Issue 115 | October 7 - 21, 2022

Picturing Place

“What we hope for from the artist is help in discovering the significance of a place. In this sense we would choose in most respects for thirty minutes with Edward Hopper’s painting Sunday Morning to thirty minutes on the street that was his subject; with Hopper’s vision we see more.” 

-Robert Adams

I just got back from my first real trip in a long time. It was an exciting adventure from start to finish. From the butterflies I felt packing my camera gear before I left, to getting on a plane for the first time since the pandemic started, to touching down in a new place, to having multiple peak experiences during my travels around Colorado and Utah, and finally to being welcomed back to NYC by a genuinely insane taxi ride home from JFK with a driver who was utterly unable to see in the rain and dark and almost got us both killed or injured multiple times. It was an incredible trip, but it’s also so good to be back in NYC, and I’m grateful to have made it home alive.

I’ve been to Colorado and Utah before - My father was a geologist who worked in these areas, and as a family we’d travel out to his old stomping grounds for summer vacations in my childhood. I don’t know if it got too expensive, but those Western trips stopped when I became a teenager. I’ve made a couple trips back in the years since to visit a close friend who made a life out there, but It had been a long while since I returned, more than a decade. I took photos the last time I was there, but only as an enthusiastic amateur - I hadn’t yet become the photographer I am now, with my more demanding ambitions and aspirations about picture making.

Although some places were familiar, most of this trip was to new places and new hikes - The Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs, Colorado National Monument outside Grand Junction, the high peaks surrounding Crested Butte, Colorado, camping on Cedar Mesa in Utah, and a hike through the hoodoos of Fisher Towers in Moab, Utah.

It’s an astonishingly beautiful landscape, and I wanted to make pictures that celebrated the beauty of the place, but I also wanted to try and make something new - pictures or sequences of photos I hadn’t seen before of these places. 

I also wanted to explore a nascent idea I had about making pictures of the geology of this landscape - something that might connect me to my father and the geology work he did in the area. 

This part of the world is almost all rocks and all kinds of rocks. You see and feel fragmented rocks, giant boulders, pebbles, slick rocks, sandy rocks, rocks that bounce your heavy car up and down like a plaything, billion-year-old rocks, million-year-old rocks, gentle rocks that support small desert plants, rock pools, worn down rocks, water-chiseled canyon rocks, massive rock walls and rock faces, mountains of solid rock, craggy fraggy draggy rocks, rocks splashed with colorful lichens, layer cake sedimentary rocks, dripped sand castle rocks, rocks that sparkle like the galaxies above, and so many more rocks.

And amidst all these rocks, you’re constantly confronted with scenes of staggering and monumental beauty. One of the primary challenges in photographing this place was just trying to convey these tremendous geological forms’ scale and living presence. 

It’s an ancient landscape, and it’s a landscape that is very directly connected to the indigenous people who lived on the land far before Europeans set out to explore this land in the 1500s, people that still live there today. The spirits of the Ancestral Puebloans in Utah felt particularly present as we camped out on their mesa and hiked through canyons they once built cliff-dwelling homes in - homes that are startingly well-preserved a thousand years later. Of course, the descendants of these people are very much alive and well now too, a vital and vibrant part of the contemporary landscape of the West.

Alongside this profound land, and underneath the vivid stars and luminous clouds of the Milky Way, which sparkled as I never saw before, there’s also the slowly unfolding ecological and environmental disaster of contemporary American life spreading inexorably throughout the landscape. Ugly houses and developments blighting otherwise pristine views, ‘Trump won’ MAGA billboards, endless strip malls, enormous homes built in ski towns like Crested Butte that will only be occupied by their very wealthy owners a few months each year, and the ubiquitous ‘Don’s Johns’ that sit on recently purchased plots of land, a sign of the construction to come, and foundations soon to be poured. 

Photographer Robert Adams documented this strip-mallification and housing development construction across Denver’s front range starting in 1968, and it was interesting to see on this trip how that process never stopped. Adams could work on a similar project today, showing just how far the juggernaut of capitalism and population growth had infringed onto the landscape since his early images. “Show affection for the world, but don’t lie about it.” Robert Adams said. It’s hard to show affection for some manmade intrusions that blight this beautiful land.

The friend I was visiting lives in a gentrifying ski town whose wealth and density increased sharply during the pandemic as rich people fled cities for mountain retreats like his. It’s a town entirely surrounded by supreme beauty, and yet I found it fascinating how my friend’s opinions of the place were so divided - half the time, he would enjoy the beauty with me. Yet, an almost equal amount of time was spent pointing out and decrying the changes and wealthy gentrification of the mountain town he’d lived in since the early 2000s (a place his partner had lived since the late 1980s). My friend’s job is running a conservation land trust. Throughout a lengthy career in this work, he’s preserved thousands of acres of land across Colorado, an accomplishment that hopefully tempers some of the angst and sadness he feels at all the places he and his organization weren’t able to preserve, all the areas still being despoiled by man’s encroachments.

I left Colorado with hundreds of photos, some on film, so I won’t see them for a while, and a lot of questions about how to make photos of places like this. Although my visit was for two weeks, it was also hectic, with hundreds of miles on the road and new places to explore almost every day. 

I think my best photos from what I’ve seen in a quick review are probably just scenes of Western natural beauty - towering storm clouds illuminated by a setting sun one evening in Utah, the shimmering and intense yellow autumn Aspen forests in the high peaks of Colorado, and the sublime enormous rock forms of Utah. 

I got some new ideas photographing this landscape, and I feel like some progress was made, but it all feels so developing and also very contingent on the immense support and help I got from my friends along the way. 

I wouldn’t have gotten any photos without the expert guidance and advice of my local friend, who took my other pal and me on all the most adventurous and exciting parts of our journey. I’m unsure if I’ll ever have the skills or experience to explore the most interesting parts of these difficult and sometimes dangerous landscapes on my own, the way I’m able to explore NYC neighborhoods on my own.

He and the other friend I traveled with were also soooo gracious and patient with my frequent picture-making stops on the trail (and my many pauses to catch my breath - 11,500 feet really tests your lungs!) I’m so blessed and lucky that I had them as companions on this Western adventure.

I really want to investigate this land further. I’m eager to review my photos in more detail, and I think I did alright for one trip. But I suspect if your goal is describing a place, you must immerse yourself in many more than one visit. I have to go back soon. It can’t be another several years until my next trip. That’s the only way. 

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Class Announcement:

Starting Saturday, October 29, I'll be teaching a five-session online class called 'Questionable Pictures' that will explore the written and unwritten rules shaping the photography we create. Inspired by the book Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph (Jason Fulford, Aperture, 2021), we'll explore different ideas around aesthetic and style conventions and subject matter (what can we make pictures of and what shouldn't we make pictures of? Who comes up with all these rules anyway, and how can we subvert them?) By the end, we'll be a class full of rebels, celebrating all the rules we broke along the way.

Learn More / Signup: [here]

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Photo at top of post - Fisher Towers, Utah 2022 by James Prochnik

Issue 114 | Sept 23 - Oct 7, 2022

Are our pictures any good?

I had hardly begun to read

I asked how can you ever be sure

that what you write is really

any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure

you die without knowing

whether anything you wrote was any good

if you have to be sure don't write

From the poem Berryman, W. S. Merwin

It's not just writers, of course. The question haunts all artists, photographers included. How can you be sure what you're doing is any good?

What if you've been practicing photography for years now? What if you've been practicing photography for decades? You've even published photo books. Are your photos any good? Were your photo projects and series worth making? Or are they just so many more images splashing across eyes & screens for seconds before quickly sinking back into the vast digital ocean of billions and billions of photos made and posted each year?

The desire to express ourselves in a visual medium can be an arduous struggle at times. We may achieve recognition for one thing or another - a specific project or photo, but if we are practicing visual artists or photographers, most of the time, we're in the dark about the value of our efforts.

The act of making a photo is so simple that anyone can do it. You look (or don't even look) through a viewfinder, click a button, light blinks onto a sensor or film, and you have a picture. Done. A new image has entered the world. Can an action so simple as clicking a button produce something with lasting meaning? Are the photos we're making with such an easy process any good?

It's not like learning piano or guitar, where you can pluck a note with zero skills, but you face a relatively long journey to gain the physical dexterity to play the notes and chords that make up a song. And discordant notes in music are relatively easy for most people to register. It's as if our minds have an innate sense of melody and musical structure. Maybe because the visual world is so complex and fluid, it's not nearly so clear to us what a dissonant photograph is.

It may be easy to click a shutter, but it is hard to make a good picture. My path toward improvement and progress in my photography practice has been long and slow. Interestingly though, my realization of the level I was at as a photographer was often one step ahead of where I was, no matter where I was. When I started as a photographer, I made pictures of things like flowers, buildings, street art, etc., but when I was making these images, I always felt they were pretty good! My flower photos seemed as colorful and sharp as the flower photos I'd see other, more recognized, photographers make. Of course, now I look back at those images, and with few exceptions, they look to me now like what they actually were - amateur snapshots of flowers in a garden, random photos of skyscrapers, or graffiti.

As I improved over time, I gained new skills. I'd learn color correction, composition, a better sense of light, or how to make pictures of a more dynamic subject matter like people. As I became proficient in each new skill, my sense of confidence would once again exceed my actual abilities, a deception from my ego that I now view as a kindness. Without this inflated sense of my abilities, I might not have kept trying to make good pictures.

I've been doing this long enough now that I can finally look back at old work without a twinge of self-consciousness, but now, as I've grown better and become more committed to the pursuit of genuine artistic expression in the medium, I'm less sure than ever if any of it's any good.  

Posting our work on social media can give you a general sense of whether or not people connect with work, but looking at pictures on the phone is far from ideal, and the algorithms that control when and how our images are seen often work at cross purposes to our intentions. For reasons like these and many more, depending on feedback from social media seems like a terrible mistake. (Unless your post receives universal acclaim, in which case it's clearly the most accurate metric invented). A classic fail of social media feedback is that things like selfies or sunsets often receive far more positive feedback than our earnest artistic expression. 

Friends and family can give you a general sense if something's good, but… they're our friends and family, so how much can you trust that? 

Are our pictures any good? W.S. Merwin is correct - you're in the wrong game if that question has to be answered. In the end, I think most photographers will have to be satisfied that occasionally the darkness will be pushed back by the light they've collected in one of their images. If we want to be artists, what matters is to keep working. Keep plumbing the depths of our soul. Keep looking. Keep describing the world we see with our eyes and hearts. Keep making photos. Our role is like fireflies on a summer night, providing brief flashes of delight to anyone walking through our fields. I think that's enough. 

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Class Announcement:

Starting Saturday, October 29, I'll be teaching a five-session online class called 'Questionable Pictures' that will explore the written and unwritten rules shaping the photography we create. Inspired by the book Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph (Jason Fulford, Aperture, 2021), we'll explore different ideas around aesthetic and style conventions and subject matter (what can we make pictures of and what shouldn't we make pictures of? Who comes up with all these rules anyway, and how can we subvert them?) By the end, we'll be a class full of rebels, celebrating all the rules we broke along the way.

Learn More / Signup: [here]

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Issue 113 | Sept 9 - Sept 23, 2022

Inflection Point

“I am not ready for anything to happen.” -Sylvia Plath

Hello dear NYC Photo Community, photo friends, and photographers! It's been a while.

I hope everyone had a light and love-filled summer of picture-making and conversating and warm golden moments. 

The photo world was active this summer as more waves of technological change rolled through. If summer 2021 was the beginning of NFT madness, summer 2022 was when AI image generation arrived on the scene with miraculous powers to generate powerful and vivid images from text prompts. I think how this technology impacts photography will be foundational, and I'm just beginning to wrap my head around the implications for photographers. 

The other significant tech change was Instagram following through with its promises to fully embrace and elevate video on the app in hopes of catching up to TikTok's lead in social videos. You couldn't look at Instagram this summer without being bombarded by endless and almost exclusively short video reels. It wasn't a great development for folks whose primary love is still photography. Nevertheless, some photographers found innovative ways to play the new game, making slideshows or interesting process videos. Others began looking for alternate social apps where still photography might reign supreme - Flickr, Vero, TryGlass, and others. Sadly I think Instagram lock-in is so strong that widespread adaption of a competitor app is unlikely to happen soon. 

There is at least one thing I still appreciate about Instagram - the way it became an easy-to-use photo sketchbook and simple archive for some of my work. 

There's no doubt that Instagram, for all its flaws, has been able to insinuate its way into my practice, and I thought it would be interesting to consider some of the ways the app has influenced the kinds of photos I share and the way I share them:

Size: Because images on a phone screen are so small, I found myself sharing photos that are mostly close-up or medium-distance shots. If the picture is too far from the subject, or the subject is too small in the frame, the images seem less likely to 'work' on Instagram.

Aspect Ratio: My DSLR makes photos that are 2x3, my phone makes images that are 3x4, and Instagram displays portrait-oriented images at a 4x5 aspect ratio, so I often end up cropping images to the 4x5 ratio. It's a better fit for Instagram, but I like the ratio. It has an appealing sturdiness. 

Filters/Edits: Even if I've edited a photo on my desktop computer, I might still further edit the photo on the phone before posting it to Instagram due to the size difference. For example, images that look acceptably dark on a big screen seem too dark when re-sized for the small screen.

DSLR v. Phone: Often, I'll find a subject and make pictures with my 'good' camera first, and if the subject or time allows, I'll make a few more very similar images with my phone. Usually, I'll post the phone versions of the image, just to get a quick sense of how others feel about the image, which makes sense for a phone app.

I'm fascinated by how all these minor digital tweaks and compromises create a series of variations and partial duplications to the point where I'm no longer sure which of the image variations I've made is the canonical version of the picture.

Whether your photo was initially produced on an 8x10 film camera or a phone, it becomes endlessly malleable, unreliable, and contingent as a digital file.

A photo of yours, like a photo of mine, might have a color version and a black and white version, it might have a filtered version, it might have a cropped version, it might have been edited differently depending on the file size, it might have a phone version and a DSLR version. It might even have a film version. 

To give it a musical metaphor, you could look at some or all of these variations on a singular image idea as being like demo versions/alternate takes of a song we know from the album release. Only with these endlessly multiplying digital copies and variations there is no album release. It's all demo versions, all alternate takes.

Multiple possibilities existed in the film days too. I remember making slides and finding a gadget I used to print those slides on Polaroid film, and then finding that I could transfer the emulsion from the Polaroid print of the slide onto watercolor paper - a Polaroid transfer. Each new transformation of the slide gave me a psychic charge. But each step in this sequence also represented an investment in money, materials, and time - experimentation was not cheap, and that cost imposed a thoughtfulness on the process.

Now endless variations and alternate takes can be freely and instantly conjured with the tap of a phone screen. One response to this fact of modern life might be, "So what? We've all worked to one degree or another like this for years; it's just how things are now. Who cares?"

True, and maybe I'm guilty of playing too much with these image editing apps and techniques, but lately, I've felt like all these endlessly proliferating images have become an unstable and disorienting hall of mirrors. There's no 'this is the one version of any picture because any picture can be endlessly modified. I've lost my way. I feel like my instinctive rejection of the endless variations on a single theme on sale in NFT collections was telling me something.

Perhaps as artists or aspiring artists, it's a good thing to reject the simplicity of the final image and embrace this complication. We can accept that all life is change and endless variation and abandon the illusion that any canonical version of any image we make will ever or could ever exist. 

But at the moment, as image editors become more powerful and AI image generation steps onto the scene with such boldness and certainty, it feels like we are at or fast approaching a real inflection point between the old world and the new digital worlds heading our ways.

Perhaps in this state of inevitable and foundational change, it's time to take one final stand for the world that used to be. Celebrate the physical one last time. Make prints of photos. Those prints will be the canonical versions of your photos. Make a photo book, and how the photos look in your book - that's how you want them to look. That is the final version. Quit tweaking. Our souls need to finish things. There will be plenty of time for change in the years ahead. There are no stopping things now. We're the last of the real world generation.

Have a great couple of weeks ahead, there’s a lot to do and make pictures of these days and I'll see you all again on September 23!

***Important Note: I'm teaching TWO upcoming online classes with StrudelmediaLive***Sunday, September 18, I'm teaching a one-session mini workshop on how to approach strangers to make street portraits. You'll leave the workshop with the tools and confidence to start making street portraits of your own, or if you are already making street portraits, some great new ideas for extending your practice.
Learn More / Signup: [here]

Starting Saturday, October 29, I'll be teaching a five-session online class called 'Questionable Pictures' that will explore the written and unwritten rules shaping the photography we create. Inspired by the book Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph (Jason Fulford, Aperture, 2021), we'll explore different ideas around aesthetic and style conventions and subject matter (what can we make pictures of and what shouldn't we make pictures of? Who comes up with all these rules anyway, and how can we subvert them?) By the end, we'll be a class full of rebels, celebrating all the rules we broke along the way.
Learn More / Signup: [here]

Issue 111 | April 29 - May 20, 2022

In Praise of Leaning Into Photo Cliches

“This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.”
-Marilynne Robinson

I got my first camera when I was 15, a hand-me-down 35mm Minolta film camera from my grandfather, and a couple of rolls of Kodacolor color negative film. I still have some prints from that first roll. There was a photo of my grandmother that I still treasure, but most of the pictures I made on that roll were of nature - a cluster of white lily-of-the-valley flowers surrounding the base of a White Pine, a photo that peered into a fog-cloaked forest, a single summer tree isolated against a blue sky on a hilltop ridge. 

The photos are in an old photo album I recently pulled off the shelf. The age of the pictures is notable - it's been decades since I made them, but the images themselves are unexceptional. There are no signs in the photos of any unique talent or that I might pursue photography much more seriously one day. But I do find the first indications that I had found a new way to engage with the world, especially the beauty of the natural world.

I've always been deeply affected by so the pleasures nature provides us. Obvious things like the annual reawakening of the earth that occurs each Spring, spectacular sunsets, dramatic clouds before or after storms, the intense colors of tulips, the graceful and harmonious arrangements of pistil and stamen at the centers of flowers, or the way a stand of bamboo bends so gracefully in a gust of wind. 

My appreciation of these phenomena is hardly unique. Everyone is moved to some degree by the sight of dramatic natural beauty. That's where the problem for photography comes into the picture. These feelings of awe or wonder touch us all. We respond to these deeply felt emotions by making thousands, millions, and billions of similar photos in a largely vain effort to hold onto some of the unique beauty of a particular moment on earth in our life.

Why make these images when we know so many others have made so many nearly identical to our own? One thing I think we're trying to do when we point a camera at a sunset is to give someone who wasn't with us something of what it feels like to be, for example, immersed in a purple rose gold sky whose glow is so pervasive it changes the color of everything on the ground as well.

That's part of it, but I think it misses my primary motivation. For many years, especially around late Spring and early summer, the second I could leave my busy, deadline-driven job in the city, I'd race to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. I'd wander around with my camera entranced by a giant pink dogwood that blossomed in one section of the garden or the carpet of bluebells unfolding in another. The resulting pictures? Pretty, but nothing close to the experience of being there. I didn't expect too much from the photos, and the images reflected that. But the experience of simply being there delivered rewards beyond compare. Walking around the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, pulled this way and that by the beauty, would almost instantly dissolve the job stress I'd felt so intensely minutes before. I'd quickly fall into a flow state, absorbed by a colorful detail or an arrangement of branches and flowers.

Photography in nature was transporting, lifting me away from my troubles, and pushing me through a portal into a new world of pure visual exploration. I was no longer living in anxious parts of my mind; I was completely present in my wandering experiences.

When I eventually left that stressful job and finally found more time to explore my interests more deeply, I returned to photography. I learned that the flow state experience wasn't limited to flowers and pretty things. I'd quickly fall into the same, rewarding state almost every time I explored the world with my camera, whether on busy city streets, at festivals, or even in quieter domestic moments around friends or loved ones.

When I finally made more time to learn more about the medium, I started to care more deeply about the images I was making. I did want to make pictures that would break through to other people. I trusted the flow state would come no matter what kind of pictures I made. 

My relationship with photography had shifted, and I found myself on a lifelong journey to learn more about photography as a craft and art form. I began to explore many different approaches to picture-making, still out in the world, but now mostly amidst people and our human-built world instead of nature.

When the Pandemic hit back in March of 2020, just as Spring was beginning in New York, I could no longer make pictures on busy city streets. Once again, I went back to nature, into my local Bay Ridge park, a narrow strip of ballfields and wooded paths between a busy residential neighborhood and a six-lane highway. 

Being an urban green space, it wasn't a lot of nature, but it was enough. Enough to calm doomscrolling pandemic anxiety and put me back into that flow state. This time, exploring nature with the benefit of years of experience, I found new ways to approach the subject that did bring real meaning to the images. Those photos eventually became a body of work, Far Apart, that was published and represented a new stage in my work.

Reflecting on my journey makes me appreciate how vital my early attraction to an often cliche subject matter was to my long-term growth as a photographer. It turned out that for me, the subject matter wasn't too important; the pictures didn't have to be so special, but finding the subject that would make me present in the world - that would put me in a flow state - was the first step I needed to take to reveal my more profound passion for the medium.

Trust your instincts. Trust your attractions. Trust the subjects that draw you in, whether they're weird, boring, cliche, or photographed a million times before. Try not to worry about what others think or get you likes on Instagram. The real task is to find the subjects that leave you lost in exploration and immersed in the flow. These experiences, more than the resulting pictures, are the fertile ground that can help grow a lifelong engagement with photography.

Due to some family issues, I’ve been spent this spring away from NYC down in Virginia. Despite the hard times that brought me down here, the beauty of the unfolding season on these familiar streets and woods of my childhood has been an extraordinary and true comfort as always. I plan to publish one more issue towards the end of May before taking a summer break. I’ll keep the Instagram account running as best as possible, so let me know if you have any photo events or talks you’d like me to share.

Be well, and I’ll see you soon.

James Prochnik | The NYC Photo Community | Issue 111 | April 9 - May 20

Want to help out Ukraine? Here are some suggestions from NPR. Photographer Nick Turpin suggested hiring these Ukrainian photo editors for postproduction services on your photos if you have the need.

Issue 110 | April 8 - April 22, 2022

This is my longest editor’s note yet -  if you want to skip past the journey that led me to write this essay, and go right to what I learned about photography and NFTs, click here.

Reflections on NFTs and Photography

I don’t know about other people, but when I wake up in the morning and put my shoes on, I think, Jesus Christ, now what? - Charles Bukowski

By nature, I’m nothing like Charles Bukowski. I try to be optimistic and generous in my outlook toward the world. I want to believe each new day offers us new opportunities and chances to begin again. I try to believe that however dark any current moment is or feels, in time light will return. 

This optimism is reflected in my photography practice. Every time I walk out the door, camera in hand, I am genuinely excited about the possibilities the world offers and hopeful about the pictures I might find. 

Over the past winter, though, I found something had changed and my innate optimism was waning. Maybe it was the complete craziness of the last six years from Trump to Q-Anon to the endless pandemic, but I began to find myself less amused by Bukowski's quote, and more nodding along in silent agreement, like, Boy oh boy, did that guy get it right. 

The endless lies, bad news, weird cult-like behavior, and divisive rhetoric of our era had begun to grind me down. I wondered if the best way to manage one’s own sanity and ability to contribute positively in times of great uncertainty and danger like ours is to just walk away, and focus most of one’s energies on the things you really care about and know are important. A monastic approach to the chaos and disruptions of our time.

I can’t ignore or walk away from the dangerous right-wing politics that have taken hold in America and elsewhere - the stakes are too high, but I had hoped I could walk away from some of our era’s cultural and art world excesses and absurdities.

So last year when I read an odd story about a guy named ‘Beeple’ who sold a jpeg that consisted of 5000 daily drawings he made over 14 years as an ‘NFT’ for 69 million dollars I thought, “Hmmm…that seems really crazy, but oh well, lifestyles of the rich and famous, who cares?”

It turns out that a lot of people care when an artist most people had never heard of makes a 69 million dollar sale using an unfamiliar technology. And while NFTs had existed as a viable tech since 2014 when a proof of concept demonstration was presented at a hacker conference, it was Beeple’s March 2021 sale, seven years later, that was the cultural defining moment that had many people asking, ‘WTF is an NFT?’

It’s not an easy question to answer, and as I explored the question over several months, I’ve come to believe that the difficulty of answering that question is one of many problems with the technology.  You ought to be able to understand the basics and the benefits of new technology without the hours of research I put into it. 

But a year ago? When Beeple made the big sale? It was just another development I was happy to ignore. Vaccines had at long last arrived and I was just excited to safely re-engage with the real world, make photographs and interact in person with the photography community I’ve come to love.

It wasn’t until late fall 2021 when cooler weather and the Omicron wave of the pandemic hit NYC, and I once again started spending less time outside making photos and more time working indoors that I began to realize how quickly and deeply NFTs as a cultural and economic phenomenon had infiltrated the online photography community, and just from a vibe perspective, this new impossible-to-ignore presence mostly struck me as mostly…annoying. The trickle, then torrent of NFT hype gave me a strong Bukowskian, “Jesus Christ, now what?” feeling.

On Twitter, where I spend most of my online time, it felt like a cult had taken over a large cross-section of photographers. People who once had their real names as Twitter handles like @JaneEdwards now had @JaneEdwards.eth as their handle - eth being Ethereum, the cryptocurrency used in most NFT transactions. While making art and personal expression had once been the primary motivation for many of these photographers, it felt like for at least the time being, money, in the form of cryptocurrencies, had become their fundamental driver, so fundamental it had become part of their name and online identity. 

Another sign of NFT’s overnight success in online photo circles was the seemingly unending stream of tweets from photographers that went something along the lines of “GM people, so happy to announce I’m dropping my first NFT collection on @OpenSea Friday 🚀🌖” It sounded so painfully cringey and dumb to me, both the endlessly echoed ‘gm’ greetings as they promoted their own or their friends NFTs, and the idea of ‘dropping’ their ‘new collection’ as if NFTs had transformed these photographers into pop stars dropping their latest single.

But really, who did I think I was criticizing in-group language or slang? Over the years I’m sure I’ve amassed a large and annoying vocabulary of in-group ‘artspeak’ language that feels almost designed to intimidate or alienate art world outsiders. On the other hand, the language around NFTs often combined artspeak with the worst technobabble and techno hype into a uniquely unpleasant and alienating language stew. 

Still, I continued to ignore the NFT trend hoping it would pass. It wasn’t until I began seeing photographers I genuinely respected talking about ‘NFT photos’ and ‘NFT photography’ that I realized that A) Damn this crap isn’t going away and B) I had to figure out my negative feelings around this new phenomenon and understand what NFTs were about as opposed to reacting so instinctually.

Was ‘NFT photography’ really a thing?

"It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar."  -Anaïs Nin

Had the past years made me into someone whose insecurities about a rapidly changing world provoked an unjustified hostility towards an exciting new development? Maybe. After all, I was told, ‘respectable’ and ‘serious’ artists were doing ‘interesting things’ in the ‘NFT space’. 

It was time to dig in and find out if my feelings were emerging from common sense or just fear, uncertainty, and doubt.  What were these interesting things the artists were doing? All I saw any way I looked was an old-fashioned gold rush.

The first thing I learned is that exploring the world of NFTs really is a descent down a very deep rabbit hole, and there’s no easy way to grasp the ins and outs of this world without learning about bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, Web 3.0, smart contracts, digital scarcity, exchanges, wallets, gas, minting, platforms, decentralized finance, proof of work, proof of stake, DAOs and much more.

I think the complexity of the space is surprisingly one of its main attractions - to scammers who exploit the complexity to take advantage of people and to enthusiasts or even critics who enjoy learning about a big complicated new thing in the world with lots of nooks and crannies and weirdness and surprises and dangers. I imagine gamers find a familiar pleasure in mapping the territory and solving the puzzles of this new space. 

But fear not, I learned as much as I could about all that junk so you don’t have to. From here on, I just want to summarize some of what I learned about NFTs, the relationship between NFTs and photography, some flaws and problems with the technology, and some possible beneficial use cases I see for the tech now or in the future.  This world of NFTs is far larger than its relationship to photography, but the relationship between NFTs and photography is where I am going to try and hold focus. 

This stuff is complicated with many different people designing many different ways of doing things and I’m aware of some exceptions and contradictions to what I’m laying out.  However, I think it’s fair to say that my descriptions and definitions accurately describe the most common actions and transactions, and understandings of the space.

WHAT I LEARNED AND WHAT I THINK ABOUT IT

1. What are NFTs? NFTs are a name for unique digital files. NFT people think of these unique digital files as ‘digital objects.’ I think of them more as digital products, an arranged marriage of code and a digital file you create, like a jpeg. The code that makes your jpeg unique and can give your jpeg new properties is not literally attached to your jpeg. The NFT code has a link to metadata which in turn holds a link to your jpeg. The record of this union between the unique NFT code and your jpeg is registered to a blockchain.

2. What is a blockchain? It’s an append-only decentralized public database.  That means you can only add information to the database like you add a link to an existing chain. Everything that’s been written into the database already is there forever, immutable. Unchangeable. Permanent. There is no person or entity who could delete something from this database. This is by design. Since when have chains ever been a good idea? Restaurant chains? The worst food. Retail chains? Cheap and awful. Dogs on chains? Cruel. Humans on chains? Immeasurably cruel. Why would you want to put your artwork on chains? In my years in photography, I’ve made and proudly shared so many photographs I now find terrible or even problematic. I’m no Tyler Mitchell who seems to have made amazing photographs from the day he picked up a camera. I love the fact that as I’ve become a better photographer, and see more clearly what I wish to express with my work and what I don’t want to express, I can easily delete old photographs that no longer reflect my current vision.  I look forward to deleting this essay in shame at some future date. By the way, I have no tattoos.  I suppose if your body is covered with tattoos of the names of past romantic partners you might be more comfortable adding your work to an immutable public ledger. 

3. Jeez, what if someone steals my photography and mints it as an NFT? If it’s on an immutable database does the thief have possession and can make money off my artwork forever? Well, remember - the NFT is not your jpeg. Some people like to conflate the two as if they’re one thing, an ‘NFT Photo’ but they’re not.  The NFT code which contains links to your artwork is on the blockchain forever, but not the actual artwork, your jpeg. Your jpeg is hosted elsewhere else and can, in most cases, be removed or taken down from at least the most popular public-facing NFT marketplaces if someone were to steal it. I think it’s really important to keep this in mind.  An NFT is not a jpeg. A jpeg is not an NFT. If they were the same (and they actually could be a single unit if it wasn’t cost-prohibitive) many of the problems of NFTs would be even worse than they already are. 

4. You brought up tattoos. Can NFTs be unminted like tattoos can be removed by lasers? As a creator, you can mint an NFT that specifies that you hold the right to ‘burn’ it at some future date. But as a collector, would you buy something that the creator could destroy at some future date? Sure, People buy anything. I wonder how many photographers include these provisions in their smart contracts. There are positive cases too like your smart contract could say that you can burn the NFT at a future date, but you will replace the burnt NFT with a new and different one or even a physical object.  

5. What’s a smart contract? This is one of the real superpowers of an NFT. It’s a contract in code that is executed automatically every time your NFT is bought or sold (providing it’s bought and sold within a closed platform like OpenSea, or a set of platforms operating under similar rules) and it can contain an infinite variety of provisions. A lot of people are most excited by the idea of royalties. Meaning not only do you make cryptocurrency the first time your NFT is sold, but you get a percentage of crypto on all future sales on the NFTs as well.

6. Crypto? Yes, crypto - cryptocurrency. This is one of the big problems with NFTs. You don’t create or buy or sell NFTs with money like US dollars. All transactions are made in cryptocurrencies, most commonly Ethereum (eth). You have to convert your regular money into Ethereum. When people argue about the environmental costs of NFTs, this is what they’re talking about.  The environmental costs all stem from the use of cryptocurrencies. Are the existing environmental costs real? Alejandro Cartagena, one of NFT’s biggest promoters in the photo world, recently dismissed these concerns as “mean reporting” and “misinformation” generated by “creators of hate”. Just to be crystal clear on this issue: Alejandro Cartagena is wrong, and grossly self-interested in his dismissal and downplaying of these concerns. There are genuine and unacceptable environmental costs to NFTs in their most commonly transacted form (using Eth as the cryptocurrency foundation).  A few days ago, on April 4, 2022, the UN warned us in their latest report that earth was “firmly on track toward an unlivable world.” The current two most popular cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum are both pushing us down that track towards an unlivable world even faster.  That is indisputable and concerns about these environmental costs ought not to be trivialized. If you are creating an NFT-based project designed to help the environment using a proof-of-work-based cryptocurrency to fund or sell it, you are part of our current environmental catastrophe, not a part of a solution to reverse or pause it.

7. Well, that sucks.  Isn’t there a way to do this thing in a more environmentally sustainable way? Yes. There are existing crypto blockchains that are far better for the environment. Their main problem is they lack the popularity of Ethereum, and so one limits whatever chances one has to sell NFTs in these far smaller marketplaces. 

8. I heard Ethereum might get super environmentally friendly soon? Yes, that’s the hope and the plan.  These plans have been in the works for more than six years. Maybe it will now happen on schedule (in the next several months), maybe it won’t. I think people ought to reconsider minting, buying, or selling eth-based NFTs until Ethereum actually achieves its environmentally-friendly goals, or play around with NFTs on more environmentally friendly blockchains just to get the hang of this whole game until Ethereum achieves its goals. If NFTs are even close to the paradigm-shifting technology their promoters claim, we’re still in early days and you have plenty of time to get involved as an early adopter.

9. Any other problems or issues with the cryptocurrency foundation of NFTs beyond environmental harm? Many. Their potential to cause harm to our existing economy and financial structures (a stated goal of many backers of these currencies), their innate speculative nature (their value rises and falls much more often and dramatically than government-backed currencies), and their unique role in facilitating cybercrimes are some of the issues that get most talked about, but there are others.

10. Let’s get back to basics. I’m a photographer. I still don’t really get the point of NFTs Can you explain it better? For photographers, I think NFTs are (at least for now) mostly an exciting new way to sell their photographs. OpenSea, the dominant platform for buying and selling NFTs is a new marketplace and a new audience for your photos just as eBay was a new marketplace for collectibles when it was introduced or Etsy was a new marketplace for crafts. Because of the crypto foundation NFTs are built on, there is a new audience for your work, with cryptocurrency to spend, and few places to spend it. Some of those people love collecting NFTs linked to photographs. Many photographers who are ‘all in’ on this space also really enjoy and have benefited from the communities of creators and supporters they’ve found and joined. I think community, by itself, ought not to be seen as virtue enough to justify some of the harms and potential for harms that accompany NFTs.  Supporters of Q-Anon are often quoted as celebrating the community they’ve found with fellow believers of that batshit conspiracy theory. Same for anti-vaxxers. The value of any given community is not automatically neutral. But having a new marketplace to sell one’s work, and at least a chance at making some real old-fashioned money selling in these new marketplaces is an incredibly attractive proposition to artists and photographers struggling to eke out a living. To the degree this tech helps everyday photographers make money who have been unable to break into traditional markets for photography like galleries or magazines or commissions, I celebrate NFTs. Unfortunately, the photographers who are best positioned to make money in NFTs are photographers who have already been given the imprimatur and acceptance of the traditional art world, are already accepted by traditional gatekeepers for photography, or are getting into the NFT space with existing large social media followings. And some of the brand new platforms or NFT-based organizations that have been most successful are just going to be new and different gatekeepers. They’re still going to keep the vast majority of people, however talented, out. That’s how they will ensure value for those they let in. Of course, there will always be a class of photographers who may never have succeeded in the traditional photo world but will succeed on these new platforms by virtue of something in their style or subject matter that fits perfectly with this new tech world. Will that be you? Maybe. Whoever it is, I suspect this class will not be large or more inclusive than existing routes for success in pre-NFT photography.

11. So you don’t see NFTs as being a new tech or new medium for photography like digital cameras were when they were introduced? No. NFTs are not a new tech or new medium in photography. The value proposition of digital cameras for photography was clear the day they were introduced.  From that point on, you did not need to use expensive film or expensive film processing or work with the limitations of film (i.e. limited number of photos in a roll). Images would now be captured electronically and transmitted directly from cameras to computers where they could be processed digitally. Images were still being captured by cameras and lenses and light-sensitive materials, but the light-sensitive materials were electronic sensors, not film.  NFTs do not improve photography in any discernable way as far as I can tell. An NFT is code that helps you sell your jpeg.  It does not create your jpeg or materially affect your photo. To this day, I haven’t heard any NFT enthusiasts articulate a clear use case for NFTs to improve or materially change photography beyond NFT's proven ability to sell and obtain crypto value from your jpegs (which can help you make a living or create a new funding stream for your work - non-trivial benefits that will influence new photography that is created)

12. Won’t photographers develop new styles of images that are optimized for presentation and sale on NFT marketplace platforms? Yes, just as some photographers make photographs optimized to stand out and garner likes and comments on social media platforms like Instagram. I’m sure some photographers who want to sell their work on these new platforms will begin to optimize their photos for the platform, making their photos most like the photos that seem to sell the best to these new audiences. This does not make these sales platforms cameras. It just means NFTs and platforms for buying and selling NFTs are one of a myriad of contemporary influences on photography. I believe linking a photograph’s value so explicitly to its speculative value in cryptocurrencies will inevitably diminish its worth as an artistic expression of humanity.

13. There have to be some positive use cases beyond buying and selling that make the NFT space worthwhile to get into. It can’t be all about money. Serious artists are involved! Like Alec Soth and Gregory Halpern. Maybe someday. But for now, it’s all about money no matter what anyone tells you, and well-known artists, thanks to their existing success in the photo world, are well-positioned to earn a lot of money selling NFTs of their old pre-NFT work. If money or the possibility of making money was a non-existent incentive, I’m confident the photography community’s interest in NFTs would be close to non-existent. But anyway here’s a positive use case I found recently.  Let’s imagine you loved Gregory Halpern's pictures you saw excerpted from his photo book ZZYZX, but you couldn’t afford the book. If Halpern posted the photos on Instagram, they’d be tiny files that aren’t really useful to learn from. But since he’s minted NFTs attached to super high-resolution versions of many if not all of the jpegs from that book to OpenSea, you can look up the project, and you can go right now and right-click to download incredible high-resolution versions of the photographs directly to your computer to study. So there is an educational value you might be able to extract from some NFTs, a value you might not even find in a poorly printed book of the artist’s work. But as an artist, do you want to make super-high-resolution un-watermarked digital versions of your work freely available to everyone? When NFTs were first invented back in 2014, one of the main use cases suggested was to establish provenance for digital artworks. So if I mint an NFT of my photo, and the first version of the NFT is attached to my name, that NFT can now be bought and sold a million times and it will be easy to establish that this unique NFT can be linked back to me as a creator.  I do think that’s a valuable use case, but the world of photographers who would have faced questions of provenance as one of their pre-NFT problems has to be incredibly small. All, or almost all, problems NFTs claim to have solved for photography were already solved well enough by existing, if often ignored, systems like copyright or contract law around licensing images or public archives. Even things like future royalties. Even things like funding large photography projects. Even things like adding informative and dynamic metadata to online archives of photographs. One benefit of NFTs is that they remind us these old-fashioned means of creating value from your photographs are still possible in the real world and may even be more robust. (If you were an artist who made wholly digital artwork like computer-generated moving graphics, digital creations that never had a physical real-world counterpart, I think the use case for NFTs has always been much stronger).

14. What about the Metaverse? Isn’t that a natural home for NFTs, and an enormous new potential marketplace for NFTs of my photographs? Sure. When the metaverse becomes a widely available and widely accessible digital world, I think we’ll see a large variety of new use cases for digital artwork, including jpegs from photographers. I’ve been excited and enthusiastic about some of those developments for decades. These days, after years of seeing so much abuse and corruption and unforeseen consequences to social media I’m more apprehensive. So far the Web 3.0/metaverse rollout has not tempered my concerns, only increased them.

15. Are NFTs some horrible catastrophe for photography? No. In the big picture NFTs are still a small corner of the photo world, and their impact, for better or worse, is likely to remain small for some time. 
    

16. My head is exploding, can we give this a rest? Mine is too, yes, let’s give it a rest. If you’re hungry for more, Andy Day’s recent article in F-Stoppers offering six critiques of the tech is a concise and effective analysis of many of the things I haven’t had room to touch on, particularly in his points 4-6. If you’re on Twitter, Molly White’s @web3isgreat is an invaluable follow, as are @digiconomist and @Jacob Silverman.

Art is what you can get away with. - Andy Warhol 

WAIT HERE ARE SOME FINAL FINAL FINAL CONCLUSIONS

I see NFTs as a cheapening influence on photography, and another way technology and unfettered capitalism divide us from one another at a time when we need mutual understanding and empathy more than ever.

NFTs push photography further away from the ineffable qualities and humanistic foundation of the artistic impulse and chain it more thoroughly and immutably than ever before to the imperatives, influences, and corruptions of speculative money and commerce. The same hedge funds and private equity whose rapacious practices are negative forces in traditional finance and politics are shaping this space and driving much of the hype here as well.

The excitement that builds around new and seemingly easy ways to make money - when existing ways of making money are often so exhausting or dispiriting or insufficient  - is a seductive siren call that is incredibly hard to resist, particularly for those living in a state of economic uncertainty. I make no judgment on the vast majority of photographers who are or might be about to dive into this new marketplace. I offer no advice, only the encouragement that they continue learning about this space and stay safe. Scams abound.

I hope well-known and influential artists, organizations, and photo community thought leaders who have rushed uncritically into this space give their efforts a second thought. NFTs and its cryptocurrency foundations are a complicated new development and I think people who are influential in the photo world have a special responsibility to learn more about the existing harms and potential for harm that exist with the tech in its current form.

I encourage anyone who is instinctively critical or on the fence to learn more about NFTs. I do think NFTs or their hopefully improved digital descendants will be with us for a while and I’ve largely enjoyed the time I’ve spent learning about them (minus the hype).  It’s a fascinating and enormous world to explore, and its creators, enthusiasts, and true believers deserve credit for making it so interesting. I imagine I’ll have more to say another time.

But for now, at last, forget about NFTs, enjoy the spring, this is one of photography’s most glorious seasons to make pictures in NYC!  Can’t wait to see all your photos!

James Prochnik | The NYC Photo Community | Issue 110 | April 8 - April 22

Want to help out Ukraine? Here are some suggestions from NPR. Photographer Nick Turpin suggested hiring these Ukrainian photo editors for postproduction services on your photos if you have the need.

Issue 109 | March 25 - April 8, 2022

I’m In A Time Zone

On Sunday, March 13, at 2 am the US entered into Daylight Saving Time, and the sunset jumped from 6:00 pm the night before to a far more reasonable 7:01 pm Sunday evening.

What nobler cause could there be then to save daylight that precious resource vital to so many photographers! I welcome that one-hour loss of sleep! As someone who suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder, the day we finally enter Daylight Saving Time really feels like the beginning of happier days ahead. It’s also the unofficial ‘Opening Day’ of my outdoor picture-making season.

So I awoke Sunday morning, cheered by the time change, and started going around the apartment fixing the time on some of our old-fashioned non-internet connected clocks; the clock radio, the clock on the stove, the old-fashioned kitchen clock, the clock on my digital camera (which actually has a daylight saving setting but I’m never sure if I’ve activated it).

The clock radio in our bathroom is 11 minutes fast. Why is my bathroom in its own time zone? I believe this special bathroom time zone was established as a way of helping to ensure we wouldn’t be late for events or appointments outside the house. And after living in this special time zone for a while, I have to say, it works. Moving to the kitchen, I noticed that clock was six minutes behind. I’m not sure, but this time zone may have been established to help ensure food was not undercooked. Or it could represent the battery dying. How many time zones does my house have, anyway? As many as Russia? Did you know Russia has 11 time zones? (As if we needed more evidence of their imperial overreach).

In the contiguous United States, we have four time zones, and in 2016 I took a cross-country road trip back and forth through them all. My buddy and I drove a long, inverted arc from NYC south through New Orleans before heading north through Albuquerque and Denver, west to LA, and finally up to Seattle. On our five-week-long trip, getting to Seattle ended up taking close to four weeks. The trip back was fast, and I remember racing through the time zones as we headed back to New York. I remember having the strange realization that as we drove we’d ‘spring forward’ in time by literally springing forward through space, as opposed to time. I also remember the beauty of the glow from the setting sun illuminating endless vistas outside Bozeman, Montona; light that lasted well past 10 pm before finally extinguishing into darkness. In New York, even on the longest days, the light from the setting sun doesn’t linger much past 9 pm.

Later light in New York City has a specific resonance for me - it means that people who finish up work at 5 or 6 have an hour or two after work to hang out, unwind, and appreciate late day sunshine with their friends. Life on the street grows busier, and it’s generally accompanied by relaxed, good vibes. As someone who enjoys making candid photographs out in the world, these after-work summer hours are some of my favorite times to make photos.

Photographers make most of their work in very specific, mostly fleeting time zones of their own. For candid street photographers, a shutter speed of 1/400th of a second is often referenced as a starting point - a fast enough fraction of a second to freeze motion and get a sharp enough photo of a moment. Fine art/fashion photographer Paolo Roversi made a lot of work in the 1/4 of a second to 1 second time zones, using the resulting blurry exposures to evoke emotional responses of beauty and ephemerality.

Photographic time zones are not always so transitory. Edward Weston, made his famous photo of a green pepper in 1927 using a 4-6 hour exposure of the vegetable according to Weston’s grandson, Kim. Photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto suggests that fossils are like photographs made over multi-million year exposure times:

Fossil are the result of natural cataclysms. They are created when something vibrantly alive is instantaneously extinguished and entombed by an earthquake, landslide, subsea volcanic eruption, or meteor impact. The earth and ash heaped on top of the thing stamp out the impression of its shape like a carved seal; then, over the course of tens of hundreds of millions of years, that shape becomes embedded in sedimentary layers and turns to stone. When you split the strata, the layer on top is the negative image, while the fossilized life form appears as the positive image. [via]

Recently there was a viral article in The Cut about surviving the coming vibe shift. The idea is that in the culture, things change, and some ways of being in the cultural moment feel dated if they persist past one of these vibe shifts. It was a fun kind of meaningless article that wasn’t really saying much more than things that seem cool in one moment, and uncool the next. What I got out of the article was an acknowledgment that shifts between time zones are never as sharp as we imagine. There’s always plenty of people that keep the old vibe long after the new vibe hits. Both the good old days and the bad old days are very much a part of our current days.

In general, I love the amorphous boundaries of time zones that The Cut article seemed nervous about. I love that any day I walk the streets of NYC, I can see young people rocking 1980s looks, folks driving 1970s muscle cars, or enjoying cafe life in urban neighborhoods still crowded with 19th-century buildings. I’m very attracted to these time zone anomalies as a photographer and when I see evidence of past eras in our present moment, I always grab a picture. It feels like I’m catching time travelers.

It’s getting late, so in the hopes of surviving the vibe shift that occurred over the course of time it took me to write this note, I’ll say goodbye.

Thanks for reading and I hope you all find the time you need to make pictures in the weeks ahead!

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Publisher's note: From this issue forward, the newsletter will be published bi-weekly (once every two weeks) through May 27. Over the summer, we'll aim for shorter issues once a month and then return to full issues on a bi-weekly schedule in the fall.

A note about Instagram: Instagram recently added a couple of new ways to view your Instagram feed: Following and Favorites. Following shows a chronological feed of folks you follow, and Favorites (you can have 50) shows you a chronological feed of your favorites. (You'll see the standard algorithmic feed if you haven’t selected one of these options). If you follow us on Instagram and want to make sure you're seeing the photo talks and events we’re posting before they happen, consider adding @nycphotocommunity to your favorites list.

peace and love,

James Prochnik | The NYC Photo Community | Issue 109 | March 25 - April 8

Want to help out Ukraine? Here are some suggestions from NPR. Photographer Nick Turpin suggested hiring these Ukrainian photo editors for postproduction services on your photos if you have the need.

Issue 108 | March 18 - 25, 2022

On Capacious Photography

I don’t know, I must have heard it on a podcast or something, but recently I found the five-dollar word “capacious,” which is a fancy way of saying ‘roomy’ or ‘spacious’ echoing around my head like an earworm I can’t get rid of. In an effort to do something useful with this situation, I’ve been thinking about what a capacious photography might be.

When I first started getting more serious about photography, my strategy for making images was the opposite of capacious, it was reductive. I tried to minimize elements in my photographs in the hopes that a reductive approach would increase the clarity of the expression I was trying to achieve. If they were portraits, I tried to find the plainest, most empty walls to serve as a backdrop for the photos. If it was something funny or interesting I saw on the street, I’d put it in the center of the viewfinder and snap a picture so that the sides of the image hold the subject in the frame (I still have this problem). Other times I would make images with the shallowest depth of field my lens had to blur out the rich complicated world that my subject existed in. I wanted to shrink the world to achieve the big hope and dreams I had for my photography.

What I realized as I became more acquainted with photography that really moved me from the greats and my peers, I began to see that their photography was successful because of all the different ways their work would try to make the pictorial space bigger and more elastic and…capacious.

Instead of two-dimensional flat images, these photographers tried to depict a three-dimensional pictorial space by layering elements in the foreground, middle ground, and background of the image. Other photographers would crop their images so that, for example, an arm from someone outside of the picture frame would come, sans body, into the picture frame, or someone inside the frame would be looking, or pointing outside the frame. Tactics like these and others would remind me, as an image viewer, that there was a big world inside and beyond the four sides of the picture frame.

Some images would hold a visual mystery, or make me wonder what, exactly, was going on in the image. These images became more spacious because they really engaged my mind, and raised questions that couldn’t really be answered. By forcing this dilemma, they made my imagination almost a part of the image as I was being encouraged to speculate on what was happening, or imagine a story that could bring meaning to the images I was viewing.

When photos were put together, in series or photobooks, that’s where I really saw a world opening up. In photography series and projects, I began to see that one could really begin to describe a subject in a much fuller way by not only giving me the precise description of individual images but by showing me that images in sequence or juxtaposition produced something more - a sum greater than the parts. To me, a successful photo series or project or book has an almost literary quality in my mind, like reading a short story.

This week’s featured photographer, Sofie Vasquez, is a great example of that. She has done a spectacular job of opening up and expanding the world of indie wrestling she is exploring in her images. She gives us portraits of the protagonists. She shows us the wrestlers in action - all of the glamour, grit, and pain of a wrestling match. She shows us fans. She shows us the wrestlers in dressing rooms, or outside the venues. In this way, and through these photos we feel like we are a fly on the wall in their world, and our imagination is activated as we wonder and want to know more, so much more about the people who are working and hustling to succeed in this world.

There are a lot of forces and incentives in play that encourage us to see the people and world we encounter through a more reductive lens. The reality is that the world, and the people in it are always always always more complex and complicated than we will ever be able to grasp. Starting from that point and trying to make pictures that allow room for as much of that complexity as we can perceive seems like a good way to go. That’s a capacious goal for a capacious photography. And that’s what I’ll aim for in the warmer and brighter months ahead.

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you all next week.

peace and love,

James Prochnik | The NYC Photo Community | Issue 108 | March 18 - March 25

Want to help out Ukraine? Here are some suggestions from NPR.

Issue 107 | March 11 - 18, 2022

Two Years Ago Today

Two years ago today, March 11, 2020, I posted the following to the NYC Photo Community Instagram account:

I’m not only a passionate photographer, but I’m passionate about the idea that in-person community is one of the secrets to thriving in any creative endeavor, such as photography.  We need each other, and together we make each other better.  So it pains me to say this, but I believe the best way I can support this community through this Coronavirus situation is to suspend promoting photo gatherings and photo events for the time being.  I trust the health experts who say the smartest way to avoid a bad outcome for our country, and those most at risk from this virus, is to hold off on non-essential gatherings and travel until we have more information, and our health system gets more prepared for the contingencies it’s already facing….Hopefully, we’ll have a better handle on the situation soon, and I can resume full operations.

I had no idea what was coming and expected things would return to normal in a month or two at most.

I started the NYC Photo Community in September of 2019, only a few months before, specifically as a way to share and promote in-person photo events around the city. My idea was to intentionally avoid online community elements in favor of simply encouraging people to get out of the house and meet fellow photographers and photography enthusiasts at photo talks, exhibitions, and meet-ups around the city. 

But then the world changed and kept changing, one dramatic event after another. 

Covid-19 began its rapid spread across the country and around the world leading to lockdowns and massive disruption of work and schools and everyday life. George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis sparking worldwide Black Lives Matter protests and social action. Ruth Bader Ginsburg died allowing Donald Trump the opportunity to appoint a third supreme court justice. Biden defeated Donald Trump in the presidential election. Effective vaccines began rolling out across the country. Insurrectionists stormed the Capitol in an attempt to prevent Biden from taking power. Coronavirus variants spread across the country. Vaccine and mask protests spread across the country. The Taliban reclaimed power in Afghanistan following the chaotic US withdrawal from our longest war. Migrants fleeing a variety of threats continued to seek safe havens around the world. Cryptocurrencies become a trillion-dollar-plus unregulated market for speculation. Climate change continues to exacerbate floods, fires, and extreme weather events in localities around the world. 

And now here we are two years on, faced with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to annex its territory - a conflict the rest of the world can’t counter directly for fear of sparking a wider war or nuclear conflict.

It’s been a lot.

While we’ve all been directly impacted, the chaotic events of the last couple of years have been experienced in very different ways by different people depending on their circumstances. Healthcare and other essential workers found themselves on the front lines overnight with all of the danger, risk, and sacrifice that entailed whether they were a doctor or a cashier at a grocery store. Many people got sick, and many still struggle with long Covid symptoms. Millions of people lost loved ones. Some folks experienced tragedies or setbacks that would have been difficult any year but were particularly difficult in the midst of a pandemic.

The pain and reckoning and protests that followed George Floyd’s murder have rippled through our society in ways that will shape our country for decades.

I think about the classic movie Koyaanisqatsi from the early 1980s that explored the dramatic and consequential effects of man and technology on the natural environment. The title of the film ‘Koyaanisqatsi,’ is a Hopi word that translates as “Life out of balance.” If life was out of balance in the early 1980s, it feels like it’s going completely off the rails right now. 

Toni Morrison wrote an essay about working in difficult times when so much of the world felt broken,

“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.”

This editor’s note might read a little disjointed and all over the place because that’s an accurate reflection of how I feel almost every day these days, but Toni Morrison’s words hit the nail right on the head and perfectly express how I feel about the NYC Photo Community and what you all have meant to me during these past two chaotic years.

You and your work have been an enormous healing inspiration to me and so many others. In the beauty and creativity and vulnerability and pain and struggle you’ve shared in your photographs, you’ve helped to show us all that there is still so much that is so good in the world if you know where to look.

Thanks for being part of this wild ride, and I’ll see you all next week.

peace and love,

James Prochnik | The NYC Photo Community | Issue 107 | March 11 - March 18

Want to help out Ukraine? Here are some suggestions from NPR.

Issue 106 | March 4 - March 11, 2022

Is A Photograph Enough?

New York Magazine just published a big ‘what are they up to now?’ feature on Brandon Stanton, founder of Humans of New York, and now up to, as the subhead declares, being a one-man philanthropy machine. Brandon started Humans of New York (HONY) in 2010, and in the 12 years since it’s grown into a social media juggernaut with 30 million followers on Facebook and Instagram.

I became aware of Stanton sometime in 2013 and was impressed by the compelling and intimate stories of struggle and triumph Stanton shared from fellow New Yorkers and so in 2014, partly inspired by HONY, I started a 365 project with the goal of making and posting a street portrait every day for a year. This project was important in my development as a photographer because the commitment to make and share a photo every day turned out to be the key to transforming a longtime interest and love of photography into a practice. That practice ultimately became the passion photography is for me today.

One thing I tried and abandoned during that year was, like HONY, interviewing the people I photographed and collecting their stories along with the picture we made together. I didn’t abandon this practice because I was bad at it. In fact, I was surprised by how much people would tell me if I just asked. It was mostly that gaining such a quick intimacy with people with the intent of ultimately sharing these conversations in public felt like pushing a boundary I didn’t really want to push, even with permission. Worse, I began to realize that the compelling stories I collected were too often a crutch to prop up bad photos. 

In the New York magazine piece on Stanton, he describes his struggle to understand what he was doing with his photos and interviews:

“He had tried calling himself a journalist, but it never felt right. When he called himself a writer, the writers piled on. “ ‘No, you’re not a writer. This isn’t writing,’ ” Stanton said, imitating them. “ ‘This guy’s being celebrated as a photographer, but he’s not a good photographer.’ What do I tell my mom I am?”

I won’t speak to the writer part since most of the stories we associate with HONY are the words of people he meets, not his own, but I can speak to his discomfort with the label of a photographer. I think he can be a good photographer and if I looked back at all he’s done, I could find plenty of solid and skillful examples to prove the point, but at the same time, I don’t think that’s where his main interest lies, and that shows in his work.

Stanton is visually interested in people enough to photograph them, and he needed those photos to put faces to the words that would follow, but his finished product suggests that our surface appearance is mostly an uninteresting facade. The good stuff is hidden, and it’s found in the stories we carry inside, and the stories we tell about ourselves.

Ram Dass said, “When you know how to listen, everybody is the guru.” I think that’s the truth Stanton discovered for himself and his 30 million followers. His tremendous success is a testament to the label I’d tell Stanton to tell his mom - He’s a listener and a storyteller.

Somewhere along the way in my 365 project, I realized that photography was my main interest. Photographs were enough for me. I didn’t need or want the words. I wanted to learn how to make the kind of photographs that were compelling on their own, with no words, or minimal captions if at all. I wanted to learn how to make photographs that hold ambiguity and mystery. I wanted to learn how to make photographs that raise questions, not answer them. If I was making a portrait, I wanted to find a way to show how our inner stories have mapped themselves onto our outward appearances, and the different ways interiority can rise to the surface in our interactions with others. It’s a learning process I’ll spend my life exploring.

With a few exceptions, the audience for this kind of photography has a tiny fraction of the reach Stanton’s work does, and that’s ok too. One of the biggest reasons I became so enthralled and passionate about photography is that it offers everyone interested in it an expansive universe of different paths to travel, some more or less populated than others, some more or less popular than others.

I don’t think the kind of photography I’m most interested in is better or worse than photography that mix images with words and some of my favorite photography books, like Rosalind Fox Solomon’s Got To Go, combine the two in ways that perfectly complement each medium, and create something wholly unique in the process.

According to the New York magazine article, Brandon Stanton no longer lives in New York. He’s now based in Atlanta, GA, and as for that dilemma of what to label himself, he’s now leaning towards calling himself a “channel for blessings.” Maybe if you listen to enough gurus, you become one too?  I wonder if that happens if you see enough gurus too.

I’ll see you all you gurus next week.

May the brave people of Ukraine be protected from the darkness in their midst. Want to help out? Here are some suggestions from NPR.

peace and love

James Prochnik | The NYC Photo Community | Issue 106 | March 4 - March 11

Issue 105 | Feb 25 - Mar 4, 2022

"The Silence of the Photograph."

Before the pandemic, I made a series of photographs from the pedestrian walkway of the Manhattan Bridge, which carries four lanes of automobile traffic and four elevated subway tracks. My photos were of commuters inside the passing subway trains lost in thought. Most of the images from the series depict the quiet introspection of commuters heading home - but the actual experience of making the photographs was far different. The walkway of the Manhattan Bridge is one of the loudest places I’ve ever made photographs, and one of the few places I felt the need to put on some musician-quality ear protection to prevent hearing damage. All of that wheel-screeching noise and rumbling? Absent from the pictures. And that’s ok - the people I’m depicting are not in the midst of the noise either - they’re inside the train which is far quieter, and it’s their experience my images aim to describe.

During the pandemic, I made a series of images in my local Bay Ridge, Brooklyn park. Those pictures are also largely quiet in their portrayal of the park - trees, people enjoying the sunshine, birds, squirrels, etc. Things you’d see in urban green spaces anywhere around the city. Unlike the subway photos, which showed quiet moments (despite being made in the midst of movement and racket) the park images were, in a way, depicting a false reality by seeming to hold a silence that did not actually exist in the place shown. While my local park is a welcome space and can be a visually beautiful space, it’s not a quiet space. A six-lane highway and busy shipping lane are on one side of the park, a dense residential neighborhood is on the other side, and jet planes heading in and out of LaGuardia and JFK Airport fly overhead. There is almost always a lot of noise in the park.

But as humans, we don’t always listen for it. If the noise doesn’t represent a threat, over time we adjust and adapt until all but the most dissonant sounds fade into the background of our consciousness. Of course, the noise doesn’t actually go away, only our perceptions of it. The actual intensity of noise pollution became much more apparent when I watched a short video I made inside the park - the cacophonous soundtrack was a discordant reminder of all the sounds my silent photographs omitted.

In a sense, that meant my images were a success - I was able to create, with photographs, a separate world adjacent to the noisy everyday world most ordinary park goers experienced. By creating a photographic portal to a quiet mysterious world within the boundaries of a noisy urban world, I found a way to reach a place of magic and comfort during the most anxious early days of the pandemic.

This adaptation to sound goes in both ways. Just as our minds begin to screen out discordant persistent noise, our photos can communicate so much information and emotion that we hardly notice their silence. This is most striking to me when I consider images made by photojournalists covering conflicts such as Nick Ut’s horrific and iconic Vietnam war-era image of 10-year-old Kim Phuc and other victims running from a U.S. napalm attack on their village. Nick Ut wasn’t the only journalist witness to the attack. Other journalists photographed and even filmed the attack. In the color film footage, we hear the plane as it comes in to drop the napalm bombs, the roaring sound of the subsequent flames, and the shouts and cries from both the witnesses and the victims as they began emerging from the flames of their burned village.

It’s not the film footage we think about today despite the fact the film was in color and had sound - it’s Nick Ut’s silent image, which nevertheless screams into our consciousness with what feels like the full pain and terror of not only the moment but of war itself. But it’s not really war or the full pain and terror of the moment. It’s a black and white photograph. In that terrible instance, the silence and stillness of the image - the world reduced not reproduced - is what broke through to the hearts of so many who saw the photograph

This weekend, amidst the noise and chatter of another dangerous moment in world history, take a moment to consider the powerful silence of the images we make. How much of the world speaks us in silence? I think there is something we can use in the quiet of a still image that will help us to better understand ourselves, our world, and our time. I think if we take the time to appreciate the silent testimony of our photographs and our world, we will find at least something of what’s really important.

I’ll see you next week.

peace and love

James Prochnik The NYC Photo Community | Issue 105 | February 25 - March 4

Issue 104 | February 18 - 25, 2022

"I once was lost, but now I'm found."

Before I shifted my career into web design and photography, I spent many years managing a busy commercial art studio that made custom art installations - things like large-scale hand-painted murals and lobby-filling sculpture installations. Working on these art projects taught me a lot about creative work under the commercial pressures of tight budgets and fast deadlines, and it also just taught me a lot about making artworks that connect with people.

An idea I still think about from those days came from one of our best clients, architect David Rockwell, who designed many highly theatrical restaurants and hospitality spaces around the world.  He would often ask us to return to the idea of the ‘lost and found’ in the art installations, we made for him. If we were hand-painting a decorative pattern on the wall, he wanted parts of it, in almost random ways, to be distressed or fade away entirely. If we were making a sculpture for a large interior space like a hotel lobby, he wanted it to emerge and swoop in and out of the interior depending on where you stood in the space. If we were making a mural for a restaurant, he wanted parts of it to appear as if the mural continued behind the banquets where no one could see it, or have us make the mural out of glass beads that would shimmer and break the surface when disturbed by air currents or different lighting. What was this idea about?  Why did it appeal so much to David Rockwell, and why has it stuck with me after so many years?

Lost and found is a concept that does seem to reflect an eternal and deep aspect of existence. When we walk through a forest, light from a sunny day will appear and disappear in dappled patterns as breezes blow through the forest canopy. Greenery and color appear in the spring, fade away by autumn, largely disappear in the winter and return the following spring. Clouds in the sky form, grow, dissipate, and form again. Emotions, like clouds, form and take over our minds for minutes or hours or milliseconds before submerging into our subconsciousness like bubbles appearing and disappearing on the surface of a boiling pot. Relationships we have with family and friends take dramatically different forms and appearances over the years.

So lost and found can be a way of understanding existence as one of continuous change.  Everything we are and know is transient, evanescent, and subject to observable change given a long enough time frame. 

I think the idea has really stuck with me as a photographer making pictures in the world because I am continually seeking to spot and hold moments that emerge and disappear in fractions of a second. Every day I walk the streets with my camera I see the truth of our lost and found world where mystery and beauty and humor and ugliness reveal themselves in flashes and just as quickly hide again. If my photograph is successful, I hold some proof, some evidence that the world, which can feel so commonplace so much of the time, is as alive and magical a place as I believe it to be. 

From an aesthetic and formal standpoint, the idea of the lost and found also holds power. A photograph that describes a scene where the subject is smack in the center and in perfect focus does half the job a photograph ought to do (a photographic challenge I wrestle with all the time). A photo like that answers some questions about the world. It tells us that such and such looked like this at a certain time on a certain day and that we think this subject is important for whatever reason.  It tells us what the photographer found. It is good to get those answers right. But the other half of the job a photograph ought to do is to raise some questions. Some of the questions you might want to raise are about the world beyond the frame, the world inside the frame, what we are seeing, and on and on.

A photograph that is somehow able to conjure what is lost, as well as what was found, invites viewers to stay longer and to engage longer with what you have made. Those are the photos that I think hold the most power. So much more to say about this idea, but it’s late and I’m feeling pretty lost in the labyrinth for now.

Hopefully, I’ll find ya next week.

❤️

James Prochnik The NYC Photo Community | Issue 104 | February 18 - February 25, 2022

Issue 103 | February 11 - 18, 2022

This week’s featured photographer, Rafael Herrin-Ferri, and his project, All The Queens Houses, have me reflecting on photographic typologies and their history and role in the medium.

One of the earliest commercially printed photobooks, The Book of Bread published in 1903, was a cookbook, a photobook, and, in the way it set of examples of bread against simple backgrounds, a photographic typology describing different kinds of bread.

Karl Blossfeldt’s book Art Forms In Nature, published in 1928, isolated details of plant forms against plain cardboard backgrounds in a typology of the kaleidoscopic forms of nature. Blossfeldt saw his typology as an instructional reference for artists and sculptors, and a manifestation of the New Objectivity movement which was a reaction to the abstractions, and gauzy romanticism of Expressionism.

August Sander’s epic project People of the 20th Century, best known from a photo book made from a small selection of the work, Face of Our Time published in 1929, was a photo typology of people and extended the principles of New Objectivity into portraiture.  While the idea of categorizing people into different types is now often seen as a suspect and even a potentially dangerous reductionist view of humanity, Sanders’ images of people, viewed just as photographs, apart from the philosophical/ ideological approach that helped conceive the project, are beautiful, absolutely humanistic on their own, and considered some of the finest portraiture works in photo history.

The concept of photo typologies as an artistic approach was really pioneered by German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher starting in 1959. Their systematic and formal photographs of German industrial architecture, displayed in equally formal grids created an austere, but information-rich presentation of some of the industrial engines of the German economy, and they continued with this work into the 1990s.

These days photo typologies are an established genre of photography used for everything from depicting the plastic waste taking over our planet, as Elizabeth Weber does in her Marine Plastic Typology to Elizabeth Bick’s Movement studies which turn the action and energy of Manhattan streets into choreographed ‘Street Ballets’. You don’t really even need to be a photographer anymore to make a photo typology - just searching a tag on Instagram will automatically generate a typology of images (or at least the start of one).

I think the trait that ties together all the most iconic examples of typologies is that they provide a visual perspective that expands our understanding and appreciation of the world. In the case of Rafael Herrin-Ferri’s Queens houses, we are presented with a new portrait of the city, one that makes tangible the idea and ideal of our city as a place of maximal diversity where people of all backgrounds can live together. In the Becher’s typologies, we realize that there can be a genuine formal beauty to the industrial forms we may have just taken for granted, or dismissed as ugly. Weber’s plastic waste typologies give us a new way to conceive of the damage we are inflicting on our oceans - a portrayal that may motivate some to help prevent these harms.

I think the idea of photo typologies is still a rich framework for photographers to explore and investigate the world, and an especially valuable tool in a city like ours which has such an abundance of material to work with. I know some of you all have made some interesting typologies of the city - send them my way, and let’s make a typology of typologies!

I’ll see you next week.

❤️

James Prochnik The NYC Photo Community | Issue 103 | February 11 - February 18

Issue 102 | February 4 - 11, 2022

This week I came across Bronx-born author Grace Paley’s delightful poem, The Poet’s Occasional Alternative which vividly describes the difference in the effort she has to make, and the appreciation she receives from writing a poem versus making a pie.

everybody will like this pie
it will have apples and cranberries
dried apricots in it  many friends
will say  why in the world did you
make only one

this does not happen with poems

My week, photographically speaking, hadn’t gone that well. I received a polite rejection on a recent call for entry submittal. Every polite rejection stings a little, but this one - for a group exhibition of older photographers called 30 over 50 was just a little stingier. You enter a call for entry like that with a little extra confidence, thinking to yourself “at least here I’ll have a chance.” Well…maybe not.

It’s all good though. If one seeks money, recognition, or applause for their photography, there will be many dispiriting polite rejections on the way to the good moments when someone does appreciate your efforts.

Standing out in the world of photography is a tough business, and I think the challenges of this endeavor are not fully appreciated for either the serious amateur or the hard-working professional. Along with existing systemic (and often toxic) challenges and barriers that shouldn’t be ignored, there’s a basic economic and cultural reality that is often glossed over - The supply of photographers and photographs - good photographers and good photographs - far exceeds the demand. My sense, as someone who looks at a lot of photography, is that there are thousands of really talented photographers in the US. And probably hundreds of thousands of photographers who can be relied on to make a pretty great picture at least once in a while if not on demand. And millions of photographers if we include everyone with access to better tools like sophisticated phone cameras that can improve anyone’s photography. The output of all these photographers is extraordinary. 95 million photos are uploaded just to Instagram each day. Whether by luck or intention, if one was able to see the best of each day’s uploads, I have to imagine one would see a few hundred if not several thousand genuinely remarkable pictures.

Viewed from this perspective, and given these numbers, any recognition we receive beyond our circle of friends and family seems worthy of note. We are not bakers, making a pie that almost everyone will enjoy. The world, in my estimation, actually needs 95 million pies a day. It does not need that many photographs.

My sense is that this supply/demand problem, as much as anything else, is driving the excitement and energy around NFTs. Some photographers want to believe so badly that at long last something has come along that will turn their photographs into special magic money pies. Some photographers, particularly the earliest and most enthusiastic advocates and adopters of this technology, will succeed in that remarkable alchemy, but the success of a few will not change the fundamental reality that photographs, in any form they may appear, will always be more plentiful than those who wish to buy them. I believe letting our hunger for conventional success turn our art, our medium, and our craft into a speculative financial instrument is a profound mistake.

Yet it’s so painful to work so damn hard at something, and not receive even modest tokens of success in our society like the money or occasional kudos most average 9-5 jobs provide so readily. This seems unfair and wrong as well.

I wonder if one reads Grace Paley’s full poem there is another message that suggests maybe, as artists, we ought not to disparage our lot in life as ignored or dismissed poets, but instead value ourselves as neighborhood bakers who craft delicious and nourishing artistic treats that really can feed the souls of family, friends, and communities we care most about. Maybe some folks from outside our communities might even get word of what we’re doing and drop by for a taste? Maybe there’s even a sustainable business in this way of seeing what we do, one that doesn’t make us feel bad so often?

Food for thought anyway. I’ll see you next week.

❤️

James Prochnik The NYC Photo Community | Issue 102 | February 4 - February 11

Issue 101 | January 28 - February 4, 2022

We’re expecting a big snowstorm in New York City and the surrounding area this weekend - as I write they’re saying 6 inches and maybe more. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone’s snowy city pics, but you won’t find any from me. The hibernating bear is my spirit animal, the cozy dark cave my snowy winter retreat.

I just googled, “Why do bears hibernate?” and of course what I’ve known with 100 percent certainty since age 4 is not true. It turns out bears don’t hibernate. They go into a lighter sleep state called ‘torpor’. Torpor has a variety of definitions - sluggish inactivity; lethargic indifference, apathy. I think these negative connotations are anti-bear, and likely don’t appreciate what’s going on behind the scenes in the bear’s body and mind. Perhaps bears in torpor are thinking back to the past summer’s hunt and replaying every moment, every fish caught, every berry eaten, every feral beehive honey hive raid. Perhaps bears in torpor are dreaming up new hunting or foraging strategies; remembering and annotating the subtle signs and clues that led them to more bountiful feeding grounds in the past with plans to find even more when Spring returns.

In my winter photography torpor, I don’t make many pictures, but I do devote significant attention to photography. Most importantly, I take the time to look back. I look at the pictures I edited and posted over the course of the year; the images that struck me at the moment as the immediate winners. I look back for pictures that I may have overlooked in those quick daily edits. While I’m pretty good at picking the very best one or two photographs immediately after a photo session, I’m less skilled at recognizing photos that don’t grab you viscerally in an instant but may work well in a project or sequence. Finding those often quieter photos takes a little time away from the emotions of the moment when the photo was made.

I think about the mix of luck and intention that led to some of my best photographs of the year and I look to see if there are any threads that might be worth tugging on in the coming year - maybe a photo ‘accident’ that looks kind of cool and worth exploring further or a subject matter or theme that may have greater promise than I first thought. I look at photos of places I returned to again and again over the last year, and interrogate that impulse - what, really, was it about certain places that had such a hold on me? What was I looking for that I never found, that kept me returning? Or what was it that I found in these places that meant so much to me, and why? I’ve found this circling back time has been crucial to my growth.

One of my big projects this winter was going back and re-editing a project that I’ve been making pictures for on and off for more than ten years. I’ve learned a lot about photo editing in the past 3-4 years, and I want the whole project to be more consistent and reflect the current way I edit images. This has been a big pain in the ass, but it’s worth it to me because the pictures and story are important to me, and I want it to look the way I want it to look.

I’ve also entered a few calls for entry and applied for a photography grant. All these efforts require looking back at my strongest bodies of work, making sure that I am submitting the best images from these projects, and really doing my best to hone and shape the sequences I submit. While most of my projects have at least 30 photos and sometimes far more, usually you can only submit 10 or 20 photos at most. Figuring out a really tight sequence that makes sense can be as challenging as making a large edit where you have more time to tell your story. These kinds of submittals also require written statements, and devoting some time to making a concise statement of 100 words or so is such an important task that I never want to do in the summer when I’m out making pictures, but don’t mind as much in the winter.

I’m looking at my photobooks, some of which don’t get the love they deserve in warmer and sunnier seasons, reading books, and seeing movies. Recently I watched two classic Jaques Demy films that were on the Criterion Channel, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort. These films were an absolutely delightful celebration of love and color and music and movement. I was completely charmed and I hope some of their sweet spirit and visual sumptuousness rub off on me when I pick up my camera again.

Maybe some of you are like me during the winter, quiet on the outside and busy on the inside. Or maybe some of you go into full winter hibernation. That’s good too. Whatever you have to do to make sure the energy and enthusiasm are there when you really need it. That’s all that counts. Enjoy the snow, I’ll see you next week.

❤️James Prochnik The NYC Photo Community | Issue 101 | January 28 - February 4

Issue 100 | January 21 - 28, 2022

Welcome to the 100th issue of the NYC Photo Community Newsletter! I'm happy I've made it this far with a project I started on a whim in September of 2019, and I'm very grateful for all of you who have chosen to come along for the ride. Thank you.  I'm especially grateful to the scores of fantastic photographers who took the time to share their work and thoughts with the community. 

Any time you start a long-term endeavor, you reach a point where you know that to keep going, you need to shake things up, adjust your direction, and stretch a little higher or further than you have so far.  It's taken me a while to get there, but I'm pleased to announce I've finally taken some steps to make the newsletter better, more useful, more user-friendly, and more readable. My goal is to create a more interesting place to connect with and be inspired by other photographers who share our enthusiasm for the medium. In short, it's infrastructure week here at the newsletter. Here's what I did and why:

—I made a brand new website for the NYC Photo Community. Much of the basic structure I envision for the website is up and live, but be warned, as of now, it's a website in early days, like a spring chick pecking its way out of an eggshell, but not quite hopping around yet. There's a ways to go still, and a lot more content I want to add. I know with time and feedback we'll get there soon.  Having a unique website is going allow for a lot of positive changes, both immediately, and long-term.  Right away it's going to be a much better platform to showcase photography and organize the kind of material this newsletter has presented in the past into a more durable and useful way. Longer-term, I plan to launch a print/zine/book/poster store on the site to help support both the NYC Photo Community and the artists who've been a part of it since its inception. I also hope to start some kind of forum where we can more easily connect online but haven't settled on the means to accomplish that yet.

—I've re-designed the typography and colors of the newsletter to be simpler, cleaner, and hopefully more readable. The design was overdue for an update, especially the old logo which always reminded me a little too closely of a coronavirus particle. That definitely had to go!  

—Like this editor's note, the newsletter had gotten far too long. To address this, most of the newsletter will now consist of brief summaries of content, and readers can click through to see or read further as they wish. Since this is the inaugural edition of the new format, I'm keeping the full editor's note this week, but future issues will just have a short excerpt and a link to the full note.  The same will go for all sections of the newsletter. This change is the biggest, and for some, it will not be welcome, so this was a change that did not come lightly for me. After a lot of thought, I believe it's the right choice and will help people find material they're most interested in more easily. I'm particularly happy that it will give a much better format to present the work and ideas of the featured photographer each week.  (I love this week's feature on Patrice Helmar!)

All for now, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on the changes and plans for the future.  Just hit reply to this email to drop me a line, or use the contact form on our website.  Thanks again for being part of this, and I'm looking forward to the next 100 issues!

❤️James Prochnik The NYC Photo Community | Issue 100 | January 21 - 28