Two New Books

I've been pretty bad about updating this blog, and especially after reading K's blog and S's blog, I feel like I should make an effort to write more. Since I got two new books this week, I figure that's a good enough topic for now.




First up is Wolfgang Tillman's Lighter. Unfortunately, it's still sitting on the kitchen table and even still in the shrink wrap. I'm not sure how I feel about Mr. Tillman's work. Some of it I find great. For instance, I'm still deeply in love with the Concorde series of pictures. But then, there's the random disaffected youths that I can't quite get. But the book wasn't that expensive, and I can see if the disaffected youths grow on me.

Next book is Stephen Shore's A Road Trip Journal. I've been consciously playing around with my journals over the past few months, trying to figure out how I want them to "work." My biggest problem right now isn't so much that they don't look the way I want, but that the overhead of making a page is too high. I've been using InDesign to create the digital pages, and firing that up is just too much effort for the most part.

A Road Trip Journal is low tech: done in 1972, it's not clear what tech there was to use. But there is everything in it, from gas receipts, to shooting logs, and a few photographs (polaroids?). One of the things that struck me is that a good day had 16 pictures taken. These days, with digital cameras, you take 16 pictures of a single object.