A little experiment. Photo taken with my Iphone, altered with the iRetouch app, filtered with CameraBag.

Notes on Visual Acoustics (see them bigger)

The architectural photographer Julius Shulman died last week. Meg and I had the good fortune to see a documentary about his life, Visual Acoustics, a few months back at the Blanton in Austin. I took notes in the dark, and then threw this little map together.

Meg (the architecture scholar) and I had quite a good conversation about Shulman’s work, and what happens when you represent a building with a photograph–when you take a 3-D experience like a building and reduce it to a 2-D piece of film. (There was a funny bit in the film when someone mentioned that to sell Modernism it has to be seen in 1-point perspective.)

My favorite part of the whole film was when Shulman said, “The camera is the least important part of photography.”

It’s not the tools, it’s the thinking.

KEY:

1. Southern Ohio Sunset snapped from the back seat of a Honda moving at 60mph
2. Rainbow and powerwashing equipment in Montreal
3. The Mueller control tower at Christmas
4. Playground in our neighborhood
5. My teeth x-rays: taken during a tortuous dental appointment
6. Jonathan Meiburg, Thor Harris, and Bill Callahan (smog) rehearsing at The Mohawk
7. A chair at Clementine coffee shop
8. Automusik at Maker Faire
9. Pimp Mon Char – seen on TV in Montreal
10. Me at Maker Faire

“I never refused when he wanted to take a picture,” said Eleanor Callahan, the 91-year-old widow of the photographer Harry Callahan. “I never complained, whatever I was doing. If he said: ‘Come quick, Eleanor — there’s a good light,’ I was right there.”

The artistic fruit of their 63-year marriage is on view in “Harry Callahan: Eleanor,” an exhibition at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Until Callahan’s death in 1999, she was his most constant and compliant subject, posing for countless portraits, figure studies and nudes.