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next year in toyko
Dean Kaufman, "Fly"
This is my favorite series of the past few months. These photos remind me of the look you get using a Kisekae—they're very, very soft. The flat processing creates a literally hazy mood, which is almost enough to make you forget how painful an experience flying can be.
A gift especially for you
An artist statement which appears to be written by a live, warm, human being. We knew it was possible!
I took this picture at the childhood home of Hank Williams, Sr. This was his boyhood bed, though the curtains were posthumously donated to the home (it's now a little museum/shrine). The curtains were handmade and show the lyrics and music to the song "Your Cheatin' Heart." There's a really wonderful lady who tends to the home and the souvenirs and things. Also, once a year out back, they have a concert of people singing like Hank Sr.
Some amateur photoblogs
A highly readable type of photography blog comes from Asia, in the form of amateur photography blogs. Many of the ones I've found are hosted on free services, with default layouts that make for a breath of fresh air. Although Google Reader has a built-in translation function—you do use Google Reader, right?—the thoughts contained in the writing become pretty obscure by the end.
Still, these blogs are notable for the highly personal images which come across them.
Not me
某姑娘
NERORISM
肉博 @_@
睡在布边边
hibernating little V*
I haven't seen any American blogs of this type. Then again, I have barely been posting photos here myself...
Moriyama-san and amateurism
Tensions everywhere we look! Amateur vs. professional, serious vs. light, digital vs. analog!
In the end, I may be considered a "professional photographer" only if that category includes blurred images.
another blogger-style re-blog
Mu Ge + happy links
I thought of posting a small screed about why I don't read i heart photograph. Then I thought better of it. So here's some stuff I like, photographs by Mu Ge from the series The Yangtse River Side and a bunch of links to things which I have enjoyed over the past couple of months.
Jin & Jam by Hellen Jo
Maya Lin
My favorite albums of the year
Eddy Current Suppression Ring
S.C.U.M.
Shaq's twitter
HARDCORE BUNNY PHOTOGRAPHY
She has sought to discover and illuminate the consequences of modern life, confront cultural mythologies, and challenge what we think we know.
Through bunnies, that is.
An online Wakaba Noda book
Wakaba Noda has a book up online which you can browse for free. It is part of a larger collection of free photography books. Just click on that dog to get going.
From Tibi, Sasha, Tarou
Does the square format work for snapshots? There's so much flash here.
Your brain as camera (alpha release)
Japanese scientists are working on a technology which monitors your brain, and reconstructs the images you see on a monitor:
They say this could eventually be used to record your dreams for you, in color no less. Blurry black-and-white first, color later. That reminds me of something.
What does this mean? Can I get this implanted in my brain with a 3G wireless chip for automatic flickr uploads? How long before we start reading impassioned pleas to save the antiquated but noble digital camera? But, for now: THIS IS ANOTHER BODY BLOW TO FILM. STAND STRONG. (but what if they develop brain-reading technology which can approximate neopan 1600, or portra 400nc...)
Suzanne Mooney [via Conscientious, as a Google Reader shared item with comment]
"Make Love to the Camera (2004 – Ongoing) is an expanding collection of diagrammatic drawings found in photographic manuals and glamour/fetish photo books depicting how to photograph the female nude. Each image depicts a diagram of a naked or semi-naked woman in a studio set-ups surrounded by lights, cameras and props. Instead of following the instructions of the diagram, I photograph the diagram itself. The work denies the erotic charge that the photographic images may have, and becomes a humorous but disturbing comment on glamour photography." - Suzanne Mooney (found via The Sonic Blog)
MCV MCV moves to Tokyo
It is set, I am moving myself to Tokyo at the very beginning of this coming January. I am hoping for many things from this move, including more exposure to gallery exhibits and photography culture in general. Of course I hope to take some good pictures as well, and to report on photographic things on this blog.
I plan to set up some other blog to post day-to-day photos. That will be announced here, once it's up.
If you live in Tokyo, or know friendly people who do, please get in touch! I'll want as much help as I can get at first, especially with respect to employment and general acclimation.
Getting excited for my first Yakult Swallows game...
PHOTOGRAPHY SMACKDOWN
I have no "wide eyes" for Ilfochrome having made probably 10,000 prints on the material, including at least 2,000 16x20's. So while you might dazzle the nimrods at the local photo club who couldn't figure out where to find the switch on a colorhead - I'll work with an inkjet and make far better looking prints.
I forgot about photo.net for a while there. Who knew it could get so spicy?
"Barrel of truth," "rock your eyes"
Possible new contender for the flickr stars series:
More excellence here. [Update: it appears as though these screenshots may the last we ever know of this elusive genius. Because we're definitely not following him to deviantart]
In a far away place...
nb, this is a reblog a la bloggér
This is from the introduction to Setting Sun: Writings by Japanese Photographers. The emphasis is mine, to make this post "more bloggy":
Even the youngest emerging photographers in Japan often find publishers for their work. In no other country do photographers so easily issue monographs; this is partly because, until the last three decades, few outlets other than books and magazines existed there for serious photography. Today, museums and galleries in Japan offer constant venues for fine art photography, and exhibitions abroad steadily increase. Established Japanese artists have worldwide audiences for their photographs. Still, most Japanese photographers prefer books as the ultimate "vehicle" for their projects. Often, they write the texts for their books, as well as magazine articles about their own work and that of other photographers. These opportunities to publish texts as well as images mean that their words have often been as influential as their photographs. Some essays have sparked controversy; others have set parameters for evolving aesthetic alliances, and have established lineages of influence.
I would like to align myself with this tradition.
Five blogs I don't read
Five blogs I don't read:
A Photo Editor, Whats the jackanory, We Can't Paint, I heart photograph, Shane Lavallete's blog
This list may mean nothing to one part of my audience, or quite a lot to another part.
On the internet, "read" [intransitive] means "subscribe to RSS feed," or "follow," as some websites have neatly named this activity. With the exception of I heart photograph, I don't read these blogs because they don't write enough posts which are relevant to me. I know I won't spend the time looking at their feeds to find the good stuff.
If you share items through Google Reader (or any RSS-friendly system) with any content from these blogs, we should be sharefriends. Email me. Sharing on the internet is our form of education.
Factory-generated artist statement #2345
I generally look to 20x200 for highly bloggable artist statements, but please let me know if you know of another good source. I'm open to fresh, life-affirming artist statements, not just ones like these which make me shudder:
This image is from the series Paradise, an exploration of areas where the contrast between nature and development is at an extreme. I am specifically interested in revealing the inconsistencies between modern occupation of a rural landscape and the suburban infrastructure that comes along with this habitation. By utilizing aesthetic techniques that have roots in mid–19th century painting, namely the Hudson River School movement, it is my intention to confront the contemporary landscape with an unencumbered eye.
Translation: "I like to take pictures of the places where man made stuff and nature stuff meet." You know, that's totally cool! The image is pretty nice! But the writing is so ponderous that the image can't possibly support it. This cannot be the way forward, can it?
Back to the academy
There's an open listserv associated with Joerg Colberg's Conscientious blog. If most of the discussion on the photo list at my workplace is centered around ship dates for the latest and "greatest" Canon gear, this list is like a class discussion in a graduate seminar in "fine art" photography.
That's not always a good thing of course, but it strikes a good balance with the work list, and is another source of stimulating information and discussion online.
Shomei Tomatsu as Jorge Luis Borges
If I could, I would want to see everything: the affairs of others, the scene of a murder, the pygmies in the African rain forest, the super-rich of Wall Street, the face of the man who stole three hundred million yen, the Sydney Opera House, the graveyard of ships in the Sargasso Sea, the tail of an orca, the plankton of the deep ocean, the inside of Prime Minister Satō's belly, Mao Zedong, Mars, Cape Kennedy, Antarctic blizzards, the animals whose name is "sloth," the pudendum of Marilyn Monroe. My eyes are infamously greedy;... to me, the stuff other photographers substitute for seeing is nothing but a kind of pessimism.
From Yomiuri shimbun, April 24, 1969
Compare to this passage in "The Library of Babel," or to the climax of "The Aleph" (search for the word 'Soler' to find it). A reminder that this blog takes its name from Borges' world.
Guess who?
Click through for much bigger versions.
Give up? OK, it's Daido Moriyama shooting the cover story ("France") for JAL's domestic in-flight magazine. He's everywhere!
Inspirational interview with Hiroh Kikai
There are too many good pull quotes to list here, interview with Hiroh Kikai from Lens Culture really pushes my buttons in a good way. Obviously he's a Japanese photographer so I'm interested from the beginning. But I appreciate his esoteric approach to photographic method, both in a career or life sense and also with respect to the momentary act of "apprehending an image," as he calls it.
An aside: there are useful and not-useful uses of this kind of language, i.e. "apprehending" an image, "commemorating" an ice cream truck. On the whole I would say that it has something to do with the (always legible) substance of thought behind the words. Kikai doesn't play around.
On the beginning of his life in photography:
I started off by taking several manual labor jobs: truck driver, dock worker... and I was able to survive on half of my salary. I was aware of the fact that I lacked photographic experience. I was still immersed in my philosophy studies at the time, and I began to think about the following concept: the essential thing was not the camera but the act of looking.
Things did, of course, eventually work out for him. I like hearing about people who find their way through unorthodox paths.
A man watching the horse races on his portable television set, 1999 by Hiroh Kikai
He thinks of his subjects outside of any context at all:
It is not the place that matters, it is the people. It is not the fact that these people are Japanese but the fact that their face and their body tells a story, whether they are Japanese, French, English or Martian...
These ideas might ring a bit zany to some audiences, but the images are there. Onward, philosophically motivated photography!
Blogroll maintenance
I made some modifications to reflect my reading habits.
Added:
- B (Blake Andrews) - thoughtful musings on film and shooting in general from a photographer in Eugene, with some great running features like this one asking photographers to recount what they were thinking when they took a particular photo.
- La Pura Vida - strongly curated photos and links from around the internet, including the highest quality stuff on Flickr.
- Lens Culture - blog of very on point online photo magazine.
- ithoughtiwasalone - online gallery, wrote about it here.
- Totem Pole Photo Gallery - Tokyo gallery, wrote about it here.
Removed:
- A bunch of blogs that don't update anymore.
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