You are such a breath of fresh air. You are bridging the gap between the exclusive and ambiguous fine art photography world and the internet. There's so much content produced about the craft of photography and very little about the art. Your experience and knowledge is so valuable. I wish other institutions would make this kind of work feel as approachable as you do. I know your videos take time and money to produce and it's difficult to measure if it's worth it. Just know that I've started buying photo books again and will be buying your Magnum course.
Alec, these videos are a gift to the photographic community. It's so great that you are taking your desire to educate into a more democratic space instead of confining your knowledge to academic institutions. Keep going, and thank you!
I was born in 1991 and this video is the first time I've heard of the existence of photo 'books' on CDs. Incredible! Thanks also to introducing the 2 books, I'd love to look through them one day.
First time ever I responded on "something youtube".... I am telling a lot of people about this channel (A LOT!). It is so great and so lovely. What a joy. T H A N K Y O U !
This hits so close to home. My grandpa has been organizing our family pictures into "Family Chronicle" DVDs, each spanning a few months at a time, for nearly two decades at this point. All with the belief that they will be readable well into the future.
Hey Alec! Thank you for making this amazing video! It turns out that there is an English version of "I photograph to remember" however, we had not uploaded it to our channel until a few months ago. You can watch the English version in this link ua-cam.com/video/pozw0qLajnk/v-deo.html
I worked for a book publisher in the '90s, specifically on CD-ROM titles. We were adding audio, animation and video to reference-type books. It was fun while it lasted. One of the many problems was that there was nowhere to sell them. They didn't fit comfortably in either bookshops nor computer stores. Another big problem was that people didn't want to buy them.
Thank you for these videos. I get so turned off by photography when its referred to in gimmicky and overly technical ways. There is so much more and it brings me joy to spend an afternoon listening to you reflect
Photo books obviously remain for their ability to be possessed. So they give the opportunity to be more personally invested. I'm now collecting them as I used to collect comics, reading them again and again, enriching my inside world. Sorry to hear that you won't make videos for a while, but happy to think that you could make a new book. Have nice journey!
That's exactly the reason I photograph stuff which is truly to my heart with film, as long as you keep the negative you'll always have a way to see it.
See HISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA, Godard's magisterial, 4.5hr film, which took ten years to complete. It's obviously "about" cinema, but its real subject is the language of cinema as a language of ideas and Godard's brilliant, idiosyncratic thinking inside the history of cinema is a solid exploration of consciousness itself. It's startling, and it's a colossus of sound, text, image collage.
Not trying to self promote or anything, but I tried to do exactly that a while ago.. if you wish to see it its on my youtube page. I dont think it works well on youtube but more in a space where it can be projected in a space with preferable dimension. In that sense, a digital slideshow can definitely work but it has to deal with quite some restrictions and you don't have any control whether the viewer is watching on their phone or on their home cinema.
@@ttposthumus My favourite implementation has been a horizontal scrolling gallery that triggers audio when you scroll to certain points for the first time.
Thank you for another great video. Technology, both hardware or software - and digging down on the latest: social networks, in particular, are great to narrow the distance between people with similar tastes or interests in life; but at the same time are not so good as an enclosing memory. Visual artifacts are not the only memory that exists, even though we memorize mostly images, but also other senses. Paper is more than a carrier of visual content. It's tactile, there's a smell of ink, glue, sometimes even fabric or other materials. Properties that a soulless media doesn't have. It won't carry all properties, but a good book will be able to suggest the missing senses, I think. I do appreciate your love for Photography.
You are absolutely right. Back then I started to build CD roms with an app called Macromedia Director and distributed my pictures on them with audio and video segments. Today I am back in the darkroom and develop 9x12 sheet film to contact the images on 40 years old agfa paper.
Thank you so much @alecsoth for these videos. Thank you for sharing the passion and creative spirit you bring to the photo book. Reading IS a creative act and these photo books and your approach of reading them is greatly appreciated. I realized today, watching this one, that the your videos bring pure joy when they drop. Thank you.
Love the works you talk about When you talk about family and photography I can't stop thinking of Doug Bubois book "All the days and nights" And the family portrait of Lee Friedlander Thank you for the video, it's really nice to see the world from your perspective. As a art student in Belgium, I really treasure what you're doing here Thank you again !
Another thank you for this series. It’s been incredibly enlightening, insightful, and inspiring. It’s helped remind me that there’s more to photography that what’s popular on Instagram. And that chasing what gets likes isn’t the same thing as making art.
Thanks Alec! Incredibly important topic for discussion. The medium is the message. There's no denying digital communication will continue to change the way human beings relate to images. I have a take on this, and I could be completely out to left field but here goes :) The book is still king...for purists...for now. I remember buying my daughter a Kindle many years ago, as a convenient alternative to the printed book. She tried the kindle but almost immediately pushed it aside - any serious reading for her happens through the printed book. There is something to it still. As with Pedro Meyer's CD exploration, I believe storytelling is what matters in any new striking way we can tell it - in order to get the attention, captivate, provoke an audience. If our work is to appeal to other human beings, then I believe we must put aside the romanticism of the tangible printed book as so vital and necessary, and look to the future. I do love books myself, but what's next, new and different? Looks to me Alec that you are using the YT space; combining the richness of video, audio, images, graphics, the written word, to communicate strong ideas. Curious how this medium fits into your journey as an artist?
thank you very much for these videos, i recommend them widely to my photography students! i especially like the fact that one can watch you thinking, this makes everything you say and show very tangible and vivid.
Getting presented pictures and words through CD or Videos you got that feeling to be taken by the hand of the photographer. So he accompanies you on your journey through his pictures and memories. When you read and see a book, you are all by yourself - not better or worse but different.
Really appreciate your making these videos: always so thoughtful and literally encouraging.....conveying an attitude that supports the courage to trust in making honest work. Sorry, the series may pause or end soon!
Just wanted to reach out from Sweden and say that I find incredible value from your videos. I love this format, and to walk a bit on the way together with your thoughts inspires me to a great extent. I take pictures to remember every day, and they are greatly underlined by the reflections you inspire.
Thoughtful and thought provoking, as always. Thanks so much for these wonderful nuggets. Definitely a valuable discussion as digital/software eats up more and more and VR is on our doorstep.
@@AlecSothUA-cam True. Yet since covid and remote working, the investment from tech on connecting through VR has taken off again, so this might be the catalyst. VR is also one of the reasons people justify NFTs as a valuable commodity, where I can enter your virtual space and see your art. Yet, even in this context I personally don’t see it surpassing the book for the reasons you mentioned. At best it’s likely another way of hosting a slideshow like on the CD.
Hello Alec, could I request a segment on Trent Parke's book Minutes to Midnight. I noticed that you are singled out for thanks by Trent (along with Jim Goldberg, Mark Power and Donovan Wylie), and thought you might be able to provide some interesting insights. Thank you.
It's funny re CD-ROM, a lot of artists took them seriously - the great Chris Marker embraced it. My mother gave me a gift one year of the then entire extant National Geographic catalogue in a nice boxset, all on CD-ROM. I assume they are longer accessible. Haha.
I want physical copies of books because Amazon or the publisher can decide at any time to pull your digital copy of it down permanently. I’ve lost movies and music, that I bought, this way. I was someone who embraced “owning” digital everything years ago, but the reality is that you own nothing digital, you’re only renting it at the pleasure of large corporations.
This is such a topical video. We now have the NFT (non-fungible token) craze happening and it's just like the 90's CD-ROM wave all over again. The fact remains that you can reach for a photo book from your shelf, sit in a comfy chair and be entertained for an hour. Try that with an NFT.
Of course, we can see photography on the screen. But several things change. The images are conditioned and restricted to the size of the screen. Also to the resolution. The quality of the screen, color, saturation, contrast, brightness. Screen reflection, etc. All the photos can pass through a screen and none are there. On paper, on each sheet, a photograph. This provides a feeling and a sense of permanence, memory and archival that the screen does not have. A sense of belonging, each photograph its sheet of paper. We know that when we turn the page, the photograph we have been looking at, remains on that page. We have this sense of presence. This sense of presence (yet) does not happen on a screen. Curiously, the screen is closer to the photograph, to the photo - graphica. It's light. But light, as we know, has no supporting surface. It has no body. It is everywhere and nowhere. Travel between bodies, between objects, reflected. Reflecting the characteristics of these bodies, which allows us to see. But, more than a photograph on a sheet of paper in a book, a photograph on a "photographic paper" - that is, a photograph, itself - further intensifies this feeling of memory, of archiving. Because, in some way, it adds the idea of original, of "first". Even if it is not the only one (copy). It is not by chance that the two books you present are of son who photograph (memorize) their parents. They are the "seconds" that try to "grab" the "first ones".
Most consumers of images today that are non-professionals and who are not working in multi-media will view their content on smartphone or tablet screens that are by now kinda uniform by default in their characteristic and "quality." At least better than how it was before in the '80s-'90s with home computers and all kinds of potential crappy calibrated screens and monitors. If you're communicating on paper, you're always speaking to a specific audience.
3 роки тому
@@phiswe Yes it's true, but ... most image consumers have always been non-professionals. Today mobile phone and tablet screens are better than screens from the 90s and will be worse than screens from the 30s. But uniform screens? I don't think so. In size? But that will not be the issue. The question is, when you are studying Picasso's Guernica in an art history book (and it is there in a book that we all study art - pro or amateur - and now by tablet or mobile phone), when you see and come across the Guernica painting live in front of you, with that scale ... no screen, never. At the same time, what is "a specific audience"? How many millions of people have seen the Mona Lisa at the Louvre and have actually passed just in front of it? I read somewhere, I don't remember in detail, but MOMA said that visitors spent an average of ten seconds in front of a work of art. Imagine that someone takes a minute. There are visitors who do not take a second to admire a work. What is a "specific audience" today. (Has anyone heard your favorite band more often live than on recording? But you probably remember moments from the concert you attended and you will hardly remember moments from listening to the recording.) There is a basic problem here. When you see a painting in a book or screen, you are looking at a photograph of that painting. This is acquired in your mind. When you see a photography in a book or screen, you don't even remember that you are not looking at the photography, but a "picture" of the photography. It is a substitute. An ersatz. For painting and for photography. But here we have a question, a problem for photography, a characteristic of photography. A sheet of paper in a book or a screen belongs to the same "habitat" as an "original" photograph on its paper. (sorry for my english).
@ If we’re honest, most books live a quiet and closed live sitting on shelves. Digital images are luckier in a way, even though they too eventually become lost in a sea of noise and silence.
I love how these just drop out of the blue and straight away it's a "stop whatever you're doing and watch"
You are such a breath of fresh air. You are bridging the gap between the exclusive and ambiguous fine art photography world and the internet. There's so much content produced about the craft of photography and very little about the art. Your experience and knowledge is so valuable. I wish other institutions would make this kind of work feel as approachable as you do. I know your videos take time and money to produce and it's difficult to measure if it's worth it. Just know that I've started buying photo books again and will be buying your Magnum course.
Hey Alec, please don’t stop making these videos, they’re great!
Alec, these videos are a gift to the photographic community. It's so great that you are taking your desire to educate into a more democratic space instead of confining your knowledge to academic institutions. Keep going, and thank you!
I was born in 1991 and this video is the first time I've heard of the existence of photo 'books' on CDs. Incredible! Thanks also to introducing the 2 books, I'd love to look through them one day.
Some of us are missing your contributions. Cheers, Luca.
First time ever I responded on "something youtube".... I am telling a lot of people about this channel (A LOT!). It is so great and so lovely. What a joy. T H A N K Y O U !
This hits so close to home. My grandpa has been organizing our family pictures into "Family Chronicle" DVDs, each spanning a few months at a time, for nearly two decades at this point. All with the belief that they will be readable well into the future.
I'll always remeber your talk at MMAM in Winona. Thanks so much for this video series!
Hey Alec! Thank you for making this amazing video! It turns out that there is an English version of "I photograph to remember" however, we had not uploaded it to our channel until a few months ago.
You can watch the English version in this link ua-cam.com/video/pozw0qLajnk/v-deo.html
I worked for a book publisher in the '90s, specifically on CD-ROM titles. We were adding audio, animation and video to reference-type books. It was fun while it lasted. One of the many problems was that there was nowhere to sell them. They didn't fit comfortably in either bookshops nor computer stores. Another big problem was that people didn't want to buy them.
Thank you Alec...looking forward to seeing along the road.
The only thing that rivals with your book collection, it’s your hat collection. Pure fire.
agree
I have the english version, I show it to my class every year. I was at uni when it first came out
Thank you for these videos. I get so turned off by photography when its referred to in gimmicky and overly technical ways. There is so much more and it brings me joy to spend an afternoon listening to you reflect
Thanks Alec for share your time and knowledge to ours.
Photo books obviously remain for their ability to be possessed. So they give the opportunity to be more personally invested. I'm now collecting them as I used to collect comics, reading them again and again, enriching my inside world.
Sorry to hear that you won't make videos for a while, but happy to think that you could make a new book. Have nice journey!
That's exactly the reason I photograph stuff which is truly to my heart with film, as long as you keep the negative you'll always have a way to see it.
One avenue I wish was explored more digitally is the mixture of audio clips and still images.
They can work together well
See HISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA, Godard's magisterial, 4.5hr film, which took ten years to complete. It's obviously "about" cinema, but its real subject is the language of cinema as a language of ideas and Godard's brilliant, idiosyncratic thinking inside the history of cinema is a solid exploration of consciousness itself. It's startling, and it's a colossus of sound, text, image collage.
Not trying to self promote or anything, but I tried to do exactly that a while ago.. if you wish to see it its on my youtube page. I dont think it works well on youtube but more in a space where it can be projected in a space with preferable dimension. In that sense, a digital slideshow can definitely work but it has to deal with quite some restrictions and you don't have any control whether the viewer is watching on their phone or on their home cinema.
@@ttposthumus My favourite implementation has been a horizontal scrolling gallery that triggers audio when you scroll to certain points for the first time.
Thank you for another great video.
Technology, both hardware or software - and digging down on the latest: social networks, in particular, are great to narrow the distance between people with similar tastes or interests in life; but at the same time are not so good as an enclosing memory. Visual artifacts are not the only memory that exists, even though we memorize mostly images, but also other senses.
Paper is more than a carrier of visual content. It's tactile, there's a smell of ink, glue, sometimes even fabric or other materials. Properties that a soulless media doesn't have.
It won't carry all properties, but a good book will be able to suggest the missing senses, I think.
I do appreciate your love for Photography.
You are absolutely right. Back then I started to build CD roms with an app called Macromedia Director and distributed my pictures on them with audio and video segments. Today I am back in the darkroom and develop 9x12 sheet film to contact the images on 40 years old agfa paper.
Two of my favorite projects! So nice to see them discussed together.
Your videos are my favorite part of UA-cam. Thank you and have a good time creating memories.
Thank you! Best wishes in your next adventures in photographing and remembering!
Thank you so much @alecsoth for these videos. Thank you for sharing the passion and creative spirit you bring to the photo book. Reading IS a creative act and these photo books and your approach of reading them is greatly appreciated. I realized today, watching this one, that the your videos bring pure joy when they drop. Thank you.
So thoughtful and insightful, yet again. Thank you Alec
Love the works you talk about
When you talk about family and photography I can't stop thinking of Doug Bubois book "All the days and nights"
And the family portrait of Lee Friedlander
Thank you for the video, it's really nice to see the world from your perspective.
As a art student in Belgium, I really treasure what you're doing here
Thank you again !
Another thank you for this series. It’s been incredibly enlightening, insightful, and inspiring. It’s helped remind me that there’s more to photography that what’s popular on Instagram. And that chasing what gets likes isn’t the same thing as making art.
Alec, I enjoy your VLOG so much! Thank you
Alec - more videos please, love them
Hi Alec - I'll say it again, thank you. I like these videos very much - you show me new things and put them in context. Thank you.
Thanks Alec! Incredibly important topic for discussion. The medium is the message.
There's no denying digital communication will continue to change the way human beings relate to images.
I have a take on this, and I could be completely out to left field but here goes :)
The book is still king...for purists...for now. I remember buying my daughter a Kindle many years ago, as a convenient alternative to the printed book. She tried the kindle but almost immediately pushed it aside - any serious reading for her happens through the printed book. There is something to it still.
As with Pedro Meyer's CD exploration, I believe storytelling is what matters in any new striking way we can tell it - in order to get the attention, captivate, provoke an audience. If our work is to appeal to other human beings, then I believe we must put aside the romanticism of the tangible printed book as so vital and necessary, and look to the future.
I do love books myself, but what's next, new and different?
Looks to me Alec that you are using the YT space; combining the richness of video, audio, images, graphics, the written word, to communicate strong ideas. Curious how this medium fits into your journey as an artist?
Thank you Carmine
thank you very much for these videos, i recommend them widely to my photography students! i especially like the fact that one can watch you thinking, this makes everything you say and show very tangible and vivid.
Thank You Mr. Soth
your videos are great, thank you. hope you continue!
Felt great watching a video again ❤️
"One can't posses the present, but one can posses the past" -Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
Love your videos so much. Thank you and best of luck with your new adventure capturing new memories of yours!
Alec, remember that "remember" is written "remember" :) Anyway, great video, very moving and interesting. See you down the road, as you say.
Getting presented pictures and words through CD or Videos you got that feeling to be taken by the hand of the photographer. So he accompanies you on your journey through his pictures and memories. When you read and see a book, you are all by yourself - not better or worse but different.
Really appreciate your making these videos: always so thoughtful and literally encouraging.....conveying an attitude that supports the courage to trust in making honest work. Sorry, the series may pause or end soon!
Another engaging and thoughtful video which I really enjoyed 🙂👍
Chimed perfectly with my thoughts and current Artistic exploration.
Thank you Alec always an enrichment
Just wanted to reach out from Sweden and say that I find incredible value from your videos. I love this format, and to walk a bit on the way together with your thoughts inspires me to a great extent. I take pictures to remember every day, and they are greatly underlined by the reflections you inspire.
Thank you Alec, this was great!
I (we) miss you! when are you coming back for another adventure in your library?
Going to miss you! Have a productive time but please do come back!!!
We will miss you, good luck on your next work project.
Hey Alec, I swear you have a video where you discuss Memoires 1995 by Seiichi Furuya but I can't find it. Did I make that up?
Thank you!
so good Alec!
Thank you, Alec
Thank you Alec for sharing this!
I would love to see you talking about Ravens by Masahisa Fukase. In case you are looking for future ideas.
Thank you!!!
Thoughtful and thought provoking, as always.
Thanks so much for these wonderful nuggets.
Definitely a valuable discussion as digital/software eats up more and more and VR is on our doorstep.
I feel like VR was supposed to be the next big thing, but like CD-Roms it never took hold
@@AlecSothUA-cam True. Yet since covid and remote working, the investment from tech on connecting through VR has taken off again, so this might be the catalyst. VR is also one of the reasons people justify NFTs as a valuable commodity, where I can enter your virtual space and see your art. Yet, even in this context I personally don’t see it surpassing the book for the reasons you mentioned. At best it’s likely another way of hosting a slideshow like on the CD.
Do you know if there been any examples of musicians collaborating with photographers to create slideshows?
Hello Alec, could I request a segment on Trent Parke's book Minutes to Midnight. I noticed that you are singled out for thanks by Trent (along with Jim Goldberg, Mark Power and Donovan Wylie), and thought you might be able to provide some interesting insights. Thank you.
great work Alec
It's funny re CD-ROM, a lot of artists took them seriously - the great Chris Marker embraced it. My mother gave me a gift one year of the then entire extant National Geographic catalogue in a nice boxset, all on CD-ROM. I assume they are longer accessible. Haha.
A largely forgotten footnote to photographic history
Thanks, however I could not make youtube automatically translate to english Pedro's video as you did, subs just wont show.
I want physical copies of books because Amazon or the publisher can decide at any time to pull your digital copy of it down permanently. I’ve lost movies and music, that I bought, this way.
I was someone who embraced “owning” digital everything years ago, but the reality is that you own nothing digital, you’re only renting it at the pleasure of large corporations.
thanks alec!
Please come back.
This is such a topical video. We now have the NFT (non-fungible token) craze happening and it's just like the 90's CD-ROM wave all over again. The fact remains that you can reach for a photo book from your shelf, sit in a comfy chair and be entertained for an hour. Try that with an NFT.
Can’t escape that “rom” means “read only memory.”
Oh wow, yes
🙏
grande el pedro
Of course, we can see photography on the screen. But several things change. The images are conditioned and restricted to the size of the screen. Also to the resolution. The quality of the screen, color, saturation, contrast, brightness. Screen reflection, etc. All the photos can pass through a screen and none are there. On paper, on each sheet, a photograph. This provides a feeling and a sense of permanence, memory and archival that the screen does not have. A sense of belonging, each photograph its sheet of paper. We know that when we turn the page, the photograph we have been looking at, remains on that page. We have this sense of presence. This sense of presence (yet) does not happen on a screen.
Curiously, the screen is closer to the photograph, to the photo - graphica. It's light. But light, as we know, has no supporting surface. It has no body. It is everywhere and nowhere. Travel between bodies, between objects, reflected. Reflecting the characteristics of these bodies, which allows us to see. But, more than a photograph on a sheet of paper in a book, a photograph on a "photographic paper" - that is, a photograph, itself - further intensifies this feeling of memory, of archiving. Because, in some way, it adds the idea of original, of "first". Even if it is not the only one (copy).
It is not by chance that the two books you present are of son who photograph (memorize) their parents. They are the "seconds" that try to "grab" the "first ones".
Exactly
So well said!
Most consumers of images today that are non-professionals and who are not working in multi-media will view their content on smartphone or tablet screens that are by now kinda uniform by default in their characteristic and "quality." At least better than how it was before in the '80s-'90s with home computers and all kinds of potential crappy calibrated screens and monitors. If you're communicating on paper, you're always speaking to a specific audience.
@@phiswe Yes it's true, but ... most image consumers have always been non-professionals. Today mobile phone and tablet screens are better than screens from the 90s and will be worse than screens from the 30s. But uniform screens? I don't think so. In size? But that will not be the issue. The question is, when you are studying Picasso's Guernica in an art history book (and it is there in a book that we all study art - pro or amateur - and now by tablet or mobile phone), when you see and come across the Guernica painting live in front of you, with that scale ... no screen, never.
At the same time, what is "a specific audience"? How many millions of people have seen the Mona Lisa at the Louvre and have actually passed just in front of it? I read somewhere, I don't remember in detail, but MOMA said that visitors spent an average of ten seconds in front of a work of art. Imagine that someone takes a minute. There are visitors who do not take a second to admire a work. What is a "specific audience" today.
(Has anyone heard your favorite band more often live than on recording? But you probably remember moments from the concert you attended and you will hardly remember moments from listening to the recording.)
There is a basic problem here. When you see a painting in a book or screen, you are looking at a photograph of that painting. This is acquired in your mind. When you see a photography in a book or screen, you don't even remember that you are not looking at the photography, but a "picture" of the photography. It is a substitute. An ersatz. For painting and for photography.
But here we have a question, a problem for photography, a characteristic of photography. A sheet of paper in a book or a screen belongs to the same "habitat" as an "original" photograph on its paper. (sorry for my english).
@ If we’re honest, most books live a quiet and closed live sitting on shelves. Digital images are luckier in a way, even though they too eventually become lost in a sea of noise and silence.
remeber
i like what i wrote in my search bar
lovely books
All of you are out here making fun of the disk needing a Mac with 4mb of ram while you are on a Mac with no disk drive
Cool format but you need to adjust your sound. My usual UA-cam video volume is barely picking your voice. Not the best experience.
Long contemplation, short comment: 💚
ZzzzzZZZzzzzzZZZZ, no more ASRM please.