Oliver Holms — Notes

Mar 21, 2025 Looking down an overgrown river. The banks are covered with vegetation and trees overhang the river obscuring the sky. The water is a muddy green. There is a pool of light on the water in the centre of frame where the light is breaking through the canopy
Mar 19, 2025 looking up to the sky through the stones arches of a ruined church in Lisbon. The structure in the foreground is shrouded in scaffolding covered with white netting. Some warm coloured sunlight is hitting the nearer arch and the sky is cloudy.
Mar 17, 2025

Why not do it now?
— Tyler Cowen

Mar 13, 2025 looking down hill from the edge of Parliament Hill towards central London. The path is unofficial and made by people walking across the grass. It forks just before a barrier of red and orange hazard tape stretched between posts on either side of the path. There are trees on either side of the path in the top corners and in the lower right there is a Y shaped shadow from a tree trunk that is an inverted mirror of the Y shape of the path
Mar 12, 2025 looking out towards central london from Parliament Hill, with the view framed between two stands of trees, focussing the eye on a tower block that is standing much taller than the residential buildings that surround it.
Mar 11, 2025 Blue sign on white wall, with — All things arise, exist, and expire — written in Thai above and English below in white text. The bottom half of the frame is full of fake flowers, mostly pink, yellow and purple orchids.
Mar 10, 2025

I don’t think of it as art — I just make things I like bigger, assuming that if I like them some other people might too.
— Corita Kent

Mar 8, 2025

Keiran Fourtet doing what he does best, and the moon while waiting for an Uber home.

Mar 5, 2025

Tomorrow

The one thing all fools have in common is that they are always getting ready to start.
—Seneca.

“The sure sign of an amateur is that he has a million plans and they all start tomorrow.”
Steven Pressfield, from Turning Pro

Mar 4, 2025 The image shows a cartoon/comic strip about abstract art. In the top panel, a smiling character in a hat and suit points to an abstract painting with geometric lines and shapes, saying "HA HA HA WHAT DOES THIS REPRESENT?" In the bottom panel, the abstract painting now has legs, and an arm which is pointing back at the person, asking "WHAT DO YOU REPRESENT?" with the character now lying flat. Below the comic is text explaining that abstract paintings react to viewers based on what viewers bring to them. It states that art "is alive if you are" and concludes with "YOU, SIR, ARE A SPACE, TOO" while showing the character lying flat on the ground with Xs for eyes. The comic appears to be commenting on the relationship between art and viewer, suggesting that meaning in art is reciprocal.
Feb 27, 2025 A white box with text that reads "pretty shitty how baseline human activities like singing, dancing and making art got turned into skills instead of being seen as behaviors &10;so now it's like 'the point of doing them is to get good at them' and not 'this is a thing humans do, the way birds sing and bees make hives." on top of a painting of women dancing in a circle in a fantastical forest. A crescent moon with a face and illustrated stars and constellations are floating among the trees
Feb 25, 2025

“ANYTHING GOES. NO RULES. NO RESTRICTIONS. NO LIMITS”

— William Klein

Feb 20, 2025

I feel like commercials exist in the world with us and we have no say in whether we see them or don’t see them. And therefore they should serve the function of art. … they inhabit the world I live in and I want the world that I live in, quite selfishly, to be beautiful and to teach me something and to have artistic merit.
— Joe Connor

From part one of this excellent interview with Joe on Setnotes.

Feb 13, 2025 A misty landscape view of a minimal structure in open field at Rye Nature Reserve, with tall support poles and multiple tree trunk segments arranged in a circle as seating. The scene is bordered by wire fencing and stretches out to a hazy horizon where patches of water are visible in the distance.

Rye Nature Reserve, December 2024

Feb 12, 2025 Crude painting of four sun flowers on a white background painted onto the side of a delapidated telecom box in the bleak scrubland beside a carpark
Feb 12, 2025

Writing a blog is nothing like writing for publication. There is no preexisting audience you have to please. The audience is created as a reflection of your curiosity. A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.
— Henrik Karlsson

Jan 30, 2025

“Your job as a writer is to imagine yourself into the lives of people who are not you . . . and, that way, provide a gateway for readers to also imagine themselves into the lives of others so that we can build up a community of shared understanding.”
—Caryl Phillips

I think this is what good documentary and portrait photography is doing too. You have to meet the subject as they are, without preconception or categorisation, so that your picture becomes a door into their world. The focus is on what makes them individual, rather than using them to illustrate a universal.

H/t Russell Davies

Dec 5, 2024 Painting of a phonebox by Keita Morimoto. The phonebox is lit with orange light and the background road, cars, trees and sky are tinged with green

Beautiful work by Keita Morimoto 森本啓太 , via Alan Jacobs.

Nov 25, 2024

“Photography is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world.” —Bruno Barbey

Nov 16, 2024 Full length shot of girl wearing blue jeans and a white top standing on a tube platform with her hair blowing in the wind created by the tube train rushing into the station. The tube train is blurred from the movement.

Zen Didion

Nov 2, 2024

INTERVIEWER: There’s a certain aesthetic to the way you live. You once talked about using good silver every day.

DIDION: Well, every day is all there is.

Oct 30, 2024

Photography, for me, is a spontaneous impulse, the result of a constant awareness, which captures both a moment and eternity. Drawing, by contrast, expands on what our consciousness has taken from the moment. Photography is an action, drawing is a meditation.
—Henri Cartier Bresson

Oct 9, 2024

A fun and opinionated set of rules for photography from photographer and former teacher Charles H. Traub — Do’s and Don’ts (found via Andy Adams newsletter, FlakPhoto).

And some of my own photography rules and advice from my (currently hibernating) newsletter here.

Oct 5, 2024 meandering line of water prints of bird footsteps on grey walkway that look like lots of little arrows pointing one way and then the other. There is a large puddle reflecting a blue sky that fills most of the top half of the frame and two parrellel lines of water that run from the bottom edge just right of centre to exit the left hand edge of frame, just above the midpoint of that side. There are three fatter, less distinct pigeon foot prints below the double lines in the bottom left corner.
Sep 28, 2024 View through a window of a blonde woman washing the glass on the other side. The smeared soap suds and the green cloth in her hand are obscuring her face. She is standing on a balcony and residential buildings are visible in the background