Who reads poetry anyway? Only other poets.
(Blake Andrews, during an interview with Bryan Formhals)
It is a strange place to be, this one where I am now. My passion and love for photographs (taking them, editing and discussing and commenting) is something in between two sides that I see …
more ...I left Bari many years ago. It is my adoptive hometown, and when I return every once in a while, I enjoy walking around aimlessly, meeting old friends, the cool breeze from the sea, rediscovering situations and places that haven’t really changed that much.
I think a lot about photography; usually random, incoherent things that I tend to forget (or more often, forget the point I was trying to make). This is an attempt to make some order. A second part is half-written. It may be published sooner or later.
portrait photographers
Are they really that good? As Bill and Jefferey often say on their show, how hard can it be to take a good photograph of George Clooney or some beautiful model?
Why do we refer to Platon, Newton, Leibovitz as some sort of geniuses because they know how to set up lights and get these professionals (whose job is looking good) to look good? Not to mention the make up artists, strobists and whatnot working for them.
more ...The world of art photography fascinates me. I especially love those who refer to themselves as “artists”, their art being typically exemplified by boring, flat, sad photos where the “artist” himself is shown with vacuous eyes, half naked, a cigarette maybe, with another sad human or animal being by his side. Or empty landscapes showing detritus and crap with not an ounce of interestingness.
I find it wildly entertaining and maddening at the same time their ability to write so much and with so many complicated words about the void their art is made of.
I love even more critics that find meaning in these empty images. It leaves me cold and a bit angry, I admit, that some of these “artists” are even able to pay their bills with this shit they (and nobody else) call “art”.
more ...Since I picked up Python a couple of years ago I have enjoyed my everyday job more and more. It’s like being thrown back to my 12-year old self playing with a ZX Spectrum or Commodore-128, when all I wanted was to create videogames or do some other stuff1; only back then I didn’t have the perseverance and the excuses that I have now.
“Excuses” is a fine word for what I do; I am assigned a task (or sometimes I go looking for one), and I see this task only as an excuse to solve the problem in a way that I see fit. So if there’s even a hint of repetition I will go and write a for-loop to do that. If I need to use a dumb-ass software that I don’t like I will write the dumb-ass piece of code myself2. Etc.
more ...A maggio scorso ho assistito a una presentazione di Francesco Cito, noto fotografo italiano. Tra i vari progetti mostrati c’era anche “Coma”, in cui raccontava, attraverso immagini piatte e struggenti, la normalità che circonda dei ragazzi entrati in coma irreversibile.
E la normalità sarebbe quella di parenti e amici …
more ...Months ago I asked the OTP community about their online reading habits. I mentioned my favourite blogs and briefly discussed my main concern which is: is online reading just a filler, sort of reading your twitter feed when you’re bored1?
Anyway, my idea is that yes, books give …
more ...Recentemente mi sono imbattuto in due cose meravigliose. La prima, una serie di foto scattate in Pakistan da un giovane, pluripremiato, fotografo, Muhammed Muheisen.
La seconda, un piccolo saggio di Marina Keegan, pieno di speranza, gioia di vivere e quel senso di fratellanza e comunità che si ha solo a …
more ...Richard Koci Hernandez made this video asking if “mobile photography has made us more reliant on tools than on our eyes”:
Sometimes you can find smart youtube comments. For example this guy wrote:
more ...Hernandez makes a valid point - the image shouldn’t be defined by the camera it’s captured …