October 2011
2 posts
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Photo slideshows
For all its apparent diversity, much of today’s photography still conforms to four or five formats, or modes. The over-large photograph and the even larger projected image, moving from the billboard to the gallery, often treated digitally, blurring the line between cinema and photography.
Instant Coffees
ASA Collective
Contact Editions
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Ermine Street
Ermine Street is the name of the old Roman road that once ran from old London Bridge to York. My current project is to trace the route. My interest started with an idea over summer to walk the whole way. While the walking idea is shelved for the time being, after lots of research, including Paul Graham’s A1 project from the early 80s, I’ve started. Ermine Street runs straight past my...
September 2011
2 posts
1 tag
a texted romance
i named myself coffeelover, as
a joke: young turk seeks young turkess
smart rhymes written, for undercover work.
first one reply, then five later,
an honest smile overpowers my sense
more emails sent: interested then?
why don’t we just meet?
it was easy to write, words tapped at home
far from real life where we’ll talk
with untexted words
so i sms a bar, and she texts
i know john snow,...
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July 2011
8 posts
2 tags
Regent's Canal
As if
water were
stone, we cycle
our eyes and ears
upon the towpath,
breathe harder,
and focus our way forward.
Our concentration
is swifting, but
as the canal moves along,
we notice—as
gently as if
cafe lattes were being
placed on pine-topped tables—
the changing scenes
on the canalside. We
do know, yes I think, this is the
Regent’s Canal, but
it is hard to know
what that means.
Image ©...
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Photography and freedom of expression. It’s not...
Image © Richard Wilhelmer
Source: Julius von Bismarck
Far less reported are incidences with security guards, public-space personnel (museums, galleries, swimming pools) and shop attendants. What it reveals is a wide mistrust of photographers. If you’re photographing, you’re seen as someone sinister, which is a view that the world is a dark and nasty place, where photographers are immediately...
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Indre Serpytype’s 1944-1991
Photos © Indre Serpytype, from her exhibition 1944-1991 at Rencontres d’Arles
One of Simon Baker’s, curator of photography at the Tate Modern, three nominations for the Arles 2011 Discovery Award is the young Lithuanian photographer Indre Serpytype. Her 1944-1991 project shows homes in Lithuania that were appropriated by the KGB for interrogation and...
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Arles Photo Festival Highlights Discovery Award... →
My article for PDN about Arles 2011
Photo © Graciele Iturbide, from her exhibition at Rencontres d’Arles 2011
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John Gossage – Berlin
Image © John Gossage
June 2011
4 posts
2 tags
Pablo Neruda - Walking Around (1933)
London 2011
Image © Julian Lass 2011
London, 1933
It so happens that I tire of being a man
It so happens that I’ll enter the tailors or the cinemas
withered, faint, impenetrable like a cygnet with feathery down
swimming in a livid sea of ash.
The smell of hairdressers makes me cry like a baby
All I want is quiet, no stones, no down-feather
I don’t want to see any shops, any...
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Ektachrome
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Pre Photoshop Press
How interesting, this photo from 1939. The caption, from the long-dead Daily Sketch, says: But what really fascinates me is the level of retouching in order to make the image newsworthy. Elizabeth’s hat and lapels have been lightened, the man behind her has had his glasses outlined, the shape of a man in front (right) has been literally created out of shadows, and the advert to the right...
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Peter Mitchell
Image © Peter Mitchell/Camera Press
I found Leeds-based Peter Mitchell’s image of London in the 1970s while going through the archives at Camera Press. I was so struck by it that I started researching Mitchell and I’d love to see more of his work. Mitchell’s work was shown in Tate Britain’s 2007 show How We Are: Photographing Britain, and the accompanying book describes...
May 2011
12 posts
1 tag
Dorothy Bohm
Image © Julian Lass 2011
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Dorothy Bohm & Wim Wenders
Yesterday I met Dorothy Bohm, who helped found the Photographer’s Gallery with Sue Davies in 1969.
Over lunch near her home in Hampstead, Dorothy told me all about her Lithuanian Jewish background, how she came to Manchester in June 1939 to escape the Nazis, aged just 14. As she departed Germany, her father put his Leica around her neck and said “this might come in useful.”
She...
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Working at home: do you need an office?
If you’re self-employed and work from home you might well be able to get away without an office by logging onto your laptop at the kitchen table, or in my case my bedroom or small studio I rent. But what about if you have a company of 20 employees? Is it always possible and efficient to work without an office?
Just heard BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour asking this very question and while...
4 tags
Fotos que ya había olvidado por completo
Fotos, die ich total vergessen hatte
Photos I’d forgotten all about
Image © Julian Lass 2011
4 tags
Fotos que ya había olvidado por completo
Fotos, die ich total vergessen hatte
Photos I’d forgotten all about
Image © Julian Lass 2011
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Are journalists obligated to inform someone...
Max Mosely just lost his plea to the European Court of Human Rights – it rejected his bid to force publications to warn people before publishing sensitive and personal material about them. That means it is still not a legal requirement for a journalist to give prior warning of a story.
I kind of feel sorry for Mosely. It was crap of News of the World to reveal he liked spending time with so many...
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Simonides: Danaë and Perseus
Danaë and her baby son Perseus have been cast out to sea in a chest by her husband Akrisios, who fears a Delphic prophecy that his son will one day kill him. Akrisios is too afraid to kill his wife, as Zeus is the father of Perseus.
The lyric poet Simonides wrote about it and a fragment survives. I translated it as best as I could, with help, and tried to retain some sense of the alliteration.
...
4 tags
Photos I’d forgotten all about
Fotos, die ich total vergessen hatte
Fotos que ya había olvidado por completo
All images © Julian Lass
4 tags
Fotos, die ich total vergessen hatte
Fotos que ya había olvidado por completo
Photos I’d forgotten all about
All images © Julian Lass
4 tags
Fotos, die ich total vergessen hatte
Fotos que ya había olvidado por completo
Photos I’d forgotten all about
All images © Julian Lass
4 tags
Fotos que ya había olvidado por completo
Fotos, die ich total vergessen hatte
Photos I’d forgotten all about
All images © Julian Lass
1 tag
Elephant & Castle group show
I’m in a group show with former London College of Communication classmates next week, anybody is welcome to come next Friday 13th May. I’ve been looking to show my work for no costs in the shopping centre at Elephant & Castle for a while now and this opportunity sprang up, so I was keen to help. It was my classmate Valentina’s idea and Royal College of Art (RCA) curation-student...
April 2011
1 post
1 tag
Photojournalist Tim Hetherington dies
Photojournalist Tim Hetherington, 40, died yesterday during a mortar attack by forces loyal to Colonel Gaddafi in Misrata, Libya. Peter N. Bouckaert, from Human Rights Watch, in Geneva, reported to Vanity Fair that “three other journalists were also hit … Getty photographer Chris Hondros [who was seriously wounded and later died]; photographer Guy Martin, of the Panos Agency, who is [still]...
March 2011
2 posts
2 tags
WatchImages © Julian Lass 2011
Hackney Canal
Concreted, steel-framed blocks along Hackney canal are minimalist cubicles, seeped in dusking March light, stepped racks, empty scaffolds. Shivering plants cling to crumbling walls, crowd-tamed black coots line the grassed verge, oblivious to heavy footfall. By the time I slow down, going west, at the building site past Kingsland Road that has upended a...
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Sebald and photography
(paraphrasing Sebald)
On Approach
Photography should have a ghostlike presence in it somewhere, something omniscient. It makes it a different reality.
Photography is about discovering things hitherto unseen. Otherwise there’s no point to the process.
By all means be experimental, but let the viewer be part of the experiment.
Photograph obscure things but don’t photograph obscurely.
There is...
February 2011
21 posts
1 tag
My portrait Telegraph Magazine
click on picture to read PDF
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My photos Geographical Magazine
Sitting on the Fence
In an attempt to shore up the porous 4,095-kilometre frontier it shares with
Bangladesh, India is constructing a barbed-wire border fence to prevent smuggling
and illegal immigration. But this poses problems for many Indian farmers, whose
fields are sandwiched between the fence and the border itself – yet offers little
security, as gaps in the unfinished barrier allow those...
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My article Telegraph Magazine Gaza Strip
click on a page to read the PDF
Article at Telegraph online
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My portrait Telegraph Magazine Annie Leonard
Annie Leonard – The Anti-Consumerist Filmmaker. Telegraph Magazine, May 2010.
read it here
Image © Julian Lass 2010
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Crowdfunding
Emphas.is is a platform where photographers rather than journalists find funding for their projects. You put your profile and proposal up, try and attract investors and then, when you’re reached your money target, do your project and send your investors personal emails and blog updates on your progress. Following on from the success of crowd funding sites such as...
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Should you post your photographs or articles on your website or blog before offering them up for sale?
If you post your articles, or your photographs onto your blog, you may be surprised to hear they’ve been published, regardless of how many people read your blog.
This is a dilemma of the blog age. On one hand, you want to advertise your services on your blog. On the other hand, by...
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In this world
the poet is anathema
the thinker a fool
the artist an escapist
– Henry Miller
According to the scientists, the inability to focus helps ensure a richer mixture of thoughts in consciousness. Because these people struggled to filter the world, they ended up letting everything in. They couldn’t help but be open-minded.Jonah Lehrer, Wall Street Journal
Can’t focus? ...
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The Point of Perception by Madi Boyd
Image © Julian Lass 2011
Madi Boyd is a London-based artist whose sculpture ‘The Point of Perception’ is a collaboration with neuroscientists to explore the limits of human sight. I saw the piece at Kinetica 2011, London, last week and that’s where the above photo’s from.
To view the sculpture, you enter a dark room through a black curtain, but the far wall is brightly...
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What is success?
Image © Julian Lass 2011
Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value Albert Einstein.
It’s easy to focus on success, especially when you’re struggling and broke. So, exactly what is it I want from my photography?
Colin Pantall asked a number of photographers ‘what is success?’ recently on his blog.
David Campbell, Professor of...
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Crowdfunding - what do you think?
Heartfelt pleas, or just clever advertising to fund foreign jaunts? Be interested to hear your thoughts.
I notice the way Gary pictures himself leafing through a book of photos. I think, he must be dedicated to his photography. But I also wonder if it is his portfolio he’s leafing through. I never see.
The voiceover is a male: American, I believe. I’m starting to wonder if it is...