Kleon Judges #Instabros – The Butler Bros | The Butler Bros

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Kleon Judges #Instabros

Tuesday, December 20th, 2011

From our December #Instabros judge Austin Kleon:

How do you judge a contest? You must have criteria, or a criterion. I figured judging a competition for my friends The Butler Bros would be simple: I’d pick the Instagram photos that suggested stories that looked the least like fiction. Photos that were honest, truthful, authentic. Using that criterion, I immediately became skeptical of photos that looked too good. Photos that looked like they were taken by expensive DSLRs and later posted from the phone were out. No easy matter, indeed. In the end, I went with another (way less ambitious) criterion:
I picked the photos I liked.

click images to enlarge

@mdenton3016

If all photos are posed, this was
the least-posed in the November #instabros batch: a mosh pit at Fun
Fun Fun Fest. It’s rare to find Instagram shots with so much energy—for one thing, something has to be happening, and a lot of times when we Instagram, nothing
is really happening: think of all the lattes and sleeping dogs in your feed…

 

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@toppbrocales

Captioned “lonely guy.” What’s his story? Who took the photo? (You never know, the photographer could’ve been dining *with* him, instead of behind him. Wouldn’t that be interesting…) Would I feel the same way about the photo without the caption? Once I read the caption, it’s impossible to know.

 

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@Vanchocstraw

@Vanchocstraw’s bio is accurate:
“a lot of walking the dogs in Austin, Texas,” but I just couldn’t get away from this photo of the Top Notch sign against an Austin sunset. Does it suggest a story? No. Sometimes a photo just looks pretty… and that’s enough.

 

 

 

 

Congratulations to this month’s winners. Each receives a Butler Bros t-shirt. Keep tagging #Instabros on your Instagrams to enter.

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Bob Dylan’s Birthday present to me.

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

In 2001 I decided to give myself the gift of Bob Dylan. He was touring the Midwest and playing at State Fairs. He was performing on my birthday, August 10th, at the Iowa State Fair Grand Stand. I bought a ticket to Des Moines and packed my Yashica Mat 124 medium format camera and my Polaroid Land Camera. I also brought along a journal my friend Lauren Greer made for me specifically for this event (note the cover below). These are some snapshots from the journal. I went on to see him play in Missouri and Illinois the following days, but nothing came close to the Iowa show.

Happy 70th, Bob Dylan.

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Bruce Robison’s You and Me

I met with Bruce Robison early one morning at Epoch coffee to talk about his new record and what sort of art might make sense for the packaging. We talked about a lot of things… politics, our kids and the continued rapid disintegration the music industry. At some point in the conversation I asked him if he had noticed the large color prints hanging on the wall in the back of the space. There were 4 or 5 oversized prints from Autumn Spadaro, a photographer I’d never heard of, hanging casually in front of some vintage furniture. One of them caught my eye immediately as a candidate for the cover image. They were obviously shot on medium format film, and had a simple graphic quality. The subject matter was very Bruce: small town Texas, decaying structures and 1970′s automobiles. The images had a touch of Eggleston, too. I took an iPhone pic of the print I liked, typeset the title over it, and emailed it to Bruce. He loved it. I called Autumn the next day and she agreed to license the image. We licensed another one of her images for the back cover too. Austin is a town where talent is everywhere, especially at coffee shops. Lindsay Braun was the studio artist on the piece. She helped with typesetting and photo-retouching. The record is currently being sold only at live performances. Go see Bruce and buy one.

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Gomez

ATO Records called a month before SXSW and said Brit rock stars Gomez would be in town and they needed promo shots for the launch of their record, A New Tide. We pitched them on two locations – they liked both. Marty shot them at The Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems and The Agave for a half day. Everything was photographed using available light. The simple images were inspired by the rock and roll photography of Elliott Landy – particularly his images of The Band. It’s an attempt at an honest documentary approach in a era where so much imagery is over-lit and over-styled.

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AvenueOne Properties

Avenue One Properties needed to reassert their presence with the high-end real estate market while attracting the next generation of homebuyers. The Love Your Area campaign engaged the Austin community directly to tell a story bigger than contracts and closings. We distributed documentary kits with Lomolito FILM cameras (not digital) and journals. One-hundred people participated in capturing their unique view of Austin. It was an epic multi-media project that got AvenueOne noticed. We used the images to launch the campaign at the Austin Museum of Art where select prints were sold for charity. Images were put into a micro site where they could be viewed by location. We also used the images and stories for print, out of home and direct mail. We didn’t have Facebook, Twitter or Google Maps mash-up technology yet and the effort still made a huge impact. Perhaps it was a campaign a few years ahead of it’s time.

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