Shooting Wide Open

Saw this video on street photographer Daido Moriyama in the new releases section of the video store (Lost Weekend on Valencia), but since we were looking for a bit of action adventure, it wasn’t quite the right fit. It’s part of the New People Artist Series, which seem to be all on Japanese artists. Just released on Jan. 26th, 84 min., in Japanese with English subtitles. Netflix doesn’t have it, so unless you want to buy it ($19 + shipping), you’d better hope your video store is as cool as mine!

Not quite safe for work – full of… oatmeal pies. Is “camel walk” an euphemism for something that I’m not aware of?

Interesting… I found this in my Amazon recommendations, one of the only times I’ve seen anything I’m actually interested in and hadn’t heard of already.

What Parisian shopping arcades were to the nineteenth century and capitalism, Dubai’s luxurious mega-malls are to the new millennium and late capitalism. The Baudelairean flaneur, who patrolled the avenues as a detached observer, today is replaced by the phoneur, a wired wanderer who uses a cell phone to text, call, Web-surf and snap digital images on the fly. The ubiquitous cellphone camera has already become a valid tool of civilian journalism. Celebrated photographer Joel Sternfeld visited Dubai in 2008, documenting its new malls with the consumer fetish object du jour, the iPhone.

160 pages, 70 plates. A February release according to Steidl, but Amazon says March 31.

First big-name iPhone book? (Besides Chase Jarvis?)

I’m donating this print to the SF ArtSpan auction that will be held on 3/27. The funds will go to open studios and Art for City Youth. The deadline to submit and be in the printed invitation was Sunday, but I believe they are still accepting donations. One work per artist will be accepted and it must be ready to go at drop off (ie framed, assembled, etc). Polytychs and giclee reproductions, as well as work that’s been previously donated are out. Submission is simple:

Artists interested in donating artwork to the pre-juried Benefit Art Show & Auction must e-mail a JPEG image of the artwork to info@artspan.org; include the following information in the body of the e-mail:

• title
• medium
• year completed
• dimensions
• retail value (bidding will start at 1/3 of this value)
• whether you would like to donate 100% or 75% to ArtSpan

I hope someone likes this enough to bid. I rarely fill the frame like this and I wish I did more often. New year’s resolution?

Alfons Schilling

The “Dunkelkammerhut” (Darkroom Hat) is a mobile camera obscura worn on the head. As usually the case with a camera obscura, images from the outside world appear both reversed and inverted in the interior of the darkroom. No sooner the wearer of the darkroom hat moves, he becomes the producer of images depicted in the camera’s interior.

Elaine showed Alfons Schilling’s darkroom hat in a slideshow on the first day of class. Flash to a couple of years ago, when Simon Lee’s bus obscura came to Rayko Photo Center in SF and I took a ride. It’s the same idea, no?

dronepop

You’ll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking… From the Scotch Mist webcast. (Wait for the feathers after 3m.)

And now, the anti-Radiohead, Coldplay’s video for “The Hardest Part,” featuring spliced Lifetime show footage of an 84-yr old woman dancing in a ridiculous outfit. (Click at your own risk since it is Coldplay audio and some, um, cheeky visuals. Potentially NSFW?)

Jeff Derose

A KZSU DJ sent that to me as a bonus accompanying this video of a cover of Coldplay’s “Fix You” by the senior (ages 70-90) chorus Young@Heart, which he saw featured in a PBS documentary. Looking at the playlist for their CD, it looks like they’ve covered Radiohead too, not to mention The Clash and “Hey Ya,” of all songs.

I will try my best to repay you, Bill, and by repay I mean avenge myself…

Saw this Barry Mcgee/Twist photo installation in the SFMOMA 75th Anniversary show today: (that’s not me, don’t get your Asian girls confused…)

Jen Wong

SFMOMA has a set of photos of the installation of the work, and one of my favorite parts – the drawings of the strange heads:

There’s also an interview with the director of conservation about McGee’s installations in their blog.

The wall text referred to the “Mission School,” referring apparently to the gritty, graf-like, Hamburger Eyes and zine aesthetic of some punks and whonot in the city. I wonder who coined the term and how the artists feel about it.

Penelope Umbrico’s Suns From Flickr was in the next room, and I’m glad I got a chance to see it in person. A pretty good day at the MOMA… the contemporary floors were my favorite as usual – I felt like going a little nuts after staring at so many small dark black and white photos from the past. Not that all work should be large and in color, but it just feels so dead to live in the past so much.

UPDATE: According to Wikipedia, the “Mission School” was coined in 2002 in a Bay Guardian article.

More McGee here and here.

Finally, all the China scans are done! Processing is a whole other matter, but I’m excited. There never seems to be a lack of negs to scan, dammit.

I’m in a lull of not really wanting to maintain my web presence that frequently at the moment. Instead, experiment with materials, think about light, get used to shooting in black and white again…

Thomas Wilfred invented the Clavilux projector and thought that it would become a popular entertainment in public and in the home. The set up can be large scale, controlled by what looks like a modern sound or lighting mixing desk, or small and personal, like TVs. The projections he favored were abstract colorful moving shapes – I think he called them Lumia shows – though it could also project other things, like a cartoon of the World’s Fair or light stripes that emulate the look of columns as backdrop to a play (? I’d sure like to know what’s going in on in that photo – are the people sleeping? blown over by wind?). The Yale Library has a lot of intriguing documents of this thing.

UPDATE: A user video of the LACMA Lumia piece (mute the audio, which consists of crowd noise only):

Also, see this post for info on a Wilfred documentary.

I saw this in the New Scientist:

This bacterial “photo” was created by projecting light onto bacterial “film” – genetically engineered E. coli bacteria. The film was infused with a sugar that turns black when digested. The bacteria in the dark parts of the Petri dish digested this sugar and so turned black, whereas in the illuminated areas, a light-activated gene prevented the bacteria from eating the sugar, and so these parts remained clear.