By Ken Tanaka at The Online Photographer:

In my own experience, and opinion, what the photographer must “add” to such subjects is revelation. When we photograph something, whether it’s a building, a garden, or a car, we are using light and position to reveal its nature to future viewers of that image.

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Mike Johnson at The Online Photographer does it again – in a wonderful post inspired by what may be his final visit to the family summer home:

I have often compared photography to fishing. I think it’s the best metaphor for the type of photography I do, and the type I like: you educate, prepare and equip yourself as best you can, and train by practicing, but, in the end, what you catch still depends on luck, chance, fate, and whim.

I’ve taken tens of thousands of pictures in Northern Michigan, I suppose. But no matter how many pictures I’ve taken, I’ve probably seen ten times as many, if not more. That’s certainly the way photography is: there are far more fish in the river than one fisherman could possibly catch in the brief time he’s got to fish. The photographs I’ve made, nice though many of them are, are no match for the ones that got away.

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As is frequently the case, The Online Photographer has a couple of great articles this week:

T.O.P 10: #2: The Concerned Photographer is a wonderful perspective on two famous photographs.

If Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” is photography’s madonna, then the last of the many great photographs of Gene Smith, Tomoko Uemura in her Bath, is our pietà.

Distrust of Beauty laments certain notions – we’ve all probably had them – about making art edgy at the expense of making it beautiful.

I heard an excellent lecture by playwright Stephen Dietz, about what he called “The Four Seductions” – the four big things that seduce artists away from making the best art they can. Three of the four are disparagement of craft, criticism, and blaming the audience; number one on Dietz’s hit parade is distrust of beauty.

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Mike Johnson of The Online Photographer:

It’s always seemed odd to me that cities don’t have photographers. The White House has an official photographer; so do football teams and opera companies; why doesn’t Chicago? Is Phoenix too bland, Atlanta eternal and unchanging, Portland, Maine uninterested in what Portland, Oregon looks like? Cities have official coffee-suppliers, inkwell-fillers, pothole-fixers, numberless keepers of records and documents less worthy than what the place look like when. Any elightened city should have at least one full-time photographer out in it day after day recording the comings and goings, the tearing down and the building up, the passage of life and the comings and goings of the people, the look of the place in the rain and the winter and at night and in times of celebration and crisis and boredom. Any parent does as much for the changing aspect of a single child, as
grows and changes forever. Any city is forever disappearing. Why not notice? [The Online Photographer]

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