Random: What's Wrong With This Photo?

One of the nicer/better/funnier parts of the trip was the fact that, slightly inexplicably, MD and I ended up with a Toyota Prius -- yup, the famed hybrid -- as our rental car. MD will wax poetic and weird about the drive, but I'll just mention here that on the drive back, we decided to listen to the radio; to our amusement, we appeared to have one of those satellite radio things that displayed the names of the songs as they played, as well as the type of radio station (rock, r&b, easy listening, info, miscellaneous, and i think classical). Now that you have some context, can anyone explain this to us?

This Week in Kerfuffle: The Faith Hill / Redbook Controversy

I'm still recovering from a weekend of dealing with The Drivers of the Mid-Atlantic Region, consuming questionably-named alcoholic beverages served in a weirdly-lit Korean karaoke bar and pool hall, scaring small children and the entirety of the bridal party by wrapping my legs around MD's torso during a particularly rousing dance/grind moment at the wedding, and did I already mention the Screwy Slut? So it's no surprise that I completely missed this brouhaha surrounding this month's Redbook cover photo of Faith Hill. Apparently the folks over at Jezebel obtained a pre-retouched copy of said cover photo of Little Miss Sunshine, and well ... yeah. You should check out the before/after thing they've got over at Jezebel, which shows in pretty plain detail how Photoshop -- our second favorite magician* -- appears to have shaved off 5 inches from her waist, thighs, and arms. Jezebel's got a handful of stellar moments of snark, with links available from this post here. The big kerfuffle happened today, when the Today show ran a segment on the whole matter, and even featured a roundtable discussion with their resident psychologist as well as the editor of Men's Health, where they all waxed annoying about how the media does this/that/the other in perpetuating problematic, idealized bodies as the norm to which we need to adhere (or for which we need to diet/starve/retch/etc). During the segment, Redbook editor Stacy Morrison stood her ground, saying that "In the end, they're not really photographs. They're images." One can go in so many different directions with this statement, and with the controversy in general. I feel like we all know the general critique of media/industry/etc. And if you watch the Today segment via Jezebel, you can maybe laugh at Men's Health editor David Zinczenko justifying what they do over there (basically, real men like cover models in t-shirts, and so that's all they do! Men in t-shirts! Who needs to photoshop when you have real-esque men wearing t-shirts! Christ. Whatever). No, I'm actually curious here about this notion of image. I don't think it necessarily has to do simply with new digital technologies. I mean, take a look at this photo: It's a photograph taken by famed photographer Matthew Brady during the American Civil War. While it does really show dead Confederate soldiers following a battle, it fails to acknowledge (well, how could it?) that the bodies have been moved so that they appear closer together, that the photograph has been staged. Does this constitute an image? Or is it still a photograph? Or how about these? The photograph on the left features Stalin with Soviet Commissar Nikolai Yezhov; the one on the right was retouched after Yezhov fell out of favor and was executed in 1940. Is the one on the left a photograph and the one on the right an image? Does a photograph carry some kind of inherent truth-value? Is an image always already manipulated -- or at least carry with it a skepticism about its location within 'reality'? In a previous post I discussed the collective cognitive weirdness engendered by the photoshop revolution. We have every reason to be skeptical of what we see. But this strange question of photograph or image has me a bit perplexed -- though I'm having some post-weekend-related problems really processing this fully. Is there some kind of grand theory to be generated here about the reproducibility of the photograph already carrying the seeds of its potential falsity? Or: can we say that a photograph, regardless of its Historical Moment, captures time, while an image captures what we'd like History to be? If the latter is the case (and I'm open to suggestions/criticisms/disappointed head-shaking), then what sort of History is that image of Faith Hill suggesting? Or what kind of History is Faith Hill being inscribed into? It's an image about image, sure, if we're talking about our manic obsession about bodies and appearance and our fear of aging and time as our ultimate enemy. But maybe this particular History is also about the falling away of -- for lack of a better word, and many apologies -- authenticity, or at least the desire for it. I mean, History has never necessarily been about the truth; but in a moment where one can argue that a photograph is not a photograph but an image, I wonder if we've lost our ability to construct even mildly plausible narratives about our trajectory. I mean, what sorts of visual documentation would/could we show for ourselves? Is a faux-skinny Faith Hill what we're going to leave behind as a part of our visual detritus? We've lost Commissar Yezhov, but we're keeping the peppy country singer? Great. * This man is, of course, our favorite magician. C'mon!

Meet Your Blogger: Mid-Atlantic Edition

md | the continental | philadelphia, 22 july 2007 Oh, but let's start at the beginning, shall we? Upcoming: our crazy weekend away from the city.
[md: I can assure you any activities between me and the plush frog were entirely consensual.]

Which Of These Buildings Is Not Like the Others?

Down on Avenue B, Saturday afternoon.

Photo Week: Where We Go To Stare

There are all sorts of places online that feed our ocularcentrism. Here are our favorites: [ht] * Tastespotting. A compilation of food porn, submitted by amateur photogs (with links back to their own blogs/sites). * Runs With Scissors' Looking Through and Back set on Flickr. Some great, oldskool pics of life in NYC. * nikolai_g's spacetime set on Flickr. Lovely pinhole photography that never fails to make me sigh. * The Lomographic World Archive site. Lomo cameras produce some of the most amazing photos I've ever seen. The color/light variations are otherworldly. (I gotta get me a Lomo!) [md] I am so predictable (ruins, ruins, ruins): * Dead Machinery * Urban Decay * Rural Ruin * My friend Matt's travel photography (links forthcoming) ["old columns" photo taken by Grant Edwards, from the Lomographic World Archive site (id no.70043994)]

Photo Week: Pretty Persuasion (aka the Photoshop Post)

Several years ago, I was a research assistant for a professor of American political economic history who was working on a manuscript about the 1896 Democratic National Convention. My job was to retouch a number of cartoons that appeared in newspapers at the time; scanned from microfilm, the images were dirty and inky, and so I had to clean them up by removing errant pixels -- and sometimes fill in the blanks. The scanning sometimes failed to pick up the outline of an important face; at other times, the professor wanted me to highlight parts of the cartoon that might otherwise have been obscured: that is, I sometimes had to exaggerate a face, or a building, or the presence of a bag of silver coins (it was an interesting moment in American monetary history, with myriad debates about whether gold, silver, or greenbacks should be the national currency. Fascinating stuff! Erm. Anyway....). Long story short: lots of photoshopping. The ethical questions of image manipulation in an ostensibly scholarly, historical text aside (that would require its own full week of rumination and blogging), working with photoshop for a year and a half made me a little pixel-crazy. I'd dream about using the photoshop eraser function on people. Seriously: everything started to feel like it could be reduced to -- and reconfigured by -- its constitutive pixels. I started to see everything as a possible jpeg file. It was weird. And then recently, these vacation photos entered into my life. [Click to enlarge] Reportedly taken on Whidbey Island (in Puget Sound, north of Seattle) and Bryce Canyon in Utah, I seriously thought that these photos were taken of perfectly reasonable, nice human beings standing in front of gigantic backdrops of those locations. Seriously. Look at them. I mean, I had received an email from my father shortly after he, my mother, and various aunts, uncles, and cousins had gone on this slightly oddball trip to Utah (if you know my family, you know that we do not travel well together, and not in a quirky Little Miss Sunshine sort of way); in his message, my father said something that set off various alarms, and which prompted the presumption of photo manipulation: We went on a hike. Er. Right. The mental image of my mother hiking is nearly as ludicrous as this "actual" image of her standing near the edge of the canyon that she reportedly hiked into. There's something about the way the flash is hitting her face, and the weird flatness of the canyons behind her, that scream Gift Shop to me. And as for AH, posing serenely somewhere on Whidbey Island -- the thing is, I know that he and MD actually went there. Or at least they say they did. There's a whole set of photos from the wedding they went to. And yet ... doesn't he look like he's about 100 miles away from whatever that lake/mountain scene is? Like maybe it's a bluescreen? [I am reminded, sort of stupidly, of Lost, specifically of that photograph of Desmond and Penny, where for an entire season we're led to believe that they were at some marina or harbor, when in fact the photo was taken in London, in front of a photographer's backdrop, and then we find out that it's taken moments before Desmond breaks up with Penny, and so the photo has poignancy beyond its locational fakery, and christ, anyway.....] There's also this photo on the right here, of our intrepid co-blogger, also presumably somewhere in the Puget Sound region. See what I mean? In this photo, it looks less like he's standing in front of a backdrop, but rather actually photoshopped into a real landscape. If not for the slight shadow to his left (indicating... just past noon?), I wouldn't have believed that our friend had actually left the comforting environs of his metropolis. I have no understanding of the technical explanations for why photos that aren't actually photoshopped end up looking like they were. [You can read here to learn how to check for actually photoshopped images.] But I am fascinated by this cultural moment in which, thanks to "advances in technology," we tend to assume that any photo we see has most likely been retouched one way or another. This has partly to do with our nearly hysterical interest in celebrity and its attendant proliferation of image as icon as image ad infinitum, but is related more to what I'm going to assume is a general malaise and/or beleaguered cynicism about what constitutes "the truth" these days. [It's not for nothing that Truthiness has so much currency.] We've become a society of doubters. The photos and images on probably awkward (both original and swiped) have occasionally been edited for cropping, lighting, and white balance. And the sometimes-necessary black bar over the eyes, to protect the innocent. But nothing else. I'd like to think that the intersection -- the dialectic, if you will* -- between text and image in probably awkward produces an effect whereby one medium illustrates the other, and that that interplay privileges neither text nor image. The images here are as important, as thought out, as the text, and in that sense we feel no compulsion to perform any funny/funky manipulation of the images; they should speak for themselves. We don't present photoshopped images without calling attention to their photoshoppedness. It's our job here to do the doubting (we've got skepticism in spades!) -- but in that doubting, we're also trying to get closer to something more honest, more aware. I don't know what it means then, when the devices we rely on to accurately capture our experiences begin to make those memories of real events appear constructed or false. I mean, it's good to question things; but sometimes it'd be nice to you know, not have to. My mother insists that she went on that hike, and that she got mild heat stroke from it. It's a sorry state of affairs that even with that photograph as evidence, I'll probably never believe her. Oh, Photoshop: ruining family relations one image at a time. *Tongue-in-cheek, folks.

Photo Week: Mystery!

I took this photo yesterday at the Sixth Street Community Garden, at 6th and Avenue B. I quite like it. I have no idea what kind of plant it is. Can anyone help me?

Photo Week Profile: Benjamin Tiven

I must preface this profile by saying I began writing this before reading HT's profile of Jason Oddy and decided I ought to read it before posting to ensure some sort of continuity of tone. I was struck by the similarity in subject matter but shocking difference in the reaction each evoked. When viewing the world through the lens of Benjamin Tiven, I see a world where chaos has resolved into symmetry, decay and motion has been halted, and absence no longer signifies loss. He chooses subjects (abandoned islands, forgotten fields and factories, ruins overlooking the sea) which once held life but now are still and empty. Despite this, there is not a sense of loss; the photos are at once elegiac and joyful. There is a sense that Tiven has not lost anything but has found an oasis of stillness. It is the world after Rapture -- Time has stopped, everyone has left, and Tiven has inherited the Earth. However, the photgrapher, meek, is also absent. When I view this images my mind knows that some agent shot these photos, stood in these structures, and strode on these fields. But the silence and stillness is so complete that these obvious, logical facts become unbelievable. The quiet is so absolute it seems impossible that it has been or ever will be disturbed. Tiven creates a Utopia for the agoraphobe and some hope that a world without us might not be such a bad world after all.

But more than any of this, I love these images because of how they make me feel. There is something about them that evokes a nostalgia for my rural youth, the art I tried to make in college, and inexplicably, math rock and hardcore. I see them and I hear "How Nothing Feels" and feel a longing to visit this world, if only for one frozen moment. But to invade this space would be to destroy it and in knowing that, I know loss. If anyone would like to start a "Buy MD the Governors Island series" fund, I certainly wouldn't stop you either. [check out Benjamin Tiven's work here.]

Photo Week: Meet Your Blogger (II)

ht, by md. clandestino | 12 july 2007.

Photo Week: Meet Your Blogger

md, by ht. clandestino | 12 july 2007.

Why I Photograph Food: or, A Paean To Pork Belly

Readers of probably awkward might have noticed that we revel in food consumption. It doesn’t have to be Burger Night for MD and me to talk/IM/email about places we want to try out, places we need to go back to, or even just random links to bigger/better/weirder ways to consume pork products. I can’t speak for MD, but I’ll confess that I think about food constantly. Around 9am I think about where I might have lunch (if it’s a weekday, most likely somewhere terrible and chain-like; I work next to Port Authority); by 3pm on any given day I know what I’m doing for dinner. And it’s generally not about hunger. It’s about the pure pleasure of thinking about what sorts of food I’m going to put down my gullet. Accompanying this perhaps off-kilter obsession with food is an OCD-like need to photograph nearly everything I’m about to consume. To be sure, I don’t take pictures of my morning bagel, or my noontime sorry excuse for a salad, or anything I prepare in my tiny Manhattan kitchen (since it’s usually a bachelorette’s dinner of soy-protein-products, to balance out the ridiculous levels of meat and cholesterol I ingest when I’m dining out). But put a plate of hot food in front of me, and there’s a good chance I’ll whip out the Lumix and snap away. I’ve embarrassed dozens of friends and family members this way; since I never use flash, I figure that I’m not really interrupting any other table’s dining experience; I’ve never been asked to put my camera away. It’s become something along the lines of second nature to me at this point. Why do I do this? It’s partly out of a post-graduate-student nervous-tic sort of thing, to continue to document and archive my daily life. And it’s partly out of sheer technological ease: I probably wouldn’t do this with a regular film camera. But I do it mainly because I love food, and I want to remember all the good (and bad) things I’ve eaten. The visual component to food cannot be denied; plating and presentation at a reasonably decent restaurant are carefully-thought-out processes; at some places, it’s something of an art form. But even more fundamentally: food itself can be an art form. Even at places that just dole out the hot noodles with Taylorist efficiency, the interplay of textures and colors makes for something really quite lovely; the visual experience adds another dimension, another layer of depth and complexity, to an oftentimes already wonderful and sensual unfolding. And a photograph can capture that in a way that the other senses can only do ephemerally. Truth be told, my rather profound love of food – both eating and photographing it – is no doubt in part me overcompensating for what I (un)lovingly think of as the lost years: a combination of questionable dining hall fare in college, minimal meat consumption, and then, in my early grad school years, what I’ll euphemistically refer to as an aversion to ingesting fat. Or calories. The road back from my slightly antagonistic relationship to food took a while (and not made much easier by living in the middle of nowhere – sorry, Ithaca), but I’m pretty happy that I finally got to a place where I can’t stop thinking about when/where/how I’m going to eat pork belly again. In that regard, my taking pictures of food is something of a badge of honor – a daily reminder/reflection of finally being in a place, literally and mentally, where the pleasures of food can be experienced in so many – and such lasting – ways.

Forbidden Spice -- Beckham on Beckham

HT takes great pride that we're not a filter blog, but I think everyone needs to see the unhealthy and unholy effect Posh Spice/Victoria Beckham has had on David Beckham: At the beginning: Today: More Images Here [md: I just realized this post is about photos. I am pleased to be back on topic.] [ht adds: victoria beckham is an alien. an alien that makes me very, very uncomfortable. her push-up breasts scare the bejesus out of me.]

Photo Week Profile: Jason Oddy

Other than a few nights in which I've found myself looking intently but defeatedly at the half-empty glass of whiskey in front of me, I've been staring almost exclusively at Jason Oddy's photographs for the past two weeks. GNF first introduced me to his work a couple of years ago, and I had a brief email exchange with him regarding a photograph that I wanted very much to have in my possession. The image was of a rundown Soviet-era sanatorium, taken from inside the window of another sanatorium building; part of an entire series of photographs featured in a 2001 issue of Metropolis documenting Soviet sanatoria now falling into ruin, the photograph grabbed me immediately and fully in its interweaving of textures, colors, content, and elegiac, (false) memory-filled faraway-ness. Although the price tag was way above my then-graduate-student means (even with a friend-of-friend-discount), I haven't stopped dreaming idly about the image, and about Oddy's oeuvre in general. Now that I've found his website, I can't help but continually scroll through the images and sigh pretty much nonstop. Oddy's work has taken him inside not only empty Soviet sanatoria, but also the UN headquarters in Geneva, Guantanamo Bay, the Pentagon, even the cluttered, unraveled homes of the recently deceased . Looking through his photographs, one is immediately struck by the absence of people -- of faces, movement, exchange -- of what we might understand or register as life. At the same time, these aren't landscape photos, or even photographs of places. Rather, these images compel a direct viewing of these spaces as place, as space constructed by and for humans, for life. And as such, they speak to the ways that space comes together to create, reflect, and perpetuate 'culture' in all the ways we might know and/or experience it. In his site, Oddy writes that "In the photographs .... I have treated architectural space as a cultural artefact, one which not only reflects but which also seeks to create historical reality." Seen in this way, the photographs feel less cold or removed than they seem stripped down to the basic questions of how space (or rather, the overt, conspicuous configuration of that space) dictates how we interact in those realms. And, across different projects, we can see overlaps in design -- how ideologies, regardless of content, similarly seek to impose order on its subjects, most fundamentally through the ways that the spaces they occupy compel specific kinds of interactions and daily exchanges. How ideologies, essentially, prescribe social relations. I could write about how Oddy's photographs are elegantly minimalist in their composition and colors, or how it just might be the case that he finds those spaces as-is, and simply has an amazing eye for capturing power or order, or its seeming absence, in their starkest, most essential states (and I do believe it's the case that both are true with regard to Oddy's talent). But there's something else at work here, something that makes these photographs entirely Oddy's, but also entirely ours, too .... And I think it has to do with the familiarity of it all, how we can imagine the kinds of relations determined these spatial configurations. How these settings bring power to life -- literally, but also figuratively, in the sense that they call our attention to the potency of architecture itself, and how we need not be in hallowed halls of multinational authority in order to experience the potency of constructed , designed space. The photographs depict, at heart, narratives of power, and how power in turn narrates the past, present, and future, in sometimes overt ways and in other instances through much more subtle channels. How it doesn't have to feel like power in order for you to be caught within it, organized by it. How power doesn't have to be an insidious, evil, demon-like cephalopod, its tentacles reaching everywhere, to nonetheless be present. And how that presence is immediately felt through its architectural manifestations. To be sure, I'm no Foucauldian, lets-intervene-in-the-ways-that-power-becomes- institutionalized-and-ritualized-in-daily-life sort of acolyte or anything. I don't think Oddy photographed these realms with a mind to present them as an immediate, always-already sort of critique of space and power. What is intriguing about Oddy's work is that in spite of its minimal, stark colors and tonal contrasts, there's still this strange nuance, this quiet trace, that one can find in all of these spaces. Their familiarity might have something to do with this feeling that, however removed they are from our own experiences, we can nonetheless sense that lived-in-ness. People become who they are in, through, and by these spaces, for better or for worse. I was already deeply in love with Oddy's oeuvre before I read his artist's statement, and well, that's when I nearly lost my shit. Near the end of his statement, Oddy quotes my favorite line from Sebald, the thing* about how grand buildings already speak to their inevitable decay. (I love that line. My dissertation would be nothing without that line.) Oddy then remarks: "A number of the places I have photographed represent some of mankind's most far-reaching attempts to systematise the world. Yet here as nowhere else we see how all such attempts are inscribed with their own failure. Hubris makes us reach for Utopia. Reality, in the guise of time, sends us back ruins." Oddy's Waiting Rooms series documents not ruins in the conventional, Roman-Empire-esque sense of the word, but rather the unraveling of architecture over time, an unraveling experienced on an individual level, but a ruin all the same. These spaces are not the endpoint of architecture -- I don't think that Oddy is necessarily suggesting through these photographs that all space comes to the same end, or that it comes to an end at all, or that we should look upon them as the future of, say, the Palace of Nations or the Pentagon. I think, rather, the contrast is between the attempt to systematise and the reality of living, of what it means to inhabit a space: the ruin is not in the decay but rather in the attempt at order itself; the endpoint of Utopia is the return to daily life. In the case of the Waiting Rooms series, depicting the cluttered spaces of the recently-deceased, that daily life continues: notice the depressions in the sofa cushions from years of wear, or the knick-knacks on the mantle, no doubt the accumulation of presents, souvenirs, and mementos over a long period. These objects reflect and inform our everyday existence, and become an integral part of what defines, for each of us, 'place.' There is little difference, in that sense then, between the painting of the fighter jet in the Pentagon conference room and the framed collage of photographs perched on the mantle. What stories do we want our spaces to tell? What kinds of narratives influence, and are then perpetuated by, current architecture and design? Oddy's photographs have got me thinking. A lot. But even more fundamentally, they've got me sighing. And, truth be told, desiring. I mean, these are spectacular photographs. If anyone would like to start a "Get HT That Sanatorium Photograph" fund, I wouldn't stop you. Ahem. * "...for somehow we know by instinct that outsized buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins." [check out Jason Oddy's work here. Seesaw magazine also did a piece, Seats of Power, compiling his photographs of chairs and sitting areas.]

My Favorite Photos (or: Memory, Ruins, etc.)

For many years I took photos almost exclusively with an old Nikon FE that my father bequeathed to me once he had upgraded -- or rather, retro-graded -- to his original love, a Pentax K-1000, which had been a replacement for his first Pentax, stolen several years earlier. I still love my Nikon FE. Manufactured in the late 70's/early80s, it's a sturdy SLR, a camera's camera, with proper metal parts and a nice, but not unmanageable, heft. Some of my best photos were taken with that camera, including the one above, of Jimmy and Ian, cousins (to each other -- not me!) who live on the tiny island of Islay, off the western coast of Scotland and home to the best scotch on the planet. One rainy morning, while waiting for the bus in tiny Port Ellen to take me to the island's wee capital, Bowmore, Ian (the bespectacled one) and I struck up a conversation: Ian: What are you waiting for? Me: The bus to Bowmore. Ian. Ah. Me: What are you waiting for? Ian: Eleven o'clock. Me: What happens at eleven? Ian: [points down the street] Pub opens. The next thing I knew, Ian had convinced me to take the 12:30 bus and in the meanwhile join him and his cousin Jimmy at the local pub. There, at eleven in the morning, about a dozen men were already sitting at little tables drinking wee glasses of vodka+lemonade. Ian ordered me a whisky. I protested, pointing out that it was, well, before noon. Ian's response: Ah, it'll set you straight for the day! I haven't been the same person since. In late November 2005, I received a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX9 as a dissertation-completion gift from NM and AFN. The gift came as a wonderful surprise, as did its digital-ness -- I had been cautiously avoiding entering into the world of digital photography, partly out of "real film" loyalty, and partly because I honestly had no idea which camera to buy. But, presented with the lovely Lumix -- with a Leica lens, no less -- well, there I suddenly was: nearly technologically at pace with the rest of the world. Finally. I celebrated by sleeping with an ex who was visiting from out of town, and then accompanying him the next day to Fort Totten, an old, Civil War-era military installation near Bayside, Queens that's still occasionally used by the Army and Coast Guard for training drills. [There's a Fort Totten park that's open to the public, but the base itself is fenced off -- email me if you want info on how to get in.] 18 hours after receiving my first (and only) digital camera, and some 8 hours after rolling out of bed with an ex, I took this photograph: It's probably the best photo I've taken with my Lumix (click on image to enlarge). I'll leave it up to you to make some quip about exes and decay. It is perhaps no surprise that my favorite two photographs involve whisky and ruins. But in thinking about Photo Week, I realized that what I loved about taking those photos was not simply in the capturing, but also in the possibility of sharing them. I'm trying to avoid some hokey conclusion about photography and community, but I will say that as we seem to get inundated with more -- and faster -- means of collecting and processing information, it's nice to sometimes slow down and just kind of ... stare ... at the image you might have in front of you. The best photographs require you to take them in a bit -- so we here at probably awkward hope that you'll join us in slowing down, sitting back, and taking some time away (er... for the most part) from our usual pomp and snark. Back to our regularly-scheduled ironic vs. irate cagematch as soon as this heat wave is over.

This Week in Awkward: Photo Week

There are many things HT and I have in common: a love of red meat, an appreciation of a good ruin, and a hatred of... well, pretty much everything else. But one thing truly unites us: Both HT and I utterly lack depth perception. Pitching, hitting, catching, horseshoes -- these things are all lost on us. I believe this might be one reason for our love of photography. The world is already flat and out of focus for us, and a camera lets us find the third dimension with a low f-stop and narrow depth of field. Diopters make the world a little less fuzzy. Perhaps most importantly, cameras give us one more excuse to step outside the moment, pin it like a butterfly and analyze it later at our leisure. This week is devoted to our love of photography and the moving and still image: HT will discuss one of her favorite photographers from a critical theory perspective, and I'll be addressing another camera jockey from my more visceral perspective. Then HT and I will share our favorite image sources on the web and I'll be writing a love letter to my new camera. Oh, Nikon D40x I love you so. [ht adds: We've had a soft opening of sorts for a couple of weeks now, but with Photo Week, we'd like to officially introduce you to our Picasa slideshow (situated on the sidebar to the right). It's got photos of just about everything we've seen/eaten/smirked at since we started the blog. Enjoy!]