Three States of Awareness

cool pic dude!

Cool Comment, Dude

 

John

Great composition. A perfect, orderly and selective rectangle.

Happiness for your great gallery

your title I consider inadequate. Excellent composition, nice tonal range. I like the granularity of your picture. So much potential in this picture that you spoiled with a bad title. Please, try again.

John what a pleasure to see a humble-- and I mean it in the best sense-- photo, instead of the constant parade of overwrought, dramatic, overcontrasted bilge that seems to be our lot on PN. I sometimes wifh there was a self-destruct button built into every digital camera that snapped more than one boat on a beach, crashing wave on a sashore, or crumbling European building sitting in some poor, goverment-subsidized farmer's field. Maybe a bit of Semptex-inspired Pavlovian conditioning would teach the apparently unteachable to think before they snap..

 

Back to this, I have little to add beyond acknowledging this as a lifetime keeper. Tony Ray-Jones and his couple near the bucolic field comes to mind, doesn't it? Wonderful stuff.

Andy

Thank you for your kind comment. Felicitations.

 

John

Thank you for your kind comments about this photo -- it seemed like a trifle to me at the time -- now it seems more worthy, especially after the critiques I have received.

 

About your critique about the caption, however. I have written for over 35 years and part of that was spent writing photo captions very successfully.

 

And another part was spent with very aged people and people with disabilities and the two often intersected, and the aged often wondered if they would go to sleep and awake in the morning at all, much less with all their faculties intact.

 

So, I projected that for this man with a cane, sitting in a lobby of his S.R.O. hotel, sitting there with his mouth open was a personal triumph -- one more day (and night) successfully achieved without the arrival of his constant pursuer -- death or total incapacity, which haunts all old people. After all, old people read the obituaries first, you know.

 

If you can improve the caption, other than 'Three old people in a hotel lobby', please let me know.

 

John

Andy,

 

You know, except for my duties as a 'critic' of some photos that need attention, I pay little attention to the 'top-rated photos' on Photo.net, and do spend a lot of time studying and critiquing my own (and the few that come to my attention through a group of friends).

 

You might, however, take a look through the photos that I have chosen as 'top-rated' in the gallery of those photos, as I think it is a breath of fresh air for the most part and may be what you are looking for.

 

This was always meant to be a capture of a 'slice of life' and I was unsure of posting it to Photo.net,,but its immediate and immense popularity shows that PN has a collective consciousness and awareness of quality that goes beyond what you may consider to be its collective poor taste.

 

I wish I could take a thousand such photos, but if I did today, they might only become popular 35 years from now, as this one probably had to wait until now to see its limelight.

 

But it speaks well for the PN audience to acknowledge this (along with those oversaturated beach and boats and destroyed government buildings next to subsidized farmland you write of)

 

By the way, I am not aware so much of other artists in this field, and do not know the work you refer to and would appreciate a link to it, the photo by Tony Ray-Jones

 

I think the lesson of this posting, is that the PN audience takes what it can, and that the members (--see the members' logos next to the raters on this photo?)-- do recognize quality work, and they will rate it and comment on it when they see it, but it's not everybody or every circumstance that will be able to produce such work.

 

However, I fear not producing work that today will receive ratings of 4s and 4.5s and posting them just because I like them - often portraits, because I think they're good, rather than try to best the beached boat shots that should be appearing in travel magazine covers.

 

Thank you for your fine comment.

 

John

Thank you so much for making note of your visit and your happiness with this photo. It did not go unremarked.

 

John ;~))

I note your remark and your visit. Thank you elsewhere for comparing me to Doisneau and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

 

I have many things to say to you -- all of them kind of course -- and am saving up my thoughts.

 

In the meantime, best wishes.

 

John

 

 

This one is just----------hilarious! Do I have to feel sorry for that? Anyway, I LOVE it!

Good one John. The 3 characters and their expressions work so well. Their placement within the frame is excellent

We all have our guilty pleasures . . . no need to feel sorry . . . or guilty for your own pleasure or your hilariousness.

 

I'm glad you enjoyed it.

 

Every photo is subjective.

 

The surrealist, Henry Cartier-Bresson took a famous photo of a boy in Valencia, Spain passing a wall and looking upward in seeming wonderous gaze at the cloud or something but he was just looking at a ball he'd bounced. Who knew? The perception is the thing, not the story, as H C-B knew, which is why his photos almost were never captioned, except by the stories that accompanied them written by others, or by a date and a place.

 

You can write your own story for this one.

 

John

 

I'm very glad you enjoyed this one; I especially appreciate comments from discerning photographers, and you are one. I especially enjoyed a trip through your 'highest rated' gallery -- it often gives me a good idea of a photographer's taste, and you have exquisitely good taste.

 

John

One thing about this triangle that really grabs me is the different levels of alertness. I see the sleeper as (what else?) subnormally alert, the gent by the elevator as normally alert, and the prim lady as exceptionally alert, as she reaches into her handbag for her pistol to dispatch the whippersnapper with the camera. Fabulous, classy image.

I always was aware (or superaware) when I had a camera that subjects were 'touchy' about being photographed and very sensitive about it, sort of like stealing their images. I find that Henri Cartier-Bresson's phrase and book title 'The Decisive Moment' in English, translates from the French, 'Images A La Sauvette' which means 'Images On the Run' or more coloquially 'Stolen Images' How's that for a thought?

 

Addendum May 3, 2005. Later reading reveals that Cartier-Bresson did indeed use the French words for 'le moment decisif' which suffers possibly from wrong gender and from lack of proper accents due to my lacking a French keyboard on my word computer. In any case, the book in France was titled 'Images a la Sauvette' -- Images on the Run or Stolen Images, which is very descriptive of what street photographers do. jsc

 

John

neat shot, John..

You're one of the few whose opinion truly, (yes very truly) does matter for me. Others' opinions also count and very much also, but yours has very much extra weight, backed up by a huge body of outstanding work.

 

Thanks again.

 

John

A SRO means Single Room Occupancy. It consists of what once was an old hotel or rooming house that did not have modern plumbing, except for a sink or basin in each room and a bathroom down the hallway.

 

One man I heard speak of such things today, an owner who had 26 such units said they rent for $135 a week for a basic room with a basin today x 4.33 = $584 /month or enough most on Social Security in San Francisco could live in one, barely. He has 26 units or 26 x 584 = $15,198 for a monthly rent roll, but he must have a resident manager, a maintenance person, and pay all utilities, taxes, etc., for a big overhead (but he's only 35 and the price of any real property in San Francisco can only go up).

 

And, of course, one knows that the basin is a substitute for a toilet, unless one is 'very delicate' and refuses to recognize reality, especially for men.

 

In fact, when I was a youth, every family had what they called a 'thundermug' at their bedside in older houses without personal bathrooms -- simply metal or ceramic pots into which one urinated if one woke up at night and which slid under the bed for delicacy and were emptied in the morning. Those have slipped mostly into obscurity these days, but they were very big in the '40s and '50s among the older people - those who were born in the previous century and who grew up in the early half of the 1900s.

 

This was a SRO, and undoubtedly, at the time, the rent was more likely $85 to $100 a month, if that, in San Francisco, which even then was considered a 'very high priced city'.

 

I worked there for union wages determined by Wire Service Guild and left a high paying job to work for Associated Press, and the guy whose job I left (trading securities said 'Kid, what are they gonna pay you someday, a grand a month?' and he was right, for they paid me $135 week to start, but I doubled that easily with overtime -- and didn't have to cheat anybody which is what the securities company's salespeople, I later figured out, were doing on a regular basis (I hadn' figured it out then, but they were doing 'pump and dump' on nursing home stocks and salesmen of this prestitious Montgomery Street firm would stick their heads in the trading room and brag 'you can't guess who I drumped 'x' stock on!!!' showing no disregard for the welfare of the customer.

 

And that attitude pervaded the securities industry as I knew it, which is why I got out of the securities industry after a short time in it and three tries, including as a securities analyst -- no one cared one good go. . da . n about the welfare of the customer to whom a fiduciary duty was owed . . . . to pick them appropriate securities or help the customer make appropriate choices . . . the firms guided the customers to make what made the biggest commission for the firm consistent with not getting the firm fined, license lost of the salesmen thrown in jail. End of story.

 

The story continues today, except for the good work of the SEC and New York's attorney general Elliot Spitzer who is doing an excellent job at policing various industries which have an affect on the finance industries, including brokerage, insurance and, I think, banking.

 

John

I just really, really love this photo and was, in fact, the first photo I ever opened from your thumbnails. "The Decisive Moment," phenomonal composition and that special elusive quality that seperates good photos from great photos. This IS a great photo and up up there with the best.

What can I say, but that so many Photonetters agree with your taste -- just look at the number of ratings and views. I hardly thought it would get 4s when I posted it, but it was 'special' to me and represented a special period in my life and was emblematic of a certain era.

 

Looking at another photo you commented on, I can only say that you have chosen well what to comment on - my best works.

 

Thank you so much.

 

John

Sad and funny at the same time. I had once almost the same scene in my viewfinder. Didn't click though out of pure sense of modesty..

I have many times had that 'sense of modesty' you have written about and indeed it may be one reason I gave up photography for so many years -- the feeling that somehow I was 'stealing' other people's privacy and their images at the same time.

 

Somehow in the intervening years, however, as your home country (Russia I presuppose) has given up the Soviet ghost and come to grips with its nuclear arsenal, but now has gotten a little pushy with its control of natural gas with Ukraine, then Belarus and as a show of power, with all of Western Europe which depends on Russian gas, and with American and multinational corporations and the U.S. military-industrial complex being so 'aggressive' trying to separate everybody from the fruits of their labor -- trying so hard to push, push, push everybody into giving up a little more, be it a soldier's life, a few more dollars for a charge at a bank that once was free, a meal on an airline that once was free, etc., I have come to grips that somehow the 'intrusiveness' of my camera is relatively minor compared to the indignities people suffer every day.

 

Plus, I also have had a revelation: I do NOT add to those indignities. I celebrate life and the people of this world. (See the comments in my portfolio about just that subject, if you will). I celebrate the dignity (and indignities) of mankind -- the ones he goes through every day.

 

The above photo is just one of those. I supposed it was intrusive when I took it, and that as a 23-year-old photographer, I was stepping into some private domain (the single room occupancy hotel of these older people) and felt I was somehow intruding).

 

But in the process, somehow I have celebrated them, by placing them not only in a worthy work of art, but also by immortalizing their day-to-day travail in a dignified manner.

 

I no longer feel the 'intrusiveness' guilt that I once felt. Maybe it's because I once practiced law for the better part of two decades, and was privy to the most private parts of people's lives, having read their medical records; their suicide attempts, talked to them about their abortions and how they felt, visited them in the hospital when they had severe depresssion and had wished and/or tried to kill themselves, so that somehow the mere preserving of a moment on media (film or sensor) no longer takes on the importance (read intrusiveness) it once did, so I am not afraid to fire my camera at almost anything that promises a good photo, and it is a rare person who seems me without one or two cameras (Good images just seem to 'fly into my lenses', it seems, because I have a knack for getting around where people are, do, or behave strangely or unusually, or just an eye for stopping and immortalizing those moments where the rest of you folks avert your eyes and walk quickly by.

 

Maybe that's why I've been so successful at something few are successful at.

 

Konstantin, you're a good photographer (excellent in fact), so don't let a case of the 'guilts' stop you from bringing home first class people photographs, but you may need some 'aging' (I don't know your age/experience in life). I did need that, and now I have it, and now I photograph guilt free. I identify with being a photographer.

 

The only drawback: Today I'm in Los Angeles with large lenses and the paparazzi have given people with long lenses a bad name -- people automatically assume somehow I'm paparazzo; I'm not and think that most of them are scum.

 

(And yes, I do look through the National Enquirer from time to time, but I don't sell to them and would never stalk a celebrity. In fact, until recently, I lived down the road/beach from one of the homes of Tom Cruise/Nicole Kidman when they were together, and I never once thought of trying to photograph them, though it might have alleviated some financial needs of mine. It's just something that I don't/won't do.

 

(Beautiful models, on the other hand, are a temptation -- photographically speaking).

 

By the way yesterday, I met a neophyte Ukrainian photographer (female) of stunning ability who needs a digital camera (Nikon). She's in Ukraine using a borrowed Nikon D50 with simply amazing results and she needs something to use for her own. I promised I'd try to help her. If anyone has any suggestions or offers of help, please e-mail me at johncrosley (@) photo.net It's little known but in Russia, roughly 60% of the young women share maybe one or two sweaters in the winter with momma, they're mostly so poor, according to someone I know who until recently has done just that, and another who still does that. (One Russian young woman and one Ukrainian young woman).

 

A camera and lens (Nikon D70 perhaps - older model even) would send this young prodigy into elation. She currently shoots for a model agency. Yes, they let her shoot all their stuff after only three months behind the viewfinder, because she's stunningly talented. But she's tied down also by them, and a gift -- whole or partial -- of a camera/lens (she knows Nikon, but Canon would work), would bring joyfulness beyond recognition. I could handle the details.

 

(I doubt if she even gets paid, or if she gets paid, she gets a dollar or so a day in pay probably -- and I can't say exactly where she shoots for fear of endangering her 'job', but if anyone writes me, I can explain.)

 

I'd love to hear from anyone who can help.

 

In the meantime, Konstantin, go for it! Russians will beg you to take their photos if they know you can do a good job. Share your digital captures with them and they'll beg for more. Don't keep your photographing them a secret -- wear it large and proudly. Some people always will look down on you, but most will want to share your fame -- to rub up against someone famous -- it might as well be you, and you'll have an Internet portfolio to show them (just tell them to look you up in Google.com (ru) when you have climbed to the top of Google.'s rankings. It's instant validation. ;~)

 

John (Crosley)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

than excellent!

So much, Janis.

 

This sat around for years, with the foreground carpet 'semi-blown from too much window light' before a little darkroom magic transformed it. PN is its first exhibition or 'seeing' by anyone -- an undiscovered personal treasure I didn't even recognize.

 

And when I say 'years', I actually mean decades -- lots of them,

 

John (Crosley)