creative with influence.

Parr at SCAD

Martin Parr is talking to students at SCAD, a Georgia art-school founded in 1978.

Marina Abromavitch: advice to the young

Marina will make a piece of work; give you an exercise. It make make you uncomfortable. If it doesn’t, did it work?

Both of these people are talking to the young artist, not that person who gave up before getting thru their teens. Art has a way of being confused, as well as confusing.

Art is more difficult than knowing how to do something. It is not limited to doing something well, or important, or grand. It is a worldmaker, not a describer.

Learn enough in your twenties so you have enough time to have more than a career.

Shipping Film

Posted on Posted in film, Getting StuffTagged , ,

Heat hurts film. Shipments to the studio come from one of the salt coasts. Temperatures inside the delivery boxes approaches 130F.

My last film order of the summer has arrived. I hope these additional boxes will get me till September, when the shipping heat is much lower.

Notice the expiration dates of the Kodak film. Portra 160 was boxed a month before the Ektar 100. Expiration dates on these boxes is in 2021. These aren’t short date film, yet those life spans seem shorter than in the old days.

That Ilford Ortho Plus is used as a lab film, mainly for masks and as inter-positives. Occasionally, we use Ortho+ as film in a pinhole camera; makes for easier ‘develop by inspection.’ When I process the pinhole negatives, I use 2 developer strengths and a water-bath to control image look.