'With one eye that is closed one looks within. With the other eye that is open one looks without' - Henri Cartier-Bresson

Ben smoking - Inspired by the weirdness of Friedlander

Portrait of David's Beard. October, 2012

Emma in a shopfront on Broad St. October, 2012

Em and Suki. October, 2012

Self, taken by Em. October, 2012

Em. October, 2012

Evan Evanovitch in the Wetherspoons. October, 2012

Up until recently my engagement with photography has dwindled almost to a husk of its former self, mostly due to the discontinuation of my two primary films; Neopan 1600 and Tmax 3200. The demise of these films drove home the imminence of 'traditional' photography's extinction and left me thoroughly disenchanted with the future of the medium.-

Without edging too far into the realms of bi-polar ranting madness, I believe the hastening of photography into the digital age will only stagnate it. The ability to determine the quality of a frames content merely by shooting and shooting and shooting and shooting, combined with the inherent physical blandness of a digital photograph (unless laboriously adulterated by Photoshop) leaves the medium unchallenging and unexciting. Additionally, new and popular means of image making such as Instagram will always, at best, be able to create an unambiguously tampered snapshot; divorced by default from it's context and devoid of it's essential authenticity as a visual document...  these bullshit commodities are also used largely to produce photographs that imitate the aesthetics of a traditional photograph, such as monochrome/cross-processed/sepia etc, which illustrates a fondness for the novelty of 'vintage' photography, but a thoroughly modern rejection of the magic of its process. So what, in fact, does this leave us with? An image emptied of its very essence, taken on a whim and forgotten much the same. A testament to mankinds pursuit of convenience at the expense of things that matter - like my high-speed emulsion Tmax film.

Photography is no longer photography, how could it be now the parameters have changed so radically in the way images are made, processed and viewed?  The internet has become a veritable dumping ground for contrived, ill-executed cyber silage from an SD card, and the power of the photograph- particularly as something beautifully crafted out of a moment in time and space; a raw glimpse of reality that's tangible on a strip of light-sensitive film - will cease to be.

-Or at least that's what I was thinking right up until I started research for an essay I'm doing on Henri Cartier-Bresson. Technology will always devour tradition. It is the enemy of passionate labour, but in returning to the old masters like Bresson, the reason for which I pursue the thing in the first place, becomes clear again.

Behind the Gare St. Lazare, 1932 - Henri Cartier-Bresson