Shooting Wide Open

Chris LaMarca

Saw this today at Verve and I love his work. A very eye-catching website too – one of the few well done Flash sites.

Lauren Greenfield

Do believe Lauren Greenfield is looking for a new intern. While you’re checking that out, take a look at the new essay on Dubai, which is sprouting skyscrapers overnight.

I’ve also just gotten the Kids+Money short she did for HBO, and I’m looking forward to and dreading watching the thing… it’s not supposed to leave you in a better mood than it found you, is it?

Spencer Murphy

Marie Sjovold

Per-Anders Pettersson

The finalists have been announced for the Magnum Expression Award. I like many of the photos, but many of the projects make me think about that second P.

Vivian Maier

John Maloof of Flickr’s Hardcore Street Photography group recently bought tens of thousands of black and white medium format negatives by Chicago street photographer Vivian Maier, who worked through the ’50s-’70s and died this April.

The story, pieced together from the thread:

I purchased a giant lot of negatives from a small auction house here in Chicago. It is the work of Vivian Maier, a French born photographer who recently past away in April of 2009 in Chicago, where she resided. I have a ton of her work (about 30-40,000 negatives) which ranges in dates from the 1950′s-1970′s.

I just contacted the Chicago Cultural Center and applied for an exhibition with the curator. It takes a few months for a response. I contacted the Stephen Daiter Gallery. The person I spoke with said the same thing, “strong work… above average for the time period” but, since they are negatives, not prints, they can’t do much for me. I thought about contacting the Chicago History Museum but just the thought of this stuff getting filed away for reference purposes keeps me from doing that. I have an emotional attachment to her work at this point.

I seriously don’t think she had heirs. One of her obituary’s said that she was a “second mother to”…(so and so). I looked them up and they are not related. I assume it was the children she was the nanny to for many years, who also most likely put up the obituary. If there were any heirs, you would think they would have claimed some of her estate. Instead, her entire property was auctioned off, to my knowledge. This is what I learned talking to the owners of the auction house. I looked into the legal rights on these and it’s vague if there are no heirs.

If anyone knows anything about Maier or has an interest in purchasing or showing these photos, John would probably like to hear from you. If you’re not on Flickr, contact me and I’ll relay the message.

Heard of the Livescribe Pulse Pen? You buy special dot paper and the infrared camera on the pen tracks your writing motions, storing them in memory (1 or 2 GB) and, if you want, recording audio sync-ed to your writing which you can then play back through the built-in speaker or headphone jack simply by tapping on the words you wrote. You can then upload the written notes to your computer along with the sync-ed audio and there is a software that can transcribe your handwriting.

It’s clearly marketed toward college students and people who need to take notes at conferences or meetings, but I am so curious about this combo of technologies that the only reason I haven’t bought one is because it is only compatible with Intel Macs running OS 10.5.5+. Another thing I don’t understand is why there is still paper and ink in this equation. I suppose an electronic tablet version would be heavier, more breakable and be more expensive – on paper you don’t have to worry about a display. Maybe the point is to still have notebooks to flip through, or maybe they just want their users to keep buying consumables. Still, I’m really looking forward to seeing a less consumable-heavy version a some point, say in combination with LED printers and heat-erasable paper:

Could this change publishing? Instead of getting your magazine through the mail you just get a digital file and print on your own paper, then erase or keep it at will?

Another company is Paperium, which makes a Mac compatible digital pen but without the audio recording. Without it, I’m not sure why this is too different from a PDA or scanning your drawings or notes. The draw of the Pulse Pen is the synchronized data collection and playback when the data is not necessarily too related or fused to each other, as in video. You gotta wonder whether we’ll eventually come to a point in time where we can collect all sorts of data simulaneously to a tiny device. Just some food for thought.

Who can solve the remaining 5 items in Blake Andrews‘s photographic Google Trends quiz? The patterns are so distinct that they should be easy for someone who’s been following the industry for a long time…

• What occurs biennially in the first few months of the year, the last one being in 2008?

• What was a one-off event that happened smack in the middle of 2007? (“Jen Bekman” is a similar spike, but comes later that year)
• What do people show sustained interest in over the years, but less so during Xmas time? (“snapshot” is very close, but no dice)
• What have people shown increasing interest in over the years and makes a good Xmas present? (CF cards has a similar pattern)
• What do people have a sustained interest in that wanes during summer and Xmas?

If nothing else, check out his blog, which is fast becoming one of my favorites.

UPDATE: The answers have been released. (#6 was snapshot after all!)

Li Lin

Li Lin’s Disappearing Landscape is one of the 798 Photo books I picked up. The book is divided into two parts – Wetland, frames of disappearing natural wetlands, and Artificial Landscape, frames of what will conceivably replace them. The more conventional landscapes of Wetland are interesting, but I really like the strangeness of the Artificial Landscapes, which was shot in Dongying city in Shandong province at what looks to be one of those cheesy amusement parks so characteristic of China.

The introduction by Liu Shuyong is also printed in an English version. The translation is a little awkward sometimes, but my Chinese is not so great, so it will have to do:

Artificial Landscape is a sarcastic photographic series that criticizes the artificial garden scenes installed in modern cities. The reinforced concrete structures imitating traditional gardens are mixed with [nationalist] dreams of political power blocs, and the dependence of commercial capital to the will to power. The crude, childish artificial landscape reflects people’s shallow understanding of Chinese characteristics.

I would say that despite the nationalism and the cheese, while more jaded folks are critical, there is a bit of naive enthusiasm and hopefulness in the reception some people give to these places. He goes to a bit of an extreme – the essay is titled “The Spawning of ‘Flowers of Evil,’ ” which, I have to admit, is an arresting turn of phrase.

If you are ever in Beijing you should pick up some of 798 Photo’s books. I think there are some slight tone and color problems with some of the prints but the shorter ones go for around 100 RMB, which is $13-15, so I can’t complain.

Trailer and man, Alabama Hills

You may have seen this in an August New Yorker:

Face powder, gunpowder, talcum of anthrax,
shavings of steel, crematoria ash, chips
of crumbling poetry paper – all these in my lockbox,
and dust, tanks, tempests, temples of dust.

Saw-, silk-, chalk-dust and chaff,
the dust the drool of a bull swinging its head
as it dreams its death
slobs out on; dust even from the scoured,

scraped littoral of the Aegean,
troops streaming screaming across it
at those who that day, that age or forever
would be foe, worthy of being dust for.

Last, hovering dust of the harvest, brief
as the half-instant hitch in the flight
of the hawk, as the poplets of light
through the leaves of the bronzing maples.

Animal dust, mineral, mental, all hoarded
not in the jar of sexy Pandora, not
in the ark where the dust of the holy aspiring
to congeal as glorious mud-thing still writhes -

just this leathery, crackled, obsolete box,
heart-sized or brain, rusted lock shattered,
hinge howling with glee to be lifted again…
Face powder, gunpowder, dust, darling dust.

- C.K. Williams

I did some searching and rethinking after the post in which I mentioned holographic cameras and it seems that the precursor to that will be something along the lines of the illusion of 3D projection through the use of multiple projectors. I guess the two technologies are qualitatively different, but 3D projection seems to be moving faster than truly holographic images at this point.

For example, the video above is a 3D video projected onto the facade of a gridlike modernist building to great effect by Urbanscreen (a collective? I can’t read their German site…). I wish I could’ve seen this in person. It’s impossible to gauge how real-looking the effect was from a 2D video, but holographic projection is apparently already developed enough that there’s a word for holographic interactive environments: tele-immersion. Sounds kinda cheesy, but shoot, what we’re doing with 3D scanning and printing, and pico projectors makes this seem inevitable. It’s the poor man’s teletransportation!

A few months ago, I listened to a couple of TED talks on the internet being one giant inventory of everything and thought it was incorrect, but you know, when I think about it, we really are trying to upload things to the net, trying to find the best way to organize them for retrieval by others. Right now we only have a grasp on the audio, textual and visual but it’s not too far fetched to think that at some point we might really be able to print 3D objects with ease – we really are working slowly toward teletransportation in a way, aren’t we?

Graeme Nicol

Trade Winds, by newly minted photojournalist Graeme Nicol, is a great little self-published online-only (as far as I can tell) book about the Nigerian community in Guang Zhou, otherwise known as Canton. It’s a glance rather than an in-depth analysis, with some portraits as well as his characteristic street photos. Maybe it’s the China angle, but the project draws me in, aesthetics of photojournalism or not. Not to mention I’ve been shooting a lot of still medium format and it’s a breath of fresh air to see a bit of movement.

You can see the entire book on his website. It is just awesome that people can do these things and put them online. I’m still fairly optimistic about the future of journalism.