John Armstrong aka John Legweak's photostream

I'm the curmudgeon formerly known as John Legweak. I'm in my extremely late fifties, live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and have a wife and two college age daughters. I've had several careers including in academia and high tech. I'm looking for another one now.

I got back into photography a couple years ago after forty years of taking snapshots with whatever point and shoot camera I had at the time and throwing the results into a drawer to be lost or forgotten or both. I'm very interested in the history of photography and in contemporary art photography.

By a strange quirk of fate I am currently an admin for a very cool and confused group called Your photo isn't really that great.

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Favorite quote from a book about art (Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World, Norton, 2008, p. 57):

Four students and I squeeze into her beat-up Honda. In the middle of the back seat, I listen to the ping-pong of their dialog. First they have a debate about one of the most vocal men in the class. "He's so arrogant and patronizing," says one of the women. "When he says, 'I don't understand,' he really means, 'You are an idiot, you're not making any sense.' And why does every observation he makes have to begin with a position statement and end with a list of recommended readings?"

"I think he's great," counters one of the men. "He's very entertaining. We'd all go to sleep without him."

"He's overinstitutionalized, domineeringly PC, and macho, all at the same time," intercedes a third student, who then turns to me and declares with glee, "He got ripped to shreds when he had his crit."

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Favorite quote from a fellow experienced-in-life photography student (can't report her name but she travelled 3000 miles with her teacher and another student to attend the opening of Lance Keimig's Darkness, Darkness exhibition in Cambridge, MA, March 2008, that included their work):

The two students and I were in my car on the way back from a visit to the big hill in Arlington to see the panoramic view of Boston.

Me: I took a picture of that gas station, I really like it.

Her: People like their pictures too much.

I thought at the time that she said this à propos of what we had been talking about before, but I felt a pang of doubt that has never gone away.

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Favorite quote from a fellow flickr member (kramer.oneill, Hardcore Street Photography):

I, for example, shouldn't go to a Hells Angels club and give a seminar on Harley-Davidsons, no matter how cool I think those bikes are. It just rings false.

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Favorite quote from a person I know who does art for a living:

John, you think too much about this stuff. I don't think about it at all, I just do it.

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Favorite quote (art-related) from a character in a novel (Martin, in Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down, Riverhead, 2005):

Literally. Well, OK, not literally literally. I hadn't, you know, turned my life into urine and stored it in my bladder and so on and so forth.

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Favorite quote from a famous photographer actually said to me (Alec Soth, MFA, Oct 25 2009):

Me: It's amazing the range of people you shoot. How do you connect with them?

Alec: Can I come over to your house?

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Favorite quote from my younger daughter (in response to a picture I had shown in artistically underexposed form) :

But daddy, it wasn't dark when we took that picture.

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Favorite quote from my older daughter (in response to a movie concept I had rolled out for her):

Why now?

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Favorite art-related music video:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wanoXM90yHE&feature=related

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Favorite photographers:

Tina Barney
Elina Brotherus
Wynn Bullock
Sophie Calle
Luc Delahaye
Masahisa Fukase
Todd Hido
Leslie Krim
Liu Zheng
Duane Michals
Richard Misrach
Yasumasa Morimura
Matthew Pillsbury
Eliot Porter
Cindy Sherman
Aaron Siskind
Alec Soth
Mike and Doug Starn
Thomas Struth
Larry Sultan
Paul Weiner
Garry Winogrand
Erwin Wurm (back when he did photography)