Author: JH

As the year is coming to its end, I see that everyone is thanking their readers. And does photo book roundups of 2007 (I haven’t seen one of those yet that wasn’t entirely hopeless).

I am not in a Christmassy mood––instead I look forward to spending part of my holidays in a hotel room in Baltimore, writing lucid code to keep Notes From Nowhere and jenshaas.com running (or rather, copying and pasting open source code from all over the web and trying to make it work, and being grumpy until it does) and attending a philosophy conference on the side. Oh well.

If there was one book worth buying in the past year, it was this one, and 88 of you did buy it already (thanks!). And *I do appreciate* that you come here, desperately cruising the art blogs, like I do, for some assurance that you have not wasted your life entirely.

New year’s resolutions? Sleep with the right curators. Trust me, regardless of what you do, this works in every field.

In this spirit––on to 2008…

I’ve gone digital in 2002, so like almost everybody else I have to make up my mind: what to do with all those images from the time before that? One project that I did back then, which fell victim to giving up film, was a ‘dog project’ that I had just started in 2001. Digital so far just hasn’t been that suitable for true point and shoot photography, at least not when compared to the forgiveness of color negative film. This is only now starting to change, with cameras like the Canon 40D (more on my latest camera choices here).

The good news is that, with almost everybody using a digital camera now, demand for the scanning of film has gone down quite a bit. Hence one can rent entire scan stations, including a high end Imacon scanner, a computer and a professional monitor, for relatively little money. Plus, the increasingly sophisticated Photoshop plugins that originally were made to remove noise from digital cameras can be used for correcting digital artifacts in scans as well. Even scans from color negative film, which has been notoriously ill suited for high end scanning, can be made to look really nice now.

So, the remaining question for me is this: do I really want to look at my old work? Some of it seems pretty lame to me today. And even those images that I kind of like, such as these two, feel a little odd, perhaps simply because now I would make them rather differently. But in a sense I think I *want* a little history included in my current work, so I’ll use part of the winter break for some scanning.

Lately my favorite answer to the inevitable party-question, “so, what then do you photograph?”, used to be: “Things and objects.” This intricate distinction was introduced to me by a professor working in meta-ethics. I had asked her how *she* would describe my ‘sujets’ (well, this kind of refined French language was introduced by her, not by me…). Her answer––”things and objects”––has grown on me (if you are into such stuff, a more technical view, from another philosopher, on the distinction between things and objects, made it into what was probably the least digestible piece ever published on this blog: “Life Was Hairy Before Epilady”, here).

Today the above book came out in North America, graced by a cover photo that I took in Italy a couple of years ago. Last night, at a dinner conversation about the new book, I was introduced to a new category: “Your images are about the structure of the universe.” Sounds good enough to me.