“While it’s certainly true that photographing unknown subjects is a privilege, I don’t claim deep intimacy or insight into the lives of those I photograph. That being said, I am committed to treating my subjects seriously. My interest is in understanding people as individuals, not the fallout of a social problem. I approach people because I’m simply curious about them. I hope the pictures of people convey some semblance of dignity, because they are precisely the type of individuals who are often wrongly perceived of as disadvantaged or outsiders. For me the picture making process has always served to prompt contact, and remove some of the indifference we have for each other — it supplies a reason for human exchange when I wouldn’t have one otherwise.”

— from Something more felt than known: a conversation with Curran Hatleberg, up at thegreatleapsideways.com

(Source: thegreatleapsideways.com)

An excellent arpeggio of magic in the park, from Antonio Xoubanova: Casa de Campo.

“What has united the vast, and diverse array of great talents who have made their work on New York city’s streets is an interest in uncovering and illuminating the peculiarities of their present moment, and doing so with whatever idiosyncratic strengths and sensitivities each individual photographer has been able to muster. The form they have given to that work brings with it a particular point of view, one that if effective can persuade us not only of the fact of what was depicted but of its necessary importance, its integrality to the particular historical moment of its expression. Straight photography has assumed this particular task in vastly differing forms for over a century, and the matter of our own particular present, of its plurality, its complexity, of its persistent threat of crisis and catastrophe, of its deep and ever widening divisions, can be made visible with stark clarity through the photographic act, even as the policies that govern that reality seem ever more blind to its nature.”

— from an essay on Paul Graham’s The Present, up here.

“34th Street_4th June 2010” © Paul Graham, from The Present

Dorothea Lange & Paul Graham.

“Antonio Xoubanova’s Casa de Campo offers itself up as an hour of strange magic spent wandering in the park – as a momentary retreat from the monotonous pressures of the city and the crumbling national economy, in favour of a little time spent ruminating on the occasionally harsh but more often graceful anachronisms of this loosely tamed and divergently used public park. The book takes unadulterated delight in the bounty of the park’s livid brightness, and marvels a little morbidly but with a deft and humorous lightness of touch at its secrets and its inscrutable shade. The organising rubric of the imagery resembles an alliterative arpeggio wherein the photographs are arranged to deliver a sense of movement, of freeness, of stillness, of shock, of revelry and of spontaneous improvisation. The repetitive changes in figure and line combine with the cinematic staging of the images on the page to deliver a bounding sense of discovery that occurs for us as readers through the pages and within the space of the park itself.”

— from An Hour of Magic Strangeness in the Park: Antonio Xoubanova’s Casa de Campo, just uploaded at thegreatleapsideways.com

“in my view montage is not an idea composed of successive shots stuck together but an idea that DERIVES from the collision between two shots that are independent of one another (the ‘dramatic’ principle). (‘Epic’ and ‘dramatic’ in relation to the methodology of form and not content or plot!!) As in Japanese hieroglyphics in which two independent ideographic characters (‘shots’) are juxtaposed and explode into a concept” - Sergei Eisenstein, in The Dramaturgy of Film Form

“53rd Street and 6th Avenue_6th May 2011” © Paul Graham, from The Present