Tuesday
Chilling and fascinating reading: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. This is a masterpiece.
They flung us there, like sand unto the reactor…At first there was disbelief, there was the sense that it was a game. But it was a real war, an atomic war. We had no idea—what’s dangerous and what’s not, what should we watch out for, and what to ignore? No one knew…Every April 26, we get together, the guys who were there. We remember how it was. You were a soldier, at war, you were necessary. We forget the bad parts and remember that. We remember that they couldn’t have made it without us. Our system, it’s a military system, essentially, and it works great in emergencies. You’re finally free there, and necessary. Freedom! And in those times the Russian shows how great he is. How unique. We’ll never be Dutch or German. And we’ll never have proper asphalt and manicured lawns. But there’ll always be plenty of heroes.
and this
Why aren’t you writing this down? What I’m saying? You only write down what you want to hear. Giving people ideas. Saying things. You need political capital, is that it? Stuff your pockets with dollars? We live here, we survive here. No one’s guilty! Show me the guilty ones! I’m for the Communists. They’ll come back and they’ll find the guilty ones. F*ck! Coming around here, writing things down.
Wednesday
Yesterday I heard a comedian quote a vaudevillian: “They only remember the home runs.”
Doubling down on this even more than before.
Modern. 16 frames per second, magic autofocus tracking, zoom lenses.
Traditional. Manual focus, composition, the decisive moment, single frame drive mode.
Those are the two beliefs. Both are true.
The best photographer will be operating in two states – using traditional creative skills to identify the best form of the photograph in front of you, then the modern technology to ensure that the frame is captured (I hate that word). And then, finally, that in the editing process that the exact as-close-to-perfect frame is selected and displayed.
Assignment: Black Lives Matter Protest
State Street
