"The Future is Analogue" -Lomographers
Lomography is the name of this lo-fi/hi-fi, analogue technique that was instigated by two Viennese students touring Prague. The fairly recent activities responsible behind “a magazine, a shop, and a community,” as the website spouts. The history is seemingly more interesting than the fashionable home page leads one to believe. The word “Lomography” stems from the LOMO LC-A camera, which was a soviet modified Cosina CX-1. The Lomo was put into production in 1982, and features a sharp glass lens and a very high light sensitivity. The camera was found in a hole in the wall camera shop in Prague by visiting art students in 1991, and it has been their project to br...Read more
Derek Johnston Presents us our Disconnection with Nature
I have read of the photographer Derek Johnston for his series of work, Landscape Specimens. One print is part of the Contemporary Photography Museum of Chicago permanent collection, among others of his work. Initially I was drawn to the series because I was interested in the way in which he displayed them, inside glass bottles filled with water. The effect is novel, for lack of a better word. Like looking through a magnifying glass to uncover a mystery. But of course, that was the intent, to present a nature landscape through a lens of unfamiliarity. Here Johnston makes a comment on our disconnection with nature, where once we were able to connect with it on personal level, now pristine en...Read more
Fink is my Friday Favorite
Larry Fink is the American born photographer most well known for his hand held flash, which captures the candid moments of celebrities and common-folk alike. From the age of 13 on, Fink found that social participation was less stressful behind his lens. Indeed, Fink’s images do not portray an outsider looking in, but instead, an active player in the moment he captures. His work is very well known, and is housed in such prestigious institutions as MOMA, site of his first one-man show in 1979, as well as the Whitney and the Guggenheim. But these anecdotes, impressive as they may be, don’t amount to the reason behind his greatness. In my opinion his greatness as a photo...Read more
Outta Flux, Lux
Fluxus was a movement originating from “chance operations.” In no way is the photography of Loretta Lux by chance, but Lux rhymes with flux, and it’s kind of a catchy title, don’t you think? Loretta Lux is a German artist who converges painting, photography and digital media into her tightly woven compositions of children. Recently, I was interested in incorporating children in my photographs as a way to induce a feeling of creepy weirdness, and Lux makes it look all too appealing. Lux’s photographs are made from images taken in a studio, and digitally retouches them on a computer. She has said that retouching a photograph can take up to 6 mon...Read more
Alternative Polaroid Workshop Weekend
Polacolor and Polacolor Manipulation and Transfers, Bi-otch! Although the Polaroid process is nearly obsolete, Polaroid’s have moved further and further into a popular artistic form of contemporary photography. Polaroid patented SX-70 film that develops automatically, back in the ‘70’s, and it became a kind of pre-digital era tool that many artists used to record those “not so significant” images that wouldn’t be photographed. It is possible to do many alternative processes with Polaroid film that offers even more artistic license in it’s creation and development! Polacolor film is made with several coated layers of dried chemicals that ...Read more
shhhhh Yurie Nagashima
Please excuse my Japanese… Going along a parallel with Nobuyoshi Araki, the blog today is concerned with the photographs of the subtler, diary-like artist Yurie Nagashima. Nagashima won the Urbanart Award in Tokyo in 1993 when she was only 22, for her series Kazoku. The work won her much esteem and fame among Tokyo as well. Kazoku, like Araki’s work, challenges the traditional culture of Japan with nudity, but with Nagashima’s work, the nudes are of herself and her family. These images (apart from the nudity) read as average family portraits, I find it a courageous statement that combines a shock value with family-values. Since then, her work remains to be centered a...Read more
Araki the Enigmatic and Prolific!
Japan’s most notorious photographer Nobuyoshi Araki was born of sandal making parents in 1940. Since then he has become a firmly established photographic legend, most notably (and most regrettably) for his “pornographic” nudes. He has said of himself “If I didn’t have photography, I’d have absolutely nothing.” What I find most appealing about his work, is that he has no filter. He has a diary like style, that records everything from Tokyo streets, flowers, meals, sadomasochisms, and his wife’s bones after cremation. He has published over 300 books of photographs. His Ethos of photography is that the camera is an extension...Read more
Photography, Art, Science, and Gary Schneider
Today, I’ve been struck by a series of work made back in ’97, by photographer Gary Schneider. In the series Genetic Self-Portrait, Schneider uses photograms of his own hands, feet and ears accompanied with images of chromosome sequences. The prints are grainy, subdued shapes and values. They appear almost alien, they are hypnotic and poetic in a gentle gregarious frozen action. The images are held in platinum prints. Platinum prints were used by Naturalistic photographer Peter Henry Emerson, who argued that photography as an artform was, or should be treated as a perfect imitation of a subject in light on the eye; he believed that individual emotional expression used...Read more
filed under: photography
tags: Art Science Gary Schneider Peter Henry Emerson Pictorialist
Ant's Eye View and Jaques-Henri Lartigue
One of the most inspiring master’s of photography began his career at six years of age. The French boy Jaques-Henri Lartigue shot in stereo, on glass plates, and also was responsible for making some of the first autochromed prints towards the end of the 19th century. The subject of his photography was his immediate surroundings and the day-to-day life of a French bourgeois adolescence: sporting events, automobile races, friends, play and fun. Lartigue presents us with a complete autobiography of his life at the turn of the century. I find that his use of the media to document his early years, unprecedented. Not because he was a bright boy who made impressive photographs,...Read more
Melanie Pullen's Fashion Statemtent
In her series High Fashion Crime Scenes, LA based photographer Melanie Pullen stages a morbidly humorous perspective on haute couture. Using forensic photos from the LA police files of actual crimes as reference, Pullen’s objective is to comment on the public’s fascination with brutal tragedy at a safe distance, as well as celebrities. Pullen begs the question, "does Hollywood steal the spotlight from important cultural events that aren’t always so fun to read about?" High Fashion Crimes Scenes blurs the line “between reality and the fake spectacle in contemporary culture and the general disassociation that humans feel in regards to issues of...Read more