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 America, Uncategorized

“Monument Valley” 1992

I really found landscape photography boring, or I would have done a lot more of it. It’s like fairly obvious when something is beautiful and majestic. Then all one needs to do is back up a few more feet till everything is in the viewfinder, and then take a meter reading of something medium light, or medium dark and then assign “Zone 5” to it. Then hold your breath and release the shutter. One could even use a tripod if one were very serious…I think the first time I saw Marc Riboud’s exhibit at ICP back in the late ’80s I knew the work he had done was much more challenging, and the prints were so much more interesting. I had the good fortune to learn all the technical stuff from Ansel Adam’s how to books, but wanted to try and do what Riboud had done. I never got to the level where Marc or his predecessor Cartier-Bresson lived, but at least I didn’t bore myself to death trying to make pretty things look pretty…

 

All Photos © Matt Weber

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

Matt Weber (Street photography), Kiss Kiss, Men of New York, Times Square, Women of New York

1/1/11

Check my man out…He just reeks of confidence. Not quite Travolta circa ’77 but he still has his strut down pat, despite a crooked foot. Meanwhile she’s got quite a vibe too. Not quite Bianca circa ’71 but that outfit works, I think…Am I babbling? Yes, but I don’t feel like pondering the shooting in Arizona anymore, or the possibility that my N.Y. JETS are going to get their asses handed to them this weekend, by pretty boy Tom Brady…

 

All Photos © Matt Weber