seeing & being seen

Hiroshi Sugimoto Boden Sea at Uttwill  2993

Photographer Sugimoto strikes a Stone Age deal with U2

Bono confessed that he loved Sugimoto’s seascape photographs and began quizzing the artist about the work.

“He started taking notes as I talked,” Sugimoto recalled. Those notes became the foundation for the new album’s title track. Last year, during a visit to Dublin, Sugimoto heard the first demo tape, and a few months later was told by Bono that U2 wanted to use the Boden Sea image on the album jacket.

“I said, ‘Are you sure? If you use it you won’t be able to put anything on top of it, not even the U2 name,” the artist remembered.

He was surprised when Bono strongly agreed. Rolling Stone is now calling the text-free jacket “an early front runner for album cover of the year.” (The cover also features an equal sign, but it is attached to the plastic wrapper, so it disappears once opened it.) Then came talk of money.

“I gave myself just a second to think about it,” Sugimoto recalled, “and I said ‘How about a Stone Age deal — no cash?’ “

Bono agreed on an “artist-to-artist” barter whereby Sugimoto could use the “No Line on the Horizon” song in any project he wanted in the future. Sugimoto says he still hasn’t made up his mind about how to use the song — which he says he likes, but liked even better in its “more hard rock” demo stage.

Errol Morris is at it again, via his NYTimes blog. At stake this time is the image below and its histories. Fascinating stuff.

No name — but a soldier brave, he fell.
We shall find her, without a name;
This picture, sometime, will tell whence he came.

— Emily Latimer, “The Unknown”

Helen Levitt, Who Captured New York Street Life on Film, is Dead at 95

Helen Levitt. New York, circa 1940.

Form is henceforth divorced from matter. In fact, matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which form is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it.

Oliver Wendell Holmes: The Stereoscope and the Stereograph (1859)

Ah, appropriated images, fair use, Google Image Search, newly iconic imagery… some of my favorite photographic issues surrounding original photograph in ubiquitous Obama poster, above. Does the Associated Press have a case?

In a not-encouraging-sign, Brandeis is to sell their art collection and close their museum:

Rocked by a budget crisis, Brandeis University will close its Rose Art Museum and sell off a 6,000-object collection that includes work by such contemporary masters as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Nam June Paik. …

“Clearly, what’s happening with Brandeis now is that they decided the easiest way is to look around the campus and find things that can be capitalized,” said David Robertson, a Northwestern University professor who is president of the Association of College and Univertsity Museums and Galleries. “It’s always art that goes first.”

But there is no precedent for selling an art collection of the Rose’s stature. Internationally recognized, the collection is strong in American art of the 1960s and 1970s and includes works by Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Morris Louis, and Helen Frankenthaler.

I’ve posted several times about the sad demise of the Polaroid, and we have all mourned appropriately.

21 Feb 1947. Edwin H. Land showing positive and negative print taken from a new camera that produces finished pictures. Bettmann/CORBIS.

BUT!… This just in: apparently a group of past employees and fellow visionaries have acquired a former Polaroid factory in the Netherlands and are hoping to return instant pack film to our photographic options. They are calling it the Impossible Project. In Edwin Land’s own words:

Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.

Yikes for lack of regularity here. I have an excuse: new darkroom! With a toilet!

Thanks, Aurora: