Jay Gould
31 Mar
Archive | March, 2010
Andrew Moore
24 Mar
I randomly came upon a beat up copy of a book by Andrew Moore called Inside Havana in the bookstore blow-out bin and I waffled quite a bit before buying it, because of so many shots verged on the typical commercial architecture shot. The website is a similar experience. There are many strange and wonderful things in each project, but there is also a high volume of fairly typical interiors. Nonetheless, there’s such an impressive range of objects (and messes!) that I was rapt.
Russia is probably my favorite, though it is also at this point in time that the projects are far back enough in time that the files are not quite processed as well for the web as the later photos. (I should be one to talk…) They are all still engrossing photos however, and the Cuba images in the book itself are perfectly fine. I’m going to try to get the Russia book too.
work in progress
22 Mar
For a while, I could only describe the type of thing that I usually like to photograph as “messes.” I’ll take a photo of anything really, but the stuff that stays on my mind and in my heart is the messy stuff, like the Mission shops and the KZSU interiors. Recently, after looking at the work of Dave Jordano and Zoe Leonard, I’ve realized that it’s not really about messes, but after scale. I like scenes that are on a very human scale, scenes that a viewer feels like they’re standing right in front of. No vistas, no clean or gritty grandeur, just a dense bunch of things within sticking-nose-into range. I love the experience of standing in front of someone’s shelves or a pile of disparate stuff and poking around with my eyes, picking stuff up, turning it over… It’s not the same when it doesn’t feel like a scene you could immediately step into. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with work on smaller and larger scales, but for some reason it never has the same emotional resonance for me.
There’s something very unsatisfying to me the pictured project because I’ve been having a rough time finding the type of visual mess that I like on the scale that I like. The latest batch looks more promising, but let me tell you, the backlog of scans and unprocessed edits is terrifying (speaking of mess!). I think I’m at around 1,300 photos, not including hundreds of scans from the found album of a random 80s band. What with school and the new editing gig, it’s looking grim. Not to mention if I tried to put in enough processing hours to finish off the backlog in a timely fashion I would probably go blind or develop a permanent squint.
Does everyone else try to concentrate on one thing at a time to avoid this mess? Or are there other backlogged souls out there?
Thomas Rousset
18 Mar
Thomas Rousset’s Praberians is something else. I love mixing of document and fiction – the realistic detail mashed together with extraordinary absurdity. It’s what makes movies so immersive, isn’t it?
Rousset writes of a…
fictive rural community, lost in space and time, evolving in a dream-like French countryside. My photographs are not following a defined narration.The real world is my inspiration. I make photographs with the inhabitants of my village and their animals and re-locate them in a floating reality that is timeless, unlikely and intriguing; a reality that is a blend of a raw normality and absurd exuberance.
Chattanooga
15 Mar
I was walking down 24th St. the other day and saw this on the ground. The white paint (plaster?) made the entire thing look naturally black and white. I love the tiny bits of color in the plants, and the leaves that look like they’re embedded in the sidewalk. After last week’s rains, the paint’s been washed away and it looks like any ol’ boring street corner now. Dang. So I made a print of this and immediately Joel pointed out alum Antonio Iannarone’s photos of street corners.
These are part of a book – Depositions (something for The Independent Photo Book?). I believe he’s also shown this work, and when I saw some snaps of the show, it turned out that he was the guy pulling an all-nighter in the darkroom last week. Ah, coincidence.
MEMORY
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What people really want: film vs digital, longform vs shortform
Whereas Kodak has so far failed to adapt adequately, Fujifilm has transformed itself into a solidly profitable business, with a market capitalisation, even after a rough year, of some $12.6 billion to Kodak’s $220m. Why did these two firms fare so differently? Both saw change coming. Larry Matteson, a former Kodak executive who now teaches [...]
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Chris Jordan on fear, inspiration and living fully
If you haven’t seen this interview, block out an hour and a half to see it now. I transcribed (and lightly edited) a great deal of it, because it was great (not the least because Chase Jarvis references one of my favorite Errol Morris films, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control). Originally I was just [...]
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Subsidizing art, subsidizing yourself
What is economic growth for, anyway? It’s for expanding our choices and making life better. Is it really so surprising that, as we grow wealthier as a society, more and more of our young people, when the amazing resources of the modern university are put at their disposal, choose to use them learning something satisfying [...]
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down with artspeak! (or, don’t let yourself go)
Arturo Soto There are probably more than 10,000 articles about how unwise and un-blog-attractive it is to apologize for not posting frequently enough to your blog. (“Don’t keep hamsters if you can’t remember to feed them”?) It is the blog version of saying, “I’ve really let myself go.” Supposing that I have, it seems that [...]
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the byline
This is what Hans Rosling says of global development in the documentary I linked to earlier. I want to dig a little deeper into this issue. I’d say that most of the photo world has done a fairly terrible job of making this point. All the images of development are somehow read as “look at [...]
