Tuscany

I am heading off to Tuscany for a panoramic trip. First I will meet my good and equally crazy photographic friend Thierry in Zuerich then drive to Siena and Florence. Decided to leave the digital stuff at home and completely focus on 6x17 and XPan equipped with 50 rolls of 120 and 30 rolls bw. Updates in the first week of October.
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Photography as Art

Photography had a hard time to reach the status of an art form. Not talking about press or daily snapshot photographs but fine art photography like classic images by Ansel Adams or Edward Weston. Maybe my statement is not correct, images by Robert Doisneau ("Kiss by the hotel"), which is rather classic street photography reached a level of art as well, at least posthum.
I am selling occasionally prints to collectors or as well to people looking for a nice panorama image. Images that I produced with film cameras and printed on fibre based paper are higher appreciated and people are ready to pay more for a darkroom print than a print that I produce with a large format inkjet printer. Somehow the effect of being able to reproduce or reprint prints any number of times, even stating as limited edition, makes one think its a poster print from the deco shop around the corner.

I like to browse photography magazines, especially issues that are not focsussing on technical details but on portfolios images. I am struggling to appreciate the artistic value of some photographers work showing totally blurred or contentless images, just because of the fact they are either famous or student of someone else famous. Anyway, if you like your own images, blurred or not, thats all that counts.
Reflecting about this I know that at least in this community, we are producing something that endures the banal everyday things that we do day by day.

My 2cents for today.

ThePrintSwap first wave kicks off

We gathered 26 photographers from 9 countries to start the first swap. In the next days the email addresses gonna be shuffled and the swap can begin..

Check out ThePrintSwap website and register for the next round in November 2006 !

Update 14th September 2006: The swap pairing is done.

Simple Things andSome Thoughts about Photography

What do I see here ? Nothing you would say. Thats correct, it looks like an empty scene, a street, a wall and a an old parking device. It might be boring or meaningless to you, but its simple and appealing to me.

You ever thought about the number of pictures that are made every day on the world ? With an inifinite (?) number of cameras, digital cameras and mobile phones some millions of images are taken every day. Maybe a million every minute. Pictures taken, deleted or forgotten. How many of them will survice a couple of weeks ? How many will really catch a piece of memory of history ? How many will be considered as art, printed and displayed somewhere ?

The more possibilities we have, the more megapixel and GB of memorycards we use, the more we should focus on essential values. Spend more time on less pictures.