Shooting Wide Open

Yayoi Kusama

Roman Ondak

Karina Smigla Bobinski

“34 x 25 x 36,” short by Jesse Epstein.

I remember photographing and everything being fine. But when I put my camera down to look at the scene, I would start crying. You can’t be in that space as a human being and not be moved. The minute I lifted up my camera, my tears stopped. I was thinking of exposure and composition and seeing the grief, but not experiencing it as a human being but as a photographer…

I didn’t and don’t want to publish a book of gritty war photography. Those images deserve the magazine or newspaper they were in, and their ability to connect to people ends there. To make a book there needs to be a longer narrative and an aesthetic that tells the story just as much as the content.

- Ben Lowry

Alex & Rebecca Norris Webb

They worked individually — Alex capturing the people he encountered on the streets, in courtyards and cafes, and Rebecca recording the interesting animals that she came across—and pooled the results of their labors.

While in Boston shooting with Futurefarmers, I spent a few precious off-hours at the Museum of Fine Arts and came across Violet Isle, a show of photographs from Cuba by Alex & Rebecca Norris Webb. The shots of birds were especially appealing to me, but the layers of subjects of geometries in the street shots were impressive.

The Present Group is offering an affordable web hosting plan that uses part of the proceeds to fund an art grant. Out of the annual cost of $84, $24 (~28%) goes into the grant fund.

The hosting is just an portion of what the organization does though. Its main venture is an art subscription service which delivers 3 artworks per year for $150. Artists can propose a work and the organization will fund the doing of it, and distribute the produced edition to subscribers. Editions are reportedly under 100 at the moment. The work looks fairly design-oriented and clean, if that’s your thing.

A juicier periodical is The Thing Quarterly, a Jonn Herschend and Will Rogan project where creatives must make an everyday object and incorporate text into the piece. It weighs in at $200 for 4 quarterly pieces, the next set of which will be by MacFadden & Thorpe, Dave Eggers, Shannon Ebner and Mike Mills.

In a Times write-up, Fluxus, the gran-daddy of much of modern intermedia and performance art, is referenced as an influence. Apt. The Thing is the modern take on object multiples, and here’s to hoping that they can be more flux than Fluxus in terms of mass production (well as “mass” as editioned art ever is) with the help of the internet. They run into the same problem as Fluxus though – you simply cannot make very low priced intricate, nice-looking art objects for the masses. Not then and not at the moment. The best you can do is a version of the more simple object multiples.

Hopefully that changes soon. Tell me if this is meant to be looked at in a museum or opened and played with as intended? Some of them are games for goodness sake!

Celine Clanet

Celine Clanet has published a monograph on dams. There are your expected dam shots, but then there are nice surprises too.

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.

A new video interview series from Pier 24.

Julia Schiller

I saw this photo by Julia Schiller on Google+ but she only has a black and white version on her website. Which is better?

We Are Dead Paper

Amelia Jordahl-Bueti

I’m back!