Archive for May, 2010
Dennis Hopper
Dennis Hopper has died today at the age of 74. A Dennis Hopper exhibition showed at Melbourne’s ACMI during 2010 and some of the work was related to the big Hopper exhibition at New York’s Tony Shafrazi Gallery I saw in 2009. Hopper is more of an artist that I thought, more of a creative […]
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Tags: ACMI, Dennis Hopper, Dennis Hopper photography, Tony Shafrazi gallery
Dad’s slides
In 1974 my dear late father brought back from Europe a collection of ready-made 35mm colour slides. These were professional photographs depicting places of interest that he was presumably unable to capture himself. I recently scanned and printed these images with a view to exhibiting the collection as an art installation. Because of their age […]
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Paper Moon
Watching the 1973 movie Paper Moon is like seeing Walker Evans photographs come to life. Set in Kansas in 1935, it’s a road movie that follows its two characters across a series of marvellous landscapes and towns. It was shot by Laszlo Kovacs, a cinematographer celebrated for his location work (Easy Rider, The Last Picture […]
Filed under: Movies, The Cinematographer's Art | 1 Comment
Tags: deep focus, deep focus cinematography, Laszlo Kovacs, Orson Welles & Bogdanovich, Paper Moon
Photo Booth
Unknown photographer. Photo-booth self-portraits, 1940s MoMA recently showed a new acquisition of forty-four photo booth pictures of an anonymous woman. This cheerful, attractive woman documented her changing appearance, which she obviously took pride in, to create a wonderful archive of her life. It is a form of extended self-portraiture, like autobiography. . .
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Pouva
The Pouva Start was a bakelite camera made in Dresden in 1956. It is a basic amateur camera with limited controls, a fairly good optical viewfinder and a lens that unscrews on a helical mount when you want to shoot. It is very quaint and attractive, in a retro Cold War kind of way – […]
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Tags: bakelite camera, camera GDR, old German cameras, Pouva, Pouva Start
Memento
I bought this in a second hand bookshop for a few dollars, a lovely memento of photographic Pictorialism. It is a small portfolio of photographs from 1915, printed in Switzerland. Each print is tipped-in, on a sheet of fine paper. The loose prints are held in a folded flaps, and each print and its support […]
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Building or jewelry?
. This is Saul Steinberg’s illustration on the cover of the 1958 French edition Robert Frank’s legendary book The Americans (Les Americains). It’s a satire of the soulless corporate architecture that was starting to take over the world’s cities – graph paper ridicules the alienating grid of International Style skyscrapers. At about the same time […]
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Tags: Ezra Stoller, Manufacturers Trust, Saul Steinberg cover Les Americains
New York is open for business
Photographs I took in NY in September 2009. . .
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Fifth Avenue sport
Fifth Avenue is an addiction. Once you get the drift of it, feel the energy of it, it makes you want to go back again and again, because it’s where life seems to be. How do you become courageous enough, and take the picture out of it, and learn how to confront the oncoming flow of […]
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You see I am here after all
You See I Am Here After All is the title of a new Zoe Leonard project, exhibited in the DIA:Beacon museum in the town of Beacon in New York State. I think it’s the largest single work of (wall) art I’ve ever seen. The project consists of about 4000 postcards of Niagara Falls, sourced from […]
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Tags: Conceptual photography, You see I am here after all, Zoe Leonard
Art of the Diorama
Another good reason for going to New York (you needed one?) is to visit the Natural History Museum to see the dioramas. These are one of the glories of New York, a city with far more than its fair share, and thety are better than you could imagine. They recreate a lost world of wilderness that […]
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Tags: dioramas, Natural History Museum Dioramas, New York Dioramas
Until the Kingdom Comes
Until the Kingdom Comes at Yossi Milo Gallery was a series of large photographs of animals by Simen Johan. Diorama in scale, they have great moral force in addition to their naturalistic description. Johan photographs animals in zoos, farms and museums using a film camera then combines the images digitally. Each one may comprise many […]
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Tags: Simen Johan, Until the Kingdom Comes
The Reality Effect
One of the recurring themes of photography is the the extreme efforts by some people to squeeze out the maximum “proof-content” of a photograph. Accident Investigation Site, shown recently at the Metropolitan Museum, is a new take on this idea. It is almost six metres long (19 feet), a one-to-one scale image of a section […]
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Tags: Accident Investigation Site, Miles Coolidge, photographic realism, reality effect, Surface Tension
Muse
These are the latest images in a series I’ve been working on for a few years: people encountering art. They were shot recently in galleries in New York and San Francisco. The project involves photographing people circulating through museums and galleries encountering works of art. I’m looking for odd behaviour, coincidences, moments, it’s humour plus […]
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Photography in education
The question facing a lot photography teachers right now is: does the darkroom still have a role in education? In the historic roll-over to the digital age, is there any point in still getting students to learn how to mix semi-toxic chemicals and stand around in the dark sloshing tanks and dipping sheets of paper […]
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Tags: Bostick & Sullivan, photography and education, teaching darkroom