Exactly, I learned French working in Cote d'Ivoire/Mali and from listening to west African music like Magic System etc.
The Parisians cannot stand my (now terrible) French and it's great fun to tease them with it.
17 karma · joined August 1, 2022
The Parisians cannot stand my (now terrible) French and it's great fun to tease them with it.
But only a few years later Altman has more influence and power than even Aurelius in his time.
We should all read Montaigne instead, the reflections of a man 1400 years later, isolated, considering his influence and how he lives/lived in the world.
Many of my clients advertise in glossy magazines and many of the stories I shoot go into limited-run luxury fashion magazines that sell in bookshops for >€30.
Though the industry has been changing for a long time, I knew things were different and that the cynicism had become unsustainable when very few people actually read / bought / subscribed to the magazines for which we worked. Few people believed in the product enough to support its ideal form.
Also, 600px-wide jpegs in an endless flow destroyed photography, but whatever.
Sub to:
- Economist - New Yorker - Foreign Affairs - New York Review of Books - London Review of Books
Love them all, deeply. And then use the reviews as firestarters.
After every finished project we would copy the files to a thumb drive and print the top 10-20 images at around 14" long edge >300dpi and place everything in a simple archival box.
The logic being that even if the digital copy becomes unsustainable because of interface change or degrading, you could still scan or photograph the prints.
Most analog prints you see 'digitized' on Instagram are iPhone photographs of prints laid flat. It's all a bit ridiculous.
Some great concept digital cameras (and digital mounts), but they've probably forgotten how the mirror worked.
I had a Nikon Coolscan 9000 that was the best scanner I ever had for 35mm and 120mm film. I worked professionally and would submit perfect scans to clients and retouchers that were far better than anything the labs were producing.
I bought a Pakon (Dogbowl variant) and modded an old Macbook Air to run it. It was great.
But, again and again, I found myself running up against entropy of time and software. It was always going to fail. I miss my Rolleiflex, I miss my Leica, I miss my Mamiya RZ and my Mamiya 7II. I miss film and writing shot notes in my notebook.
But the manufacturers and the labs are all going in one direction, digital, and the price of film and development is rising.
Since I've moved to Amsterdam from NYC I've looked at darkrooms/dokas but it's all too hobbyist and caught in an older era. Reluctantly, I've gone all digital and adapted my workflow to make it less painful: profiles, curves, mobile cloud syncing, batch treatments, decent historical archiving.
I've found a great digital printer and a great print shop, and now the only real issue if finding a good framer.
I have the same thing with any solitary sport. Rowing/Sculling in particular. No phones in the boat (since they're very tippy), and an hour of reasonably delicate physical activity.
The rowing movement requires a little concentration so it absorbs say 40% of the mental activity, what's leftover flows into light thinking and connection-making, without much angst.
I used to hike between the villages there and carry a $20 dumb (dual sim) that only had two numbers: my wife and my work. Even having the work number was fine because the conversations were very simple: no images, no text, just verbal exchange.
Blissful.