{"id":508,"date":"2008-12-26T10:30:04","date_gmt":"2008-12-26T10:30:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=508"},"modified":"2008-12-26T10:30:04","modified_gmt":"2008-12-26T10:30:04","slug":"a-christmas-message-and-a-small-milestone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=508","title":{"rendered":"A Christmas Message and a small Milestone"},"content":{"rendered":"

Forget Ahmadinejad<\/em> and the Queen<\/em>. My Christmas message came in the early hours of Christmas morning. Santa and his elves were busy working overtime with the fairy dust and a small present came floating into my mind as I woke to roll drowsy out of bed to empty my bladder at 3am, and after completing the necessary I sat down with paper and pencil to record it. Unusually for such night-time notes it remained legible and made some sense when I found it again in the morning.<\/p>\n

A few months back I got myself involved in one of those long and essentially pointless discussions on internet forums that I usually stay clear of, which I think had started with the question “what is a photograph<\/em>“, although as such things do soon strayed off into other areas (at least one per participant.) I’d contributed Walker Evans’<\/em>s quote from the text for a show at MoMA in the early 1950s about valid photography “Under no circumstances is it anything ever anywhere near a beach” <\/em>(which I had put on >Re:PHOTO<\/em><\/a> a few months earlier<\/p>\n

However it’s perhaps more relevant that on Christmas Eve I had been thinking about Minor White<\/em>, both in writing my Seasonal Greetings<\/a><\/em> and also leafing through the latest Winter 2008 issue of Aperture<\/em>, which on its final inside page has a feature by Anne Wilkes Tucker<\/em> on what she truly describes as a “seminal gathering<\/em>” at the Aspen Institute in 1951, which is accompanied by a group photograph of just over 20 or those taking part. This high-powered crew included Wayne Miller, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Berenice Abbott, Frederick Sommer, Nancy<\/em> and Beaumont Newhall, Herbert Bayer, Eliot Porter, Minor White, Ferenc Berko<\/em> and Laura Gilpin<\/em>. The event led to both the founding of Aperture<\/em>, with Minor White<\/em> as editor and moving spirit and also the genesis of the Society for Photographic Education<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Aperture <\/a>has now reached issue 193 (as a subscriber for many years I now have well over a hundred issues on my bookshelves) and published many fine books and editions. I wrote a double feature on its history at the time of its 50th anniversary (another piece no longer on line – but perhaps to be rewritten to come out at the same time as issue 200?)<\/p>\n

So here (at last) is my little present, a kind of definition of worthwhile photography:<\/p>\n

The simultaneous exposure of two sensitive surfaces – one in the camera and the other in the photographer’s mind<\/em>.<\/big><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u0092m always wary about milestones. It\u0092s a word too close to millstones, which though perhaps notable for grit also hang round necks. But I do note that a few days ago I wrote my 500th post to this blog.<\/p>\n

Also, looking at the statistics from my web host (which I seldom do,) I find that with a few days left, >Re:PHOTO<\/em> is getting very close to 500,000 page views for 2008, though unless there is a sudden surge it won\u0092t quite reach the half a million this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Forget Ahmadinejad and the Queen. My Christmas message came in the early hours of Christmas morning. Santa and his elves were busy working overtime with the fairy dust and a small present came floating into my mind as I woke to roll drowsy out of bed to empty my bladder at 3am, and after completing … Continue reading A Christmas Message and a small Milestone<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-own-work","category-photo-issues","category-photographers"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}