I'm much better in person.
I just updated the NEW section of timsoter.com and posted an edit of photos from Tuscany. All photos were shot on film with the Olympus Stylus 35mm, lo-res scans were made during the making of the 4×6 prints. I was initially concerned that by cropping them into a 6×7 ratio for the site the images would lose their initial essence, but they just became a different variation of the shot image. I especially like the crop of the opening image above. Full image below.
This is a photo composite of mine that the Clean, a long standing, well respected band from New Zealand, are using for their press. I shot it two years ago, when I managed to see them perform five days in one week - the best performance perhaps being an inadvertent private show, when I made the above photo as they warmed up for a few hours, running through songs that would be played for their three night stand at Cakeshop. David Kilgour (right) politely asked me at one point, “Uh… Tim? Would you mind not getting so close when you shoot?” I put my camera down, grateful that I had what I needed. (I needed to be physically close with my wide lens in order to get the head to toe shots that I wanted.) I stopped and just listened. And had a midday beer. A complete treat.
If you’re not familiar with the music of the Clean, Interview magazine has an interview with David and perhaps most importantly, a track from their new album, ‘Mister Pop.’ Read and listen here.
I recently shot this in Italy; a homeowner had lined up Snow White and the dwarves, equidistantly spaced on the ledge outside their hedge-lined home. I drove past it almost everyday and tried unsuccessfully to figure out why there were only five dwarves. Space constraints? A mistranslation? No matter. This photo appeals to me because it’s got a whif of humor but really plays to my interest in the photographic flattening of reality, concentrating on two-dimensional design and flat division of space through cropping and big solid blocks of color. If you squint your eyes the stone bannister forms a nice iconic T-shape placed directly inline above… Dopey, I think this is Dopey. He made the cut.
I’ve put together the edit of photos (which I am now securely calling ‘The Process’) into a small mock-up book. Please give me a call and I’ll come and show it to you.
I managed to find every negative that I was searching for… except for the print above, shot in 2001. If there was one image out of all seventy-five that I couldn’t find the neg for (for the time being anyway, I do believe that it’s just been wildly misfiled) I’m glad it’s this one; none of the other photos have people as the subject. Still this image is not out of line with the edit.
Having said that I love this image, I think it foreshadowed the national destruction of the attention span, which I think is incredibly evident today.