Month: October 2014

Odds Against Tomorrow 4

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The 1959 movie Odds Against Tomorrow culminates in a heist of this bank in Hudson, upstate New York. That door and clock are significant in the holdup scene.

I noticed the similarity between the woman walking down the street and one of my favourite Harry Callahan photographs, ‘Chicago’, 1961, dated only two years later than the movie.

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Harry Callahan, ‘Chicago’, 1961

See my other posts on the photography in Odds Against Tomorrow:

Odds Against Tomorrow 1, Odds Against Tomorrow 2, and Odds Against Tomorrow 3.

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Harry Nankin

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Nankin-PhD

Melbourne photo media artist Harry Nankin has a new exhibition, briefly. It’s his PhD exhibition which will run for four days, closing this Friday.

“Harry Nankin is an Australian photographer and environmental artist. He often uses the camera-less ‘photogram’ or ‘shadowgram’ to record ecological phenomena: employing processes that are partly land art, partly performance and partly photography, he endeavours to turn the landscape itself into a camera.”

Harry’s website harrynankin.com shows the ambition of his large scale projects. Many of them employ giant sheets of photographic paper exposed directly to the landscape at night. He doesn’t take photographs of nature, nature itself makes the photograph.

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What is Isinglass?

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A057

From A Dictionary of Photography, London, 1867:

Isinglass. Fish glue; a pure form of gelatine. It is soluble in boiling water, and gelatinizes on cooling; it is also soluble in weak acids but is precipitated by the addition of an alkali.

Isinglass is obtained from the air bladders of sturgeons, and principally from the great sturgeons found in the Caspian Sea. It is manufactured chiefly at Astracan, and is bleached by the fumes of burning sulphur.

The process of manufacture consists in first steeping the bladders in water, then removing the outer skin, putting them into a hempen bag, squeezing them, softening them between the hands and twisting them into small cylinders, which are afterwards beat into the shape of a lyre.

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Muybridge in South Melbourne

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Muybridge-south-melbourne

Greg Neville, South Melbourne building construction, 2014

These photographs shows the exterior of a building that is currently under construction in South Melbourne. The facade has rows of panels with images from Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion. There is no signage to identify what the building will be used for, although it is safe to bet it has something to do with sport.

The images are from this panel in Animal Locomotion, Muybridge’s great project. Curiously the designers have reversed the pictures so the athlete is facing the opposite direction. The reason for this may become apparent when the building is complete. Anyway, there is no copyright and Muybridge is not around to complain.

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Eadweard Muybridge, from Animal Locomotion, 1872-85

When the building is finished I’ll post some better photos and judge if they’ve done the great man a service.

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