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Around The Horn
13 January 2025
In this recurring column, we highlight a few items we've run across that don't merit a full story of their own but are interesting enough to bring to your attention. This time we look at people reading, a ski jumper, tulips, APS-C, Goldilocks, Advice for Young Artists, Teju Cole and Moneta Sleet, Jr.
- Kathryn Bromwich presents Photographs of People Reading from David Hurn's reprise of his seminal volume On Reading. "Wherever Hurn travelled as a photojournalist, he took images of people reading books, magazines and, lately, on mobile phones," she writes.
- Associated Press photographer Matthias Schrader photographed A Ski Jumper Soaring Above the Clouds. "I held the camera very flat over the snow next to the ski jump and took this photo of the young Austrian Markus Mueller with my Sony Alpha 1, a 16-35mm lens and a speed of 1/2000 at f5.6," he writes.
- In Yearning (Vase With Tulips), Harold Davis creates magic with "an improvised black background using filtered sunlight from the front and left side. I placed a white card slightly out of the frame-of-view on the right side to better balance the light on the vase."
- Thom Hogan considers The Continuing Problem of APS-C for companies. Which is, he writes, "to provide lower priced entry products they need the cost savings implicit in APS-C, but they really don't want those lower priced products to compete with the higher end and higher margin products they make." Instead, China is filling out the lens options admirably. "When the Chinese come for cameras, Japan is going to find out that they didn't build enough customer loyalty at all levels to protect themselves," he adds.
- Jim Kasson tells the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Flashes, not to mention the three tripods she tried as the three bears wandered off with their Nikon Z's and she arrived at the empty house with her "Hasselblad X2D and the 55V lens over her shoulder."
- Sophie Wright reviews Alec Soth's Advice for Young Artists. "As we learn in the (self-conducted) interview at the end of the book, this is Soth's non-verbal answer to a question he often receives from students," she writes. "It also comes as no surprise that the author of the book doesn't really feel like he has the answers, nor has he stopped asking himself questions despite a lengthy and successful career."
- In A City on Fire Can't Be Photographed, Teju Cole writes, "You don't put photographs of the Lahaina blaze or the Camp Fire on the walls of your home. Our ways of seeing are not yet adequate to our predicament." Or, as he puts it at the end, "I looked at a photograph I'd made that night. The blood-red color of the apartment building was from the light cast by the fire trucks. The pungent smoke rising above the burning apartment now looked like an innocent cloud. The photograph was intense, but it was intense like a photograph, not like a fire."
- The San Francisco Public Library will present The Photography of Moneta Sleet, Jr From Ebony Magazine on Friday at 11 a.m. The free one-hour presentation by Jehoiada Calvin, archivist at the Johnson Publishing Company Archive, will also be available on YouTube. Registration required.
More to come! Meanwhile, here's a look back. And please support our efforts...