A Glimpse of Burn Diary

 

BurnDiary is about to have featured 100 photographers in more than two years.

Personal stories, details, places, landscapes… all through the eyes of the photographers during their daily life that week.

We have chosen photographers from every continent asking not to show their work but to share their days and moments, using BurnDiary as a personal diary.

So many images and visions that now we are glad to show every now and then as glimpsed author by author.

Diego Orlando

 

 

Ekin Kucuk

During my Instagram takeover I tried to show Instanbul, my city.

I love traveling between Asia and Europe with the ferry almost everyday and take pictures from the routes of my daily life.

 

Ekin Kucuk’s Website

 

 

Simone De Peak

The week of my Burn Diary take over, was a representation of my daily life and surrounds here in my hometown Newcastle, Australia. Working as a press photographer, I find even in my everyday life myself naturally observing family, friends and strangers in their environment while waiting for a moment to appear to capture. Sometimes that moment is caught on a camera, and other times I’ll just soak that moment up for a memory that hopefully stays with me.
It was great experience to take a closer look at my hometown and share the daily slices of life I love about it with Burn Diary..

 

 

 

Tom Hyde

During my takeover week @burndiary I transitioned from black and white observations around our little farm in the rainforest of western Washington State into the first sketches of a new personal project exploring climate change, initially set in the semi-arid Okanogan region of north central Washington State, with a few diary entries of serendipity in between.

The haze of debate surrounding the reality of climate change is beginning to clear but do we have the will to mitigated its advance and impacts?
In my mind, this is THE issue facing the planet and humanity. With a background in environmental policy and journalism, I am working to bring my own personal perspective to the issue.

 

Tom Hyde’s Website

 

Bio

Ekin Kucuk:
Kucuk was born in Adana, Turkey and currently lives in Istanbul. Photography has always been part of her life as she has a few photographers in the family. Travel is essential part of Kucuk, both physically and mentally. It is “my diary, a way for me to document my journey.”

Tom Hyde:
With a background in journalism and environmental policy, Thomas Hyde is a photographer based in the Pacific Northwest.
His photos have appeared in Le Monde, The Sun, National Parks, and Burn Magazine. His conservation efforts helped to create one of the world’s largest marine protected areas, for which he was personally recognized by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown and NOAA Administrator James Baker. Hyde is currently working on personal projects involving climate change.

Simone De Peak:
De Peak is an award winning Australian Photojournalist, specialising in editorial, documentary, portraiture and magazine work. Never one to venture anywhere without a camera, in her spare time she documents the everyday life of people in their surroundings of her hometown Newcastle, Australia.
An avid collector, she is currently working towards a book from her decluttering project where everyday for an entire year she took a photo of one her many beloved kitsch items from her collection in whatever surroundings she was in on that day before parting ways with it.

 

Follow Burn Diary on Instagram: @burndiary

25 thoughts on “A Glimpse of Burn Diary”

  1. And a good glimpse it is!
    Lots of good stuff over at BurnDiary. This is a nice summary.

    There are even shots of people laughing….wow….all bases are covered….

    I am only been an ahole with that last comment but I couldn’t resist….

    Anyways….good stuff!

  2. A diary, whether written or photographic, over a period of time becomes more than the sum of its parts. It becomes an historical document, personal to the maker but also, because they have shared the time period with the maker, of great interest to other readers. A simple street snapshot taken 100 years ago becomes, today, a view of a a world now lost; the mode of transport, dress etc. – and all the more poignant for showing people who are almost certainly no longer with us.
    This is the power of photography, in a way, it can stop time.
    The best diary photographs can also stand alone as good photographs and some shown here do just that. Ekin’s photograph of the ferry and the one below it of Istanbul with the awnings in the foreground are very good photographs: his photograph of the man with the Rolling Stones tattoo is a good example of a photograph with historical context.

  3. Imants…
    It’s more than a bunch of photos and a “and”… Come on, isn’t it :)! Just as your photos on New Year’s Day you shot in BW a couple of years ago of some of your friends and family. Some as you mentioned at the time aren’t with us anymore, mean a lot more than a bunch of photos. BTW those photos were very good, kinda stopped in my tracks.

  4. Photos need to be placed within some visual, social, verbal context and these only sit on a screen and end up in “like dislike” response world world. See responses here… good… great…a bunch of photos …. and very good

    I don’t take photos socially as I prefer to participate than to record what I am not doing because I am too busy taking photos. Plus those photos have relevance to friends and family and to others they may rate a minor curiosity as at its best.

    Look at David’d approach what he does encompasses his life and he places his work on social, commercial, worldly and private platforms as well as being very aware of the relationship between photographer…. audience… photograph… and world.

    The work here does not The work here is essentially private and communicates “This is what I do” I am asking yes ok it is what you do well clarify and place it in some context.

  5. I generally agree with Imants, though in my brief time paying attention to Instagram I notice that some photographers manage to elevate the genre. For example, I enjoyed Tom Hyde’s work in real time, as you could see a story developing, although I don’t think this edit does it justice.

    But for the most part, I think these arguments miss the point. Instagram is much more about building one’s own brand through networking or advertising than it is a place to enjoy serious photography. If you are trying to break into the biz, there’s a possibility that industry bigs might discover you. If you are an industry big, more followers might mean more sales of whatever it is one is selling.

    I fear that showing work in such a tiny format diminishes the art, and it certainly limits the range of what one can show. But no one else seems to care, so I say what me worry? Maybe it’s akin to movie previews that give away the surprise. Most people, it seems, would rather know what to expect than be surprised, so seeing a nice print or a photo in an online essay that one first saw on Instagram may be a better experience for most. Whatever.

  6. I’m recovering from brain surgery and so when I saw how this is developing I thought I would just leave it alone. I seek calm, peace and tranquility right now. But what the heck:

    As noted above, the point is “diary.” Just as David set it up to be. It must be working within his expectations or I doubt he would have posted this.

    There is another point, too:

    FUN.

    A little online community, a family of sorts, has formed around Burn. Aside from whatever else it might do, the diary is a fun exercise. It is fun for those who practice it to reach out to the other members of this community and to say, hello, Burn community, this is where I was and what I did during each ones seven-day diary commitment. It is fun for the remainder of the community to be able to look and see what other members of their community did during their seven days.

    Fun.

    And to those members of the Burn family who dropped me a note of encouragement on Facebook or Instagram, or even just a simple “like” to show me they had taken note of my situation and were with me in that small way, I truly do appreciate it.

  7. IMANTS

    i can easily see where BurnDiary would not suit an artist like you…although the truth is i would love to see what you came up within a given week of shooting…one picture? two? that would be seriously fine with me…

    BurnDiary is somebody’s visual adventure for a week..any value it that? for many out there in photo land who DO want to actually work in the business, this is a great testing ground and BurnDiary is seen by most significant editors of magazines etc….so for the photographer who wants to “produce on demand” it is a better way to show a portfolio to and editor than any way i can think of…proof of being able to make photographs in a short time span…which every working photographer must do…your favorite and mine Tamara did this for example….

    some of course work out better than others…we can never know in advance how someone will do …and editors know this pressure…and they require someone who can be relaxed, shoot as they want, and yet still have pictures to see for a week of time….people paying commissions want the artist in you TODAY

    not your cup of tea? i get that i really do…yet for me diaries are the most fun reading of all…and we surely have more viewers for BurnDiary than we do here on Burn…

    so surely for a segment of our audience of mostly young photographers who apply for BurnDiary it means a lot….again, for those who want commissions/assignments or to attract a book publisher…i get more requests for “how can i get an assignment?” from BurnDiary than for any other single thing here on Burn…

    it’s probably not for you….it’s not who you are as a photographer….still, the door is always open

    cheers, david

  8. It is just when isolated as here (A Glimpse of Burn Diary) that they get lost as there is no real context for them to work with. It all just becomes a bunch of pictures.

    On the other Burn Diary works well as they are a snapshot, here today gone tomorrow and then we move on to the next one. We know the context where the photos reside….it is a week. Many use both visuals and text in Burn Diary to enhance their work and ideas thus it all becomes positive for the audience, they get a chance to participate.

  9. Imants, stated as you have lastly stated it above, I find I basically agree with you. Laid out as a single spread to stand alone at the top of the pages in the form of a Burn photo essay, the impact falls short of what it did when the images were being posted almost as soon as seen, experienced and taken.

    Still, as I always do, be they your absolutely unique images, David’s, Tom’s, MW’s, Tamara’s, Patricia’s or whoever’s images, I enjoyed looking at them.

  10. WOW!!!!!!!

    I hate to chime in for a third time but for quite some time now I have been of dull and drugged brain and the doctor tells me it will take me weeks to months to fully heal and regain all my capacities – BUT I took no pain killers today and I just now sat down, got a phone call and inadvertently opened this series back up as I talked…

    WOW!!!!!!!

    It was like I was looking at a whole new set of images I had never even seen before.

    And they are good. Excellent, in fact. I more than “enjoyed looking at them.” I loved looking at them. It was exciting. It even filled me with a new level of hope.

    I wish all the images were the same size as Tom’s. They do have more impact at that size – even with artifacts. I don’t know why they are not at least that big as original Instagrams are close to four times the size of Tom’s. I remember how Burn Diary started out posting pics that seemed to have been about that size and then later on cut down the resolution, perhaps for the sake of design. I think this may have been a mistake.

    Ok.

    Tavra. I have no more to say.

    I have said enough.

    I am finished now.

    Carry on, Burn people.

  11. I’ve never used Instagram and don’t have a smart phone but I was very impressed with Ekin’s photographs here: I loved her use of the square format.

    Bill, good to hear that you are on the road to recovery.

    Mike.

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