Austin Kleon

You are here: Blog / Archives for photography

Harry and his monster hat

 “One cannot open a newspaper without being disgusted by new records of shame…. the house and land we occupy, have lost their best value, and a man looks gloomily at his children, and thinks, ‘What have I done that you should begin life in dishonor?’”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1851

A devastating image by photographer Brook Mitchell in the NYTimes. Nails the stakes of climate change: It is our children who will have to sift through the wreckage.

I was particularly affected by the photo, as I have a towheaded almost-six-year-old who looks a lot like Harry. (“Where have you been my blue-eyed son?” Dylan sings in “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall,” a song that now destroys me.)

A little googling led me to the original Guardian piece about Australian farm families battling the draught. You can see more photos of Harry and his family there, including this one, of him wearing what he calls his “monster hat”:

That one brings the slightest smile: Children are resilient, and no matter how bad it gets, there will still be moments of humor. Even if it’s gallows humor.

On the other side of the camera

wearing a crown

I needed new some new photos, so I asked one of my favorite artists, Clayton Cubitt, if he’d take them. We spent a couple of really pleasant hours last month in his studio in Williamsburg, just chatting about art and life and taking pictures.

Clayton likes to take a polaroid of studio visitors wearing a prop crown — he says he thinks everybody deserves to be royalty for at least a few minutes. (Iggy Pop: “Every stinking bum should wear a crown.”)

Here’s a photo I took of him in action — the tattoo on his right arm, “this too shall pass,” was explained by Abraham Lincoln (a quote I used in the last chapter of Keep Going):

“It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words, “And this too, shall pass away.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!”

“Sometimes I worry it’s weird for my subjects to see a giant ‘this too shall pass’ tattoo on my trigger arm,” he says, “But it’s true and it’s why I photograph.”

Roberto Benigni in Down By Law

He gets a new hatchmark on his left arm for each year he makes it around the sun. 

You can read more about his life and work in this interview.

Here’s my favorite photo that he took of me:

The season of lies

Back home after two weeks on the road with the kids. No new epiphanies, only fortified beliefs:

1. Traveling with young children is not a “vacation” it is a “trip.”

The sooner you understand and accept this the sooner you can lower your expectations accordingly. My kids are, I think, wonderful travelers, and even so, traveling with them is beyond exhausting.

2. Photos can say whatever we want them to say.

Instagram lies. If you follow me on Instagram, it probably looked like I was having the time of my life. Nope! There was a lot of eye candy to be had, but a large majority of the trip was pretty miserable.

I found myself thinking a lot about Errol Morris’s book, Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography, and how he summarized it in these handy 8 points:

  1. All photographs are posed.
  2. The intentions of the photographer are not recorded in a photographic image. (You can imagine what they are, but it’s pure speculation.)
  3. Photographs are neither true nor false. (They have no truth-value.)
  4. False beliefs adhere to photographs like flies to flypaper.
  5. There is a causal connection between a photograph and what it is a photograph of. (Even photoshopped images.)
  6. Uncovering the relationship between a photograph and reality is no easy matter.
  7. Most people don’t care about this and prefer to speculate about what they beleive about a photograph.
  8. The more famous a photograph is, the more likely it is that people will claim it has been posed or faked.

If you’re sitting around this summer scrolling Instagram seething with jealousy over vacation photos, remember what Mary Karr says: “Don’t make the mistake of comparing your twisted-up insides to people’s blow-dried outsides.” You have no idea what kind of time anybody’s having. Images are nothing without context.

If you love summer and summer vacation, I’m happy for you. For me, it’s the season of lies. Best to pour some iced tea, crack a book, and wait for it to pass.

(Happy to be back, BTW. Will write a more upbeat post tomorrow!)

Reading right to left

After I wrote about looking at things upside down, a reader relayed what his daughter was learning in army cadet training: “In the field, troops are told to scan from right to left. As we generally read left to right, doing the opposite aids in detecting anomalies in the landscape and potential threats to safety.”

Here’s photographer Dale Wilson (emphasis mine):

One of the first tricks I learned many years ago had nothing to do with photography, but was drilled into me by an army sergeant. It only took a few smacks up the back of my head to learn how to look from right-to-left when scanning a landscape in an effort to see the hidden “enemy” in our mock battles. This process of reverse reading forced me to slow down and read each tree as if it were a syllable I was seeing for the first time. Even today, about thirty years after I called that sergeant every adjective not found in a descent dictionary, I still find myself scanning a landscape from right-to-left.

More on reading right-to-left here.

VISUAL ACOUSTICS

visual_acoustics_500px

Notes on Visual Acoustics (see them bigger)

The architectural photographer Julius Shulman died last week. Meg and I had the good fortune to see a documentary about his life, Visual Acoustics, a few months back at the Blanton in Austin. I took notes in the dark, and then threw this little map together.

Meg (the architecture scholar) and I had quite a good conversation about Shulman’s work, and what happens when you represent a building with a photograph–when you take a 3-D experience like a building and reduce it to a 2-D piece of film. (There was a funny bit in the film when someone mentioned that to sell Modernism it has to be seen in 1-point perspective.)

My favorite part of the whole film was when Shulman said, “The camera is the least important part of photography.”

It’s not the tools, it’s the thinking.

2008: THE YEAR IN PHOTOS

Because I rarely post any photography, here are some snapshots Meg and I took this year:

Ohio: tree + sunset

Montreal

NOEL

Playground in the fog

My Teeth X-rays

Bill Callahan at the Mohawk 3.30.08

Maker Faire 2008

Pimp mon Char

Maker Faire 2008

KEY:

1. Southern Ohio Sunset snapped from the back seat of a Honda moving at 60mph
2. Rainbow and powerwashing equipment in Montreal
3. The Mueller control tower at Christmas
4. Playground in our neighborhood
5. My teeth x-rays: taken during a tortuous dental appointment
6. Jonathan Meiburg, Thor Harris, and Bill Callahan (smog) rehearsing at The Mohawk
7. A chair at Clementine coffee shop
8. Automusik at Maker Faire
9. Pimp Mon Char – seen on TV in Montreal
10. Me at Maker Faire

DRAWING THAT SIGNIFICANT OTHER, PART TWO

Like a response to yesterday’s post, “The Artist’s Wife: A Constant Muse Who Never Said No”:

“I never refused when he wanted to take a picture,” said Eleanor Callahan, the 91-year-old widow of the photographer Harry Callahan. “I never complained, whatever I was doing. If he said: ‘Come quick, Eleanor — there’s a good light,’ I was right there.”

The artistic fruit of their 63-year marriage is on view in “Harry Callahan: Eleanor,” an exhibition at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Until Callahan’s death in 1999, she was his most constant and compliant subject, posing for countless portraits, figure studies and nudes.

Recent posts

Follow me elsewhere