Showing only Notes + Links tagged photography
The Faces Behind the Famous Hands | The Big Money
Ellen Sirot has been in the hand-modeling business for 20 years. She has worked on countless campaigns selling just about everything from nail polish to pregnancy tests. Recently, she has jumped on new opportunities in tech advertising, such as this Verizon (VZ) campaign. While some models don’t bother to baby their hands, Sirot insists on it. She wears gloves all the time and has even developed her own line of hand cream to keep them moisturized.
Oh, no.
“Turbo“, 2008 by Baptiste Debombourg.
Tom Moody dissects this piece of “internet aware art” from VVORK, which he defines, in one sense, as “offline art made with internet presentation and dissemination in mind.”
Neat idea but it doesn’t need to exist as a piece—you have everything you need from the installation shot. The bulge, a gallery pole, and the human for scale. It reads as instantly and dramatically as an advertising image, with the “product” being an academic soundbite about patriarchal space rendered abject. Would this have been made without vvork.com and the internet to spread it around? Yes, it could be an image in an art magazine, but would it have survived the first critic’s visit who noticed the piece only “read” from a couple of angles and didn’t hold up to more than a few seconds’ study? Vvork means never having to explain—success is presumed.
One of my teachers says that a good work of art can’t be read like a sentence.
Finally got a chance to check out Paula McCartney’s solo-show Birdwatching at Klompching Gallery in DUMBO tonight. Stacy posted a great write-up of the show earlier this week on the 20x200 blog:
Since 2003, Paula McCartney has been creating a world where the birds sit still for her camera, come when called, and show themselves when asked. The project is a deliberately constructed theater as well as a kind of conceptual landscape photography, and through it she has managed to create a world that even the most die-hard naturalist would envy. What I’m most touched by in viewing these images is that the artifice has become an intrinsic piece of the art itself: she isn’t trying to trick you into thinking that these are anything but craft-store bought fake birds. An even more subtle “inside” joke are her captions that from scene to scene mix real life species with some more fancifully made up common names that are just close enough to real North American Birds to sound legit to the non-birder ear. These images are made with a tender humor, as well as an honest appreciation for what it really takes to be someone who learns to see the seemingly invisible in the natural world.
Lies, deception, and birds? Totally coveting the book.
Untitled from 10 D.70.V2 by William Eggleston
Hey, Hot Shot! - William Eggleston to Judge First Book Prize in Photography
The winning photographer receives a $3,000 grant, publication of a book of photography, and inclusion in a website presenting the work of the award winning artists. Eggleston will also write the introduction for the book, which will be published by Duke University Press in association with CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies.
That’s a pretty phenomenal prize for a photo competition. But, serious photographers only: “Each applicant must submit forty images from a larger body of work that, if he or she wins, would be the body of work from which the images for the book are selected.”
Kawaguchiko from half awake and half asleep in the water by Asako Narahashi
Asako Narahashi’s series half awake and half asleep in the water is a collection of C-Prints of various coastal sites in Japan. Since beginning the project in 2001, the artist has photographed over fifty locations with a Nikonos 35mm waterproof film camera. Narahashi floats chest deep in the ocean while facing back towards the shore, her camera held half-submerged in the water. By watching the waves without using the viewfinder, the artist times her pictures according to the swells of the ocean tide.
I say plagiarism in photography is literally impossible. Plagiarism is copying the expression of an idea. Copying an idea is no foul, in my book. You can’t own an idea, only a specific expression of it. Copyright office even agrees on this point. With a book, I can copy down the exact words and, there, I’ve plagiarised. With a photograph, the process itself negates the ability to copy another’s expression. The camera records the conditions present directly in front of the open shutter at the time the picture is made. Once that moment passes, the time required to open and close the shutter, capturing that moment again is completely lost forever. You can attempt to get the same lighting, the same position, the same compass headings, same equipment etc, but you can never again capture that moment in time. It’s a photographic impossibility, even in the studio.
Todd Walker, Plagiarism in Photography Is Impossible | Ocular Octopus
See also: two lighters, the bottle eversion project (and the notes about eversion).
Hidalgo County, Texas, 1939, by Russell Lee
This retro-futuristic photograph just stopped me in my internet-tracks. It took me a second to put my finger on why, but then I remembered that there was a gigantic print of this image hanging on the wall outside the darkroom where I spent two summers learning to develop photographs.
I’m pretty sure that I will double-take every time that I see this photograph for the rest of my life.
(via Blake Andrews)
The Micheels House, Designed by Paul Rudolph, Westport, Connecticut, 1972 - 2007, by Chris Mottalini
Wrote about Chris Mottalini’s beautiful series After You Left, They Took it Apart (Demolished Paul Rudolph Homes) today on the Hey, Hot Shot! Blog:
Important works of art are handled with white cotton gloves, doted over by curators and housed in atmospherically controlled Plexiglas cubes. All too often, important works of architecture are not afforded the same attention by conservationists. Once a style falls out of favor, monumentally important buildings are bought and sold at the mercy of the real estate market, and left to decay until they meet the wrecking ball.
Make It Plain, 2006
This is a series of five unglazed color photographs set inside of custom built frames.Installation view
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2008
Two color photographs set inside of custom frames and a copy of Eastman Kodak’s Twenty‐Fourth Edition book titled “How to Make Good Pictures” affixed to the floor.
Awesome!
hud:
Pablo Inirio is the darkroom printer for Magnum Photos in NY. For some photographers, mostly the older ones, Magnum still prints in this old school, analog way. Here’s a twitpic of Inirio in his modest darkroom.
He’s worked at Magnum for the past 18 years or so. Once I had the pleasure to meet him in the darkroom and see some of these test prints like the one above. The smell of the chemicals instantly took me back to the make-shift darkroom we set up in our bathroom growing up. I remember the enlarger was set precariously on the sink, the trays of chemicals arranged in the shower, and a towel wedged under the doorway. Maybe that’s one reason I like these test prints.
I don’t know if Pablo Inirio saves them, or if he has any rights associated, but to me these test prints, with +/- exposure notes, are works of art. 20x200?
MoMa to mount major Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition
The Museum of Modern Art will stage a a major retrospective of the photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson from April 11 to June 28, the museum announced this week.
The exhibition, “Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century,” will include 300 prints from 1929 to 1989, “at least one fifth of them previously unknown to the public,” MoMA promises.
Excellent.
Untitled from Suite Vénitienne, 1980-96, by Sophie Calle
For months I followed strangers on the street. For the pleasure of following them, not because they particularly interested me. I photographed them without their knowledge, took note of their movements, then finally lost sight of them and forgot them.
At the end of January 1980, on the streets of Paris, I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in a crowd. That very evening, quite by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice.
Large Hangars and Fuel Storage
Tonopah Test Range, NV
Distance ~ 18 miles
10:44 a.m.
from Limit Telephotography by Trevor Paglen
A number of classified military bases and installations are located in some of the remotest parts of the United States, hidden deep in western deserts and buffered by dozens of miles of restricted land. Many of these sites are so remote, in fact, that there is nowhere on Earth where a civilian might be able to see them with an unaided eye. In order to produce images of these remote and hidden landscapes, therefore, some unorthodox viewing and imaging techniques are required.
Limit-telephotography involves photographing landscapes that cannot be seen with the unaided eye. The technique employs high powered telescopes whose focal lengths range between 1300mm and 7000mm. At this level of magnification, hidden aspects of the landscape become apparent.
Yum.
Todd Selby of The Selby photographs the beans-to-bars process at Mast Brothers Chocolate Factory.
(via youngna)
