RYANDAYTHOMPSON | BLOG: Archive

May 20th

May 17th

Domestic #1

There are plenty of aspects to life. My wonderful family is one of my very favorite aspects. If I could just shoot our domestic life I’d be toats OK with it.

May 16th

30 tags

Getting "Iced" with Icey

Alaska is astonishing. I have been many places. Zion, Indian Creek, Yosemite, Rocky Mountain National Park, Joshua Tree, Telluride, numerous beaches in numerous countries, the Tetons, the Absaroka, Glacier, Olympic, Tuscolo outside of Rome, Zermatt, Interlaken, Gstaad, Barcelona, Munich, and the list goes on. Alaska is hands down the most incredible place I have been and It isn’t because...

May 13th

GKC on Young Idealism

I found this quote during the course of reading. The gradual end of ski season and lots of flying opened reading back up to me and I’ve knocked out around 1300 pages in the last few weeks. ‘When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: “Ah, yes, when one is young one has the ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in...

May 10th

6 tags

Melting

Our world is slowly starting to thaw. While 1000 feet above us everything is still fairly socked in everything around our little apartment is rushing water and chirping birds. I’ve honestly never lived somewhere where summer was not more or less beginning to set in by this point. Our first truly warm days began last week. Meh. I love rock climbing and summer activity, and I enjoy the...

May 10th

2 tags

Winter's Ending

Even though we probably have two more shreddable months here, winter is rapidly coming to an end (as exemplified by my sitting around in a T-Shirt eating pizza outside in the meadow village earlier this afternoon) and as it does I’ve been thinking through my favorite non-shredding photos from the season. This blog has been more of a meditation than it has anything else and I’ve left...

Mar 27th

17 tags

Nov 30th

7 tags

Steichen on Light and Maeterlinck on Photography's...

I picked up a few books at the library on a trip to Bozeman on Thursday to hang out with my friend Becca. Among them are Steichen’s autobiography (a thrilling piece) and various books on Stieglitz and O’Keefe. I’m pretty excited about the books on Stieglitz and O’Keefe, two of my favorite artists in the history of ever, but I’m finding some very interesting bits...

Nov 23rd

10 tags

Robert Werling on Landscape Photography

I bought Robert Werling’s “Beyond Light: American Landscapes.” To date it is one of my favorite photography books. The dude still shoots 8x10 view camera. Cole Weston wrote the highly favorable foreward to the book. In and of itself, that should tip one off that Robert Werling is worth looking at and reading. Words seem to have graced the Photo-Secessionists and their heirs...

Nov 16th

9 tags

Meandering II: The Otherworld

I’m not sure what, precisely, it is about unfettered and unbothered solo walking that is so inspiring but I find myself repeatedly lit on fire when I wander. Two things. First, it appears that the act of wandering is fulfilling because, in one way or another, that’s what we’re all doing. We’re wandering. Searching, looking, absorbing, seeking something. The wandering...

Nov 15th

6 tags

Meandering

I wandered through the forest today. Winter hit us hard and the stoke is high. I was relieved that I could go out there to shoot for commercial purposes and still…feel. It is really hard to shoot commercial and retain your person. It ended up being a stellar morning for both art and commercial purposes.

Nov 11th

16 tags

Fielder on Seeing and It's Snowing

It’s snowing pretty hard today. Besides the fact that this means I will soon be floating through wide expanses of powdery goodness and flying through glades of beautiful pines strapped to two pieces of wood, it also makes for very surreal forests. Winter makes the earth look like a different planet. So I took a walk. It was stunning. I also decided to spend some time reading the...

Nov 8th

9 tags

Affective O'Keefe and Muench on Nature Photography

I wandered around the forest a bit this evening proceeding an afternoon I spent looking through a giant book of O’Keefe with essays. I was pleased to discover that much of what I had independently concluded about her work was seen and commemorated in the essays throughout the book. Namely, that she was battling to communicate universal forms with a very non-European method (though I sense...

Nov 7th

12 tags

"The Difference Between Looking and Seeing"

I decided to take a brief break from the photo-secesisonists today to look at some O’Keefe and read a bit in Galen Rowell’s Retrospective. First, I was surprised at how unimpressed I was with Galen’s work at the beginning of his career. It seems fairly documentary at a very basic level. However, as his work progresses it started to take on an almost impressionistic,...

Nov 6th

8 tags

Bullock, Light, and the Camera

Just some thoughts. Photos are from the last few days. Wynn Bullock continues to be a giant inspiration to me. It’s interesting that Bullock was so far detached from the Photo-Secession (or at least, detached from the high school drama that was Stieglitz/Strand/O’Keefe/Steichen/Weston/Modotti) yet had some of the greatest things to say about the rapidly changing medium and its...

Nov 4th

6 tags

Weston on Art

“Art must have a living quality to it which relates it to present needs, or to future hopes, opens new roads for those ready to travel, those who were ripe but needed an awakening shock…” - Edward Weston

Oct 31st

8 tags

Alfred Stieglitz on Feeling

I was browsing through this book (which I am seriously buying the day I get $40 spare dollars) and found a story Stieglitz told on one of his superlative and formative early photographs, Winter on Fifth Avenue. I think it is highly instructive on the endeavor of making a photograph. I kept it in mind as I recorded the interspersed photos. “There was a great blizzard. I loved snow, I...

Oct 28th

1 note

7 tags

Oct 28th

8 tags

Frederick Sommer on Art

I ran into this while I was reading this week. The photos are spread out from stuff I did in the last few days. “It’s fictitious to think that ideas in art don’t exist in reality. There is no imagination, no flight of fancy that is not grounded in reality. A superlative photograph, in its cohesion, is a reintroduction to nature. For verification, no matter how abstract...

Oct 27th

3 tags

Oct 26th

8 tags

Some Thoughts on Photography and Art

Probably listen to this while you read and look at the proceeding. It’s by this dude (or dudes, I’m not sure) named Swod. The song is Montauk. I’ve been doing a LOT of thinking on photography, creativity, my job, commercial photography, and art. I’m a pretty thinky person I guess and need to get some of the things that have been topics of contemplation out of my head....

Oct 26th

8 tags