Shooting Wide Open

Michael Sebastian

Saw Michael Sebastian’s work recently on Lenscratch. Constructed Landscapes is a series on that now familiar theme, the manmade suburban/freeway landscape. The wider shots are suburban scenes that we have seen time and again, but when he gets up close to little details, his sense of color is great. He says in his statement (tweaked by me):

For the last six-odd years I’ve driven a 100-mile round trip to and from my practice – from my suburban home, along a busy stretch of interstate highway through central Kentucky, to my workplace in a small city, and back again at day’s end. I pass homes small and large, modest and palatial; truck stops, quarries, and industrial sites; rural hamlets and suburban shopping malls… a landscape of such manicured plastic faux-perfection that it discomfits with its suggestion of discontent among material abundance. The resulting images have provoked in me, variously, feelings of satisfaction, amusement, ambivalence, isolation, or even vague menace.

I felt pretty much the same thing a few weeks ago when I witnessed the ridiculous sight of three men painting the grass bright green at school in preparation for Alumni Weekend, not the least because apparently it takes two men to supervise one man with a spray nozzle. A large tent had been erected for an annual event in front of Hoover Tower, and when it was dismantled, the lawn looked yellow and trampled down. I can only hope that the this was a desperate one-off tactic in preparation for an important donor weekend, but come to think of it, I can’t recall that I’ve ever seen much yellow grass here. Now I am too freaked out to lie down in too-green grass to read or sleep. Ugh. And the saddest thing is that the poor squirrels and birds have to eat off of that tainted grass! If you suspect painted grass, look at any water fixtures in the lawn – if they have a strange greenish tint, presume the worst.

Incidentally, I love the green in Sebastian’s photos, but that painting the grass incident really places the series in a new, mildly dystopian light. Painting the damn grass, would you believe it!

I saw an ad in the paper for artificial grass, and googled it. There is an entire industry of fake grass. One of the more surreal choices for company names – Better Than Real Grass. Wow. Have we really gotten so divorced from the actual function of plants and natural systems that everything really is about the perfect appearance?! I suppose this isn’t all that surprising considering the ornamental nature of lawns in the first place. But really, wow. What happened to lying in some cool grass in the shade in summertime? I bet you that artificial turf gets warm in summer since it lacks the natural evaporative cooling effect of respiring plants. And isn’t cleaning pet waste off artificial grass kind of a sanitary hazard without the decomposition that happens naturally over time in real grass?

I hope not, but I imagine it’s only a matter of time before entire housing subdivisions are outfitted with Better Than Real Grass. How long before everything is so infused with synthetic materials that we don’t have any daily contact with purely natural materials? Craziness. But maybe it’s already pretty much happened for many people. To take myself as an example, I walk on concrete, use computers and pens, eat some packaged foods, wear clothes and sleep on fabrics that are blends of polyester, use all sorts of plastic and metal things… yeah, aside from the organic produce I buy half the time, it’s pretty much happened.

There are sirens and gunshots in a song about a side hug? See ~3:30 for a demo of a narrowly averted dastardly frontal hug… “Jesus never hugged nobody like that!”

Amber Shields

Johanne is an intimate, direct project. (Go and see – these two I picked work for me but don’t tell the half of it.) You really can make meaningful photographs in your own backyard – we’ve got no excuse! It also makes me wonder if it’s only at a certain stage of life, or when a person develops a certain mindset after intense lows or reconsideration of their lives that they’re open to allowing someone to reveal them like this.

Her statements feel very right too. Sometimes bits and pieces tell the story better than carefully constructed word architecture.

This week I got the good news that I’ll be getting a grant from the university to finish up and exhibit the KZSU project. I’m planning to reshoot some interiors in large format, but most of what I want to do is environmental portraits. So I look at Johanne and think wouldn’t it be nice, if I managed such simple intimacy. But honestly, I don’t think my subjects want to go there, and I’m not really sure I’d want to show them that way. I suppose it’s easier when it’s family. But no, I take that back. At any rate, more thinking to be done.

Jared Boger

I should really be writing two long papers, but I am in a mood to look at new images. I realized that the hard drive took with it all my jpegs of people I wanted to feature, but surprisingly that makes me more enthusiastic than before about finding more photos.

I was wondering the other day, “Are there blind photographers?” And sure enough, there are, though some of them are technically not totally blind. From Sight Unseen:

Visual information is practical to our survival and yet it has become pervasive in our world. We respond to visual overload by shuttering and narrowing our perception, so as to rebalance our senses. But for the sight-impaired artists in this exhibition, the act of making a photograph has provided new ways of seeing.

These artists employ diverse strategies in their work. Some use the camera to present their own inner visions. Some capture the outside world unfiltered with a non-retinal photography of chance. And a number of the artists, legally blind but retaining a limited, highly attenuated sight, photograph to capture the outside world and bring it into their realm.

I first saw this on The Ingoing (N-always SFW, unless you have awesome work), the shared blog of a couple of girls I’ve been following on Flickr for, oh, probably most of the 4+ years they’ve been collaborating. There’s lots of other good stuff there too, so hop on over and try not to feel too much like a peeping stalker. Their proper website is definitely NSFW, which is too bad, since I think they’ve actually done more interesting stuff than the naked romping.

via

Why don’t we have pictures of men sitting on moons anymore?

My laptop hard drive kicked the bucket on Tuesday. I’d backed up recently and had been shooting mostly film anyhow, so I have a few hours of rescanning and reprocessing to do, hopefully during Thanksgiving and Xmas, when I’ll also try to catch up on some needed blogging on the more fascinating pieces of course material. Aside from that, I have not lost much. Invest in back-ups, people! (Drobo anyone?)

In the meantime, here is a sight for sore eyes:

It turns out trampolining (?) can be an extreme sport of sorts… What I find amazing is that there is not all that much room between where his head lands and the metal bar of the trampoline. Scary! Maybe they can’t make them too big or they’ll lose their tautness?

And another kind of jumping.

Daniel White

Weird caves? Huge cakes? These are 3D renders of the Mandlebrot set. Background info and images at Daniel White’s site.

(via Utata)

Picture Black Friday

If you haven’t heard about Picture Black Friday yet, it’s a collab between John Saponara, TMC and Conscientious. Any photographer who wants to can take pictures on or about Black Friday and submit them. A selection will appear on the site, but I wish we could see most of the submissions. It sounds like an interesting collective activity (the photography!).

I’m still not sure what I want to do yet, especially since I am the world’s worst morning person, but here’s a news piece in the Times I came across while looking:

The [National Retail Federation] said retailers were performing dress rehearsals with their employees. Some stores plan to serve drinks to shoppers, or offer entertainment while they are in line, to maintain calm.

Last year, frenzied shoppers at a Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, N.Y., trampled Jdimytai Damour, a store worker who died soon afterward. To prevent any repeat, Wal-Mart has sharply changed how it intends to manage the crowds. That new plan, developed by experts who have wrangled throngs at events like the Super Bowl and the Olympics, will affect how customers approach and enter the stores, shop, check out and exit.

The most significant change at Wal-Mart is that the majority of its discount stores (as opposed to its Supercenters) will open Thanksgiving morning at 6 a.m. and stay open through Friday evening. In another new twist, shoppers will not have to sprint toward a pile of flat-screen televisions. Rather, customers will be able to enter the store at any time and line up at merchandise displays. When the products go on sale Friday at 5 a.m., workers will supervise the lines.

Rocketboom, with Al Yankovic

Read more about Autotune in the New Yorker.