5 a week
Archive for September, 2007
strobes, the secret satisfaction of shattering stuff, and owls
From Art MoCo, a link to the German photographer Martin Klimas. What could be more gratifying than dropping ceramic figurines in the dark, using the sound of impact to trigger a strobe-lit exposure of their demise?
His website also caters thoughtfully to my weakness for imagery of birds - birds in flight, to boot. I don’t see much in the way of titles, but the Snowy Owl image, below top, could not but remind me of the Doc Edgerton owl, below bottom.
Spooky. Strobe photo by Harold Edgerton and Charles Wyckoff.
chicken or egg
Roger Fenton’s assistant, Sparling. 1855. Library of Congress, via Errol Morris.
Oh, Errol. My crush on Errol Morris escalates by the minute. In today’s installment of his intermittent NYTimes blog he dissects one of my favorite photographic tales, wherein Roger Fenton, Crimean war photographer extraordinaire, ostensibly staged the famed Valley of the Shadow of Death photograph by dragging spent cannonballs out of a ditch, highlighting and dramatizing the danger at hand with available symbols. Two photographs from that day (below) have been customarily presented as evidence of this pre-digital-manipulation: one with cannonballs on road, one with cannonballs in ditch. But… not so fast… pesky cannonballs can both be dragged onto a road and may also be pushed off of a road. Which photograph came first?
As a fan of retrospective readings into images, flights of fancy (poor Roger Fenton’s aching back, for example: “oh, this cannonball is just too heavy!”), and the general embracing of visual ambiguity, I love the discussion that ensues between Errol Morris and various interested parties. The subsequent flurry of amateur-detective comments is also not to be missed. Even better, a 2nd installment on this story is promised. I’m on tenterhooks.
Roger Fenton. Valley of the Shadow of Death. 1855.
Roger Fenton. Valley of the Shadow of Death. 1855
police as curators
Hot off the press: a Nan Goldin photograph from (Sir) Elton John’s private collection, to be exhibited at England’s Baltic Modern Art Gallery, has been confiscated by the police, on suspicion that it may breach child pornography laws. The NYTimes and the Telegraph are all over it. Apparently the Saatchi already went through this nonsense with a Nan Goldin photograph in 2001, and London police backed down after realizing they were unlikely to secure a conviction.
To find the culprit image, “Edda and Klara Belly Dancing, Berlin (1998)” (above), I had to actually head to the physical stacks (gasp), as a perfunctory online search proved unusually fruitless. Quickly found it in the intimidatingly hefty The Devil’s Playground (Phaidon, 2003). Jen Graves of the Seattle Stranger wrote this last year:
…but you stop dead in your tracks when you hit Edda and Klara Belly Dancing, Berlin (1998), a Nan Goldin photograph that came into the museum’s possession just last year. Both of the young girls are laughing and playing; one of them is wrapped in a scrap of sheer costume fabric and the other is lying on her back, her knees bent under her, her legs spread wide for the viewer. Though this is a perfectly natural moment, the dark open hole of the girl’s vagina is harrowing. My first thought is that she is about to be raped, or maybe is being raped already, by me, by my looking. I come to my senses. She’s at home, playing with a friend and laughing. She’s fine. I’m the one who’s afraid.
Read Mia Fineman’s The Nan Goldin Story here.
Update: I had the picture here, but I’m taking it down, as I was getting a sudden spate of blog traffic to this entry, apparently, which made me uncomfortable. Interesting. Go find the book if you’re interested.
voyeurism, cont.
from the series The Park, 1971, by Kohei Yoshiyuki
Tangentially related to previous post on surveillance cameras is yesterday’s article in the NYTimes: Sex in the Park, and it Sneaky Spectators, discussing Kohei Yoshiyuki’s photographs of and within a subculture of voyeurism in the night life of Tokyo’s parks during the 1970s. Of the images that I have seen (Document: Park, originally published in 1980, to be republished this fall), the photographs are much more about the watchers of the furtive trysters than about the trysting itself. (Note to self: infrared flash for nocturnal discretion!) I love that the first exhibition of these photographs, in 1979, required viewers to enter a darkened gallery with a flashlight.
from the series The Park, 1973, by Kohei Yoshiyuki
more cameras ≠ less crime
I keep bringing up recent Panopticon-style mega-surveillance initiatives in the context of discussions about increasing ubiquity of photographic documentation. According to this article, and as I cynically suspected, said proliferation of crime-deterrent cameras in London is not corresponding to an increase in the solving of crimes.
So many Photoshop filters, so little time…
… or, in the realm of the physical print, so many beverages for recreational (and thirst-quenching) image toning… I haven’t tried this personally, nor am I particularly inclined to, although I did tone one of my first photo projects ever in a batch of tea.
Day at the beach
I am recently rather insatiable in the found photographs department, so much so that I am adding a category here to that effect. Found, and purchased, yesterday at the flea market:
Forget this?
Pictures, pictures everywhere. We have been talking in class about Alec Wilkinson’s New Yorker article: Remember This?: A project to record everything we do in life, and Gordon Bell’s insane noble ambitious attempt to digitize, photographically and otherwise, his life experiences. All of them, that is. It is appropriate, then, that everywhere I turn today I am confronted with rumors of new gadgets and software embracing and pushing variations on this theme of pixel mania.
The Triops camera, a prototype finalist in the Braun Prize 2007, is “designed to take photos at moments you might not expect.” (Hmmm… personally, I often take photos at moments I might not expect.) Its 3 fisheye lenses react to motion or sound, capturing a 360 degree p
anorama when stimuli triggered (or manually).
Want to wear your own SenseCam of sorts, but worried about discretion? Check out the world’s tiniest camera yet produced.
And, moving from the gadget realm into potential software futures, I appear to be a few months behind (or living under a rock, apparently) to have missed the mad jump on the Photosynth bandwagon (eye-popping demo here). It took me approximately 30 seconds, post-demo, to call IT department to reserve a PC laptop (what?! Microsoft doesn’t support Apple products? Shocking.). Image categorization, multiples, appropriation, data visualization, 3-D tourism… how many of my favorite subjects can it simultaneously address? I haven’t been so anxious to get my hands on a Microsoft platform in… ever.
