flower portraits and photographs of childhood

dear subjects,

apologies for the lack of postage this week, but i will say that there is an exciting theme week in the works... more on that next week. until then, a few thoughts:

a while back, everyone was posting about Colin Pantall's Sofa Portraits of his daughter (which turned out to be--oddly, to me--controversial). i just saw on Colin's blog that he's working on a new series of his daughter interacting with flowers. the image below is lovely. the photographs i have seen so far are much much more sentimental than the Sofa Portraits. but i really do think that they are hitting on the same themes at heart about interior life, and observing children while they are turned inward. a few more are here.


he also posted a discussion about children as subjects of controversy (and more) between Sally Mann and filmaker Steven Cantor, who made the documentary "What Remains" about Mann. you can check it out over here.

p.s. wow. Alec Soth's blog archives are really gone.

famous photographers without websites: goldin, dijkstra, and mann

continuing the theme of photographers without websites, i thought i would point out just a few of the famous portrait photographers without official sites.

Nan Goldin is the mother to an entire generation of photographers inspired by her confessional, frank, self-chronicling approach to color photography. i'm not surprised that she doesn't have a website, but it's a shame that there isn't an amazing archive of her work available online. though maybe her work is best viewed in her great books, like the Ballad of Sexual Dependency... the photo on the left, of her ex-girlfriend Siobhan, is one of my favorites of hers. there's an interesting article about her here, in which she says of her subjects: "People feel that I'm narcissistic, voyeuristic or vicarious. Or they say I make the viewer vicarious. But I don't think so. I show my people in their full strength, staring back at you. They're not victimised by you. They're not objectified by you."

Rineke Dijkstra is another major fine art portraitist without a website, as Colin Pantall pointed out in the comments. as Colin said, and as is true for the other photographers in this category, she just doesn't need a website.

Image Makers, Image Takers has a cool interview with Dijkstra, available online where she talks about really concrete and practical stuff, from how she chooses subjects to whether she thinks photographers have to be technologically proficient...

Sally Mann is another one. i don't think a website is quite her style. luckily there are already some great resources about her work online, including videos from her episode of the show Art 21 and a small collection of YouTube videos... at left is one of Subjectify's all-time favorite subjects, Miss Jessie Mann.