Archive for July, 2010

. . This arresting image (click on it) is the beginning of the Lullaby of Broadway sequence in Gold Diggers of 1935, a Busby Berkeley movie.  It’s one of the grand song and dance set pieces that Berkeley is famous for; a short film in itself, lasting for 13 minutes. It starts with a distant […]


Demon

21Jul10

I was at a bonfire recently and took a lot of photographs. Reviewing the pictures later I discovered that the figure of a fiery demon had appeared in the flames. … OK, I Photoshopped it a little … but not as much as you thought. This is what the camera saw. The demon was already […]


Sunrise

21Jul10

. I shot this on a recent trip to Sydney. The light is so different there, the moisture from the ocean and harbour seems to make it softer. This image reminds me of those sky photographs by Richard Misrach. . . . You thought it was a landscape? Think again. Here it is before Photoshop. […]


Criss Cross

21Jul10

Criss Cross is a 1949 film noir directed by the great Robert Siodmak. Set in postwar L.A. it has that German look that caught on in Hollywood after the cream of European talent found a haven from Nazism there. Those expratiate artists injected a mood of pessimism and dread into American film, using stark black […]


Google art

21Jul10

The biggest photographic endeavour in the world today must be Google Earth, an attempt to photograph the entire surface of the planet down to every street and house. As a resource of photographic images it is immense, an archive of the physical world that Borges might have dreamt up. This megalomaniac project is upsetting a […]


.As the Google car drives along, its camera breaks the world. . . .


The identity of individuals on the street is blurred to protect privacy. Does someone at Google sit down at a computer and deface the faces one-by-one? Or does software find the pattern of the human face in the millions of Google pictures and blur them automatically? Which scenario is scarier? . . .


Slow computer uploads cause a hesitation between satellite view and street view. Half the world looks like an old computer game. . . .


The Google plane flies over New York photographing from different positions. When the images are joined later by their software algorithms, perspective becomes distorted. A strange wobbly metropolis is revealed. . .


Is this the ugliest place you can imagine? It’s high up in Manhattan past Harlem and I found it on Google Earth while researching a New York trip. It looks like a circuit board. A Street View search of the surrounding low level buildings shows what appears to be a liveable urban environment but this […]



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