G. Steve Journal

Nostalgia

A segment on NPR this week on the return of the show Mad Men featured a clip of the character Don Draper, played by Jon Hamm, making an inspired pitch about the Kodak carousel projector. It's really an homage to the magic and seduction of photography.

In his pitch, Draper talks about using nostalgia as a way to create a "deeper bond with the product ... it's delicate , but potent..."

"...nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound ... it's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. It's a time machine - goes backwards, forwards...  it takes us to a place where we ache to go again..."

Peace

Usually, when I try to explain how I decide to frame a scene in the camera's viewfinder I have trouble describing exactly what it is I am trying to do –– what I am looking for.  In the past I've simply said I pay attention to the edges of the frame until "the image resolves itself." True enough but not sure how helpful that is.

Well, I came across another description of the process and, though it may not add much to the discussion in terms of specifics, it struck me as a more elegant description of what occurs at the moment a photographer decides that's the shot. It's from John Szarkowski's introduction to the book: "William Eggleston's Guide:"

"... a photographer wants form, an unarguable right relationship of shapes, a visual stability in which all components are equally important. The photographer hopes, in brief, to discover a tension so exact that it is peace."

Irreducible

I enjoyed reading the sentiments expressed in Peter Schjeldahl's review of the Cindy Sherman retrospective at MOMA.  For those not familiar with Sherman, for the past 30 years she has created photographic self-portraits dressed as someone else, for example, Queen Elizabeth or Marilyn Monroe.

The intellectual vogue is long over, though the pedantry lingers, presuming that the mysteries of Sherman's art – photographs that are like one-frame movies, which she directs and acts in – demand special explanation. (She is remarkably tolerant of interviewers who keep asking her what she means, as if, like any artist, she hadn't already answered in the only way possible for her: in the work.)  But the mysteries are irreducible.

Paradise

Last month I came across two separate reminders to pay attention to the "ordinary" days that seem to fly by more quickly than ever.

Here's author Rudy Rucker from a recent interview talking about the paintings of Bruegel:

     ... his pictures evoke a sense of the divine nature of the physical world. Everything is alive. We're in paradise, if only we pay attention.

And from an NPR radio interview, Alexander Payne, director of the movie The Descendants: 

    ... life is .. a collection of extraordinary, ordinary moments.  We just need to pay attention to them all -- wake up and pay attention to how beautiful it all is.