I’ve been perusing Gerhard Richter’s Atlas over the last few days — an overwhelming collection of snapshots, newspaper clippings, photos from books, photographic experiments, and family photos from 1962-2006. I used to cut photos out of magazines and make collages. Now I just right click when I see something interesting that I think I’ll want to see again.

Occasionally I’ll browse through these images when I need inspiration, or run them as my screen saver. After spending some time with Richter’s collection of photos in book form, perhaps I’ll be inspired to group some images by theme and print proof sheets. How do you organize and review the images that catch your eye? I prefer to group images together instead of using the one-at-a-time approach on Tumblr. Perhaps I’ve answered my own question with this gallery of 15 photos that recently went into my digital atlas.

My presentation at last week’s Mono Lake Night Photography Festival was about the value of cultivating a diverse set of artistic influences. You are already doing this informally. The idea is to talk or write about your artistic input, as a playground for better understanding how these things are influencing your artistic output.

I had 45 minutes to talk, and spent just under 2 minutes talking about how each of these artists has influenced my night photography. As the presentation was both fast and media intensive, I’ve reproduced the list of artists below for those who attended the conference.

I encourage you to make your own list of influences. This could be a desert island list of your favorite films, photography books, novels, museum exhibits, dance performances — whatever you’re into. Making a list is the first step — the epiphanies are born out of process of articulating why you love this work, and how the work has influenced you. The writing doesn’t have to be lengthy — start with one sentence for the why, and one for the how. Have fun, and feel free to share your list.

1. Gordon Matta-Clark: Conical Intersect [video on UbuWeb] [photos & bio on artnet]
2. John Divola: Vandalism Series [photos on divola.com]
3. Roger Ballen: Outland | Shadow Chamber | Boarding House
4. John Pfahl: Altered Landscapes
5. Draw on your image: To be discussed in a future blog post
6. Gaspar Noe: Enter the Void [Netflix]
7. Matthew Barney: Cremaster Cycle
8. Werner Herzog: Of Walking In Ice
9. Mark Rothko: Rothko’s Rooms [Netflix]
10. William Vollmann: Imperial
11. Michelangelo Antonioni: Red Desert [Netflix]
12. David T. Hanson: Waste Land
13. Flotation Tanks
14. Haruki Murakami: A Wild Sheep Chase
15. Ikeda Carlotta: Butoh Dance
16. Yasujiro Ozu: Tokyo Story [Netflix]
17. Master Musicians of Jajouka: Apocalypse Across the Sky | Pipes of Pan
18. Lotte Reiniger: The Adventures of Prince Achmed [Netflix]
19. Caspar David Friedrich [friendsofart.net]
20. John Hind: Our True Intent Is All For Your Delight
21. Chris Verene: Family | Chris Verene
22. Jacques Tati: Playtime
23. Erik Kessels: In Almost Every Picture #9 Black Dog

Note: Book and movie links go to Amazon, and help put a few extra pennies into the epiphany research jar.

Issue 18 of contemporary art magazine Hi-Fructose hit the streets recently, and features a 6-page piece on the Billboard Liberation Front (BLF). I’ve been a huge fan of the BLF’s advertising improvements for a long time, so it was a big thrill to photograph 3 generations of BLF operatives for Hi-Fructose. BLF honcho Jack Napier found this amazing empty warehouse location, which I scouted a few days before the shoot. I was really fortunate to have friend and talented photographer Riki Feldmann on this assignment to help with the lighting.

We used the huge 86″ Alienbees PLM with a diffuser on the key light, and then kicked a bare-bulb fill light off the floor from the other side. A Canon 5D Mark II with a 24-70/2.8L was tripod mounted for the group shots, and a second 5D II with a 70-200/2.8L was used for the individual portraits. PocketWizards were used to trigger the strobes, and everything worked without a hitch. The shooting time was about 2 hours for 25 portraits and 4 group shots.

As expected, the BLF was a rowdy and hilarious group to photograph. Riki and I were about to mark where to stand for the portraits with tape on the floor, and then someone spilled some whiskey. When people asked where to stand for their portrait, we told them “between the puddle of water, and the puddle of whiskey.” In the large group shot in the magazine, there is a dead bird on the floor. One of the BLF members made an amazing disguise out of a bucket and a cardboard box while he was waiting to be photographed.

In addition to the piece on the BLF, issue 18 of Hi-Fructose features some really amazing art — I was particularly blown away by the eerie, futuristic ruins of Jean-Pierre Roy. The interview with Mr. Roy is superb — he speaks very eloquently about his work, and I found some interesting artistic parallels to abandoned places night photography (more on that later). Attaboy and Annie Owens put out a really fine publication — look for Hi-Fructose at a bookstore, gallery, or museum near you.

What if I told you there was a place in San Francisco to view an amazing collection of modern photography from the 1920′s to present.
And what if it was free to get in. And the space was huge.
And only 20 people were allowed in at a time, so you could stand in front of your favorites as long as you want.
And there were no crowds. And it was quiet.

This amazing place exists. It’s called Pier 24.
A whole room of Bernd and Hilla Becher typologies.
A whole room of Lee Friedlander.
A whole room of Robert Adams.
Arbus. Eggleston. Winogrand. Frank. Evans. Sugimoto. Misrach. Weston. Stieglitz. Strand.

The current exhibit runs through February 28th. Appointments to view the collection are available starting on January 3rd. Get this on your calendar for 2011!

Update: More motivation to visit Pier 24 from B.

New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape opened yesterday at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and runs through October 3, 2010 along with the companion exhibit, Picturing Modernity. I visited the museum yesterday, and really enjoyed the show. I’ve spent quite a bit of time with the superb New Topographics book — viewing the actual prints was exciting.

Most of the exhibition contains small silver gelatin black and white prints with an open, low/medium contrast style of printing that is befitting of the subject matter. A few of the Lewis Baltz prints are a notable exception, with very deep blacks and stark high contrast printing. Stephen Shore’s photos are the only color images in the show.

Seeing the Joe Deal aerial subdivision views all together on the wall gave them a lot more weight than in the book. There is so much tension in not having any sky or horizon line. My eye wants to see something in the image as the horizon, which gives an off-kilter feeling to some of the images.

Finding a photographic approach that deferred and complexified meaning rather than specifying it, is what made these pictures interesting to me. — John Schott

John Schott’s work was also better on the wall than in the book. His accompanying audio segment is especially poignant. I’m still puzzling out how Nicholas Nixon’s Boston rooftop images fit into the show – they’re dense with the detail of the city skyline. Gohlke’s irrigation canal image is a deceivingly simple image that reflects the man vs. nature theme of the show so well with the beautiful sky and reflection balanced by weeds and tire tracks in the mud.

After seeing large prints of the Becher’s Industrial Landscapes a few years ago, the smaller prints in this show seemed lackluster, and a few are in need of conservation. This re-staging of the 1975 exhibit really shows the modest scale of the prints in the current era of giant 10 foot prints that are trying to compete with painting. After spending a considerable amount of time contemplating these intimate black and white prints, the large scale of the work in the Fisher Collection seemed rather ostentatious at times. Perhaps you’ll want to save that exhibition for another day.

Tip: Pick up the free audio tour to the left of the staircase as you walk into the museum. The New Topographics exhibit features about 2 minutes of commentary from most of the photographers.

Books from the Photographers in New Topographics

The New Topographics book is outstanding. Published by Steidl this year, the title seems to regularly go in and out of stock with each press run. I recommend reading the essays before seeing the show. The reproduction of the original catalog in the book is very cool. Below is a selected book list of photographers in the show, some with brief commentary. If there are photographers in the show that you’d like to investigate further, hopefully this list will save you some time.

Robert Adams

• Summer Nights, Walking — night photography of Colorado in the 1970′s.
• Why People Photograph — a highly recommended book of inspiring essays on photography.
• Gone
• The New West: Landscapes Along the Colorado Front Range
• What We Bought: The New World: Scenes from the Denver Metropolitan Area, 1970-1974

Lewis Baltz

• The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California — The hardback from 2001 is about $45. A paperback re-issue is scheduled for later this year.
• Nevada 1977 — really looking forward to this one.

Bernd and Hilla Becher

• Industrial Landscapes — my favorite of the Becher books, these images show more of the surrounding landscape than the typologies.
• Bernd and Hilla Becher: Life and Work

Joe Deal

• West and West: Reimagining the Great Plains

Frank Golhke

• Thoughts on Landscape: Collected Writings and Interviews — there is gold in this book. Highly recommended right alongside Why People Photograph.
• Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke

Nicholas Nixon

• The Brown Sisters. Thirty-Three Years — an essential book for anyone interested in portrait photography.
• Live, Love, Look, Last
• Family Pictures (Photographers at Work)

John Schott

• No monographs other than inclusion in the New Topographics book.

Stephen Shore

• Uncommon Places: The Complete Works — this book is on my desert island list.
• American Surfaces

Henry Wessel

• Henry Wessel — if you missed the Wessel exhibition back in 2007, this book is the next best thing. Highly recommended.