Matt Weber (Street photography), Fights & Playfights, Kids & Teens

“Hey Photograph This!” 2011

These kids go to the Mickey Mantle school which is for kids that get left behind. They use to call these type of learning institutions, 600 Schools. Who knows, they might be fourth or fifth graders, and they got me real good. They began circling me and as I kept dodging snowball after snowball, one of them snuck up behind me and when I turned, he got me in the face with a cinder block sized chunk of icy snow…My Leica was completely covered as well and I had to retreat in defeat with just a few frames to console myself with…

 

© Matt Weber

Matt Weber (Street photography), Color, Offspring, Old New York

“The Fuller Building” 2010

The Fuller building on east 57th Street is very beautiful. Even the elevators are amazing. Here I’m photographing my kid after seeing the Peter Sekaer exhibit at Howard Greenberg’s gallery. Sekaer was a good friend of Walker Evans and traveled with Evans down south as Walker made many of his signature images. Meanwhile Sekaer was busy taking  pictures which at times were virtually identical, and at other times completely different than Evans. The monograph on Sekaer was very overdue and is a good book to say the least. I usually lament the books that come out a few years after a photographer dies, but in this case it’s fucking ridiculous…Peter Sekaer died in 1950 and his monograph was published in 2010!

Better late than never…

All Photos © Matt Weber

Matt Weber (Street photography), Coney Island, Kids & Teens

“The Perfect Photograph” by Jeff Ladd

Here is a far from perfect photo of Jeff Ladd’s “Perfect Photograph” This is an I-phone snap but you can see that I didn’t get all thrifty, because I sprung for an 8 ply archival mat board to house this masterpiece. Why is this perfect? I have made a big deal over this picture for a long time. To arrange SEVEN people in perfect position is almost impossible. Throw in the energy between the two girls in the middle and voila, you have a work of art! If you think it’s easy, look around at your photos, and see if this has happened to you. Now an amateur could take a picture like this with his or her Holga on the first day of use…But a master photographer could also take hundreds of excellent photographs and still never take one this perfect…Jeff is very humble when I tease him about this picture. That’s a nice trait for sure, but Jeff also is doing something which may be even more important and certainly more beneficial for all of us other photographers. He is publishing out of print photo books which very few of us could hope to afford. He now has published a dozen very scarce and significant tiles with his company, Errata Editions…Check it out!

Matt Weber (Street photography), Men of New York

“Mandatory Snow Picture” 2011

Even Dave Beckerman confided that he’s tired of all this snow, and then I notice that he couldn’t control himself and went to Central Park hunting for more snow pictures! In Dave’s defense, the only photographs which one will see on display in the stores that do framing, are pictures of New York covered in snow. As someone who actually makes a living selling prints, it would be financial suicide to ignore these picturesque moments in time. I’m just a big wimp and have maybe one snow mission left in me per year…

 

All Photos © Matt Weber