_valerian

We will never see all the best photographs. They were not made for all of us to see. But, some of those breathtaking photographs that have come from boxes in closets and family albums and have ended up online are being posted at Look At Me. Spend at least 10 solid seconds per picture.

This and this and this and so many more.

Fantastic !

I’d also like to add that the layout and design of this site is nearly perfect.

update

>>>Mark said:
“I know we’ve talked about this before: when it comes right down to it, you have to evaluate a photograph based on its final form, without worrying about what the photographer was thinking. ”

and I said:

“Exactly. The scary and liberating part of all that is that the photographer means very little to the work once it has been made. But at the same time, who the photographer was when they took those photos (notice that each photo has at least one person looking directly at the camera) matters considerably- there is a sense of intimacy or at least familiarity in most of those photographs. Looks and expressions that would not be presented towards anyone else other than the person who was holding the camera. They are recorded moments and proof of some sort of exchange, a small little ceremony of Getting Your Photo Taken. I can’t get enough of this type of Pure Photography.
Looking over this sort of work has made me consider what I am working on. Last night I printed a bunch of photographs quite small, snapshot size on 8×10 paper. The paper was a mistake- I did not get multigrade contrast paper and instead got the kind with a fixed contrast- so I played around and wound up printing a small stack of photographs that I had otherwise looked over, mirror self portraits and photographs of women I know. The end results were quite unexpectedly interesting. Less like I AM MAKING A PHOTOGRAPH than, Look At this Photograph I Took. How different? Not sure what I mean just yet. ”

Yesterday I decided to not go to Tokyo and instead decided to go somewhere I had never heard of. A few hours and trains later I ended up in Katsuura, a small resort town halfway down the Chiba peninsula on the Pacific Ocean side. The day before was spent at school and then in my darkroom, so a day away from home and Tokyo was just what I thought I needed.
I had the entire day, a few extra bucks, my Leica, a Nikon F2, my Big Mini (for color) and 20 rolls of film. The light was good, the town was what a sea side resort town looks like in Feburary- grey and boarded up. There were few people under 50 that I saw walking around. Katsuura was a nice place to visit but one of those locations where I would not want to be placed by the JET program.

I did not really talk to anyone all day except for a nice little old lady (she said she was 70 years old) who talked for quite a while, asking if I have a girlfriend and then saying that I should find a nice Japanese girl to settle down and have 2 or 3 children with. She invited me to her place for tea, which I politely declined, but promised I would come back in the summer to see her.
For dinner I ducked into a small sushi shop which was run by another older woman, probably the same age as the first. She made me a sushi dinner and yes it was good. Conversation once more veered towards romance (not between myself and the chef), again I heard the suggestion to find a nice Japanese girl for marriage.

Maybe I will post some of the photographs here after I develop them. I still have 50 rolls of film to process so it might be a while. But yeah, Katsuura is a good day trip from Tokyo. Each month I plan to spend a day in some other place I have not gone to- thinking Choshi at the tip of Chiba or a stop on the Uchibou line is where I am headed next time.