It is Rineke Dijkstra talking about her life and work with Louise Baring at the Tate. She talks about moving from commercial to art photography, and the differences in body image she saw shooting European vs American children. I don’t particularly like how much they try to read into the body language and expressions of the portraits, but one terribly telling story she mentions is of shooting the following picture at Hilton Head in South Carolina and hearing the mother shout in the background for her daughter to hold her stomach in because she’s so fat.

What an ugly thing we do to girls with this idea of “glamor” and “beauty.”

Restrepo
7pm, December 7, 2011
New People Cinema
1746 Post Street, SF
Tickets

For anyone in SF this week,Open Show partners with SF Film Society to present a special screening of Restrepo. Proceeds with benefit the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Co-director Sebastian Junger was nice enough to answer a few questions about war, neutrality in journalism and what combat offers soldiers that real life does not. Check that out even if you can’t make the event.

Mark your calendars. On Sun, Nov. 20th, there will be an event at Occupy SF called Artist Bloc Day of Politics, Action, and Art.

We are artists and art workers of the 99%. We are struggling to survive and sustain our creative practice in an economy that does not value us as workers, that privatizes cultural institutions and that continuously defunds art programs–from public education to government grants. We are putting our creative efforts towards this movement and considering our role in the fight for economic and social justice.

Join us for the Artists Bloc day at Occupy San Francisco for hands-on workshops, participatory projects, discussions and speakers. The day will include screen-printing, crocheting, banner-making workshops, a speaker’s booth, pirate radio station, and conversations facilitated by local artists about arts funding, education and the systems of oppression that affect artists economic sustainability and more.

Jim Dow

Jim Dow will speak and show work at PhotoAlliance on the 11th (next Friday). American Studies seems to be the project to look at, and it’s strangely fragmentary – full of color and black & white, architectural interiors and details of graffiti. I prefer the latter, but I’m looking forward to seeing what selection of images he decides to show.

Corey Arnold

Corey Arnold’s Fish Work has been made into a book and a selection of photos is being shown at Fecal Face Dot Gallery. (Don’t let the name put you off, they seem like nice people…) I lapped up the chance to get the book signed, as Fish Work was one of my first favorite projects when this was just a wee blog. I still love them, and to be a bit flip, I think I like it for the amount of orange in it. (Seriously though.)

Too bad, however, that the book doesn’t cover all the regions of the project. I particularly love these images from the Norway set and they are absent. Sigh.

You see what I mean about the orange? It is extremely satisfying.

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!)