artificial Stars

Portfolio: Different Genres

2009-02-02T14:01:00.006Z

The following images are from my recent shoot with Icelandic journalist Nanna Arnadottir. They represent a range of different genres achieved over the course of the same shoot.

Update: Text Size

2009-01-03T13:43:00.003Z

Since the text on aS.blogspot has become denser, the "Smaller" font size has become insufficient to prevent headache and dizziness, despite its tiny, neat appeal.

The main body of text on the site will now be presented in "Normal". Apologies for any aesthetic inconveniences.

Cardiff & Bures Miller @ MAO

2008-11-29T11:38:00.045Z

The current exhibition taking over the labyrinthine galleries of Modern Art Oxford is "The House of Books Has No Windows" by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, two artists who have gained much-deserved notoriety through their collaboration. Six of their installations are on display - Dark Pool, The Muriel Lake Incident, Road Trip, Opera for a Small Room, The Killing Machine, and The House of Books has No Windows, the most recent and titular piece.

Their work is mind-blowingly impressive, minutely detailed with its own vernacular mythology and arthouse glamour. Their skills of set-dressing put the rest of their field to shame, and their black sense of humour adds a subtle warmth to their pieces.

1. Dark Pool (1995)

On entering the doorway to The Dark Pool, one encounters a realm of suspended animation, an elaborate assemblage of furniture, carpets, books, empty dishes and mechanical paraphernalia. As viewers move through the installation, they activate acoustic components of the work - the silence of the space is broken by strands of music, echoes of stories and fragments of dialogue.

This large room-size installation, bathed in a central pool of light and ringed with motion sensors that trigger bursts of sound and dialogue, is immediately unsettling to step into. The door closes behind you and the cloud of small sounds and shuffling footsteps envelops you. The first thing you prepare yourself for, faced with a jumbled array of unwashed cups, old notebooks and tanks of murky water is the smell. Approaching the center of the installation, it quickly emerges that there is no such horror. What might otherwise be dank and repulsive has an entirely neutral aroma, of wood and paper. Your curiosity is encouraged. Passing a motion sensor shrouded in black cloth, once again you prepare yourself for a House-of-Horrors blast of ancient groaning and shreaking, infortuitously timed to surprise you as you lean towards the open notebooks to peer at their scrawled contents. Instead, a quiet murmur of clear dialogue and ambient noise slowly rises to meet you.

At this point, the nature of the installation changes for the viewer, and it becomes possible to engage with each minute, dusty piece as an object of curiosity, as if one were browsing the quarters of an elderly portrait artist happily engaged with making tea elsewhere. The power of the installation is to hold you gently in its claustrophobic world, personally introducing you to each carefully chosen and artfully disarranged book, cup and wire. Small elements, such as the navy shirt or blanket crumpled on the bare mattress, suggest a benign and thriving presence to whom the litter of the room represent significant personal artefacts.

You can view a video clip of the installation, from the official website, here, and there is a poorly designed but very interesting "map" of the installation here.

2. The Muriel Lake Incident (1999)

The visitor stands in front of a large wooden box looking through a rectangular opening to see a miniature model of a cinema with grey, empty rows of seats, and a small projection screen onto which a film is being projected. Listening on a pair of headphones they hear the 3-dimentional (binaural) sounds of the film, a woman next to them talking and eating popcorn and a surprise ending including a gunshot and a frightened audience.

"This is going to sound strange, but that woman...she was in my dream last night. I was..." "Sssssh!" An irritated audience member forcefully interrupts the intriguing murmurs from the female intimate whispering in your ear. "I'll tell you later," She frustratingly aborts her story. The description given by the website is sadly impoverished; a very similar installation with a slightly more elaborate set-up, their 2001 Venice Biennale piece The Paradise Institute (2001), includes a more poetic summary of the experience.

What is more particular about the installation is the personal binaural “surround sound” that every individual in the audience experiences through the headphones. The sense of isolation each might feel is broken by intrusions seemingly coming from inside the theatre. A cellphone belonging to a member of the audience rings. A close “female friend” whispers intimately in your ear: “Did you check the stove before we left?” Fiction and reality become intermingled as absorption in the film is suspended and other realities flow in.

The moment in the experience where a woman with flowing black curls dances, her eyes shut and straps of her tight black dress falling from her shoulders, and the female voice in your ear describes her dream has a highly erotic sense of claimed intimacy. The installation is oddly effective, consisting of a cardboard box containing a diorama theatre where a grainy monochrome film is projected onto the screen in the back, the audio delivered through headphones unceremoniously bolted to the plywood exterior. It is the only one of the installations that benefits rather than suffers from fellow gallery visitors piling in with you, as they act as other cinema patrons for the purposes of The Muriel Lake Incident.

3. Road Trip (2004)

The artists found a carousel of slides, mostly of empty landscapes, that originally belonged to George’s grandfather. His grandfather, whom he had never met, had traveled across Canada to meet with a doctor in New York for the cancer that he was dying from. The slides are projected onto a screen, while out of two audio speakers a conversation between the artists can be heard discussing the order and reason for the slides, trying to discover the mystery behind the images.

Exactly as described above, Road Trip consists of a holiday snap-style slideshow set-up with helpful voiceovers discussing places and people you have no knowledge of or connection to with a rich sense of nostalgia. There is a even a brief, possibly staged interruption where Miller cannot find his next slide and the screen remains blank for several long minutes. The shots themselves are stunning, but there is something distinctly underwhelming about the format.

4. Opera for a Small Room (2005)

There are twenty-four antique loudspeakers out of which come songs, sounds, arias, and occasional pop tunes. There are almost two thousand records stacked around the room and eight record players, which turn on and off robotically syncing with the soundtrack. The sound of someone moving and sorting albums is heard. The audience cannot enter the room. To see and hear his world, they have to look through windows, holes in the walls, and cracks in the doorways and watch his shadow move around the room.

Photographs by no means do this installation any justice, and it was by far my favourite piece of the exhibition.

Entering a vast, darkened hall, you come across a tiny wooden cabin emanating golden light, strange shadows and the rich, reverberating wave of an operatic aria; the private space of a silent afficionado bathing in the lustrous music. Approaching the cabin's many wooden windows, the hollow echoes turn stronger and the viewer's sense of voyeurism is engaged. Whilst exploring the many scattered details of the scene, suddenly the lights dim and in the hall, a storm commences. The golden light and opera fades to a roar of thunder. Different coloured lights, a disco of hot red and blue, flicker through the cabin and a loud pop track thumps out of the chaos.

The intimate luxury of the carefully arranged scene is nothing short of cinematic, and offers a genuinely intense experience of living a carefully composed arthouse tableau. The stormy "rock opera" fragments the scene and change it into something more spontaneous and detached, with elements both of threat to the viewer - now disengaged from the comfort of the golden aria - and of humour at the juxtaposition between the two scenes. It is a highly technical and effective method of moulding an environment and providing an intercessionary element that brings the viewer into the piece; "physical cinema", something present in all their work - as Cardiff says, referring to "‘fucking up’ of our physical space" -

The fine line that separates our physical immediate world and creating an augmented or ‘third world’ we like to call it is really prominent in a lot of our works...in ways this augmented space has always been there with our imagination.

The interchangeability of cinema and sculpture is something coming into art, owing much to the work of Matthew Barney, that envelops the viewer in a sense of a broader mythology. It is poignantly expressed through this installation, along with Dark Pool and The Killing Machine, and a concept presented directly through The Muriel Lake Incident, The Paradise Institute and Imbalance.6 (Jump). Their first collaborative piece, Dark Pool, was actually the result of an aborted attempt to produce an amateur film along the lines of Fassbinder's Der Amerikanische Soldat (The American Soldier) after they attended a 15-film Fassbinder retrospective immediately after his death.

As with Barney, I imagine it will take several more evolutions of this concept in the artists' work to get a clearer idea of the broader themes expressed; the Killing Machine gives a more punctuated insight into the specific thoughts and processes that define each.

5. The Killing Machine (2007)

Partly inspired by Franz Kafka's 'In the Penal Colony' and partly by the American system of capital punishment as well as the current political situation, the piece is an ironic approach to killing and torture machines. A moving megaphone speaker encircles an electric dental chair. The chair is covered in pink fun fur with leather straps and spikes. In the installation are two robotic arms that hover and move- sometimes like a ballet, and sometimes attacking the invisible prisoner in the chair with pneumonic pistons. A disco ball turns above the mechanism reflecting an array of coloured lights while a guitar hit by a robotic wand wails and a wall of old TV’s turns on and off creating an eerie glow.

In our culture right now there is a strange deliberate and indifferent approach to killing. I think that our interest in creating this piece comes from a response to that.

From the Networked Music Review interview :

Janet: I guess the pink fun fur was more me and the mechanical robot aspect was more George but we both have to be enthusiastic for any element to stay in a piece and not be cut.
George: Hmm, I thought the idea for the robot arms was yours and the pink fun fur was mine.

Janet: Yeah. You may be right.

I strongly recommend that you watch the video of this installation here. The music is "Heartstrings" by Frieda Abtan, with additional percussion by Titus Maderlechner. The robot arm design is by Carlo Crovato.

Playing on both a Kafkaesque aesthetic of oppressive surrealism and the tormented grandeur they discovered in their Pandemonium (2005) installation in Cellblock Seven of the Eastern State Pentitentiary, The Killing Machine is a profoundly frightening and yet somehow charming and accessible piece. After some brave patron approached the machine to press the Red Button, the two long robot arms whir happily out of hibernation and quietly dance, their slim light-mounted heads bending curiously down to the abused pelt of fake fur lining the dentist's chair between them in place of a flesh-and-blood victim. After quietly examining their invisible subject for several minutes, the strings crash in and the robots delicately select targets on which to descend, punctuating each dive with the solid click of a pneumatic spike judiciously applied to intangible thighs and chest. The movement programmed into the robot arms is nothing short of technical virtuosity, imbuing these slim, cruel denizens with both a bird-like curiosity and a cold, mathematical approach to their labours. One half-expects them to waltz at the end, much like the executioners of Barney's Cremaster 2 (NB. go to Characters > Two Steps: The Executioners Song for a brief clip).

The work is cold, chaotic, ordered, cruel, glamorous, seedy, clinical, artefactual...it expresses full-force the way that execution is portrayed, in succinct and cinematic style.

5. The House of Books has No Windows (2008)

...The House of Books has No Decent-Sized Photographs.

It doesn't surprise me that, despite the fact that this is the most recent and titular piece, none of the gallery press kits features a photograph or detail of this lack-luster piece of whimsical nonsense. Perhaps for any other artist, a new or unknown individual, you might find a pleasing composition and a shallow but strong aesthetic. In the context of the corpus of work built by these two artists, this is literally child's play.

On walking past this for the second time on the way back from The Killing Machine, I found a middle-aged woman and her little daughter sitting cross-legged inside. It wouldn't surprise me if they didn't realise it was supposed to be art. It would, however, make a charming fort for ages 5-8.

If you can't make it to Oxford, I thoroughly recommend viewing the artists' website at CardiffMiller.com. It has similar photographic tours, videos and summaries of their installations - the video for Bures Miller's solo work Imbalance.6 (Jump) alone is worth it.

Suggested Reading

also on aS.blogspot

New Blog @ emptycities

2008-09-21T18:31:00.003+01:00

aS.blogspot.com will be updated very soon with an article on Steven Klein. In the meantime, please have a look round emptycities.blogspot.com for examples of my own work.

You can use it to mitigate my over-enthusiastic cynicism.

Al Magnus

2008-04-22T12:40:00.012+01:00

The appeal of Al Magnus' work to a broad demographic is fairly obvious. His broad composition landscapes, in a palette of luminous hi-res pastels, is a sort of softcore surrealism -that is, going through the motions for people who don't like to feel left out without demanding any real involvement.

Magnus' work runs essentially around the same visual concepts as Robert ParkeHarrison's environmentalist work - cynically, many of the pieces feel like glossy, under-realised, shameless rip-offs of ParkeHarrison's The Architect's Brother. Where ParkeHarrison depicts the Everyman's Nightmare, Magnus has gone for the Child's Dream. I feel that I should be more sympathetic, given that my own design logo exactly parallels his, a motif of stars hanging from the sky by threads that he also employs in his image 'Jesters'; but everything in Magnus' world is hanging by a thread, on more than one level.

In terms of technique, his failure to produce aesthetically subtle work has a lot to do with his choice of medium. Blending glossy CGI elements and photographs into a 'photographic' landscape is difficult. Magnus fails to photoshop realistic focus back onto the finished product - his experiments with focus result in either hard patches of gaussian blur or a rather primitive tilt-shift look - and the result is extremely flat. There is something aggressively mundane about a number of the compositions, a common problem of static CGI renders. Clearly some copious effort has gone into the processing of these images, and they are not necessarily amateurish, but neither do they seem to be maturing.

You may also have noticed that, at the size they are presented, it is impossible to make out more than the most rudimentary detail in any of the images. Whilst it may not be prerequisite of fine art that it scale nicely, Magnus does his work absolutely no favours. The loss of detail appears insignificant to his aims; he pushes the concept of each image above its real content.

From alMagnus.com :

Every picture tells a story.

To tell it, lengths of rope or chain, lightning, ladders, bridges
or handrails are interwoven. These strands hold together
the pieces of a photographic cloth, weave links,
keeping Man from wandering.
A strand now links Him to his own Universe or Fate.
Pins are threaded. Moon-pins, a lamp-pin. Pins that can suggest.
Jewels are stapled, as mysterious as temples,
as disconcerting as puzzles.
On the pieces of that cloth, a world where everything is a link,
apprentice seamstresses pull and the strands rise,
always higher.

Clearly it would be difficult to find the above anything other than nauseatingly whimsical, and it in no way justifies the ugly truth; that Magnus basically started with a mundane set of child's-eye observations and stretched the concept thinner than the sellotape he uses to patch some of these things together. In an interview with Phot'Aix available on his own website, Magnus explains that each of his compositions takes six hours to arrange on his computer; clearly, this just isn't a substantial enough investment of time and energy to produce something of artisitic value and significance.

The below video from YouTube is a kitsch arrangement of Magnus' and Saint-Exupéry's work to a grainy soundtrack of The Beatles' 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' that successfully reduces all three oeuvres into a clanging mess of trashy star-wipes, and just about summarises the tone of Magnus' collection.

Magnus could quickly profit from injecting some aggression into his vision - his world could benefit from the odd element of dark humour or decay. Right now, shiny though they are, these images are the intellectual equivalent of photographing babies and/or kittens in various miniaturised outfits; only the most fragile of gentle spirits amongst us will, or should, find real comfort in it.

They might look their best as printed wallpaper for a children's nursery, but the small, low-contrast examples made available by Magnus are only tacky postcards from a realm of the quiet dream.

His images are available to view at his website, alMagnus.com, in his photo.net galleries, and in an album by Matta on MyOpera.

also on aS.blogspot

Mike Brodie

2008-04-16T14:47:00.025+01:00

Polaroid Images

From an interview with Fecal Face.com:

Do you have any inside knowledge on cheap polaroid film hookups?
Besides shoplifting, no.

What do you do to pay the bills?
Random shit, I can't have a job. That's just not where I'm at right now. I've realized that. I need to be able to do whatever the hell I want when I want. Which not havin a job doesn't necessarily guarantee, but it's a start. From march 6th -24th I'll be checked into a pharmaceudical lab and will be takin 450 mgs of arthritis pain medication. If I make it out alive I'm getting a tax free $3500. Which technically is going to be similar to getting paid $8.50 per hour, but I get paid for sleeping and eating.

That's crazy. How did you come across something like that and is there any chance of any long term issues with taking that amount of medication? I bet you have to sign some crazy papers for that shit.
Yeah, a friend told me about it. The first day I signed my name on about 25 different forms. It's not that bad really. These kind of things have been goin' on for awhile all over the country. This is really the only way pharmaceaudicals can be prescribed. They gotta be approved by the FDA first, and that's where I come in. This particular drug I think can really fuck up your pancreas though, so I guess its better that I'm doing this now than when I'm 40, because I think I have a super buff pancreas right now.

-=-

Mike Brodie, a.K.a. The Polaroid Kid(d), is the lazy, seedy personification of American anti-culture, albeit with a super buff pancreas. He arrives towards the trailing end of a stream of contemporary anti-heroes - drifting alcoholic loners who spend their time hanging out in dives and junkie squats, living in the occasional company of a host of deranged, unwashed addicts and petty criminals, with an accidental post-punk wardrobe and a vocabulary of thick slang with its origins in the nocturnal murmurings of crashed-out crack whores.

Modern cultural icons like Burroughs, Bukowski and even Tom Waits have glamourised urban squalor and, as fellow American Dream apostate Chuck Palahniuk puts it, 'hitting bottom'; legendary photographer William Egglestone and his innumerable disciples visualised this extraordinarily 'ordinary' p(erspective in a quiet panoramas of 'old tyres, Dr Pepper machines, discarded air-conditioners, vending machines, empty and dirty Coca-Cola bottles, torn posters, power poles and power wires, street barricades, one-way signs, detour signs, No Parking signs, parking meters and palm trees crowding the same curb' (shameless Wikipedia crib of Eudora Welty, The Democratic Forest) as possessing surreally menacing qualities. The stubborn ordinariness of life, desire and failure takes on a terrifying beauty and poignancy. Apparently.

The miracle of the genre, however, is the more worn out the cynical aesthetic becomes, the more profound the irony at its core. Brodie may be innocent of its legacy, but the self-conscious beauty of his portraits owes much of its significance to the endurance of the stark 'realist' - probably better classified as surrealist, ironical realist, or any number of ambiguous compounds of existing genres - aesthetic of the American Ordinary.

35mm Images

The images selected above are tame, well-balanced examples of work that draws on a wealth of dirt, tattoo ink and other cultural debris. A more striking demonstration of his skill in capturing his subjects is probably Untitled #12 and Untitled #23 from his 2007 exhibition at the Needles & Pens gallery. Both images depict an eviscerated possum lying on a cardboard box. #12 includes the murder weapon, a small kitchen knife, and the killer, a faceless figure in a butcher apron with bloodied hands and a black dog at his side; #23 is more vague, with only the lower body of the mangled creature visible from under the wide brim of a hat as another unidentifiable person leans intimately close over the creature's corpse - too close, clearly, but the action is obscured by the hat. Both shots are ripe with a fragile, luminous tension and elements of the surreal and arcane - even the bloody viscera glows a pale, almost floral, pastel shade of orange in the washed-out nostalgia of traditional film. There is very little to imply the purpose of the brutal slaughter, although the presence of the apron suggests that you probably don't want to know.

The simplicity of the zero-time Polaroid and, since the decline of the Polaroid camera, 35mm has a consistently illuminating touch that draws each image out to the dividing line between the mundane and sublime poignancy. Brodie's affection for his old-school equipment is a strong point in favour of the significance of his 'accidental documentary photography' as works of art; he is the founder of the vibrantly eccentric site plrds.com (Updated 2-Feb: The website link shifts, but this URL is current), which as one of the least navigable websites ever devised also has an exciting spontaneity to the content you may or may not be able to extract from it. You should be forewarned that Brodie has, for example, a loosely abstract idea of what a domain name is and it is not worth following up any of those occasionally printed on random pages.

Self-Portrait by Mike Brodie

After the eviscerated rodent it may not surprise you that Mike Brodie looks more like a budding serial killer than a walnut-complexioned, denim-clad loner with an unfiltered cigarette smouldering between an incomplete set of yellowing teeth. Clearly there is a youthful quality to his work that is highly comparable to his Chinese contemporary Lin Zhi Peng, who goes by an equally moronic nickname: an easy social intimacy with his subjects, proof of his access to youthful and marginal subcultures; a slightly juvenile sense of humour that has a tendency towards broken or suggestive objects; a strong physicality in his portraits rather than a more languid, considered appreciation of the human form; and a whimsical optimism in terms of what constitutes a worthy image.

Still, it's quite clear that Lin Zhi Peng, No. 223, has had a lot more joy out of life as a young artist than Brodie. Brodie's subjects - by his own testimony, all people he knows well - seem entirely indifferent to his presence in his best pictures, and casually unresponsive in his more mediocre work. It's a subculture that's a lot less fun than it looks, apparently. The mere presence of No. 223 and his camera, by contrast, seems to send his cohort of of lithe Chinese adolescents into either paroxysms of gleeful excitement, acute states of confusion, or an ecstatic blend of both - where Brodie's camerawork is soberly illustrative, Lin's is feverishly generative.

At the age of 21, Brodie feels palpably older - if not more mature - in style than his contemporaries. As Art&Antiques Magazine elegantly puts it, despite a 'callow, scattershot approach to photography,...the contemplative Polaroids he’s produced over the past few years already feel like the work of an old soul.' Perhaps sifting through the tattered remains of the American Dream is wearying work; perhaps his taste in sweater-vests is an indicator of a prematurely aging taste. For his work and for his wardrobe, though, he might bear in mind that a more noble, macho sort of realism is creeping into his genre and consider casting his thematic net a little wider - potentially a risky maneouvre for someone widely praised for just that, capitalising on the idea of ethnography as art in itself and achieving significance by 'capturing a rare and valuable glimpse of a marginalised group', as the standard praise for this achievement goes.

With the massive market for journalism and amateur photojournalism that now exists online, as critics were swifter to point out in the case of Lin Zhi Peng, edgy subject matter does not necessarily make art. Stylistic consistency, technical prowess and a coherent vision make art, and whilst Brodie seems to have the potential to prove himself in all these areas, he will need to broaden his horizons first.

also on aS.blogspot

Spring Retrospective

2008-03-21T01:00:00.025Z

Photographers
listed and illustrated alphabetically

No. 223 : Joe Baran : Joaquín Bérchez : Guy Bourdin : Akif Hakan Celebi [I] [II]
Abbey Drucker : A. Murat Eren : Gilbert Garcin : Lara Jade : Mario Leko
Andrew L. Moore [I] [II] : Robert Parkeharrison : Eolo Perfido : Eugenio Recuenco
Satoshi Saikusa : David Shrigley : Andrew Ward : Oswald Yves : Giovanni Zaccagnini

Sculptors & Installation Artists
listed and illustrated alphabetically

Peter Callesen [Paper] : Brian Dettmer [Books] : Fred Eerdekens [Light] [I] [II]
Mark Jenkins [ Tape] : Yayoi Kusama [Dots]

CultureBlog
listed chronologically

Egypt Under the Stereoscope : The Secret Books by Sean Kernan : Gohonzon
Cantor Dust on the Sierpinski Carpet : Atlas by Maria Kodama and Jorge Luis Borges

2007-2008 Top Photographers

Akif Hakan Celebi : No. 223 : Gilbert Garcin : Joe Baran
Robert ParkeHarrison : Andrew L. Moore

Robert ParkeHarrison

2008-02-26T10:43:00.037Z

Stolen Summer, 2006
Scribe, 2006
Black Snow, 2006

Robert ParkeHarrison is, essentially, a surrealist steampunk environmentalist, the prodigal lovechild of Gilbert Garcin and Matthew Barney raised on Antoine de Saint Exupéry, and as you might imagine based on these convoluted descriptions and the photographs above, he's a frightening man.

The three images above and two below, more recent work from the infuriating slideshow applet on his website, are probably best understood in the vein of Barney's Drawing Restraint, although the role of the copious quantities of congealed petroleum jelly in Drawing Restraint - a canvas both unremarkably uniform and unpredictably chaotic, moulded as much by the sophisticated internal interactions within its heaving mass as by the bizarre rituals enacted on it, around it and in it by Barney - is replaced here by a blanket of snow.

The first image, Stolen Summer, is one of the more shocking; the obscene decadence and ruthlessness of the countless crucifixions is absurd, delicately radiant and utterly repulsive. The sickly pallor of the hands at work in the lower register suggests a compulsive fervour in the work of the collector, redolent with moral decay. Scribe is a concept that Barney might well covet. The traditional depiction of 'drawing restraint', its fetishistic, exhausting transference of the contents creative mind onto canvas and the resultant blurring of an individual's identity with his work, has often been a bloody quill; the device strapped to the disembodied hand is admittedly a tortuously efficient incarnation. This destructive entropy of interpreting (or reprocessing) the environment is a major and recurrent theme of his dystopic scenery, and the message here is darker and more subtle than the more directly suggestive environmental moralising in his earlier collections The Architect's Brother (esp. Reliquary, Cloud Cleaner and Breathing Machine) and Exhausted Globe (see below). Black Snow is bizarrely optimistic, depicting a beached and broken industrial 'whale' staining the snow with a pale blood of rust and oil. Like Overflow (see below) it inverts a more common image of nature perishing in the clutches of industry; Dream Fall (see below) could also be interpreted as an absurd subversion of rainfall in the same vein.

Dream Fall, 2002
Overflow, 2006

The entire range of his work has clear tendencies towards the surreal and the steampunk; the compositions, studio sets built and enacted by ParkeHarrison himself, depict 'industry' as a series of Rube Goldberg machines, awkwardly attempting to replace the work done by nature (cf. Airway, The Sower). Images lacking this strong formulaic style, such as those above, plunge further into a more dreamlike world of soft urban skylines, prominently displaying another feature of ParkeHarrison photography: the absence of distinctive human portraits.

The figures in his world are ghostly blurs or disembodied limbs in his more recent work, and an unremarkable middle-aged corporate businessman in older work, effectively a bland 'everyman'. The starkly ethereal Dream Fall (top) is amongst his more whimsical compositions, eschewing his usual blood-and-iron brutality in favour of a quieter, more personal level of entropy. Equally the drowned world of Overflow, with its furniture and unfortunate occupant bobbing in a placid lake the colour of algae bloom, has the sinister undertone of a bleak ParkeHarrison utopia where civilisation has been overcome and ruthlessly blanketed over (cf. Reclamation). One man's utopia might easily become a nightmare for the rest of humanity, but this particular hell is decisively quiet.

Exhausted Globe, 1997
Departure, 1997
Consumption, 1997

This early series from the collection held at the George Eastman House, Exhausted Globe, depicts attempts to 'patch the sky' and, quaintly, abandon the spent planet via jet pack. Clearly influenced by Le Petit Prince, these aluminium prints are the bluntest expression of disenchantment demonstrated in terms of absurd, delusional hope and manifestly forlorn attempts to preserve the inextricably condemned. ParkeHarrison's work is rife with cynicism, black humour and sinister misanthropy, and it is beautifully executed. Perhaps unfortunately, it is his aesthetic sensitivity and subtlety that undermines his message. The sense of inevitability and human frailty in these images is so profoundly, even morbidly, fascinating that it inspires nothing more active than horrifically fixated appreciation; ParkeHarrison does not seem to suggest or desire a 'better' world; if anything he longs for the stark, murky landscape in the window of Overflow.

In the end, ParkeHarrison doesn't want a restoration of environmental harmony. He wants a jet pack.

also on aS.blogspot

No. 223

2008-02-17T17:10:00.024Z

No. 223, as Chinese photographer Lin Zhi Peng is arguably better known, is the forerunner in a collective of modern photographers whose work graces the pages of New Photography in China by 3030 Press, published last year. The reviewers of auspiciousdragon.net argue of the book that 'these are young photographers indeed, and the photos contain a heavy mix of the sort of self-obsessed, crude, and banal that you might expect from a similar collection anywhere in the rich world...that is, these young photographers are being normal'.

Even from the few images displayed with this post, it should be obvious that to use the term 'normal' to describe the behaviour exhibited in 223's extensive archive of images is an extremely cynical move on behalf of the birdwatching duo responsible for auspiciousdragon, which takes a boldly eclectic approach to sharing expertise on photography, culinary techniques and cancer. It's not hard to see their point; whilst Abbey Drucker's sweetly nostalgic work betrays a dated, unsophisticated sense of humour, Lin Zhi Peng occasionally demonstrates a painfully modern and equally immature attraction to the comic potential of bodily fluids and poor visual innuendo...

If Guy Bourdin has shot the above, 'bumbum cock', it would just be highly questionable art. I honestly think, however, it might be preferable in the context of 223's portfolio to give him the benefit of the doubt and classify this under 'mildly amusing mistake'. 223 clearly has a sense of humour that keeps him working in the boundary between 'surreal' and 'ridiculous'; he stumbles over both sides of the line with an immense range of emotional tone perfectly executed with coherent style, refined composition, sensitive yet modern lighting and recurrent themes. There is a healthy dose of immaturity in his choice of subject that rarely bleeds over into his technique, and it is this immaturity that is the source of his flair, energy, experimentalism and intimacy with a strange, vivid subculture of lithe adolescents drunk on adrenaline and radiating sexual tension.

Whilst it may align itself with some of the enduring stereotypes of 'youth culture, 'normal' doesn't even nearly cut it. The image used on the cover of New Photography in China depicts the faceless half of a girl in pink tights squatting and spitting a stream of what has been identified (by Theme Magazine, without any supporting evidence) as soy milk, past her exposed crotch and onto the ground between her feet; a striking, stomach-turning composition ripe with chemically-heightened libidinous energy (or 'punk', if you will) and the major export of Japan: the fucking surreal.

In a very intelligent, if not particularly incisive, interview with PingMag 223 relates the philosophy of new, younger artists created by the democracy of blogging and digital distribution - 'if you like it, do it'. Trite as this soundbite may be, the most sceptical critic cannot deny that the charm of this approach is pervasive in his portfolio.

Whatever the qualities of his already sizeable collection on Flickr, it is clear from his most recent images that his style is developing. More bleak landscapes with flecks of colour and swirls of snow and foam are replacing the luminous youths throwing milk and cats caught on the windowsill, and his technique is providing ample support for his experimentation. New images appear on his disturbingly tacky blog, designed by 223 himself and not boding especially well for this year's follow-up to New Photography in China produced by members of the same collective, New Graphic Design in China; following his chain of thought, however, will present difficulties to those without a working knowledge of Chinese. To assist the dwindling majority of those who don't, the link '下一页' appears to take you to the proceeding page.

223 may have all the warning indicators of a gimmick, but there is substance and sensitivity in his prolific work. As one blogger describes, many of the images prove unforgettable.

also on aS.blogspot

Abbey Drucker

2008-02-15T11:40:00.011Z

Google informs me that photographer Abbey Drucker has an exciting life. If you think anything could possibly aspire to be more exciting than shooting such luminaries as Chingy and Paris Hilton, you might be more envious of her work on the album cover for The National's 'Boxer', her liaison with Interpol's Paul Banks or the bewildering information that at least one sugar-hyped blogger claims that her 'moral barometer' is founded on asking herself the question, 'Would Abbey Drucker Laugh?'.

As a rule, I would guess that the standard answer to that question is an understated 'No...'. Extensive galleries of her work - though not, from a quick browse of her client list, as extensive as you might have expected - on her portfolio website show a very feminine approach to the tapering feline silhouettes of contemporary fashion culture, simultaneously candid and flattering. Tousled hair, smudged eyeliner and various states of undress give a sense of unthreatening voyeurism, cliché but not overdone. Her subjects seem genuinely unaware of her presence in the room; the sexual tension of fashion photography is clearly lacking, for better or worse, and the viewer is a diminuitive contribution to the bustling activity. Only the teenagers she photographs snarl and pout into the frame, radiating unfocussed lust and spiritual angst. Many scenes demonstrate an effective, if sentimental, nostalgia for a 'vintage' era; noir influences and pageant beauty are enhanced with grainy monochrome and light cross-processing. In a sense she captures the real traces in society of the scenes staged by Gregory Crewdson and recreated time and time again - Vanity Fair's Hitchcock spread being the most interesting recent example.

Her two 'personal' galleries, unfortunately, do reveal a certain lack in her sense of humour. She may not be pretentious, driven more by an appreciation of beauty than by the need to 'represent', but there is clearly something a little bland about her ambitions. The images are quietly quirkly, sweetly diminuitive, not in the least controversial. The tired humour of a man with a hot dog suggestively position on a plate in his lap and a row of beach joggers showing off their variously tanned behinds in an unimpressive array of identical thongs is nostalgic in a more tacky, dated sense, refusing to toy with modern themes or standards.

Abbey Drucker is, without a doubt, an asset to the industry and the creator of highly worthy images for the public domain. Sadly, this may say more about the industry than about the creative significance of her work. Essentially, in the 50s or the 80s - where she clearly feels more at home - her portfolio might well have been commonplace.

also on aS.blogspot

The Two Sides of Eolo Perfido

2007-12-27T15:52:00.000Z

At first glance Eolo Perfido is a good example of the contemporary photographer - a little edgy and experimental, with clear influences from current fashion and art cultures, but focussed principally on traditional studio photography of slender ethnic women in slightly bizarre textile creations. His exceptionally charming website takes you through five galleries of very standard, formulaic work - very well executed, to be sure, but subject to the old caveats on the worthiness of fashion photography as an artform. The sixth, without warning, changes setting completely. The last gallery, the largest of all, is a portfolio of photographs of the desert region of Morrocco.

Vibrant with colour and sensitively-handled light, they also represent a feat of photojournalism and the flexibility to adapt to the highly distinct demands of studio and field photography. The Extras section also incorporates a fascinating and equally well-shot selection of behind-the-scenes photographs for several shoots and images of layouts in which has work has been incorporated. This French-born photographer has a lot of warmth, passion, and talent.

A. Murat Eren

2007-12-22T14:50:00.000Z

Hi. I am just another photographer from New Orleans and this is my small photography web site to share some of my works, but not the best ones (kiddin').

A. Murat Eren may not be pushing the hard sell on his images - as he states on his website he is, by profession, an open source software developer, which is a reasonable explanation for the nice light, simple album layout - but with a more selective approach to showcasing his work, he probably could. An engineer's technical curiosity is quite clear in his more misguided experimentation; combining the ridiculous novelty technique of tilt-shift photography - the product of which is a focus distortion which makes the environment appear like a model or toy set - with the agonisingly tired setting of...a cemetery. Perhaps there was potentially some irony in the concept; A. Murat Eren neither recognised nor employed any. The result is a boring mess of blurs.

Tilt-shift photography, it should be noted, really has very limited creative potential. The images are striking, but their novelty - 'that looks like a model of a city....but, no, what is this caption here...oh god, maybe we're all the pawns of some higher race...' - wears off very rapidly, and the technique is now easily and very frequently emulated using Photoshop.

Another failed experiment, producing two vague images, employs pinhole photography. Clearly the restriction of the medium should drive its creative application, but Eren again fails to produce anything but the most frustratingly straightforward compositions.

Still, experimentation is admirable and, of course, the right of the amateur photographer. The quality, warmth and gentle humour of his standard work is beyond reproach, with only the occasional touch of over-sentimentality :

This, for example, is just a well-lit Lolcat template.

His blogs, his personal There is no silver bullet. and his photography blog Meren's Wall, make the prima fascie case for his endearingly askew grammar; since they are both exclusively in Turkish, I'm bound to judge the former from the three Cradle of Filth songs and embarrassingly geeky cartoon tacked to the sidebar, and the latter from the generally high standard of new photographs, with the exception of a few more lolcats :

Overlooking the rather sinister accidental composition, I can't tell you why Eren selects his photographs the way he does. Also, my Turkish is rusty but from the amount of jargon I would guess that he's rather in love with the technical aspects of photography over its aesthetics; but there are a number of outstanding images in his collection.

Also, the man likes cats. That must count for something.

Joe Baran

2007-12-22T11:45:00.000Z

It would be easy, and maybe fair, to assign Baran's work to the Gothic Suburbia category in the Lynch-Crewdson vein of seedy, plastic surrealism. Many of the images resemble nothing so much as a trade-off between Crewdson's subject matter and Jeff Wall's compositional style - empty environments with a charcoal gloss. From this perspective they lack the studio melodrama of Crewdson and the unjudgmental naturalism of Wall and occupy an insignificant niche.

This would be, however, a unreasonably pretentious aproach to a rather glorious collection of cold, beautifully shot images with a sensitive veneer of cross-processing that as a collection compose a quiet, almost dystopian landscape. The light balance has a strange, fractal flatness - reminiscent of Wall's style in the holistic multi-point focus that disorientates by refusing to imply the camera's sense of perspective, creating a perceptual labyrinth of lines - that evokes the ethereal aura of an altogether softer brand of surreal and grittier tone to the environment. His online portfolio includes some more misguided composition work, but as a whole represents a unifying sense of style and purpose. Derivative or sublime, depending on whether his technique is enough to separate him from his more prestigious rivals.

Eugenio Recuenco

2007-11-26T16:32:00.001Z

Recuenco has a very elegant, clean, contemporary style; the models and environments are soft, dark and sumptuous, the early afternoon espresso in the Cafe San Eustachio to the omnipresent profit-driven Starbucks that (for the sake of complicated metaphor) is fashion photography. The portraiture is driven by an easy, casual intimacy with the models, and the composition is very thoughtful if not creative. His work lacks, thankfully, the sharp vinyl superficiality of the industry staples and betrays no misogyny or patronising towards the graceful forms that flow naturally through the abundant shoots available online; just a quiet, studied appreciation of beauty in a range of contexts.

For a well-deserved break from edgy conceptual work, browse any one of the many extensive and tasteful galleries of Recuenco's work at his professional website, Gianfranco Meza & Co representation or Eric Dover Studio. Or go to the Cafe San Eustachio and order an espresso.

There is also a set of photographs taken behind the scenes with Recuenco at a Lavazza shoot on their official website.

The series is definitely a point of interest in itself, although ultimately demands little more than the observation that Recuenco could use a haircut.

also on aS.blogspot :

Book Sculpture by Brian Dettmer

2007-11-20T15:27:00.000Z

Brian Dettmer performs what has been aptly described as 'book autopsies', sectioning and excising old tomes to reveal the illustrations and/or structure of the volume. There is definitely something reminiscent of old anatomical drawings and modern 'cutaway' models in the work; something vaguely obscene and sinister, and yet fascinating. The layers and folds resemble nothing so much as ribs and layers of flesh. From the images available from the many galleries at which Dettmer appears to be represented, you might well conclude that his work is done little justice by photography; the intricate detail demands to be examined and explored, the layers beg to be pried open, as if there were some vital organ at the centre of each book to be exposed. One of the most creative and beautiful examples of derivative art, book sculpture is by no means uncommon in contemporary circles, but Dettmer's work is by far the most compelling and sensitive, if not the most elaborate.

There are examples of his work available at the Aron Packer Gallery website, the Kinz, Tillou + Feigen Gallery and by the far the most vibrant collection at the Haydee Rovirosa, but Dettmer does not yet have his own dedicated portfolio online.

also on aS.blogspot

Andrew Ward

2007-11-19T14:01:00.000Z

Well-composed, full of dusky charcoal shadows and ripe with a dusty, languid nostalgia, there is something deeply appealing and somehow morbid about Andrew Ward's 35mm photography. His background in technical film-making is immediately evident in the images; they could easily be stills from a slow, ambient, pointless short reflecting on life in what the images evoke as the Third World. Some of the photographs reflect a keen eye for opportunities in his environment - a shot of light falling through a café window, etching the letters of the sign onto the wooden table - but as a collection they fall far short of photojournalism. They are too whimsical to be significant and too contextualised to be purely aesthetic photography. They inhabit the marginalised perimeter in the discipline that their subjects occupy in society; an Asphodel Plain of warm, attractive, detailed and ultimately unimportant moments.

Nonetheless, Ward's portfolio is simple, unpretentious, selective and very attractive. Rather than focus on a CV of exhibitions he brings to prominence in his biography the fact that his work graces the private collections of the likes of Wim Wenders, Steven Soderberg, Owen Wilson and Mackenzie Crook. A risky boast for a man who clearly has professional associations with such public figures, and one that says very little about the aesthetic quality of his work since we have minimal information on Owen Wilson's appreciation of composition, but an interesting way to push a reputation which for all intents and purposes appears well-deserved.

also on aS.blogspot

Gilbert Garcin

2007-11-16T11:45:00.000Z

By turns whimsical, mystical, classical, political and profoundly surreal, Marseille-based photographer Gilbert Garcin - approaching the ripe age of 80 - is director, producer and subject in his own epic odyssey into a grainy monochrome dreamscape of stark, inescapable beauty. It is very difficult to accept that his work spans only a very recent period in the history of art - 1993 to present, in fact, culminating in the publications of his complete works in October 2007; there is a definite impression of a dated and yet enduring style, a quality of the timelessness of the 'classic' in the individual sense of the aesthetic. He blends studio sets in both 2-D and 3-D, compositing, perceptual illusions and some techniques which are purely inexplicable. The result is something both endearing and intensely sublime in its equal irreverence to reality and the ultimate inability, or unsuitability, of art to purely express reality.

The man himself is an accomplished actor and comedian, approaching his sets with the deadpan whimsy of the traditional Surrealist; a common theme in his compositions is the resolution of the eternal struggle of figures in Greek mythology, for example. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux, an image of Garcin as Sisyphus with a newly constructed wagon track on which to roll his boulder up the mountains of Tartarus; a later piece, L’atelier de Sisyphe, shows Sisyphus pushing his boulder onto a large see-saw. The kind of soul-destroying labour assigned to the sinners of Graeco-Roman mythology frequently reappears - Tantalus and Atlas are two of the clearer references - and the spirit of this theme is absorbed into some of his more satirical and humorous work.

Le Chien d'Elliott (above), uses the idea of repetitive, pointless motion in a lighter sense; other images are more cutting, and add it to a sense of the monumental weight and ultimate futility of the passing of time in the universe. Yet even the most grave of metaphors in Garcin's collection is beautifully realised; his subjects are lost in disorientating labyrinths of repetitive lines, whorls and shapes but they all, as one image takes as a theme, Faire de Son Mieux (Do One's Best). Life in the dreamscape is ridiculous, timeless, beautiful and ironic.

The vast majority of his works are exceptionally well-presented, although all at the size depicted above, at his website Gilbert-Garcin.com and several others that are not in his collection are at Kunst-Handel. Amazon.fr stocks his photography books, intermittently, including several collaborative efforts.

He is currently exhibiting alongside Peter Cresswell at the Independent Photographers Gallery in East Sussex until 1st December; other exhibitions, past and forthcoming, are listed in French on his blog.

also on aS.blogspot

Yayoi Kusama

Satoshi Saïkusa

2007-11-07T14:07:00.000Z

Satoshi Saïkusa is another renowned fashion photographer - not quite renowned enough for Wikipedia, but his rather irritating fuschia-on-black portfolio comprises copious work for a number of major fashion magazines and portrait photography of Sofia Coppola, Vincent Gallo, Takeshi Kaneshiro and Dave Navarro, amongst others. It's pretty clear why his skills as a portrait photographer are in demand; the images are all at once natural, glossy, active, serene...enough significance to hold interest, and enough gloss to keep everyone looking young, beautiful and fashionably edgy.

As with most fashion photographers, it's difficult to tell whether his portfolio - moderately exciting as it is - is the product of much creative input by way of Saïkusa at all. Nonetheless, there are some interesting images in his rather chaotic website, and as a collection it is a good reference and learning resource for artists and photographers with the conventional focus on young, beautiful, scantily-clad women.

Oswald Yves

2007-11-05T14:27:00.000Z

The most enlightening piece of information that either Oswald Yves' website or the rest of the internet can tell you is that he is, possibly, Canadian. This may or not account in itself for the wide selection of beautifully shot, over-saturated weirdness populating his website. His attempts to demonstrate 'psychosis' see him tormenting a teddy bear, there is an entire section dedicated to silhouetted pictures and he appears to have an inexplicable fondness for wind turbines.

Nonetheless, his palpable 'newness' to photography is exceptionally endearing in light of his technique, which whilst may not be exceptionally innovative but demonstrates a burgeoning talent with a keen eye for composition and good technical skill. The images are striking, and well-presented in his online portfolio - strangely, whilst his subject matter focuses mainly on somewhat pedestrian and unconvincing 'conceptual' art, his nature photography is probably the most hypnotic and each photograph deserves more space and focus than his layout choices suggest.

Definitely one to watch, anyway.

Andrew L. Moore [II : Cuba]

2007-10-31T18:17:00.000Z

also on aS.blogspot

Andrew L. Moore [I : Russia]

Papercut by Peter Callesen

2007-10-30T23:58:00.000Z

Closet Eismeer
Looking Back
Erected Ruin
Peter Callesen, a Danish artist with steady hands and far too much time on them, produces a confusing range of different media. His papercuts, ranging in size from A4 80gsm to the size of a garden shed, are based principally on the theme of paired opposites of significance - cradle to grave, inside to outside - and executed with a deftness that produces the surreal effect of polished, pristine, well-packed snow. Which, incidentally, he also uses a lot of. His website, PeterCallesen.com, exhibits papercuts, installations, performance art and works with ice, snow and water.

The papercuts are, almost without exception, delightfully intricate and witty. His sketches, on the other hand, are rather disturbing - and yet nothing in comparison to his profoundly moronic performance work, which is presented in the form of loosely animated GIFs. 'The Dying Swan is Dying', a title which one vainly hopes was somehow lost in the translation, appears to comprise 25 minutes of Callesen arsing around in a cheap purple knock-off of the Big Bird costume, his own snow-white underwear, purple tights and red Converse All-Stars; he proceeds to draw a poor stick figure on a wall and apply a rusty saw and hammer to various objects occulted by the low image resolution.

Viewer discretion is advised.

also on aS.blogspot

Yayoi Kusama

2007-10-30T20:52:00.000Z

As Wikipedia would put it, 'her work shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop and abstract expressionism, but she describes herself as an 'obsessive artist'... She has long struggled with mental illness'. Another choice narratives describe her as 'aided by a self-ironic narcissism yet devastated by an obsessive sensitivity'; this from an exhibition listing at the Galeria Civica in Modena, where the suspect quality of the English demonstrated by 'ensconced in the artistic ferment of New York, she took an active role in the happenings for peace in Vietnam' is rife but not instantly obvious due to the florid interpretative language.

Kusama herself could be sensitively described as a 'character' - her highly eccentric style of dress, mirroring her art, has transformed her from a kind of Japanese Björk in the 60s to the rather gender-ambiguous clown on the cover of this month's Art Review.

Before

After

The listing from Kunsthaus Zürich, where one of her pieces - The Passing of Winter - was shown as part of the Expanded Eye exhibition, comments on the labyrinthine theme of the work in the exhibition; 'trasformata in un divertente labirinto', as Galeria Civica puts it. This might well be the most credible way of describing the impact of her installation work, with its disorientating, chaotic uniformity; the infinite variety in the size and proportion of the shapes distorts perception, creating a surreal dream-like ambience. Less a House of Leaves than a house of dotty psychedelia, substituting high impact for winding subtlety, but exceptionally memorable nonetheless.

The other credible way, heavily implied by other critics in less basic terminology, is the woman clearly has issues with dots. Lots and lots of dots. She apparently suffers from hallucinations of dots, and thus - rather logically, and yet clearly some reasonable distance from actual logic - covers things with...yes, dots.

But yes, the woman likes dots. See many, many more dots at her official website, YayoiKusama.jp, the Galeria Civica website and the PBase photo gallery of the Dot Obssession exhibit. There is also an impressive and slightly less abrasive (though equally dot-infested) site on the making of a documentary on the artist, Kusama: Princess of Polka Dots. An overenthusiastic Spanish person also keeps a very devoted blog following her work on Blogspot, and Image-Googling Kusama turns up an impressive selection of high-resolution pictures of her works.

Cultureblog: Atlas by Jorge Luis Borges and Maria Kodama

2007-10-30T17:20:00.002Z

The above image from the now out-of-print Atlas, published in 1984 shortly before his death, is the collaborative work of Jorge Luis Borges and his assistant Maria Kodama. Scans of the photographs are, inevitably, rare and of disappointing quality but they demonstrate a poignant sensitivity to the author, now blind from glaucoma. The above image, showing Borges examining the inscription on a Japanese obelisk is courtesy of the Garden of Forking Paths, currently the most comprehensive Borges resource online.

For the interested, the University of Iowa is compiling a very impressive, more academically focussed resource to incorporate scholarly discussion on Borges' work and, in the unforeseeable future, texts of his work at the Borges Center.

Also on aS.blogspot

The Secret Books by Sean Keenan

Fred Eerdekens [II]

2007-10-24T12:02:00.000+01:00

Fred Eerdekens

2007-10-23T22:30:00.000+01:00

Fred Eerdekens installation work is based on the concept of projecting a strong beam of light through structures that appear integrally sound in their own right to cast perfectly formed words in shadow on the opposing wall. In the Photoshop era this kind of work suffers from a strange ambivalence of a diminished initial impact followed by a swiftly flourishing sense of wonder. The real charm of his work is in the innocuous nature of the sculpture pieces, no more abstract than anything else we are encouraged to consider as art; and as far as technique goes, the shadow-writing itself has a surreal sharpness and quality of composition and proportion. It is difficult to accept at first that there is no technical deception involved.

As far as the artist himself goes, Fred Eerdekens has not yet made Wikipedia's eponymous List of Belgians - my knowledge of Belgian culture does not extend to assessing the standards by which the others made it on to the list, although the creator of the list states the following as potentially validating characteristics for entry:

fictional characters who are undisputedly Belgian
important ones whose citizenship is unknown or not Belgian and with Belgian creators.

Whilst his work has been frequently exhibited he does not appear to have much notoriety in his own right. I suspect that this is because his work is more technically and aesthetically interesting than anything else; not to say that it lacks significance, since some of the pieces have a clear message that draws on the idea of a sculpture containing a hidden message which the beam of light reveals.

To see more photographs and angles you can try his website, although as the images in this post may demonstrate the resolution of the photographs is not all it might be.

Andrew L. Moore [I : Russia]

2007-10-22T15:38:00.000+01:00

Andrew L. Moore has, deservedly, the most illustrious CV of any photographer I have ever come across. He has lecturer, published, given interviews and blogged for the better part of a decade, and you will be hard-pressed to find a single mundane or substandard image in his beautifully maintained website galleries. He has published images in regional collections that show a broad, sensitive cultural nuance in each case - the kind of images that make anyone wonder how in hell he found the scenes he photographed, never mind executed each composition with such casual technical finesse. He explains the process of obtaining access to the hidden niches in his interview with Conscientious Blog : Although one method is to work through diplomatic channels to gain entry to controlled places, my approach has always been to fly below the radar, so to speak. The first thing I try to do is find someone who has the contacts, charm, and curiosity necessary to get things done in a bureaucratic maze, as well as someone who understands what kinds of pictures I'm trying to make. Clearly I should stop narrating before you begin to suspect that I've been paid for such an unashamedly positive review of his work, but aside from a certain lack of close work on human subjects, his galleries really want for nothing.

The same cannot perhaps be said of his films, all of which are available to view in sample size on his website, which would appear promising from the quality of his still work. Confusingly they are, in fact, rather amateurish and pedestrian, full of inappropriate cuts and generic music, but perhaps a point of interest to the curious.

Futebol features small South American children kicking an old ball around to sentimental soundbites and hyperactive drums. Vito, unless it's an exercise in irony, is a rather self-indulgent piece of pretentious w*** feautring an artist chain-smoking and discussing his installation work at the English department of a university: 'what we wanted to do was enclose the existent...spheres...into a kind of...field...of spheres...like an invasion of the killer tomatoes'. Swimmer, Slideshow and Gotham are basically just images with tacky, outdate transitions and irritating music. How to Draw a Bunny, a feature-length documentary on artist Ray Johnson, appears to be characterised by the same irritating pretentiousness, mundane 'creative' dialogue, substandard transition editing and inappropriate music; the film apparently picked up the Special Jury Prize at Sundance 2002, however, so perhaps there's some redeeming quality to the full-length version.

His website is at andrewlmoore.com.

Photography by David Shrigley

2007-10-19T03:27:00.000+01:00

On the subject of context-based art (I want to say 'installation', but I refuse to believe that a piece of paper can be 'installed' anywhere...now a framed piece of paper, that's an installation...) David Shrigley may be better known for his original combination of highly incisive wit and a complete and total inability to draw, published as the Book of Shrigley, but he has since broadened his horizons beyond his deformed felt-tip figures. His website is seriously worth a thorough browse; his ideas are insanely clever and beautifully captured.

Tape Sculpture by Mark Jenkins

2007-10-18T13:32:00.000+01:00

Mark Jenkins has a dream, and that dream is to fill public spaces with strategic, humorous, disposable objects and photograph their adoption into local society. Whilst his photography is a little flat and bleak, some of the images are pretty priceless; there's a substantial collection on his website. For anyone interested in making some low-overhead public art themselves Mark also maintains a tutorial website at tapesculpture.org.

Cultureblog: Cantor Dust on the Sierpinski Carpet

2007-10-18T00:14:00.003+01:00

The Sierpinski Carpet is a plane fractal representing the ternary Cantor set extrapolated into 2-dimensions. Besides being a rather attractive rug pattern, like the other 2-D generalisation, Cantor dust, the 3-D extrapolation Menger sponge and the ternary set itself, it has zero measure.

In the Cantor set, starting with a unit length (ie. any length, with one end of the line being point 0 and the other being point 1) you divide the length into three equal segments and remove the middle third, and continue to infinite iterations.

Since the sum of the removed parts tends to infinity the set has zero measure, although clearly some parts of the segments are never removed, so it also contains an infinite number of points.

In the Carpet the central square piece is removed from a square sliced into thirds horizontally and vertically; the area tends to zero and the total perimeter of the holes tend to infinity. For some reason, this is pretty damn awesome.

Guy Bourdin

2007-10-17T19:14:00.001+01:00

Guy Bourdin, one of the 'best known photographers of fashion and advertising of the second half of the 20th century' according to Wikipedia, states his case for fashion photography as art with a plush elephant and a dead hooker. This is a man with unrealised dreams of shooting in a morgue, using cadavers as models; rather an unashamedly telling attitude to the industry. A few of his pieces are available to view at his website, and more here; in case you were wondering, the 'Surprise' section might be appropriately retitled 'unrewarded curiosity'.

Apparently, David Bowie has an opinion. Here it is. For a concise summary, read the italics :

Since the advent of AIDS and the new morality, and, of course his death, his dark sexy fatal style had fallen out of Vogue. An uncompromising photographer, he had found a twisty avenue through desire and death. A white female leg sticking gloomily out of a bath of black liquid enamel. Two glued up babes covered in tiny pearls. The glue prevented their skins from breathing and they pass out. 'Oh it would be beautiful,' he is to have said, 'to photograph them dead in bed.' He was a French Guy. He had known Man Ray. Loved Lewis Carroll. His first gig was doing hats for Vogue. He'd place dead flies or bees on the faces of the models, or, female head wears hat crushed between three skinned calves heads, tongues lolling.
What was this? Fine Arts? The surrealists might even think his work passé. Well, it was the `50s, that's what it was.
The tight-collar `50s seen through unspeakable hostility. He wanted but he couldn't paint. So he threw globs of revengeful hatred at his nubile subjects. He would systematically pull the phone cord out of the wall. He was never to be disturbed. Disturbed. Never. Everything and everyone died around him.

Giovanni Zaccagnini

2007-10-17T14:12:00.000+01:00

Giovanni Zaccagnini, a 30-year-old Italian fashion photographer, immediately raises the question of whether fashion photography can be considered art. Clearly the more widely respected photographers of the genre will be those take the concept into more creative and abstract realms than the GQ formula, but as a rule, how many truly hideous pictures can you take of a beautiful woman wearing very little on a carefully dressed set? And is it even possible to somehow photograph more than that, to capture something significant amongst the shiny ornaments selected and artfully arranged beforehand? Cynically, fashion photography seems to become Art only after the style it captures lapses into the past and becomes a cultural artefact. Still, as I say - half-naked women, well-paid photographers, expensive sets. It's the MSG of photography.

Zaccagnini's website offers a lot of images, but his composition skills seem to falter at the digital level. Most of the images are scans of magazine pages and the layout is pretty basic and uninspired, although it succeeds in functional terms. His brief biography reveals all you might already have guessed from the minimal text content -

After finishing high school I went and leave in NY looking for work, adventure and also to learn english better.

When I came back to Rome after a while, I started working and studing at the same time. After one year I went to Naples to see the exibith of Mario Testino. That's when he asked me to go and work for him in Paris.

I went and after 3 years of assisting, I decided I was ready to go my way.

Joaquín Bérchez

2007-10-15T22:59:00.000+01:00

Joaquín Bérchez, a well-respected Spanish photographer specialising in eye-bleedingly high resolution images of small architectural features with sharp, profound lighting and texture has the rare gift of literally bringing stone to life. However that sounds, it is no sweeping compliment; his eye finds innocuous features in monumental structures and brings them into intense focus, creating a curvaceous maddalena from a twisting pillar and a labyrinth from a geometric wall-etching. A frustratingly limited but extremely well-tended collection of images can be found on the website for the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, from his exhibition Proposiciones Arquitectonicas. Several more are available from his exhibition at the Colegio Mayor Azarbe.

If you plan on using a search engine to search for further images, be aware that his name proliferates in every possible variation on spelling and accent, his works are often inexplicably retitled for the country of exhibition, and the Cisa Palladio exhibition is often listed under the Italian translation of the title, Proposte Architettoniche.

Akif Hakan Celebi [II]

2007-10-15T01:13:00.001+01:00

If you needed any more convincing to go here...

Akif Hakan Celebi

2007-10-14T21:53:00.000+01:00

As a brief visit to Hakan's website will show you, he is a lot more prolific and talented than available image files can demonstrate, if rather single-minded with his subject matter. The images above are taken from the albums Bathroom Rituals and Tranquility and his entry to the International Colour Awards, At Night.

Mario Leko

2007-10-14T21:42:00.000+01:00

More images from Croatian photographer Mario Leko at his fotocommunity gallery and his slightly chaotic and pretentious myspace page.

CultureBlog: ご本尊, 御本尊 (Gohonzon)

2007-10-09T16:48:00.006+01:00

Gohonzon are a type of script mandala (文字漫荼羅, moji mandala) that are
the primary object of veneration in various Nichiren schools of Japanese
Buddhism. In private settings, they are usually housed in a Buddhist altar;
photography and reproduction of the gohonzon is discouraged as the
resultant images are unconsecrated and vulnerable to damage.

More (unconsecrated) examples can be found at the Buddhist Dictionary.

CultureBlog: 'The Secret Books' by Sean Kernan

2007-10-05T12:10:00.001+01:00

Unpublished photographs produced by photographer Sean Kernan
in illustrating The Secret Books, collecting three stories (The Library
of Babel, Borges & I and The Book of Sand) alongside Borges' poetry.

These unused images are displayed at the Garden of Forking Paths'
website. Many of the published images are used in the book's website.

More of Sean Kernan's work is available to view at his studio website.

Lara Jade

2007-08-23T19:28:00.001+01:00

More images at
larajade photography

Cultureblog: Egypt through the Stereoscope

2007-08-23T11:04:00.005+01:00

Stereoscopy records two imperceptibly misaligned images that can be superimposed by a particular viewing technique to create the illusion of 3-D depth. The manual viewing technique, as suggested by Wikipedia, necessitates the position of three brightly-coloured dots on a central horizontal axis between each image:
To view the crossed-eye view shown here, the viewer should move slightly back from his or her normal viewing distance and place his viewpoint on a line perpendicular to the center of the image. A finger should be placed halfway between the eyes and the image, then the finger should be viewed. The three bright spots between the pictures should become four spots, and the two images become three. If the focus of the eyes is now allowed to drift to the surface of the screen without uncrossing the eyes, a three dimensional depth illusion will appear in the central image. The finger may now be removed from the view.

More images and the source text are located at
Egypt through the Stereoscope. (03-01-09: Link Updated)