Photo Shelter’s Blog, Shoot the Blog, has ended its run and its amazing author Rachel Hulin has started her own.  So move on over to the as-yet-to-be-unnamed blog!

Looks like she is still keeping up her insanely fast posting pace, witty and sometimes wicked humor, and continuing to share large lush images.   Enjoy.

Photoshelter’s Shoot the Blog had another great recent post, pointing me to a treasure trove of wonderful portraits. Photographer Bill Jay has been photographing photographers for close to 40 years.  Currently, he has over 1,000 portraits in his files, with more to be added.

Guess who that is above….?  John Pfahl in 1980.

I just sent a good 30+ minutes cruising Jay’s amazing Web site and its curious organization, until I realized that I could look at the portraits alphabetically.  Oh well, my bad is your gain.  Below are some of my favorites from page 1 alone as well as some folks of local interest.  Be sure to look up past PRC Lecturers as well!  Good news for us, he’ll be releasing a book with Nazraeli Press soon.

CAUTION, this is VERY ADDICTIVE.  Enjoy!

Aaron Siskind
Frederick Sommers
A young Jerry Uelsmann
Lucien Clergue, who looks a lot like Dustin Hoffman
Manuel Alvarez Bravo
Martin Parr
Paul Caponigro
Robert Heinecken
Russell Lee

Of local interest:
PRC founder Chris Enos
Nick Nixon
Marie Cosindas and John Szarkowski
Joe Deal
Diana Gaston

ABOVE IMAGE: John Pfahl, copyright Bill Jay

Edward Winkleman, art dealer and owner of Winkleman Gallery, has an incredibly active blog. Not only does he thoughtfully blog almost every day, but he usually generates 100+ comments.

Edward’s honest and frank posts gives those on the other side an incredible insight into the gallery scene and business. Bravo for transparency!

Recently, he started a weekly post, Tuesday’s Aside, in which he answers people’s gallery and career questions.

Here are some recent gems:

1.) Investing in Yourself - what to do to advance your career when you come into extra $
2.) Political Correctness - in the gallery scene and artworld
3.) Studio Visit Strategies - what to do and not to do when a gallerist or curator visits and when, how, and even if to ask for one

and finally one of my favorites, Shifting Gears: Trust the Spiral
- what do to if your signature style & subject changes

In this last post, Edward introduces a fantastic metaphor, the art spiral pictured above, and goes on to share his insights on this process. It’s such a wonderful summation of the artistic process (which so often does have an artist coming back to the same themes and ideas again and again, just parsed differently) that I will quote it in full. Enjoy!

Anonymous you note: “I know the direction I’m (already) moving in, which is quite different.” In my experience, though, the direction most artists are moving in only seems different for a while. Here’s a simplified version of how I imagine most artists’ journeys/interests (as opposed to careers) would look if charted. [see above]

The spiral is the path I see/hear about repeatedly in studio visits. Obviously there are many more spokes to this spiral, different subjects that reemerge from time to time, points along the path where you adopt the influence or return to a subject (marked with the red asterisks) and others when some idea/subject/concern occurs to you but you press on ignoring it (where the spiral crosses a spoke but there is no asterisk).

I find this image useful, though, when I recognize during a studio visit that an artist has “returned” to an idea or introduced something that might seem entirely new until I see much older work and realize that for many artists they keep returning to the same ideas again and again, only with more insight/ experience than the last time. At such junctures, certain ideas might seem to be threatening what you’ve built perhaps because it’s been a while since Subject A was part of your practice/ consciousness. You might have dropped it off at one asterisk. But generally it’s radiating through your overall practice all the while. If you need it again, you can pick it up and use it.

An artist I showed this diagram to the other day suggested it’s actually much more complex than this. Rather than one two-dimensional spiral, each artist’s journey is actually a three-dimensional series of multiple interwoven spirals, and the intersections are not always so chronological. I suspect he’s right, but the whole point of illustrating this is to note that I don’t think dealers (or anyone else) should associate changes in an artist’s practice with a lack of seriousness. Not if they’re taking a long-term view.

It may not be easy even for the artist, at the point marked “Today,” to see how it’s all related (and how a drastic change in medium or practice will later be combined with other more thoroughly examined spokes and bring one’s audience back round). Personally I think what seem like dramatic shifts are OK so long as the artist has interesting ideas, is rigorous about exploring them, and has a solid studio practice. It will all come together again, and probably be much more interesting for pushing further out along the spiral, rather than sticking in one spot along it.

Do they include any from this excellent list of 10 songs with photographic themes courtesy of Photo Shelter’s most excellent Shoot the Blog?

Besides Outkast’s Hey Ya! and their iconic “shake it like a Polaroid picture” chorus, what else, pun intended, develops? (Be sure to also check out the above post’s comment section for even more photo songs and photo punniness.)

A mix of such tunes might just be the perfect soundtrack for the next PRC PhotoSLAM!  What do you think?

While you contemplate, you can listen to Jack Jackson’s F-Stop Blues!

Above is just one of the many images featured on the hilarious blog photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com. Check back daily and be sure to browse their older posts, accessible at the bottom of the page. Do give yourself enough time to browse, you’ll be sucked in!

Below is their ode to post modernism that accompanies the above classic from Mexico’s Maxim as well as their open call for erased furniture, missing belly buttons, elongated body parts, and cloning gone wild.

“By renormalizing the model’s waistline, Maxim Mexico takes a bold socio-political stance in the ongoing battle of the politics of representation, clearly referencing the oppressive reification of male-gaze heteronormative modes of synthesis in a semiotic blancmange of post-structural teakettle barbecue hatstand fishmonger.”