Author: JH

There is a reason why June is considered off season in the Alps. I remember looking up a hotel on the web a couple of years ago, near the Mont Blanc. Their fancy booking system indicated that rooms were available. When we arrived, it turned out that the hotel was closed for the entire month – and so were all hotels in the area… apparently, to them this was so obvious that they did not even post it on their website. But the good part of all this is that *if* you find a hotel that is open, there are certainly no crowds, and the weather is changing every hour, which makes for interesting photographs.

I think I’ve been to more exhibitions of Stephen Shore’s work over the past ten years than of any other photographer. But that was purely accidental – I am not all that interested in the staged approach of his more recent work. And I do not find an image interesting simply because it was made with a large format camera. However, I’ve never seen the reasoning behind using large format laid out better than in this interview. Of course, to achieve the effect Shore talks about, today you can use a high resolution digital camera of considerably smaller format as well – still, much of what is being said in the interview sounds convincing to me.

[See an update here.]

I remember working on the final edit of a book of photographs from a group of designers a couple of years ago, and at some point the book-designer buried his face in his hands and and asked, “what is it with designers taking pictures of rusty traffic signs?” Well, not only designers do that. This one from earlier today – guilty as charged…