Shooting Wide Open

Binary isn’t always digital. These South Koreans are making a moving image with the two colors of their jackets, which they flip in and out, and the relative positions of their bodies as they move in sync.

Can you imagine the number of hours they had to practice?! I love that they are vocalizing and basically dancing rather than simply flipping books or holding up cards.

(Thanks to James.)

Zoe Leonard, Analogue

I showed Lukas some of my Mission storefronts and he pointed me to Zoe Leonard’s Analogue, her first publication. (Grab it for $21 while you can!) I opened it and got that exhilarated feeling – basically a combination of fear and pride – you get when, after seeing your work, someone recommends something which turns out to seem so much better than your own but at the same time you want to jump up and down to emulate it with your own twist through some painful persistence. You know? You know?

Incidentally, she’s been short-listed for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize along with Anna Fox, Sophie Ristelhueber and Donovan Wylie, and there’s an exhibition of their work at the Photographer’s Gallery in London til April 17th. The winner is to be announced on March 17th, so I’ll cross my fingers. (via Tim Clark)

There is also a Times review of her past Dia exhibition, if you’re curious: “Change and Permanence, Captured by Cameras.”

Her photos make me wish my camera focused a bit closer. There are a few black and whites interspersed through the book but I am finding it nearly impossible to take an interest in any but the most abstract black and whites at the moment. After shooting so much color, there is something there beyond the pure color of it that I am no longer willing to give up. Maybe it is simply the pure color. It’s enough.

Haven’t had much time lately to get out there and shoot some MF (I think I’m missed several iterations of holiday windows). I’m really starting to miss it what with lugging the 4×5 around. However, I’m just starting to scan the color sheets that I’m getting back from the lab and I am enamored. Results to follow.

And it continues.

I started as a photo editor for the school paper one night a week and the increased screen time takes away my motivation for keeping up with the blogosphere, so mostly I am reading the blogs that post once or less per day. A minor case of information inflammation. Anyone got a cure? Right now all I can handle is my own business. So here’re some shots of the Mission. You may have seen them before. In that case, tough luck.

Atlas Obscura has organized Obscura Day, to happen in cities worldwide on March 20. The idea seems to be explorations of strange places and collections of stuff, some usually closed to the public. Some of the fascinating ones: (I skew a bit towards the science-y…)

• Brooklyn: Join the Brooklyn Historic Railway Association for an exploration of Vanderbilt’s lost subway tunnel, right under Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Rediscovered by an urban explorer in 1980, the tunnel remains one of New York’s great secrets.
• Bucks County, Pennsylvania: Bring hammers, mallets, bats, and other percussive instruments for this gathering at the mysterious Ringing Rocks Park in eastern Pennsylvania, where the stones have a most curious property: they ring out musical tones when struck.
• Hutchinson, Kansas: Sixty-five stories below Hutchinson, Kansas sits a massive salt mine with mineral veins stretching from Kansas all the way to New Mexico.
• Niagra Falls: Join us at the Niagara Science Museum for an afternoon of classic, historical experiments conducted with restored antique scientific equipment.
• Portland: Join us a tour of the world’s only nuclear reactor run by undergraduates. Learn about nuclear science, and experience the blue glow of Cherenkov radiation.
• Iceland: A special tour of the Icelandic Phallological Museum in Husavik.
• Tokyo: Michael John Grist will be leading an Obscura Day expedition to the G-Cans project. G-Cans is a massive underground waterway and water storage area built by the Japanese government to protect Tokyo from flooding during the monsoon seasons.

But out of all of those, the most promising to me is a local expedition to California City, put on in collaboration with BLDBLOG:

In the desert 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles is a suburb abandoned in advance of itself—the unfinished extension of a place called California City. McMansions can be made out here and there amidst the ghost-grid, mirages of suburbia in the middle of nowhere. Meaningless STOP signs stand guard over dead intersections.

And it’s a weird geography: two of the most prominent nearby landmarks include a prison and an automobile test-driving facility run by Honda. There is also a visually spectacular boron mine to the southeast—it’s the largest open-pit mine in California, according to the Center for Land Use Interpretation—and an Air Force base.

To make things more surreal, in an attempt to boost its economic fortunes, California City hired actor Erik Estrada, of CHiPs fame, to act as the town’s media spokesperson. The history of the town itself is of a failed Californian utopia—in fact, incredibly, if completed, it was intended to rival Los Angeles.

California City is now the site of a proposed mega-farm for solar energy harvesting, as well as for a bizarre plan to build the so-called Cannabis City of the Future.

Note, however, that this is not a guided tour; it is simply an organized simultaneity of people all going out to investigate these streets en masse. Armed with cameras, microphones, sketchbooks, GPS devices, quickly scrawled notes for future blog posts, and more, we’ll be exploring the site at our own pace, perhaps even miles apart at various times. This is not a guided tour with an expert on the area.

Locals, there are also San Mateo, SF and Palo Alto events. Dang, I’ll be travelling for my spring break water trip in the wee hours of the morning on that day, but this is a helluva vacation checklist for the nerd and nerdette who spent Valentine’s Day assembling an electronic arts project. Not that I’d know anything about that, heh heh. Go forth, kids – I will live the Obscura Day vicariously through you!

(Thanks, Greg!)

Seen in the Panorama: Joshuah Bearman’s “The Only Muscle I Can’t Control,” about the Mr. Romance bodice ripper cover competition. Check out an excerpt: “My Weekend Amongst the Fabios.”

Does this look like your misspent youth? Click if you want to read the short interview with photographer Alejandro Galiardo.

Either way, you can see actual prints of some of the photos in the photo issue of Maximum Rock & Roll at Needles and Pens, which is a little craft and zine store that has an intimate gallery corner. The issue release celebration is today from 6-9p, but you can pop in anytime over the next few weeks.

Burned Out, Jared Iorio