Shooting Wide Open

A little fledgling program called Color a Sound, which uses pictures drawn on transparency to trigger sounds. It’s not overly impressive at this point, but I’d like to think that with a little more development, it could result in some creative musicking.

Color a Sound from blair neal on Vimeo.

At the least, tech makes consumption more about making and less about out of the box. Reminds me of Marc Levoy’s Frankencamera (watch out! web 1.0 site coming up!), which NPR
did a little piece on last year. It’s not what most people have time or patience for, but who knows what weird efficient things we’ve got up our own sleeves.

Either way, I really like the idea of the Edit button in programs. Instead of just being able to set certain parameters for predefined functions, wouldn’t it be cool to be able to change the function in a fundamental way? I suppose if your programming chops are good enough you can do that now by designing your own stand-alone program, but I’m hoping this will become easier for laymen. It’s not quite there yet, but the idea is seeping into consumer programs like Max for Live.

Combine this with the touchscreen technology (Max for iPhone?) and it could all get very visually appealing and interesting.

Hey, computers weren’t all that impressive when they first came out either. We’re still at the beginning of things – you don’t tell a five year old that his drawing sucks, right? Check back in 10 years…

Traci Matlock

There’s nothing like the feeling of being content with a newly processed photo. Even if you know that by next week you will probably have changed your mind.

Writers Explain What It’s Like Toiling on the Content Farm (Corbin Hiar)

“We are going to be the largest net hirer of journalists in the world next year,” AOL’s media and studios division president David Eun said last month in an interview with Michael Learmonth of Ad Age. Many of the jobs will be added to its hyper-local venture, Patch, while the majority of AOL’s freelancers will work for the company’s content farms. These two areas into which AOL is ambitiously expanding are the fastest growing sectors of the journalism market.

This week, Hiar tackles the content farms. Ironically, they use a CC photo from Flickr (of an HDR-ed tractor – how relevant) to illustrate the story, which focuses on the experiences of freelancers who work for places like eHow:

She began working for Demand in 2008, a year after graduating with honors from a prestigious journalism program. It was simply a way for her to make some easy money. In addition to working as a barista and freelance journalist, she wrote two or three posts a week for Demand on “anything that I could remotely punch out quickly.”

The articles she wrote — all of which were selected from an algorithmically generated list — included How to Wear a Sweater Vest” and How to Massage a Dog That Is Emotionally Stressed,” even though she would never willingly don a sweater vest and has never owned a dog.

“I was completely aware that I was writing crap,” she said. “I was like, ‘I hope to God people don’t read my advice on how to make gin at home because they’ll probably poison themselves.’”

Next week, the hyper-local coverage trend, which might more directly relate to the state of photojournalism. Although… content farm : stock photography?

(Thanks, Fo!)

KZSU received a copy of An Autobiography of the San Francisco Bay Area, Pt I and the music director thought it was up my alley. It’s a little collection of photographs from Bay Area photographers like Larry Sultan, Jim Goldberg, Michael Jang, John Chiara, and on and on. The volume isn’t large enough to serve as a reference, but the artist statements in the back of the book were pretty interesting, especially the ones that ventured away from explanation of process to include something of the artist’s own personal experience…

Katy Grannan, Gail and Dale, Pacifica (II)

California sunshine is relentless, even cruel. A lifetime spent in the Northeast makes me suspicious of so much sun, but out West there is no hiding from it.

In upstate New York I photographed a girl who planned to move to California to become a rockstar, or a tattoo artist. She called after returning east to her mother’s house, a year or so later, to say things hadn’t worked out in California. She couldn’t find work. She used to many drugs and was robbed by her friends. Upstate New York was better, she said.

I thought about this girl when I moved to San Francisco. I saw people like her everywhere: in the Mission, in the Tenderloin, downtown on Market Street. How could it be that she – that they – had misunderstood the light?

Oscar Wilde famously stated, “Anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco.” Many of us are still looking for whatever it is we believe the West offers: reinvention, escape… We believe it will be easier here; it will be different.

The sun is shining.

Chauncey Hare, from This Was Corporate America

And then there’s Chauncey Hare’s black and white statement to match his black and white photo. Somebody needs to make a documentary film about this man. It would be fascinating. Or maybe just unsettling.

These photographs were made to protest and warn against he growing domination of working people by multinational corporations and their elite owners and managers.

Richard Misrach, David, from Telegraph 3AM

In contrast, Misrach’s thoughts on the political efficacy of his earlier work:

I began this project when I was twenty-two years old. For almost two years I roamed the five-block stretch of Telegraph Avenue from Dwight Way to the UC Berkeley campus with a camera on my shoulder. I think the fact that I asked permission and was working slow on a tripod actually made people curious and receptive to what I was doing. In every photograph, the street people were looking directly into the camera. This was very important to me. It both suggested their willing participation and their confrontation with the rest of the world. At first I was pretty intimidated, but over time I became a fixture of the Avenue.

It was my first serious attempt at making formally beautiful prints of political content. I also recognized for the first time that creating social change and making art might in fact be at odds. This was a real eye-opener that I’ve been trying to deal with ever since. After Telegraph 3AM was completed, I felt disillusioned. Instead of making an effective political statement, I felt like I ended up with a coffee table book. I’m not sure what I was expecting at the time but it seemed that I had failed. I hadn’t created social change or made particularly great art, but it did get me to reconsider how photography actually functions in the world. Thirty-five years later, I find that the work in fact effectively captures a historical moment. So, perhaps I was too hard on myself back then.

I’m starting to think that political statements in still photography only really effective ask questions instead of declaring things. Experimental photos prompt, what is this a picture of? And much of photojournalism essentially asks the viewer, why do we allow this to happen? To me, there’s something about the muteness of a still that brings more questions to mind than answers.

Not to sound like a 3am self-help infomercial, but… I mean, have you ever found an answer in a photograph? Are photos even supposed to be articulate? I’m reminded of a great quote by Colum McCann in Let the Great World Spin:

The disconnect between his mouth and his mind. That’s where the camera came in.

A couple of months ago I peeked in on the public demo portion of a Tech x Journalism iPad app developing workshop given by Hacks/Hackers. While most of the apps were useful in a way that didn’t really push the envelope that much, one that wasn’t so realized stuck with me the most. It’s called Ephemera – the idea is to insert user generated visual info into Google Maps.

The idea is specifically centered around ephemera like menus and event posters that have some sort of nostalgia value or are quaint to look at, but to me the broader idea is more interesting. How can we organize and make searchable not just ephemera but photos of locations in a way that is easy to search on the time dimension? Don’t you wish you could go to Google Maps and enable some sort of historical search that would tell you whether your dry cleaners used to be an independent arts space?

Maybe I’m assuming this is more appealing than it actually is, but I think it would be very powerful to search visually by time as well as space. It’d certainly be useful to some extent in researching cultural topics, serving as a sort of window into spatially overwritten history. It’s not applicable to the far past, but I wish it was – I was researching the John Day fossil beds before my Yellowstone trip and wanted to focus on the period of time from 20 to 14 million years ago. It was surprisingly hard to narrow down results in any meaningful way. (Too bad the Google search parameters don’t allow you to enter millions of years… What websites were the apatosaurs community reading?)

With something like this though, execution is key; I don’t think we can just lay Flickr over Maps and leave the viewer to sort through thousands of photos per address. Wiki time indexed database of photos?

William Eggleston

If you want to see the Peaches photo, go to Pier 24 immediately! (The American contemporary room is a color lover’s paradise! Soth’s green chair photo that I’d blogged earlier was there!) Although, they said that the next show, which includes some of the Fischer collection to contribute to SFMOMA’s introduction show, will contain all of Eggleston’s Guide. Shows will usually last half a year, but this first one was curtailed to make sure that their Fischer show coincided with MOMA’s.

I went to Free First Tuesdays at MOMA and the photo galleries at 49 Geary that same day for comparison. The jury’s still out on whether Pilara’s collection spans the breadth that MOMA’s does, though his collection sure seems complete – there were whole roomfuls of Winogrand’s Animals, Friedlander’s TV screens and Larry Clark’s Teen Lust, as well as an Arbus portfolio and all of Sugimoto’s portraits of waxen Henry VIII and his six wives.

Muybridge + Klett!

That said, the stuff in the Fischer Collection intro show at MOMA was incredible. (I’ll have to go again, especially since the New Topographics show is coming to town this weekend.) I loved the Calder room – it’s great that they put the mobiles in an area that is a passageway, so that air currents of moving people stirred the pieces. I’ve seen collections of mobiles in enclosed spaces and it just isn’t the same. Though this time the brightly lit area made enjoying shadows impossible. Still, it was fun, I think for the same reason that it’s pleasant to lie under a tree and watch the leaves flutter.

And. The scale and color of the Ellsworth Kellys and Anselm Kiefers were invigorating in a way that made the relative darkness of the warehouse at Pier 24 seem a bit funereal. Still, considering that they only have one full-time and one part-time employee, and charge no admission, it’s very impressive. After the tour ended, I found myself virtually skipping toward the rooms I liked.

Both these places let me with a bittersweet feeling as a side effect of too much exposure to $$$$. You can work at your aesthetic language and photograph for 20 years, but in the end, the people who end up bringing your work to the public in an affordable, appealing way are the super rich guys. It’s great that the money goes toward these sort of things, but you wonder if there will ever be anything that rivals affluent patronage and donations from men looking to preserve their embossed eternal names.

At least there are no prices attached, as in the galleries. It’s so strange to see them next to the work. You know that the thing on the wall is not aimed at you. Strange that a place that shows artists’ work is so implicitly not for artists. Maybe that’s just my cynical side. I’ve been reading books on the art world and there are dollar signs everywhere. It’s a bit disheartening that so much effort is spent talking about the money and business rather than the artwork. But I suppose that’s what sells books.

Still, it’s really strange to see Barry McGee’s work in a corner of Fraenkel. Am I wrong?

The Yellowstone trip was fruitful in unexpected ways. It turned out to be a very fun group of people, and much silliness occurred. Almost all of the photos I like happen to be from a little town called Buhl in Idaho, where we also found an empty stone grain silo in which we proceeded to stage a sound art piece. More on that as soon we figure how to distribute audio files for processing. Suffice it to say, the reverb was incredible. If you’ve ever heard of crazy sound engineers suspending speakers in wells (“wellverb“) or Radiohead recording “Exit Music” in a big stone castle… now I understand why.

I ordered a copy of Peter Beard’s The End of the Game and the seller accidentally sent me a German language copy. The mistake has been rectified, except I still own the German edition. Does anyone want it? I’d be happy to snail mail it to anyone in the US.

The book was originally published in English, so this is a bit strange, but I can’t think of a single good use for it in my hands unless I want to cut it up for the pictures, which is still something I can’t bring myself to do to books, especially nice ones that have done me no wrong.

You, of course, are free to do that if you have the stomach for it. Only stipulation is that you don’t take it just to resell, scout’s honor. If you’re interested, email jin [at] killeryellow dot com.

UPDATE: The book has found a home.