It’s snowing!
They speak to me
Art Institute adds Warhol’s ‘Empire’ to Chicago skyline
From 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. [Friday, December 9], the modern skyscraper [the Aon Center] overlooking Millennium Park will be acting as a movie screen onto which the Art Institute of Chicago will be projecting Andy Warhol’s eight-hour silent, black-and-white epic “Empire,” which consists of one long, unbroken shot of New York’s Empire State Building. Said to be the first outdoor U.S. screening of this landmark — if not exactly action-packed — film, the event marks the very public, logistically challenging kickoff to the Art Institute’s new exhibition Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964-1977, which opens to members Saturday and to the public Tuesday.
Birds only move gracefully when they’re flying
I’ll tell you the best snare drum on earth is like a trampoline in November
things to see in Rome when you think you’ve seen it all
Being that I’m on a moratorium against photographs on my own blog, I’ll break my sight-silence (sitence?) to show you some things you might otherwise not know about:
Rhein II
Andreas Gursky’s “Rhein II” set a new record for the highest selling price for a photograph ($4.3 million) yesterday. I must say I rather like it, though I do wonder how these things happen.
Before and after pictures of joggers by Sacha Goldberger
The images are by renowned French photographer Sacha Goldberger, who decided to set up an outdoor studio in the Bois de Boulogne park in Paris to capture the cross section of society who use it for exercise. He stopped people as they ran and invited them to stand in front of a 3m² sheet of paper to be photographed. But wanting to capture them at their most off-guard, Sacha asked them to have a sprint immediately prior to being photographed. He then used the same team and equipment as on a high-level fashion shoot — complete with four assistants and studio-quality lighting. One week later, Sacha asked the joggers to wear similar clothes to his real studio. They would be photographed again using the same backdrop and lighting, but this time there would be a professional make-up and hair stylist on hand to make them look their very best.
Hidden Mothers
This was a practice where the mother…often disguised or hiding often under a spread…holds her baby tightly for the photographer to insure a sharply focused image.
Hidden Mother : Tintypes and Cabinets Flickr Group
(via Roslyn Cook / Retronaut)
Thomas Bernhard on Photography
«Every photograph—whoever took it, whoever is pictured in it—is a gross violation of human dignity, a monstrous falsification of nature, a base insult to humanity. [...] Photography is the greatest mockery in the world, the ultimate mockery of the world.»
More thoughts on photography & thinking, whilst reading Bernhard & Beckett in Dublin.
for the ride
I love this photo by Karrah Kobus (you can order prints by the way), a Minneapolis based photographer, which was inspired by a similarly striking photograph by Alex Stoddard.
Grab a chocolate, grab a Band-Aid holder
We’re potentially in the market for a wooden toy
Barry Stone, Darkside of the Rainbow
Darkside of the Rainbow, Barry Stone’s first solo show at Art Palace, takes its title from the common practice of playing the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz and Pink Floyd’s Darkside of the Moon (1973) album synchronously. Just as the superimposition of film and album suggests new associations emerging from the juxtaposition of seemingly incongruous elements, so too do Stone’s groupings of photographs, drawings, collage and paintings.
Very impressive, Mr. Stone.
You can see more of Barry’s work here. See also, Pastelegram.
Jason Molina – Don’t It Look Like Rain
The wolf outside my door don’t need
Anymore of my blood
Of my bood
She don’t wait for nothing
nothing anymore
She’s watching for nothing anymore
Moon above my light
Starts fading out
I live for nothing anymore
I live for nothing
Erika Larsen, Sámi (2007-2011)
Sámi is the result of a four-year-long project in which Washington DC based photographer Erika Larsen immersed herself in the life of the Sámi people. The Sámi (Joni Mitchell and René Zellweger are both descendents), are an indigenous tribe living within the Arctic circle in the northern parts of Scandinavia and Russia.
Good
my current desktop
open wide
He saws down trees in the water
my current desktop
I think that almost everything I do – this book included – is of a genre that I guess you could call detective nonfiction
We think we know what we’re looking at when we look at a photograph. We think we’re looking at something objective. We think we can see reality. But often we’re just looking back at ourselves rather than out into the world. We are reinforcing our beliefs with what we see. The idea of my book is that there’s a mystery in every photograph. What are we really looking at? In my experience, trying to figure out just what’s going on inevitably involves an investigation. I like to think of myself as the new Sherlock Holmes of photography.
From an interview with Errol Morris on his new book Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography.
my current desktop
Jamie with a .44 Magnum Ruger Super Redhawk
A photo series of women and their guns.
Saul Leiter, early color photography
This is from an announcement for a Saul Leiter retrospective in 2008, and even though I think we’ve posted about his work before, he is always worth revisiting.
Saul Leiter started shooting color and black-and-white street photography in New York in the 1940s. He had no formal training in photography, but the genius of his early work was quickly acknowledged by Edward Steichen, who included Leiter in two important MoMA shows in the 1950s. MoMA’s 1957 conference “Experimental Photography in Color” featured 20 color photographs by Leiter.
After that, however, Leiter’s personal color photography was, for the most part, not shared with the public. He became better-known as a successful fashion photographer in the 1950s and 60s. All the while, Leiter continued to stroll the streets wherever he was (mostly New York and Paris), making photographs for his own pleasure. He printed some of his black-and-white street photos, but kept most of his color slides tucked away in boxes. It was only in the 1990s that he began to look back at that remarkable color work and start to make prints. His sense of color and densely compressed urban life represents a truly unique vision of those times.
