Fa la la la la la la la de da

© Caleb Cole

Ho Ho Ho! and Happy Holidays from Ellen and Tommy

Hasselblad 50 Cfi lens for sale

Lens plus lens hood and both caps. Glass is clean. $800 plus shipping.

Canon 16-35mm L Zoom Lens for sale

Glass clean as a whistle, includes front and rear lens caps, EW83E lens hood, LZ1319 soft storage case. Comes with B&W 77mm UV filter -- always on. I have not used this lens much at all; it's in mint condition. $700 plus shipping and handling. Also for sale, a Canon PL C - Filter - circular polarizer - 77 mm for $80.00.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Welcome to the Met. Do Not Enter Here.

This morning I got up extra early to travel to NYC so that I could go to the Met to see the Robert Frank exhibition on my way to show my portfolio at a review. Here's what I learned: do not go to the Met when you are carrying around your large portfolio of prints. They won't check portfolios, not because of security but because it's too much of a liability. "What if the prints were damaged -- you could sue!" said the security guard when I pressed the matter. They wouldn't let me in at all, and there was nothing to be done about it, so I walked outside, muttering a string of very bad words under my breath, then took a cab to my next destination -- except to perpetuate my run of bad luck, the cabbie let me out on 47th instead of 27th, and I was so flustered after the whole thing at the Met that I didn't notice where I was until it was too late. So I took a long walk in the cold rain.

Thoreau

My friend Colleen Plumb sent me this lovely passage:

"I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. It seemed to me that I had several more lives to live. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I learned this, at least, by my experiment, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. In proportion as he simplifies his life the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor will poverty be poverty, nor weakness weakness."
-Thoreau

Photo Books in Ten Years?

I have to admit that when it comes to books -- any books, but especially photobooks -- I'm about as curmudgeonly a luddite as you could find anywhere unless you ventured into an English department meeting at the sort of school where I have taught that subject for the last few decades or so. In such dusty enclaves you will find groups of people who scorn Kindles, despair of the decline in literacy in America, scowl about technology, eschew television, shake their heads at the demise of local newspapers, subscribe to The New Yorker, and prefer not to read much of anything on line. At times I find myself walking a razor's edge; after all, I write this blog, and I spend altogether too much time on Facebook, e-mail, and various on-line sites where I'm usually either reading about photographs or looking at them. In fact, I'm indebted to one such site, Women in Photography, for being the first to exhibit my photography.

But the question that prompted this post, posed by Miki Johnson on Resolve, is about photobooks: what do I think they'll look like in ten years? (I guess the idea is to have some sort of cyberspace conversation about it.)

I think they'll look pretty much the same way they do now, except the quantity, quality and variety is, unfortunately, likely to diminish -- that's been the trend for some time -- mostly a function of economics, I suppose. I love photobooks as they are; I own far too many, considering my limited budget and tiny house. I like holding them on my lap, I like the heft of them, the feel of the pages, the images on paper, the boards. I study them: where are the page numbers, the titles; how are the images sequenced; if there is text, how does it connect to the images? The idea that I'm going to read a photobook on an iPhone is like -- you're kidding, right? (I don't even own an iPhone. I liked those phones with cords; you could hear better, plus you had to sit down, stop doing the dishes and laundry, and actually listen to the person at the other end of the line.)

I don't think we need gimmicks, I just think we need more good books and more time to enjoy them. I'd like to see text integrated with images better -- if that's an innovation, I'm all for that. It's not easy to do -- I can't think of very many photobooks that use text well. Bazan's Cuba does.

America is always looking for the next new thing. The next Zhu Zhu pet. But as for me, I'm already thinking retro. Back to the future. The next time I visit my daughter in St. Louis, I'm going to shop for a typewriter. A manual typewriter. I'm interested in reclaiming the stuff of the past that was good, the way serious music buffs collect vinyl. (Btw I just read an article that said vinyl is making a comeback because the sound quality is superior. Duh.) I shoot film and print in a darkroom, and I still think that for black and white, gelatin silver prints are superior to anything an inkjet printer can do.

I suspect that the best books have to be created by brave souls who are less interested in making money than in making something beautiful. If a book is really good, if the quality is there, and if it's to my liking, well, I'll buy it. I don't know about other folks. (If I were a publisher, I wouldn't worry too much about identifying the market; I'd produce books that I thought were good. Look at the success of Nazraeli Press. Think of all the great works of literature and all the great movies that had trouble finding a publisher or a producer. Me, I prefer a long shot and try not to pay too much attention to the odds.)

I think we lose sight of what's meaningful when we get caught in numbers and when we want predictable outcomes. Business models. Statistical significance. Well, life is full of unpredictable outcomes. I'm not terribly interested in "product." I'm interested in great images, in beauty, in truth. I buy photobooks because I want to live with them. Ironically, lots of them have increased in value considerably in only a few years. Just the other day I noticed that my Francesca Woodman is worth a few hundred dollars. That blows my mind. But, you know, when a book is really good, in one way or another, its value increases. And besides, which would you rather leave in your wake -- books by Helen Levitt, Koudelka, and Pentti Sammallahti, or a piece of plastic?

August Sander at Gallery Kayafas

Bricklayer, © August Sander

I love August Sander's work and can't wait to see the 24 prints now at Gallery Kayafas in Boston.