08-Jul-11
A NEW AMERICAN PICTURE by Doug Rickard
A NEW AMERICAN PICTURE by Doug Rickard
The older notions of photographers physically exploring their world may have in some ways come to pass. The Egglestons, Shores, Levitts, Winogrands ventured out with perhaps only the loosest intentions or framework of a “project” and allowed the world to provide. It is common now for artists to conceive of a project first and then impose that view almost filter-like upon what they are looking at. I would never argue that one approach is better than the other as long as – in the case of the latter – the work doesn’t become a mere illustration of an idea. For me, I learned photography through an ability to trust in the world and a rather strong distrust of “ideas,” so clever frameworks rarely excite unless the work from image to image surprises and transcends. Doug Rickard’s work in his book A New American Picture has me excited, perhaps a bit disturbed, and completely captivated.
Rickard’s work on this project has a clever framework. He has been exploring the world through Google street views. Google has been mapping the world from the vantage point of the center of its streets. The camera, tethered to a GPS system, is mounted on a car and takes wide angle images every twenty feet or so from a fixed height of about 7 feet. The user of Google’s street views can not only pan 360 degrees but pan up and down and zoom in on a part of the image. The final images are run through facial recognition software which attempts to blur the faces of people unintentionally recorded when the camera car passed by…” – Jeff Ladd
via Conscientious.
22-Jun-11
Pierre Le Hors ’s fireworks studies
Pierre Le Hors ’s fireworks studies
firework studies is a book compiling photographs of fireworks in the night sky. by constraining nearly all tonal values to stark blacks and pure whites, the trails, explosions and clouds of debris are reduced to a series of simple repeated formal elements: arced lines, spherical bursts, and randomly dispersed particles. i made no effort to limit digital artifacts resulting from pushing the image files past their conventional range; the resulting noise becomes hard to distinguish from the texture of the fireworks themselves.
Published by Hassla Books
21-Jun-11
Le Soleil moribond
“Le Soleil moribond s’endormir sous une arche,
Le Soleil moribond
“Le Soleil moribond s’endormir sous une arche,
Et, comme un long linceul trainant à l’Orient,
Entends, ma chère, entends la douce Nuit qui marche.”
20-Jun-11
Alec Soth’s “Broken Manual”
Alec Soth’s “Broken Manual”
“I went around the country photographing different people that have attempted to escape, either by being monks, or survivalists, or just generally hermits,” he says. “But it’s not a documentary of these people, it’s evoking the spirit of escape.”
The project came out with Somewhere to Disappear, a film by Laure Flammarion and Arnaud Uyttenhove about the making of Broken Manual
