Mish-Mosh

It has been tough getting away for shots lately. I have swept through areas of the city a few times and what I see is not as compelling as it has been in the past. Detroit is struggling and it does appear that intense efforts are in place (and in action) to clean up a bit. Rather than leaving homes abandoned, doorless, with broken windows, just waiting for a little gas and a match to add it to the arson-fatality list, owners (or maybe concerned citizens) are boarding up the doors and windows.

A few weeks ago I was cruising through a neighborhood and spotted a house with the rear end self-dismantling (with the aid of gravity) so I stopped and shot it. "Why are you shooting my house!" came an loud and angry retort from the man who was boarding up the windows. I had not seen him when I pulled up.

With time constraints and with less brain-freeze photos, I haven't been getting into the city.

I'm working through all my old photos, seeing what I have, reprocessing the better ones in PhotoShop, and renaming each and every file so I can more easily find them, all 100,000+ photos. (These are ALL my photos, incl. the ones I never intended to use.) It's no wonder I have a small cemetery of spent digital cameras. Fuji S5000, Canon S50, Minolta-Dimage Z3, Lumix FZ8, Canon Power Shots (three models in the IS series), Canon Rebel, Lumix DMC-ZS7, plus a few others...

And when I'm not engaged in life-stuff or the above, I am reading/looking...all photography. My latest read is called "Image Makers - Image Takers," by Anne-Celine Jaeger. It is an interesting collection of short interviews with quite a few photographers (many whose photos I enjoy) in various fields of picture taking, discussing their motivations, probing their thoughts about photography. Each interview is about ten pages or so and the book is quite interesting.

And I'm waiting for a reprint of Walker Evan's seminal "American Photographs." Though I have seen most of these photos, I have never seen the original layout and order. Errata Editions has published some very rare and scarce photo books in much smaller format at "reasonable" prices ($40), small editions but copied directly from the original. I have mixed feelings about these because another I have, William Klein's "Life is Good...New York" and the reproductions are murky and very small. I've seen a few larger versions of some of the photos and the quality is in the reprint book is very disappointing. I don't know about publishing, but it does seem when they squashed down the images for this much smaller book, they didn't go back in and clean up the images, maybe resize them or something.

But Walker Evans is one of my favorites and a definite influence on how I was going to shoot up Detroit.