Category Archives: Podcast Entry

Audio Podcast Entries

Camera Position 17 : The Instant and the Machine

The idea of photography that depends on the exact moment of exposure for success didn’t originate with Cartier-Bresson, but he certainly made the most of that perfect instant. Bresson’s idea of “the decisive moment” is examined this week, along with the idea of how photographers always have to grapple with the intersection between idea and their machinery.

Cartier-Bresson - Heyeres, 1932

Camera Position 16 : The Game Of Inches

Sometimes, photography is the proverbial “game of inches.” I made several pictures of this “barca” (boat) on a canal in Venice. I had initially been interested in the boat’s shadow and the intersection of the shadow of the boat and the shadow of the building and the way the boat’s bow interacted with the wall behind. That was working well, but it wasn’t until I saw the way that the reflection of the sky from the adjacent canal created a shift in the way space was rendered that I felt that I had a real photograph.

Barca, Venezia, 2003

Barca, Venezia, 2003 (reflection)

Camera Position 15 : Moving Camera Position & Moving Your Boundaries

I’ve moved my Camera Position! I’ve abandoned Apple’s “easy but limited” iWeb software and moved over to a WordPress blog. Hopefully, the majority of listeners have made the switch with no problems. There is a new RSS subscription feed (see first post at the top of the page to see the new information). If you’re subscribed to the podcast through iTunes, you should have been directed to the new feed automatically, but if not, you’ll need to resubscribe.

The biggest advantage to the new web presence is the ability to have readers/listeners leave comments, which I hope some of you will do.

For this podcast episode, I want to talk briefly about going outside of your boundaries as a photographer. All photographers are more comfortable with some subjects than with others, but sometimes trying something new opens the door to some really interesting new photographic experiences. This image of Sr. Mazzetti is a case in point. I’ve long made photographs that purposefully eliminated people from the scene in an effort to create a sense of timelessness in my images. My interest has been in the way that centuries of hands have manipulated the landscape and structures of Italy. This past year, I embarked new series of images of people, and have begun to draw a parallel between the people whose lives were devoted to sculpting the land, buildings and objects that surrounded them, and the people who do that same work today. Sr. Mazzetti is a Rameria, or a coppersmith, and this photograph was made in his Bottega del Rame.

Sr. Mazzetti, Ramiera, Montepulciano, 2005

Camera Position 14 : Strand’s “Family” Revisited

In Camera Position #8, we looked at Paul Strand’s “The Family, Luzzara, Italy, 1953”. Listener Don Bricker wrote in to note that there are, in fact, two different images of this photograph. The idea that Strand “directed” this image by changing the content in an important way should be considered when we think about how we see the photograph.

“The Family” Luzzara, Italy, 1953
Photographs by Paul Strand

Camera Position 13 : Time and the Subject

Photographers sometimes have a hard time separating their own emotional response they have to a subject from the image that they make of that subject. It’s up to us as imagemakers not only to respond to the subject and the way we feel about it, but also to remember that our viewers can only rely on the pure visual authority of the image to understand our story. We always have to keep in mind that while we may have responded to the subject in one way, our viewers can only respond in their own way.

Roma, 1990
Photograph by Jeff Curto