Bryan Formhals Blog - Latest Comments

Re: The View From the Balcony

maycee — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 00:31:36 -0000

nice post!

Re: A Year And Change In New York

Wes — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 15:04:32 -0000

Oh, I miss it sometimes (especially when I see all the photo events and shows each week) but then it's 80 degrees here and I go to the beach and all is good.

"Live in New York City once, but explicitly leave before it makes you hard; momentarily live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft."

Re: A Photograph Living in No Man’s Land

bformhals — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 00:29:32 -0000

Thanks Jaime. Great quote. I love Mr. Adams.

These outliers really bother me because I feel the message they are sending is the strongest. Kind of like a kick in the ass that forces you to look in other directions.

Troubling, but but worth paying attention to, and I think that's the key...

Good luck with those negs :)

Re: A Photograph Living in No Man’s Land

fishtownlarry — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 00:00:22 -0000

Todd Hido references them as orphans which I think is a very fitting name. I too go through this problem, particularly now, because I have been restructuring (organizing, cataloging, then digitizing) the majority of my negatives (about 450 neg sheets to date), from daily things that I have photographed since 8 years ago.

It then leaves me in a place where I can't decide what they about. I can't label it. I can just tell people, its what I find along the way.

Its like this Robert Adams quote

"No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film."

Re: New BW Project Teaser

Gustaf — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 07:59:46 -0000

I really like that last one. Looking forward to see more.

Re: New BW Project Teaser

No — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 01:23:19 -0000

Excellent post, I'm looking forward to see the rest of your project.

Re: New Year, New Project

tomleininger — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 14:20:31 -0000

It will be interesting to see where this work will go. Black and white has been percolating in my head for a while now too. Baffling is a good description of it.

Re: Merry Happy Holiday

Watch Movies Online — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 20:33:38 -0000

Happy Hollyday to all :)

Re: Merry Happy Holiday

Andy — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 11:39:31 -0000

Rah. A good move, indeed. Merry Christmas, friend.

Re: Street photography, NYC

Missy — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:59:47 -0000

I like the ones with fewer people. Folks seem to do their own thing more when they have space. The streets themselves also have more presence. Have you seen this guy's stuff? He captures a street's character well.

Re: Backdrifts: Re-evaluating a Project

Scott Symes — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:34:14 -0000

This is good insight into the never ending editing process. It is also a much more eloquent way of describing my frustration with a fixed photography project than I could have ever put together myself. Those projects have never worked for me.

To do this long-term, very organic type of editing, I need to become more comfortable with my evolving shooting style, not to mention the potential huge changes in medium (color, black & white, film, digital, saturated, low contrast, etc...) That can be tough for me but I'm getting better at it. Looking at fewer traditional 'fine art' books helps since they are nearly always extremely consistent in those areas from beginning to end.

Re: A few thoughts & Chapter One: Friday, July 26, 2002

bformhals — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 13:05:44 -0000

Yes, and it's really a new format, so people haven't really mastered it yet. In the future I think people will be much more thoughtful about it because they'll realize that these status updates and Tweets are their digital autobiographies. It's really fascinating. Would be great to be an anthropologist in the future.

For me, it's just a good exercise in understanding memory and the creative process.

Re: A few thoughts & Chapter One: Friday, July 26, 2002

Andy — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 12:58:36 -0000

I have been thinking about exactly how the Tweets and Updates comprise our miniature autobiographies and started looking at how to get all of my updates since joining Facebook just this morning. Before I read your post. Great minds.

Re: Entering the wilderness of portraiture

Chris Norris — Fri, 15 May 2009 23:25:26 -0000

Well, we'd love to see you over at Verities and Balderdash. I have a similar interest and struggle right now. As usual, you articulate it much better than I have.

Re: The Great New Photography Collective That You’ll Never Hear About

Lara Wechsler — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:38:30 -0000

Same thing happened to me, it is tough, mine would have been way way easier too then yours. All I wanted to do was get a group of 4 native NYC photogs together to put together a prospectus for submission as a group show to galleries all over NYC. They were 4 photographers I picked who I really really liked their work and we meet once in real life (IRL if you will) and everyone was into it, but no one really wanted to do any of the work, and it does require some work. I started to do some of it, did a group statement and sent it around, but I at least needed each photog to send me about 10 - 20 photos along with their own statements. That in itself was touch enough, I just didn't feel like pulling teeth so I gave up which meant all the rest of the people, well I don't know if I can say they gave up exactly, but just nothing happened. They most of them were older then me mostly with families, full time jobs and lives, one was basically homeless at the time also with a family separated from them at that time, it is tough, really tough, I just wanted to be in a show with them. If I had done everything, like meaning wrote their statements, paid for their prints and framing, then sure it probably could have happened but too much mola for me to do that alone.

Re: The Great New Photography Collective That You’ll Never Hear About

devilmangod — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 21:10:37 -0000

Funny, not being a part of blinding but hearing about it made me really excited about the prospects. I also did have some ideas as to how the website could be developed with less money (ie. developing outside the US and Europe). Reading this delivers a crushing blow to me. However I firmly believe that if its fallen apart this easily, it was not meant to be. I'm sure this isnt the end of it. Something better will resurface and things will be on the road again; or not. Either way, things have a way of working itself out. The most important thing is to keep those gloves up and come back out of that corner, punching!

Re: The Great New Photography Collective That You’ll Never Hear About

dan — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 21:21:04 -0000

damn, good post bryan.

Re: Curating 2.0, A Moveable Feast

brayn — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 18:33:47 -0000

Thanks. you're probably right. for now I'm avoiding using the term in reference to my personal activities. probably purely to protect myself from the scorn of respectable photography curators. I'm sure Jorg Coldberg would have a problem with it :)

Re: Curating 2.0, A Moveable Feast

Gareth — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 04:05:18 -0000

Interesting quotation, and post. I'm not sure we're so far away from the "original meaning" of the word when we talk about curation of material, photographic or otherwise, on the internet. Whether one talks about the internet as simply an ether in which information is held, or as an entity itself - a vast museum, or library - the people putting things into particular boxes, particular areas (Delicious bookmark lists, Last.fm "listened to" library's, Flickr favourite 'streams) are, in the original sense of the word, taking care of, looking after, something. And of course, the acts themselves may not be intended as "curation", and the things "curated" may be largely meaningless to some, or even to many; but viewed from outside, viewed by people from another planet watching what we do, watching us with "intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic", it is going to appear that we are all, in our way, organising the incredible quantity of information that surrounds us. And we would, no doubt, for better or for worse, look like so many millions of ants moving and arranging the twigs and stones that surround their hill.

Re: Photographic Subject Matter During the New Depression

brayn — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 21:17:04 -0000

Thanks for the thoughtful comment Brian. Perhaps the photographs of empty malls, storefronts and foreclosed suburbs might eventually tell us something other than we assume now. I think there's no doubt that history will judge this time as a period of obvious hardship but perhaps also a period of great transformation. Not sure if you've seen the article in The Atlantic but it's certainly illuminating.

How the Crash Will Reshape America

"The places that thrive today are those with the highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative people, the highest rate of metabolism. Velocity and density are not words that many people use when describing the suburbs. The economy is driven by key urban areas; a different geography is required."

"What will this geography look like? It will likely be sparser in the Midwest and also, ultimately, in those parts of the Southeast that are dependent on manufacturing. Its suburbs will be thinner and its houses, perhaps, smaller. Some of its southwestern cities will grow less quickly. Its great mega-regions will rise farther upward and extend farther outward. It will feature a lower rate of homeownership, and a more mobile population of renters. In short, it will be a more concentrated geography, one that allows more people to mix more freely and interact more efficiently in a discrete number of dense, innovative mega-regions and creative cities. Serendipitously, it will be a landscape suited to a world in which petroleum is no longer cheap by any measure. But most of all, it will be a landscape that can accommodate and accelerate invention, innovation, and creation—the activities in which the U.S. still holds a big competitive advantage."

Re: Photographic Subject Matter During the New Depression

Brian Ulrich — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 19:43:26 -0000

Bryan, nice post and glad to see you're pondering this further than the obvious. I do think
a bunch of photographs of empty malls, storefronts and foreclosed homes might be actually quite telling but no one has really seen the photographs so that'll be the real proof. On that note though I think it may do well to look further back historically to how photographs have rendered our moments, both personal and social. Even down to advertising we certainly are transformed by pictures. Photography since it's beginnings has acted so well as propaganda, in fact with the sublimation of photography into a digital age, it's easier for photographs to act as propaganda than ever since the content can always be informed and is harder to be ambiguous.

Re: Eating BBQ in Richmond

michael Simon — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:41:06 -0000

I just saw this! I grew up in Richmond. This is right down the street from the Greyhound station. Bill's is a Richmond institution.

Re: Why NYC? Let’s go back to 2004 – Part 2

dan — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 02:45:34 -0000

ah, walter :D

Re: Why NYC? Let’s go back to 2004 – Part 2

brayn — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 23:31:52 -0000

well, you'd need to tell me which benjamin you're talking about before I can roll my eyes :) my references to writing on photography are rather meager....which maybe a good thing...

Re: Why NYC? Let’s go back to 2004 – Part 2

dan — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 21:10:30 -0000

got into my first 'groove' of shooting since moving yesterday, it came while i was just walking around my area with only a loose destination in mind.

maybe you will roll your eyes but benjamin has a lot about the flaneur. i havent read sontag yet but i'm 95% sure she's using it from him.