the molitor collaboration

Forget what I said in previous posts. I may still have some sympathies for Laroque and Simpson and Johnston but I have reached a place where there are no more photographic heroes for me on the web.

Unless you count Andrew Molitor, of course¹.

There are so many wonderful ideas on his blog, and once you start reading you realize what’s missing from the internet these days; the excitement that I still remember from the days when the web was young, when you could discover brilliance without the taint of money-making.

He makes fun of all the mediocre photographers which do workshops and proposes his own version; he destroys these pretentious and useless attempts at explaining “composition”; he proposes one exercise that may be the only thing that a wannabe-photographer ought to learn; he rants against Ming Thein with a mixture of viciousness and affection; and he writes some very true things about the current crop of boring and over-the-top photography that are all the rage these days.

And finally he writes stuff like this which hit me in the head:

He has drained the life out of the thing he pointed the camera at.

Now this is something I do not ever want to do.

the collaboration project

So I like how the guy thinks. Last January, he launched a collaboration project: I was in.

There was a theme but I did not see it (really). You could say I have overlooked the theme thing because deep in me I knew I could not follow any theme. I took the opportunity to force myself to go out and shoot something else entirely from my usual family photos.

But I did things differently this time. I sat down and tried to conceive a plan for these photographs, as opposed to just go out and shoot things that I happen to see. The plan was something different from following a “theme”; at first I just thought of some geometric forms that I could find and join or refer to in different photographs; a simple line which could be a lamppost in one frame which flows organically into a a trail path, and so on. I also decided that I had to do arrange my shots into short vertical sequences; a landscape of some sort made up by 3 or 4 photos on top of one another. Or something like that.

After a month of shooting (which reduced to a few hours in total grabbing my camera on my way to work or to the shops) I sat down and tried to make these juxtaposition.

I could not find lines or shapes or make satisfying landscapes so the end results morphed in something else, more freeform and experimental. I think the following may work better if printed small and physically arranged on a cardboard, but for now they just live here on this blog. If you are using a small screen try zooming out a little to get more than one photo at once on the screen.

sequenza #1

sequenza #2

sequenza #3

sequenza #4

sequenza #5

sequenza #6