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Diane Arbus’ archives were recently gifted to the Met in NYC.
Unlike the belongings of artists who fade gradually from view, which are sometimes scattered, pilfered or lost, Arbus’s effects were in some ways frozen in time when she committed suicide at 48. Quickly her life began to acquire a cult status paralleling that of her photography.
(via sippey)
Wow, The Simpsons did a parody of Noah Kalina’s Everyday video. Noah, you just graduated summa cum laude from Pop Culture University.
Update: But apparently the background music was used without permission.
A few months back a producer from the Simpsons contacted Carly about using her song ‘everyday’ for an upcoming episode in which they were going to parody my video. She was negotiating a rate for the song, until they never got back to her. No fee was agreed on, no contracts signed.
Maybe they decided since it was parody they didn’t need permission? I don’t find that likely since what little I know about Hollywood/TV is that they’re really concerned about clearing rights. (thx, slava)
Update: The song rights mixup was an accidental oversight and is currently being corrected.
This photo of lower Manhattan taken from the Statue of Liberty in 1901 is plenty interesting, especially what I believe is the beginnings of the Manhattan Bridge under construction behind the Brooklyn Bridge.
Update: The bridge under construction is most likely the Williamsburg Bridge, not the Manhattan Bridge. (thx, jake)
Photo of Steve Jobs at his home in 1982.
This was a very typical time. I was single. All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo, you know, and that’s what I had.
This was right in the thick of Lisa/Macintosh development; I bet Jobs didn’t spend a whole lot of time at home. Note: there’s some bad Exif data that prevents the display of this photo in Safari (ironic, eh?)…try Firefox instead. (thx, mark)
Update: Exif data fixed, Safari away.
Jessica Dimmock’s The Ninth Floor is a series of photos taken of heroin addicts living in a ninth floor Manhattan apartment. The NY Times and New York magazine have slideshows with a little more context. Also available in book form. NSFW. (via clusterflock)
Yasumasa Morimura takes photos of himself recreating iconic photos like Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder and Che Guevara. A bit of Cindy Sherman + these photos + maybe even a little Be Kind Rewind. At Luhring Augustine in NYC until Dec 22. (thx, tony)
For example, those participants shown the doctored photograph of the protest in Rome (top right), in which figures placed in the foreground give the impression of violence, rated the event as being significantly more violent and negative than it actually was. In their comments, they also provided false details, such as conflicts, damages, injuries and casualties that did not appear in the photos and were not documented at the event.
(via conscientious)
Top 50 photo series from the 2006 Critical Mass competition. Some good stuff in there if you poke around a bit…2005 and 2004 too. (via ffffound!)
A terrific post recapping the early years of photography. The oldest known color photograph was taken in 1872.
Update: Or was it? James Clerk Maxwell took this color photo of a purty ribbon in 1861. Maxwell also, and so but by the way, linked electromagnetism and light in a seminal paper from that same year, work that Albert Einstein called “the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton”. (thx, chris)
With the blessing of the main abbot, Shi Yong Xin, Guariglia has earned the full collaboration of the monks to create an astonishing, empathic record of the Shaolin art forms and the individuals who consider themselves the keepers of these traditions. It is the first time the monks have allowed such extensive documentation of these masters and their centuries-old art forms-from Buddhist mudras to classical kung fu-in their original setting, a 1,500-year-old Buddhist temple.
Photos and video here. Watching the videos, especially the one featuring Tong Jian Quan, I was reminded of hip hop dancing (Michael Jackson in particular) in a way that watching kung-fu and other martial arts in Hollywood movies does not.
Also, Shaolin monk Hai Deng was famous for performing a one-finger handstand. The video seems a little suspect but this performance brings the single finger handstand into the realm of possibility.
Scene: Two women on a smoke break outside in the rain, a white woman dressed all in black and a black woman dressed in all white. The woman in all black holds a giant golf umbrella with alternating black and white panels.
Excuse for missing it: Three stories up and babysitting.
See also: Unphotographable, a text account of pictures missed.
Eye-Fi is a wireless memory card for digital cameras. Once you get it set up, you take a photo with your camera and it’s automatically uploaded to your computer and to Flickr (or another photo sharing site of your choosing). The first thing you notice about the Eye-Fi is that it looks just like an ordinary 2-gig SD card…so tiny that when you use it for the first time, you almost can’t help but examine your camera from all angles to make certain that there are no wires involved. It’s magic.
But can an enchanted memory card make you a better photographer? That is, does it make you want to use your camera more and take better pictures? I’ve been testing an Eye-Fi for the past week, courtesy of my friends at Photojojo (where every order comes with a Blow Pop!). The setup and usage were pretty easy. Not having to fuss with an uploading cord was nice. I didn’t like the requirement of setting up each wireless connection you want the card to use; it should find open wireless access points when it can. But after a week of using the card, I finally figured out the optimal way to use the Eye-Fi:
1. Get a Flickr account.
2. Set the Eye-Fi to upload automatically to your Flickr account with the privacy set so that only you can see it.
3. Use Flickr’s online organization tools to publish, group, tag, or order prints of the keepers and discard/ignore the rest.
Instant online-only workflow…no intermediate “download then find the best ones then upload” steps required, everything happens right in Flickr. The lack of editing tools (brightness, levels, etc.) on Flickr might be a deal breaker for some, but for the rest, it certainly makes it easier to take a lot of photographs and get them up where family and friends can see them.
Advice for young photographers, including:
In college, take a year off and drive across the country, and camp along the way. Do it with good friends that are smart; not dumbasses that just want to get high. Bring some books. Bring some audio books if you can’t read.
Photograph of a human Statue of Liberty taken circa-WWI in Des Moines, Iowa.
Silhouettes of patrons at the American Museum of Natural History by NYC photographer Joe Holmes. Joe also has a nice photo of the Manhattan Bridge up today on his photoblog.
Has Abe Lincoln been discovered in the background of a pair of photographs taken right before the Gettysburg Address?
The new photos are enlarged details from much wider crowd shots; they were discovered by a Civil War hobbyist earlier this year in the vast trove of Library of Congress photographs digitized since 2000, and provided to USA Today. They show a figure believed to be Lincoln, white-gloved and in his trademark stovepipe hat, in a military procession.
The funny thing is, if you look at a similar photograph of Lincoln taken shortly after his speech, there are at least three men seated around him who are wearing stovepipe hats. The photographic evidence alone is not compelling. “Paging Errol Morris. Would Errol Morris please come to the information desk. Thank you.”
Jason Salavon’s Field Guide to Style & Color, a reproduction of the 2007 Ikea catalog with everything but the structure and color excluded. You may remember Mr. Salavon from his composite photographs and videos of blowjobs, late night talk show hosts, and Playboy centerfolds.
Examples of photographic tampering from the 1860s to the present. This would be more instructive with the unaltered originals displayed in situ.
Limit-telephotography involves photographing landscapes that cannot be seen with the unaided eye. The technique employs high powered telescopes whose focal lengths range between 1300mm and 7000mm. At this level of magnification, hidden aspects of the landscape become apparent.
Trevor Paglen uses this technique to take photographs of military bases surrounded by miles of restricted land. (via 3quarksdaily)
This is the 2 billionth photo uploaded to Flickr. 2,000,000,000!
A collection of group photos taken by Annie Leibovitz for the cover of Vanity Fair. That’s an unfortunate getup on Sarah Jessica Parker.
How are Don DeLillo, Flickr, and The Most Photographed Barn in America related? Read on, my friends.
These have been passed around the web extensively in the past week or so, but if you haven’t seen these photos of a 1968 French nuclear test, now’s the time. Best viewed as large as you can zoom them.
Joel pointed to these iconic photographs of the 20th century duplicated with the elderly as the subjects last week. See also: iconic photographs recreated with Legos. I remember another set of photo recreations that I can’t seem to find…famous historical events as if they happened in a video game. Anyone recall seeing something like that?
Update: Screenshots is what I was looking for. (thx, rumsey)
Over at Slate, Jim Lewis assesses Errol Morris’s posts on Roger Fenton’s photographs in his Zoom blog for The New York Times:
He seems to have struck a nerve, or perhaps forensics is a more popular pastime than I would have guessed. The whole affair snowballed to browser-crashing size: If you add the readers’ comments to Morris’ own writing, you get a word count of about 223,000, which—just to put it in perspective—is slightly longer than Moby-Dick.
Euro art collective Henry VIII’s Wives recreate iconic 20th century photographs using Glaswegian pensioners as models, all posed outside their housing complex in Glasgow. A real glaswegian kiss to the complacent gaze with which the original photos are too-easily met.
(thx, joseph)
Alexander Bohn wrote a glowing review of FFFFOUND! at Speak Up the other day. My FFFFOUND! fandom is documented elsewhere, so I’ll comment instead on an observation Bohn made in his initial paragraph:
Graphic design might not work in the white cube, but it flourishes on a white background. A new mutated strain of design blog has evolved: The Randomly Curated Other People’s Images White Background Site, or RCOPIWS. Sites like Manystuff, Monoscope, Your Daily Awesome, and VVORK (among countless others) offer designers and design aficionados a constant flood of typographic morsels, interesting photos, arresting new art, and the like. One such site sets itself apart, notably, from the other RCOPIWSes: the collaborative image-bookmarking site ffffound.com — allegedly, but unconfirmed, initiated by online fiend Yugo Nakamura.
Among the many things that the internet has democratized is curating, a task once more or less exclusive to editors (magazine, book, and newspaper), art gallery owners, media executives (music, TV, and film), and museum curators. They choose the art you see on a museum’s wall, the shows you see on TV, the movies that get made, and the stories you read in the newspaper. The ease and low cost of publishing on the web coupled with the abundance of sample-ready media has made the curating process available to many more people. Smashing Telly is David Galbraith’s rolling film festival (or TV channel). By simply listening to the music that you like, Last.fm allows anyone to put together their own radio station to share with others. kottke.org is essentially a table of contents for a magazine I wish existed. Shorpy has freed old photography from the nearly impenetrable Library of Congress web site and presented it in a compelling blog-like fashion.
In the case of FFFFOUND! and other RCOPIWSs, I would argue that these sites showcase a new form of art curating. The pace is faster, you don’t need a physical gallery or museum, and you don’t need to worry about crossing arbitrary boundaries of style or media. Nor do you need to concern yourself with questions like “is this person an artist or an outsider artist?” If a particular piece is good or compelling or noteworthy, in it goes. The last week’s output at Monoscope would make a pretty good show in a Chelsea art gallery, no? It’ll be interesting to see how this grassroots art curating will affect the art/design/photography world at large. Jen Bekman, who has roots in the internet industry, is already exploring this new frontier with her nimble gallery and the Hey, Hot Shot! competition. Others are sure to follow.
Ursine is a new series of photos by Jill Greenberg, who previously did monkey portraiture and crying children, the latter of which provoked some controversy in the blogosphere.
I was going to shoot grizzly bears because they’re safer than bloggers.
A complete series of photos are available on Greenberg’s web site, sadly buried in an inscrutable Flash interface.
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