Brooks Jensen, editor at Lenswork talked about the movie “Tomorrow” starring Robert Duvall in a couple of his audio commontaries on photography. If you are not listening to Brooks and you are interested in photography in any way, you’re missing out on some great stuff. Here is a synopsis of what the movie shows us:

• Good copntent can survive transition from one medium to another. “Tomorrow” translates nicely from book (William Faulkner) to play (Horton Foote) to movie (directed by Joseph Anthony). So to can a good photograph be presented as a print, in a book and on the web.
• When you are interested in a particular artist you can use Amazon, Google or IMDB to find some hidden gems. Work that might not have been commercially successful but might have great personal value to the artist and therefore shed new light on your understanding of an artist.
• We must be careful in our actions as photographers so that we don’t leave a trail of bad karma and thereby alienate people to having us in there presents.
• Finally, you should look to the best bits of your photography and develop and recycle them. Who knows what direction it might take you.

Only Brooks could get all this great material that applies to photography out of movie from the early 70’s. One thing he breifly touches on, but probably has the most impact on us today as photographers is the presents of these huge databases of photographic knowledge. Here are but a few of these as of mid 2005. I expect this will be an area that get a lot of attention in the future.

• Google
• Amazon
• Flicker
• The Internet Movie Database

Work we put on the web will follow us to our graves. This is both a curse and a blessing.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 11th, 2005 at 10:10 am and is filed under Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.