Shooting Wide Open

Martin Adolfsson‘s Suburbia Gone Wild

Brandon Schulman‘s A Portrait of America Left Behind

Wyatt Roy

These were taken in India by Wyatt, another newly minted grad who has been known to step up to the plate at the Daily and who has just returned from two months worth of adventures that will make you salivate.

You should feel compelled to shoot something orange (bonus if it includes a pigeon). And yes, you may also feel compelled to always go west.

Some old snapshots have surfaced of a young Iggy Pop and the Stooges performing in the gym at Farmington High in Michigan. He pretty much looks like the Iggy we know. If someone had an amateur audio recording from this session, I’d really be impressed.

1.

Can you imagine looking through some old high school snapshots and realizing Iggy Pop is in them? (Though no less surprising than looking through your college photographs and finding Obama.) Hey, it’s gotta happen to somebody.

To hit on a familiar notion (I’m fairly sure someone else has speculated about this before – Blake?), it does make you wonder how many photos of yourself are out there in other people’s shoeboxes. I for one would love to see them. The frission of tiny unwitting avatars of myself hidden in people’s closests is irresistable. (I could be hiding in your house right now!) This frission likely has no potency for celebrities who are trying to cultivate an image and for whom it simply comes with the territory, but for all but the most paranoid of us regular folk, this is an unmined bounty buried underground.

Do privacy concerns have any real credence in this scenario? I tend to think that if you’re going to be embarassed about something you said or did being repeated or documented, then simply don’t do it in the first place.

2.

And to speak directly to the music scene, if you take a lot of photos in your local community, do you start recognizing the scenesters? Familiar strangers you could say. Someone must’ve done this already – a narrative of a stranger’s life pieced together over time purely from their peripheral presence in your photographs of something else.

Tim Hetherington

This was published a while back as part of his last set of Libya images, but today I was struck by how different this one looks in the midst of the others.

This is as far as I’ll get to acknowledging today’s date. With all the coverage, I need a reprieve rather than a reminder. Days like seem like the perverse blog and publication version of Hallmark holidays.

At the end of my working day, I am almost always depressed. Mine is not a straight path like an engineer’s, it’s not A to B. I make a very curly road just by the restrictions of goals and materials. A real engineer would probably solve the problem differently. But the solutions of engineers are often much alike, because human brains are much alike. Everything we think can in principle be thought by someone else. The real ideas, as evolution shows, come about by chance. Reality is very creative.

- Theo Jansen

Theo Jansen of Strandbeest renown with the New Yorker in this week’s issue.

Check out these photos by Lena Herzog too.

Tommy Forbes

Kinda sorta via LPV.

Mr_ina

(via LPV)

Flea market goodness. There was a couple of others, but I liked the sparseness and angularity of this one.

I witness the hate and evil in men.
- Enrique Metinides

Art Talk! has an episode with Metinides, in which he talks about his incredible beginnings shooting for a paper at age 14 (does it remind you of Teenage Paparazzo?), the stories behind some of his photographs, and the morbid curiosity of gathered onlookers (not to mention the inevitable presence of the ice cream vendors they attract to the scene).

They also have episodes with Richard Prince and Barry McGee.