Recently I’ve been really into the BBC’s The Genius of Photography. I’ve probably watched it at least five times in the last two months. Some of my favorite parts came from Joel Meyerowitz. He’s just crazy about photography. I found this interview with him over at Too Much Chocolate from about a year ago and at the end he discusses reviewing his work for a soon to be released retrospective book.

“Then after ‘reading’ all the work you become familiar again with who you were when you were young and if you are honest, and try not to rewrite your own history to make it seem perfect, you can begin to understand the momentum that developed in your life. After that, choosing the photographs requires being open to letting your old favorites fall away, and letting lesser images, which may have been the real glue holding bodies of work together, come into the light in a new way. What I’m getting at is that the process is, after all, one of looking back from where one is now! And what you know NOW is more than you knew when you were in that moment, so you cannot be an innocent again. But finding a balance between that time of youthful discovery and the present is where the work gathers its real meaning. And that is where I am now!”

I really love this answer. I often times think of how many missed opportunities I’ve had. In so many ways I am painfully aware of the fact that I still miss too many opportunities. One of the outcomes of watching the Genius of Photography series has definitely been a desire to shoot more. Here’s to making that happen. Joel’s comments do kind of make me excited to get old, I just hope I have something to show for it when I get there.

A few weeks ago I was looking through the work of Mark Steinmetz with awe and then recently American Suburb X happened to post this summation of his work by Doug Rickard. I was drawn to Mark’s work and Doug has most definitely hit the nail on the head. A few excerpts:

“The gray that blankets the whole town, that blankets the woods, that shadows the sky, that creeps into the open areas… does this gray work its way into them or them into it? And the black tar, the rubber smells and oil stained driveways, the metal roofs and the ugly concrete porches… the dead end jobs, the tangled trees and the rotting leaves… there to reflect what exists behind the eyes or do the eyes tell the tale of these things, these places… the stories that speak from these objects.”

“The broken wills and the lost hopes, the disappearing dreams of the growing young blanketed over by the failures of the calloused common. The average man doing average dead end things and their average dead end streets. The emptiness inhabiting the empty places, the gray blanketing the living… the streets and the trash, their homes and no cash, their blocks and their dead ends.”