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Editor's Notes

• #2: hello! good morning! im alex solmssen, and im an artist and professional photographer. im so glad to be here with you all today, its so exciting to be able to share a bit of my story with you.... and its probably clear to you already that i think alot about photographs. I’m going to start with a little excersize in memory... a little demonstration.... but first, let me ask are any of you photographers? ok, how many of you are avid photographers in your own life? any of you have a camera? how bout your phones, how many of you take photos with your phones? so its a part of your life, your daily life? and your kids? right, we all take endless photos of our kids! and our food! because they're precious and delicious! so, we take all these millions of pictures of the things in front of us, because the photos are documents, testaments to the things that happen to us.
• #3: i really believe in the power of pictures. like music, or scent, we only understand the tip of the iceberg in how these things effect and shape our consciousness.
• #4: My earliest memory in my life, is of sitting with my brother on a beach. i remember it so clearly, i even remember the way the gentle tide was lapping over my legs- it was a nice warm day and i remember just this warm sunshine and i know we were in ireland on vacation, theres a castle we were staying in, my brother was patting the water and splashing. i also remember that i was jealous, or angry even, that my brother had an actual swimsuit, while i only had a diaper. pretty specific, huh? (also, troubling! im sure its not a good thing if your first memory- while sitting on a beach at sunset, on the west coast of ireland,is of fundamental inequality and resentment!) the thing is- this memory is most likely not real!
• #5: you can open your eyes! i would have been only 1 1/2 years old at that moment! the part of our brains that collect memories remains undeveloped (!) before the age of two. so where does this very visceral memory come from? a photograph! this photograph! its so interesting to me that sometimes our memories from childhood can be traced to a single image, and maybe we dont even have the actual event as a memory, that the photo has become the memory. so we depend on photos to help us be who we are, who we were, and we even use them to see ourselves as we want to be. so we agree that photos are much more than just a documentary tool they can shape our ideas and visions and help us see things in a different light. yay photography! thank you and goodnight!
• #6: yay photography! it is more than a document! it actually helps us define our past, to show who we are now to the world, and we use it to shape a vision of our future selves. sort of natural that i became a photographer then! not unlikely at all! so today i’m gonna talk to you a little about the history of photography, my family’s history of photography and my personal history as a photographer. and how ive used it to create new perspectives. then we can talk about the ways you can use it to do the same.
• #7: alex solmssen photography brazil dc ny. shoot commercial, editorial, and fine art show in galleries. a photographer, takes alot of pictures we get used to the fickle nature of scale/depth of field/ who is a photographer
• #8: when im shooting for work or for my own self, photography has been a tool for helping me to see differently. the better i get at using the camera to see the better i see.
• #9: the better i get at using the camera to see the better i see. a photographer, takes alot of pictures who is a photographer so it would be helpful to have a little understanding of the history and science. how many of you have actually used a film camera? in the last five years? film photography was all there was, until recently. I'll tell you a little about the olden days! journey back with me in time! lets start in the earliest part of the 1800's, and wet plate photography.
• #10: wait! before photography even existed, there was ... the camera! what does the word camera mean? The term camera comes from the word camera obscura (Latin for "dark chamber"), an early mechanism for projecting images... in its essence, a camera is just a dark room next to a light space with a pinhole or lens in between which functions much like the eye. actually, cameras existed in the fifth and fourth centuries BC! We used what came to be called 'camera obscuras' or pinhole cameras, for entertainment and as a drawing aid. it was essentially a box with a tiny hole in it. becasue light travels in straight lines, when it passes through the pinhole it casts a refraction on the other side, the same way our eyes lens does. all that remained was to fix the image cast permanently. we finally got around to that around the turn of the 18th century. by 1840 we were somewhat more competent, and the many experiments with different solutions had coalesced into what we know as wet plate photography.
• #11: as early as 4/5 century camera obscura, darkened room/vault locked treasure room, light room next to dark room 13th cent - eng used to view eclipses perfected in 16th began travel for painting neipce and daguerre 1820s mid-19th century - eastman kodak
• #13: great great grand great grand grand dad me next
• #14: so, 1840. and that brings us to this photo. this photo of my great great grandfather and mother with their son. . it is a daguerreotype, made by coating metal plates with light-sensitive emulsion, its one of the earliest forms of photography - photo- graphy, literally drawing - with - light. an ardous process, fraught with potential problems, and hugely toxic! i like to tell people that my photography career began before i was born. beginning with this image, he and then his son went on to commission hundreds of photos, recording every aspect of their lives. 3.  Your great,great grandfather. His wife, 1st cousin to Felix Mendelssohn, the composer. Daguerrotype c. 1845, 6 years after invention
• #15: certainly not an everyday occurance in most peoples lives, but it caught hold of my great great grandfather and my family ever since! i like to tell peole that my photography career began vefore i was born. beginning with this image, he and then his son went on to commission hundreds of photos, recording every aspect of their lives. 4. same family with relatives, small boy is your great grandfather
• #16: here is an image of my great grandfather in the family car, my grandmother riding on the running board with her twin.. this is in germany, where my fathers family is from. certainly not an everyday occurance in most peoples lives, but it caught hold of my great great grandfather and my family ever since! i like to tell peole that my photography career began vefore i was born. beginning with this image, he and then his son went on to commission hundreds of photos, recording every aspect of their lives. 5. Mercedes in front of their house.  Gaggie and twin Alice. Mother and robert in car. 6.Your great grandfather marries nanny of daughter; first wife died earlier.
• #17: 6.Your great grandfather marries nanny of daughter; first wife died earlier.
• #18: 7. Your grandfather is baby, my father. German and English nannies, mother on left.  This wa how they dressed to go shopping.  About 1906.
• #19: this image was taken by my great grandmother of her family taking off in a chartered zeppelin. it is a glass plate stereo type. stereotypes were made using dual lens cameras and viewers set at the same distance apart as your eyes, so that when viewed in the special viewer it appeared to be 3D! we were all early adopters in my family!
• #20: seamstresses in my grandmother’s home.  Miniature Bugatti, gift of cousin who raced the real thing.
• #21: 9. Cousins Harold and Ullo at top, My father and brother Max below.
• #22: Max, Grandpa, their father inspired by their mothers, my grandfather and his brothers were all avid photographers and collected many cameras between them, so my own father grew up surrounded by the wonderful machines, and home darkrooms.
• #26: they emigrated to america.
• #27: P at wheel of miniatur Bugatti. as a freshman at harvard my father became an editor for the harvard crimson and began publishing photos, eventually becoming a photographer for life magazine, then entering the navy, as a deepsea diver, responsible for shooting underwater wreckage and um, stuff.
• #28: his winding career path then brought him to singapore as a foreign service officer, he met my mom, and citing a love for a new kind of music called bossa nova, he requested to be stationed in brazil. they moved there in 1964, my father now a cultural advisor to the attache. what a time in brazil! the sixties!
• #29: what a time in brazil! the sixties!
• #30: but photography was not to be denied! some photos he took of jobim caught the attention of a sao paulo government official, and the city of sp asked him to do a book of photos about the city. my brother and i were both born in brazil, and so our family photos from that time are very mixed in with his films and photos for the book.
• #43: as an exhibiting artist i was showing in galleries these images, but it led to BBB but i had to very quicckly radically change the process but keep my vision
• #44: nyc baby
• #45: shoot like water
• #47: as i learned to physically shoot more and develop the unconscious
• #50: RR = i began to see that some of the best things about his work were already showing up in mine this is his image from carnaval on the left and mine from fashion week on the right.
• #51: another one of his images
• #52: my image
• #53: this one his image uses a tech
• #65: so if you can stop for a moment and think about the photos that you see and share every day. if you work with imagery. can you rembeer an image that you saw that really stuck with you, and think of it in the context of these six words... imagine that image in your mind right now, and think about why it sticks with you, and if it sticks w you because recall a photo
• #66: hello! good morning! im alex solmssen, and im an artist and professional photographer. im so glad to be here with you all today, its so exciting to be able to share a bit of my story with you.... so, are any of you photographers? ok, how many of you are avid photographers in your own life? any of you have a camera? how bout your phones, how many of you take photos with your phones? so its a part of your life, your daily life? and your kids? right, we all take endless photos of our kids! and our food! because they're precious and delicious! so, we take all these millions of pictures of the things in front of us, because the photos are documents, testaments to the things that happen to us. so i could state pretty correctly that we are all photographers. have you ever taken a photo that changed your life? or someone elses? is there a moment from your childhood that you remember solely because of the photograph? My earliest memory in my life, is of sitting with my brother on a beach. i remember it so clearly, i even remember the way the gentle tide waas lapping over my legs- i also remember that i was jealous, or angry even, that my brother had an actual swimsuit, while i only had a diaper. pretty specific, huh? (also, troubling! im sure its not a good thing if your first memory- while sitting on a beach at sunset, it was on the west coast of ireland,is of fundamental inequality and resentment!) the thing is- this memory is most likely not real! i would have been only 1 1/2 years old at that moment! the part of our brains thatcollect memories remains undeveloped (!) before the age of two. so where does this very visceral memory come from? a photograph! this photograph! its so interesting to me that sometimes our memories from childhood can be traced to a single image, and maybe we dont even have the actual event as a memory, that the photo has become the memory. so we depend on photos to help us be who we are, who we were, and we even use them to see ourselves as we want to be. so we agree that photos are much more than just a tool of documentary...they can shape our ideas and visions and help us see things in a different light. yay photography! thank you and goodnight! sort of natural that i became a photographer then! not unlikely at all! so i'd like to talk to you today about how the camera, and photography has shaped the way i view the world, and how ive used it to create new perspectives. then we can talk about the ways you can use it to do the same. so i ask you again, what do you remember most from childhood. is there an image in your head when you think of it? and now many of you are doing the same for your own families and loved ones. its great to be able to share photos these days! people used to complain about going to dinner at their friends and being subjected to endless slideshows of their vacations! we do it constantly now. your child's first steps, got that, uploaded and shared! its so easy! and grandma is thrilled and calls to tell little timmy that he is so smart! instantly, you've made a lassting document, and even engendered new memories- remember when grandma called you the smartest boy in the world! or your highschool buddy sees the post on fb and now theres a playdate! or your highschool sweetie sees your fab new dress pic online, and decides to get in touch! maybe that photo has even created a new set of problems! so we use that camera and it gets this pivotal role in our lives, but in truth, we don't even think about the thousands of images we have tucked away on the computer, in the phone, we hardly even go back and re-look at them, once they are shared. so what is the most important photograph you have ever taken? why was it precious or important? where is it now? how many of you have actually used a film camera? in the last five years? film photography was all there was, until recently. I'll tell you a little about the olden days! journey back with me in time! lets start in the earliest part of the 1800's, and wet plate photography. wait! before photography even existed, there was ... the camera! what does the word camera mean? The term camera comes from the word camera obscura (Latin for "dark chamber"), an early mechanism for projecting images...actually, cameras existed in the fifth and fourth centuries BC! We used what came to be called 'camera obscuras' or pinhole cameras, for entertainment and as a drawing aid. it was essentially a box with a tiny hole in it. becasue light travels in straight lines, when it passes through the pinhole it casts a refraction on the other side, the same way our eyes lens does. all that remained was to fix the image cast permanently. we finally got around to that around the turn of the 18th century. by 1840 we were somewhat more competent, and the many experiments with different solutions had coalesced into what we know as wet plate photography. so, 1840. and that brings us to this photo. this photo of my great great grandfather and mother with their son. my great grandfather. it is a daguerreotype, made by coating metal plates with light-sensitive emulsion, its one of the earliest forms of photography - photo- graphy, literally drawing - with - light. an ardous process, fraught with potential problems, and hugely toxic! certainly not an everyday occurance in most peoples lives, but it caught hold of my great great grandfather and my family ever since! i like to tell peole that my photography career began vefore i was born. beginning with this image, he and then his son went on to commission hundreds of photos, recording every aspect of their lives. here is an image of my great grandfather in the family car, my grandmother riding on the running board. this is in germany, where my fathers family is from. the first family member to actually take photos were the women. this image was taken by my great grandmother of her family taking off in a chartered zeppelin. it is a glass plate stereo type. stereotypes were made using dual lens cameras and viewers set at the same distance apart as your eyes, so that when viewed in the special viewer it appeared to be 3D! we were all early adopters in my family! inspired by their mothers, my grandfather and his brothers were all avid photographers and collected many cameras between them, so my own father grew up surrounded by the wonderful machines, and home darkrooms. they emigrated to america. as a freshman at harvard my father became an editor for the harvard crimson and began publishing photos, eventually becoming a photographer for life magazine, then entering the navy, as a deepsea diver, responsible for shooting underwater wreckage and um, stuff. his winding career path then brought him to singapore as a foreign service officer, he met my mom, and citing a love for a new kind of music called bossa nova, he requested to be stationed in brazil. they moved there in 1964, my father now a cultural advisor to the attache. what a time in brazil! the sixties! but photography was not to be denied! some photos he took of jobim caught the attention of a sao paulo government official, and the city of sp asked him to do a book of photos about the city. my brother and i were both born in brazil, and so our family photos from that time are very mixed in with his films and photos for the book. everyone has family films, family photos...- ours just didn't have us kids in them much, except as incidental figures. or silhouettes. perhaps thats why i feel so intimately connected to brazil, though we left when i was very young, when his work led him back to the us, and washington dc, where i grew up. and so i grew up with his amazing photographs, as well as cameras , shooting trips instead of vacations, and most definitely an appreciation for great art. i dont remember my first camera, or the first time i developed film. its all just present for me. so when i decided, i am a photographer, im going to be a photographer, it was as if i had to differentiate myself in some way from what my father did, i was going to be a professional, and artist, it was going to be my main thing.