Robert Frank’s Guggenheim application, 1954 (possiblyplausible)
“a broad, voluminous picture record…”
“…using the miniature camera exclusively…”
As well as experimenting with a variety of cameras from, 1.3 mp toy Cameras to Polaroid, to 5x4 film, I also dabble in sound & video, usually captured on my iPhone. Sometimes manipulated, other times not. This piece is an edit created from 2 locations, using 2 sets of moving images and a disparate ambient sound piece.
A couple of days ago I talked about revisiting old journals. As part of that process I dug around in some of my old 5x4 negatives dating as far back as 1989. There are some gems, and as a consequence I’ve scanned a couple.
No sooner had I opened them on my computer had I realised why they had never been printed. My developing skills were still very rough [I was tray developing in those day using pyro] and the amount of marks and scratches on the emulsion and IN the emulsion made these images unprintable.
Until now that is.
Using any good software tool I can easily and seamlessly remove the blemishes that would have gotten in the way of me making a beautiful print. The image above in particular, had black holes in the emulsion which print as black spots and therefore need to be etched out of the print then re-spotted back in, always in the sky too, always the skies!
So here is one such negative reused as it were. All I need now is the time to make the prints then find a space to exhibit them.
Having decided that you can never over sell yourself, here is a list of my creative online outlets.
In no particular order.
- Static online photo-gallery [updated sporadically]
- flickr [updated sporadically]
- lo-res daily [updated daily]
- mlkshk, very P.O.M.O*., for those images I like but don’t know what to do with?
- facing north a long term project [updated sporadically]
- mixel I have a mixed account and am sharing the results on tumblr as well
coming soon,diptych delight** 2 k worth of words, a new idea that I will tinker with on and off based on the original idea from the 3rd effect website- my official work presence on tumblr, s2z-pic.tumblr.com
*P.O.M.O.= Post-modern, google it.
** A working title, this may change some time in the near future?
This exhibition, through these fascinating and usually private series of images (many of them previously unpublished), celebrates what and how Magnum photographers saw along the way for nearly a century.
Yesterday, I hit the the Ian Potter Centre at Federation square, for once I enjoyed the contemporary art, which was a show about how artists work with the idea of history. The exhibition entitled, 10 ways to look at the past had a mix of mediums, from Swallow’s hand carved sculptures to film, cinema and still photography.
I also enjoy the space as an architectural piece and can’t help but try and capture and abstract it a little further. [See first image] While there I recorded some of the ambient sounds of the space and hope to take this idea further, using perhaps an ebook?
Also on show was, some contemporary work from the NGV collection, including my all-time favourite sculpture/installation piece, of the butcher shop window, with fake meat & offal, by Ivan Durrant see second image above. [A short Video, of him and his work from the ABC site.]
So what does it all mean when even the sacred world of art is transformed and meme-ified for the broader internet? To me, the art world meme reflects the inevitable collision of the high art world with, well, everybody else. In a world in which the average art appreciator can feel empowered to create, remix and revamp, the art world meme is the internet generation’s version of sketching at the museum.
In the future, Warhol predicted, we’ll all have our 15 minutes of fame. But now that everyone can become famous, we need new metrics for lasting fame and success. For the art world, becoming a meme might just be one of those metrics. After all, living on in people’s Photoshop queues and social media ensures that an artist’s name echoes throughout eternity… or at least the Twittersphere.
I just finished my last few sheets of Polaroid 600 film. I’d been holding off making pictures with them for some time.
Yesterday I purchased a new camera the Polaroid 300. This camera currently has plenty of readily available film stock, particularly given that fuji make a film that fits as well. So I went ahead and finished the shots in the older polaroid camera. I photographed familiar things, things that over the years I’ve come to love seeing photographed and whose appearance delights me as a photograph.
As I expected, the pictures are full of the usual Polaroid flaws, which, despite Walter Benjamin’s and John Berger’s assertions make them unique and individual objects. Which in turn makes them priceless to me. Are they worthy of further contemplation and fetishisation, I don’t know. The only given is they will deteriorate over time, granted they may outlive me, but, the colours will shift and the blemishes will grow.
Who knows maybe they’ll hang on a gallery wall one day, because I don’t feel they can be truly appreciated any other way than as small objects, decaying, slowly.
Tagging your city with graffiti: looks cool, but it’s illegal.
Tagging an Instagram photo of your city with #citybit to get featured on the Citygrams tumblr? Now that’s cool and legal!
Represent Your City on Instagram with #citybit
Thanks Alice!
A fruitful day yesterday. (Taken with Instagram at s2z studio)
After having an encounter on mlkshk.com over some Nick Cave ephemera, I decided to go digging though my old analog notebooks that date back to my years as a University student from the early ’80s to the ’90s. Boy are there some gems in there!
A couple of things struck me about the process.
Throughout the books are polaroids, made in a time when while expensive, still infinite in terms of having another go. Now of course, this is all history, making these rediscovered polaroids all the more poignant. To add fuel to the fire some of these polaroid photographs are showing sings of chemical deterioration. A wonderful metaphor for life and time.
Be prepared for more scans of these images as I work my way through these books.
The lesson in all this? Keep an analogue AND a digital journal, my analogue journal entries dwindled considerably around 2004, and stopping altogether in early 2008 for nearly 2 years. Why? I’m not sure? Rest assured, I have gone back just this year, to keeping both.
“…Julia Dolan, the Portland Art Museum’s photography curator, says digital technology may have many more people taking pictures but that doesn’t change what constitutes a photographer or a good photograph.
“It’s an issue of intention,” says Dolan. “That’s what separates us from Robert Frank. I can make a grocery list, for example, but that doesn’t mean it’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning poem.”
Dolan also thinks it’s a tad grandiose to assume this is photography’s democratic era.
“Photography has always been available to the masses,” she says. “That was true way back even in the 19th century. Digital technology has just amplified that perception and added new abilities for us.”
Intention, as Dolan meant it, suggests a few things: a knowledge of photographic technique and composition, and also photographic history. That means the best pictures have a larger design behind them, a skill that often eludes amateurs……Or maybe his stark reproach is a reminder that feast and famine can be partners in this profligate photographic heyday. Frank, now 87, continues to keep his artistic intentions lean and hungry by pushing back against the legacy that has defined photographic practice for 50 years.
For the millions of us with smartphones and little pocket cameras, he still has much to show us.”
Respect!
