Shooting Wide Open

art as change

Jin — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:29:59 +0000

A shot from work in progress. Click for larger view.

Plus, excerpts from a couple of interviews we’ve been reading:

Time-Space-Existence: A Conversation with Wolfgang Laib (PDF)

WL: I know that some people think I am an apolitical nature romantic who sits in the meadows and takes no interest at all in social relationships. But a politician has influence today, at most he influences tomorrow, but culture and art exert influence over centuries. This sounds very naive to some people because they claim that matters are decided on entirely different levels – in politics, in economics – and art plays absolutely no role. But this is not hte case if you look at matters over longer periods of time. You can see it from the past: ultimately art and culture, not wars and confrontations, have stimulated change in people. Wars may have shoved this or that boundary or shifted the balance of power back and forth, but art and culture have carried mankind further, brought them somewhere else, and it has always been this way. I am still of the opinion that – and this may sound insanely naive – art changes the world.

When I see the best and most beautiful figures at the Metropolitan Museum, they have been scrubbed, and everything important about them has been polished away. This is what art historians consider good, the purely material form – but what is really important is gone. By contrast, there is the way that people in India treat these figures every day, how all kinds of things are poured over them, like milk and honey, and how the figures turn black from the votive lights and incense.

Dirty Toys: Mike Kelley Interviewed

MK: One of the big lies of Modernism is that certain changes in aesthetics would change culture completely, forever. Instead, I think it’s a continuous process – art may not effect lasting changes, but by changing certain representations, art changes ideas about things. If you make certain notions of behavior hip enough so that enough people want them, then the culture has to accommodate those behaviors. Things might flip back, but at least it shows that the possibility of change is there.

weekend silliness: Most unwanted song

Jin — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 18:08:45 +0000

If you haven’t seen/heard it already, Komar and Melamid did a faux-scientific survey of what elements of music and subject matter people want and don’t want in songs and assembled the Most Wanted Song as well as the the Most Unwanted Song. Of course, the unwanted song turns out to be more interesting than the wanted song, which is pop pablum. Kids singing about holidays and Walmart has never sounded so good.

Here they are if you’re too lazy to click on the links, though due to upload constraints, these are sub 128 kbps.

light bar

Jin — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:51:20 +0000

In Vancouver, an artist collective called Instant Coffee is doing a show called Light Bar:

Instant Coffee presents Light Bar, a full-spectrum light bar installation and venue for light therapy, light lectures, light shows, light reading and light rock. Instant Coffee’s Light Bar is an ongoing art project that investigates the potential and power of light. The artists come to this idea through necessity; living in Vancouver, where the rain can seem endless, the negative effects of the lack of sunlight on individual psyches and the large social milieu feel at times paramount. The use of light as a therapy or as a remedy for SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) is commonly and effectively used by individuals, but for Light Bar, Instant Coffee puts it to the test in small or large group situations.

singles

Jin — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:00:15 +0000

A couple of less intense things today, thanks to Utata. First, is there anything strange about these portraits by Brandon Voges? At first it seems like he caught the subjects at slightly distressed or unflattering moments, but there is something just off about the way they all have puffy cheeks and open mouths and upturned eyebrows. Turns out they’re all upside down portraits. As in the subject was upside down. At that point, I marvel at how much hair product they used…

Nikki Graziano

Then, seen in Wired, this is what happens when you love math functions and photography.

Frederick Sommer

Jin — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:37:44 +0000

Frederick Sommer

Speaking of photobooks, Joel showed the work of Frederick Sommer, who does everything from painting on cellophane negatives to cut paper objects, and pulled out The Box, which is a little clear plastic box of unbound cards with titles printed on one side and reproductions of photos, collages and cut paper on the other. A sort of greatest hits box. I thought it was great, since you get something that’s easy to store and not easily damaged since it’s protected by the box, and if you wanted to display them, you could do it on a rotating mix and match basis. The pieces themselves are a little more hardy too, since they are heavy cards rather than flimsy prints, so it’s easy to lay them around on a table and pick some up without feeling like you’re going to ruin someone’s valuable print.

FYI, there is also a Son of the Box. Unfortunately both are hard to find or extremely pricey at this point, but I wonder what the production costs on doing something similar with contemporary work would be.

the young

Jin — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:12:25 +0000

From the Panorama, “Junot Diaz in conversation with Dave Eggers”:

JD: I think more than anything, my basic lesson as an artist has been humility. So when I get a bunch of stuff, like “Do you want to come to this thing, do you want to come to that thing?” I say to myself “Do I want to go to this because I want applause? Do I want applause to make up for the fact that my mommy never held me enough? Or is this something where I feel I can be of service, is this an event where I can be of service?” That’s the way I choose.

He also talked about age and the relatively low amount of options open to those starting out when older. He’s talking about writers, but it pretty applies to photographers.

Young people are more isolated from adults than they’ve ever been. Unless you’re an adult who is getting paid to somehow be involved with young people, chances are most adults have no contact with young people that they’re not related to. And the isolation is kind of a structural and it’s very deep and it’s very visible. When I came to the US, they hadn’t gotten this whole thing that, you know, strange adults were gonna rape and kidnap you, they hadn’t convinced us of that yet. Strange adults were someone you could possibly talk to – we hadn’t yet been divided by fear. The reality is that most of the raping, abuse, and attacking of young people was happening inside their families, but hey no matter, it was easier to convince people to be scared of strangers.

DE: I wonder what you think about whether the MFA programs in general are doing enough. Because I’ve had some frustrating experiences where I’ve written recommendations for former students of mine and young writers of color I’ve met along the way, and the results haven’t always been so good. A lot of MFA programs, they’re not interested in a nontraditional learner, or someone from abroad, or someone not from a polished academic background. it makes me furious sometimes.

JD: What’s scary about MFA programs is that there’s a huge amount of privilege these universities hoard. And what’s fascinating is that if you actually look at the profile of writers doing an MFA program, they look nothing like the rest of our society. They’re almost always between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-seven, so it’s almost never people with families. I think for me the biggest problem is that, again, if it doesn’t look anything like the rest of our country, what the fuck is going on? I don’t only want to read writing from twenty-six-year-old hipsters. I include myself in that category, for real. It’s like, sixty-something percent of the adults in this country have got kids. I would love to see that kind of age range represented, because I feel like it would deepen our literary tradition. And it’s not like MFAs control the bulk of everything that gets written. But it’s a lot of money and a lot of privilege that they do control. So I’m like you, I think that at least a third to half of all MFA seats should be reserved for people with families. Our literature would change in ways that would challenge all of us.

It’s that I feel like if these kids are not in a classroom with a couple of forty and fifty- and sixty-year-old people who have children, I feel like everyone loses. And the literature itself loses that as well.

Do we assume certain things about talent and youth? Or is the system set up so that a young person who doesn’t have a livelihood is favored over an adult with a living-wage day job?

And the state of the arts in America?

Audience member: My son wants to apply to MIT next year; he told me that his goal in college is not to take a single English class. How do you approach students like that?

JD: I think that at this moment we belong to a country that marginalizes and trivializes the arts. For all the lip service this country gives to the arts, I feel like your child is in some ways voicing the real code of this country, which is, like, “Can I avoid this totally irrelevant, superfluous practice?” If you live in this country as long as I have, you become really prepared to deal with that. I guess my faith is always the same: exposure to the arts, especially that passionate, compassionate exposure to the arts, always seems to melt the pharaoh’s heart. And that doesn’t mean that you’ll win every person, but out of every ten, if you win one, you’re doing more than some of our highly funded arts organizations do. I don’t blame a young person who spends his entire life soaking in anti-arts culture for not liking the arts. I believe that so much is the way this gets distributed in people’s head, seen at an unconscious level.

Stray Dog of Tokyo

Jin — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 20:21:33 +0000

Saw this video on street photographer Daido Moriyama in the new releases section of the video store (Lost Weekend on Valencia), but since we were looking for a bit of action adventure, it wasn’t quite the right fit. It’s part of the New People Artist Series, which seem to be all on Japanese artists. Just released on Jan. 26th, 84 min., in Japanese with English subtitles. Netflix doesn’t have it, so unless you want to buy it ($19 + shipping), you’d better hope your video store is as cool as mine!

weekend silliness: Southern Culture on the Skids

Jin — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 20:47:05 +0000

Not quite safe for work – full of… oatmeal pies. Is “camel walk” an euphemism for something that I’m not aware of?

iDubai

Jin — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 18:31:30 +0000

Interesting… I found this in my Amazon recommendations, one of the only times I’ve seen anything I’m actually interested in and hadn’t heard of already.

What Parisian shopping arcades were to the nineteenth century and capitalism, Dubai’s luxurious mega-malls are to the new millennium and late capitalism. The Baudelairean flaneur, who patrolled the avenues as a detached observer, today is replaced by the phoneur, a wired wanderer who uses a cell phone to text, call, Web-surf and snap digital images on the fly. The ubiquitous cellphone camera has already become a valid tool of civilian journalism. Celebrated photographer Joel Sternfeld visited Dubai in 2008, documenting its new malls with the consumer fetish object du jour, the iPhone.

160 pages, 70 plates. A February release according to Steidl, but Amazon says March 31.

First big-name iPhone book? (Besides Chase Jarvis?)

Artspan SF

Jin — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:33:30 +0000

I’m donating this print to the SF ArtSpan auction that will be held on 3/27. The funds will go to open studios and Art for City Youth. The deadline to submit and be in the printed invitation was Sunday, but I believe they are still accepting donations. One work per artist will be accepted and it must be ready to go at drop off (ie framed, assembled, etc). Polytychs and giclee reproductions, as well as work that’s been previously donated are out. Submission is simple:

Artists interested in donating artwork to the pre-juried Benefit Art Show & Auction must e-mail a JPEG image of the artwork to info@artspan.org; include the following information in the body of the e-mail:

title

medium

year completed

dimensions

retail value (bidding will start at 1/3 of this value)

whether you would like to donate 100% or 75% to ArtSpan

I hope someone likes this enough to bid. I rarely fill the frame like this and I wish I did more often. New year’s resolution?

obscura

Jin — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:59:01 +0000

Alfons Schilling

The “Dunkelkammerhut” (Darkroom Hat) is a mobile camera obscura worn on the head. As usually the case with a camera obscura, images from the outside world appear both reversed and inverted in the interior of the darkroom. No sooner the wearer of the darkroom hat moves, he becomes the producer of images depicted in the camera’s interior.

Elaine showed Alfons Schilling’s darkroom hat in a slideshow on the first day of class. Flash to a couple of years ago, when Simon Lee’s bus obscura came to Rayko Photo Center in SF and I took a ride. It’s the same idea, no?

dronepop

weekend silliness: Nude and old

Jin — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 04:41:33 +0000

You’ll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking… From the Scotch Mist webcast. (Wait for the feathers after 3m.)

And now, the anti-Radiohead, Coldplay’s video for “The Hardest Part,” featuring spliced Lifetime show footage of an 84-yr old woman dancing in a ridiculous outfit. (Click at your own risk since it is Coldplay audio and some, um, cheeky visuals. Potentially NSFW?)

Jeff Derose

A KZSU DJ sent that to me as a bonus accompanying this video of a cover of Coldplay’s “Fix You” by the senior (ages 70-90) chorus Young@Heart, which he saw featured in a PBS documentary. Looking at the playlist for their CD, it looks like they’ve covered Radiohead too, not to mention The Clash and “Hey Ya,” of all songs.

I will try my best to repay you, Bill, and by repay I mean avenge myself…

Barry McGee

Jin — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 04:40:37 +0000

Saw this Barry Mcgee/Twist photo installation in the SFMOMA 75th Anniversary show today: (that’s not me, don’t get your Asian girls confused…)

Jen Wong

SFMOMA has a set of photos of the installation of the work, and one of my favorite parts – the drawings of the strange heads:

There’s also an interview with the director of conservation about McGee’s installations in their blog.

The wall text referred to the “Mission School,” referring apparently to the gritty, graf-like, Hamburger Eyes and zine aesthetic of some punks and whonot in the city. I wonder who coined the term and how the artists feel about it.

Penelope Umbrico’s Suns From Flickr was in the next room, and I’m glad I got a chance to see it in person. A pretty good day at the MOMA… the contemporary floors were my favorite as usual – I felt like going a little nuts after staring at so many small dark black and white photos from the past. Not that all work should be large and in color, but it just feels so dead to live in the past so much.

UPDATE: According to Wikipedia, the “Mission School” was coined in 2002 in a Bay Guardian article.

More McGee here and here.

no rest for scanners

Jin — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 21:24:09 +0000

Finally, all the China scans are done! Processing is a whole other matter, but I’m excited. There never seems to be a lack of negs to scan, dammit.

I’m in a lull of not really wanting to maintain my web presence that frequently at the moment. Instead, experiment with materials, think about light, get used to shooting in black and white again…

Thomas Wilfred

Jin — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 19:31:25 +0000

Thomas Wilfred invented the Clavilux projector and thought that it would become a popular entertainment in public and in the home. The set up can be large scale, controlled by what looks like a modern sound or lighting mixing desk, or small and personal, like TVs. The projections he favored were abstract colorful moving shapes – I think he called them Lumia shows – though it could also project other things, like a cartoon of the World’s Fair or light stripes that emulate the look of columns as backdrop to a play (? I’d sure like to know what’s going in on in that photo – are the people sleeping? blown over by wind?). The Yale Library has a lot of intriguing documents of this thing.

UPDATE: A user video of the LACMA Lumia piece (mute the audio, which consists of crowd noise only):

Also, see this post for info on a Wilfred documentary.

bacterial photography

Jin — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 03:53:39 +0000

I saw this in the New Scientist:

This bacterial “photo” was created by projecting light onto bacterial “film” – genetically engineered E. coli bacteria. The film was infused with a sugar that turns black when digested. The bacteria in the dark parts of the Petri dish digested this sugar and so turned black, whereas in the illuminated areas, a light-activated gene prevented the bacteria from eating the sugar, and so these parts remained clear.

mermaids and CG

Jin — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 07:23:46 +0000

(via)

Awesome. Go here for a full version: Care and feeding of a mermaid

And something completely different:

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

(via)

Damn, CG has come a long way. Apparently this is all CG except for a very few things which Roman lists in the comments. If you pay very close attention to detail and light, you can tell it’s animated, but it’s hard to believe that this is all CG. Very photographic. I guess architecture is a lot easier than people!

happy new year!

Jin — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 01:38:31 +0000

Wynn Bullock

William Clift (click picture for bigger version!)

First things first, thanks to Blake for including me (just like me to come in 11th) in his list of interesting blogs. Being a fickle female (la donna e mobile / qual piuma al vento!) my favorites shift like the wind, but at the moment, one blog that doesn’t get talked up enough is Thomas Prior’s, which I found through Ms. Hulin. He features mainly his own work. What I like is that he doesn’t write too much, but often says a little bit about an outtake, or how and where he did or didn’t get a shot. Very process.

And thanks to Miki over at Livebooks for including me in a couple (Consumption, Innovation) of the crowd-sourced photobook posts that you’ve no doubt seen by now. Really exciting topic, and collaboration is always awesome.

On a more personal note, another quarter’s begun and I’ve been occupied with the administrative and logistic juggling that happens at the beginning of each term. So far the quarter is looking very exciting. In addition to the large format 4×5 class with Joel Leivick where I saw the images above and where we are just getting our hands on holders and cameras, I’m also taking an incredibly interesting class called “Light as a Sculptural Element,” taught by Elaine Buckholtz, who not only designed sets for Meredith Monk and Merce Cunningham back in the day, but also makes her own sound/motion/light sculptures. She seems intent on getting us to experiment with any and all aspects of light, from using point sources to building sun scopes or projecting images and combining everything with sound or motion. Part of the class will involve everyone keeping journals – blog, video playlists, etc – of concepts and artists they find along the way, so I will likely incorporate that into this blog. I’m curious to see what others come up with. I’ve never quite had a class where curiosity and effort mattered so much more than the final results, and my brain is already filled with different things I want to try – hopefully several of them will be affordable and feasible. I can’t believe I get credit for playing around with light.

This class is a total undiscovered gem. They need to rename it something exciting like “Light-fueled Brain Explosions.” Guess they need it to be more academic than that…

Then there is a seminar with sculptor Chris Bell on the practical aspects of being an artist. The plan is to make sandwiches at the beginning of each class and go on the occasional excursion to a museum or functioning studio. There is another seminar, which I haven’t made it to yet, where students in the department show works in all different media. Looks to be a good term to put feelers out into multimedia. The only thing is that much of this 3D and light media seems completely tied to the in-person experience and probably comes off horribly unimpressive through recorded representations.

As if that wasn’t enough, I’m also taking a couple of non-graded classes from the Civil and Environmental Engineering department about water issues – one in preparation for a spring break trip to several places along the Colorado River, and the other focused on general engineering and social issues, with local infrastructure as examples. The spring break trip includes tours of dams as well as a visit with Navajo nation to hear that side of the story, among other things, so these next few months are gonna be jam-packed! It’s hard enough to convince my brain to sleep as it, but now I’ve really got no chance.

The trip prep course unfortunately bumped a small seminar I wanted to take with Lukas Felzmann, whose teaching style I find very helpful and fun. I’ve taken a couple of his classes already and I wish I could take one every quarter. I should really do a review of his dense and teeming new book, Waters in Between at some point. For now, take a look at Jeff Ladd’s review and Douglas Stockdale’s review (the book is also one of Doug’s top photobooks of 2009).

Phew, too much name-dropping! More on the content of the classes as they unfold.

BONUS ROUND: Speak of e-readers, looks like Plastic Logic is getting pretty close to the launch of its Que reader, which utilizes a plastic instead of glass display, making it lighter. It sounds interesting, but is prohibitively expensive right now ($650 for the 4GB and $800 for the 8GB 3G version). There are apparently some advantages to this expense though: “Organic transistors can be made at much lower temperatures than those made with conventional silicon, which means it’s possible to print them on top of lightweight, flexible plastic instead of glass. Though the display itself is flexible, it’s encased in rigid plastic. The advantage of the flexible plastic display is that it’s nearly unbreakable.”

Little Monkey King

Jin — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 18:20:22 +0000

Maohair

Any Chinese readers out there? I’ve seen the work of expats or foreign photojournalists in China, but I wouldn’t really know where to start with native Chinese photojournalists, but in a bit of luck, the first story in Zachary Mexico’s China Underground is about the self-made photojourno using the pseudonymn Maohair. Check out the link for an excerpt about his beginnings. He has a Chinese blog but you can see a few albums of his work at the top. The moniker on the blog is taken from one of my favorite stories, the episodic Journey to the West, where the Monkey King (as he’s known in the West for some reason) Wu Kong fights off all sorts of demons and monsters to help his master complete the quest to retrieve the sutras.

And on a different topic, it turns out Ansel Adams did some street?!

Bernie DeChant

Jin — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 03:16:48 +0000

Bernie DeChant