l e n s c r a t c h
One of the photography twitter accounts I follow linked to a lenscratch post a few months ago, I liked what I read and so I subscribed to it. I didn't realise at the time that it had been listed in Source's 10 photography-related blogs you should read list but it is definitely a worthy entrant into that list.
What I like about reading lenscratch, is that it puts me in mind of the experience of visiting The Photographers' Gallery in London. When visiting the gallery, there may be a headline exhibition going on, but there are also plenty of alternative exhibitions too, by photographers I may never have heard of, of subjects I've never considered working with. This is what I like about lenscratch. Pretty much every post features someone I've never heard of, and presents their work in a Photographer's gallery style - highlighting a couple of their projects, displaying text from the photographer about their work, and showing a sample of the photographs.
The Artist's Gallery: California Open Exhibition and Sky Bergman is an example of one such post, specifically the Sky Bergman bit, focussing on photographs of Japanese commuters. It appeals to my sense of the everyday, the fact that a single photograph doesn't tell you much, but when you put a collection of them together you start getting an idea of the interaction of people on the underground, of the different kind of people you may see, etc. Explained much better at lenscratch as
I became fascinated by the interaction of the people on the Japanese subway system. There are few places in the world where one’s income, marital status, race, and interests bare no consequence to the person sitting next to them. One exception, however, is of those individuals on a subway. The Japanese people have created a society that heavily relies on public transportation as opposed to being a culture of cars. Social rank is not implied by your means of transportation. The young, the old, the rich, and the poor, sit next to each other, share each other’s space, and occasionally glimpse into each other’s lives
I'm enjoying the concept of a collection of everyday photos at the moment, something which is probably obvious from my current project choice of "Out of place". Having just read the chapter on "Everyday subjects" in Lomokev's new book 52 Photographic Projects I was pleased to see the sentence "At times single images aren't very strong, but with lots of them they become greater than the sum of their parts" which sums up pretty exactly what my motivation is.
Back to lenscratch, it is one of the few blogs that I take my time reading, I don't skim read it as I do with many others, I savour it, usually choosing to save the experience for a weekend when I have the time to enjoy it the most. Give it a try. But, before you go, what other photography related blogs should I be savouring?