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 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