Herb Ritts emulation

This is the first half of the shoot :: trying to emulate Herb Ritts

I'm shooting another model tomorrow, so more to come.

Danny Lyon

“I wanted to change history and preserve humanity... But in the process I changed myself and preserved my own.” 

McDonalization of Che

A new book is out by Michael Casey called Che's Afterlife (official site). It explores the ridiculously widespread Alberto Korda photograph seen and known throughout the world. (I read somewhere it is probably the most commonly re-purposed photograph ever shot.)

In really plain, kinda "guerilla" gonzo-esq language, Casey talks about how this one image of Che has been commercialized into an emblem of and for post-modern pop culture -- he says it's been diminished into a profitable "brand" for the "rebellious youth" -- I'm not giving all the details of his argument ... go to the links to read more if you have time/even want to.

I think this book could be really interesting -- or really long. You can read an excerpt here :: Che's Afterlife (part)

Anyway, it's a cool idea -- but a whole book's worth of goods? -- I'm not so sure.

Charting new courses

This is such a great poem -- one of those you want to memorize and keep with you wherever you go.

Some of Rich's work is too heavy on the lesbian/feminist themes for me -- but maybe her commitment to those ideas allows her 

to write such an empowering poem about a speaker whose sexuality is unclear -- it really doesn't make a difference

if the "explorer" is male or female. (("I am she: I am he")) Rich suggests we can share this pursuit together.

Adrienne Rich :: Diving into the Wreck

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

Editorial piece I shot this weekend -- still trying to put it all together -- had some major technical difficulties and lost a lotta files... not very fun losing files :: 

Sarah Moon

:: (full) interview by Ilona Suschitzky ::

(here's the end)

So how does it all begin?

-- It's never the same... of course I have a point of view, I make formal choices, but I prefer to feel my unconscious leading me before my will interferes. I appreciate that photography allows me to be uncertain, and for example, to have no idea why I might ask someone to hold a guinea fowl in their arms and then to scream as well. Maybe what suits me is that in one second I can't affirm anything because the next one can cancel it all. Sometimes I am not even sure of what I have seen. For me it is an enormous advantage to allow myself to be vague and to move by instinct rather than thought. I find it hard to be too precise, too definite... I like to go on searching, maybe it's the quest more than the ending that keeps me going.

Mark Borthwick

I'd never heard of this guy before -- but he is also a musician, cook, filmmaker, and all around pretty interesting person; he has photo gallery-installation-dinner parties at his home for like 100 people. 

I don't know, honestly, how interested I am in his images --  but he makes some really great statements in this interview. I copied and pasted the parts I really like :: (click here for the full link) ... really, though, please, read the whole thing.... it's good.

So you feel like when you are doing photography that you can accomplish all those multidimensional feelings?

MB: It's just attaching yourself to that feeling. For me, it was an enormous awakening to realize that there was a certain period in my life, maybe five years ago, for the ten years prior to that, where I struggled between the idea of Here I am today, I'm writing, the next day I'm drawing, the next day I'm taking pictures, and the next day I'm with the kids. Because there was no time, I never gave myself time to actually edit the pictures, or analyze the pictures, and question what I was doing and I realized that I never wanted to attach myself to that question. That question was never involved in the way that I was working; I was never practicing the idea of trying to understand what I was doing, what I was putting out there. I just wanted to leave it for what it was.


On why he doesn't shoot fashion anymore:

MB: No, no, it's exhausting in the sense that you're continually put into a position of a student. You have these hypocritical fashion editors out there, a few of them that try to attain their rules and put that forth. I don't believe in any of it anymore and fashion itself has become extremely unfashionable in that sense. Especially today, I think it's amazing to hang out on stoops here, where we live and see there's another way. There's always another way. Magazines took such a step backwards over the last twenty years trying to close the door to the other way. And I'm always interested in the other way, and I attach myself to that, whether it's with the clothes, the music, the cooking or just the idea of bringing people together. There's so much joy to be had with the small little events that happen to you daily. Te last couple of days have been magical. I walk out of this place, vibrating at a pace that's just phenomenal. There could be two or three people walking down the street, could be a kid and its mother and they sit down on the floor and... that's very precious. That lasts forever.

Answering what you said before about reaching a larger audience again with this, that's what I'm interested in now. I'm not trying to make it bigger than what it is, but at the same time, I'm interested to see where it can go. I like putting myself in a position where I'm back at the beginning again, and just nurture that. It's so much less about me and so much more about communicating and listening to the audience and people around. Maybe that's what this is about: that I gave myself the opportunity to take a step out and just listen for a while.

We were sharing love for joni mitchell today in one of my classes. It got me listening to her all day.

But I really love this song. I've loved it for a long time --

work in progress

Here's what I have toned and edited so far for a catalogue  I'm working on (collaboratively with another designer in my class) for sumgirls, local boutique -- more images to come. These were shot at green lakes state park in Syracuse last weekend.

so excited

Noor

I really don't consume a lotta photojournalism --- but I think the work on Noor is so incredible. Most of the photographers really play with film/color/and alternative ways of showing

stills and storytelling.

About the site ::

“We don’t apologize for ruining your day and making you think hard about things,” said Noor photographer Samantha Appleton, answering the complaints about the presentation. “Some people probably will have a problem with that, and those are the people we’re trying to reach the most.”

pep bonet

jon lowenstein -- chicago

Faulkner's Nobel Prize Banquet Speech

Preparing my portfolio for review this week, I realized there's still so much to learn and room for me to mature not only as a photographer but also as a citizen of this country and of this world. I noticed that I've veered away from what I used to better understand ... photography is not always about making a "beautiful" picture. It is really about capturing the journey of the photographer or the subject ... the journey of light, the mind, the journey of feeling, the experience of experiencing and understanding -- wisdom. I've gotten caught up in the aesthetics of things and have forgotten the personal, the emotional -- I've lost the drive to capture that "magical image" which holds beauty as well as knowledge, reality, truth, pure feeling.

At the end of class a few days ago, one of my english professors told us to go out and take on the wide wild sea that's before us. I know she wasn't completely serious, but I think, at least at this point in my life, that I often forget to take a good look of what's really in front of me. The world is warm, cold, funny, serious, sparkling, dull, banal, complex, confusing, clear  ___ insert your own adjective, etc. etc. etc. And if photography or art can help us to internalize these layer of meaning scatter throughout the world, why should we not use it as a medium of exploration? This is getting really existential, but I've realize that I need to use the camera to explore these realities and complexities. I want to say more than "this is a really pretty picture." It can be pretty, but why is it pretty, what does it capture that makes it beautiful or smart or real or unclear. 

I'll end with a piece from Faulkner's Nobel prize acceptance speech... (Written about the horrific aftermaths of war... but I think we can still apply this same spirit and wisdom to our own creative pursuits.)

"I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."

my guilty pleasure

surprisingly good advice from mickey rourke

Also, nice choice of location

Richard Burbridge :: more of his portfolio on Art + Commerce

Here's a Q&A with him that's pretty good :: from hint mag

Imogen Cunningham :: on the photographer

"One must be able to gain an understanding at short notice and close range of the beauties of character, intellect, and spirit so as to be able to draw out the best qualities and make them show in the outer aspect of the sitter. To do this one must not have a too pronounced notion of what constitutes beauty in the external and, above all, must not worship it. To worship beauty for its own sake is narrow, and one surely cannot derive from it that esthetic pleasure which comes from finding beauty in the commonest things." 

R3 Project

A group of people living together in Barcelona created a blog about urban eco-friendly living :: R3 Projects. They renovated an old flat and publish their progress on the site. What's cool is that the blog has turned into more of a collection of artistic projects than just an explanation of what they're doing. Creatively and environmentally inspiring... video tour of the flat

Shepard Fairey

Awesome exhibit of work from poster designer/propagandist Shepard Fairey going on right now at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art. Even if you're not familiar with his overall body of work, I'm sure you've seen his Obama campaign poster. Here's the NYtimes article. Check out his website: obeygiant.com.

Disclaimer: these images don't even give you a moderately complete overview of all that he's done creatively over the past decade. Definitely check him out.

  

San Antonio

A few images from spring break, San Antonio

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." Dr. Howard Thurman

stevens and the imagination

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

Wallace Stevens

Light the first light of evening, as in a room

In which we rest and, for small reason, think

The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.

It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,

Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl

Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,

A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.

We feel the obscurity of order, a whole,

A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.

We say God and the imagination are one...

How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,

We make a dwelling in the evening air,

In which being there together is enough.

Indexhibit

Stumbled upon Indexhibit, an application/template for designers' portfolios. A lot of the user sites look elegant, beautiful, and clean. gorgeous stuff

Dulce Pinzon

Saw an incredible exhibit, "Caras Vemos, Corazones no Sabemos (faces we see, hearts we don't know): The Human Landscape of Mexican Immigration" at The Museo Alameda  in San Antonio. Featured work from photographer Dulce Pinzon. Pinzon asks us to rethink our cultural obsession with the mythical superhero and acknowledge the real, often quite, heroes of our everyday.

Insensate

I'm still trying to decide how I feel about one of the pieces Nick Knight posted on SHOWstudio

To get the full effect of the project, you have to go to the site and watch his four minute fashiony/surrealist kind of kaleidoscope of light, image, and sexuality. I still don't know if it's beautiful or just weird and falsely pretentious. I guess what annoys me more than anything is the title -- I looked it up, and insensate means void of senses, without feeling, cold, foolish...etc. -- blah, wow, ok ... I mean, fashion is all about extravagance, but is Knight really just balling up all of the overused/over-sexualized conventions we see in a lot of fashion pictures and presenting them in a cool little pdf package you can print off and stick on your bedroom wall (he mentions each "print" is number, what?)) ... On a more positive note, the video, no doubt, draws you in. The movement is beautiful, it's trippy in a positive way, and overall visually stunning. I guess what it's lacking, for me, is the ability to become something smarter than what we always see. I realize I'm not the one to talk, but it'd be cool to see someone with so much power and influence give us something new to think about. 

the joys of the canadian tuxedo

I'm in Texas where head-to-toe denim is endemic.

pros: lottsa cotton, lottsa pockets

styles that stick

more pictures to come...

heart breakers

(skip to bottom to see poem)

I realized I haven't posted for a while, but now I'm on my break in San Antonio with some down time.

Last week, my poetry professor showed this image of Elizabeth Bishop and her fellow poet/lover Robert Lowell at the beach. I am definitely charmed by this relationship that lasted on and off for such a large part of their lives. One of my friends was telling me about Words in Air, which is a collection of their writings (over 1,000 pgs of letters). The NYorker published a great article a couple months ago about them and the book. I haven't read much of Lowell's work, but whenever I re-encounter Bishop, I'm always thrown off for a couple days. She just seems to say so much I wish I could but don't know how. 

Bishop's poem, "Man-Moth" (inspired by newspaper's misspelling of "mammoth") is about the creative process. It questions if individual artistic pursuits (or the imagination) can honestly survive within a common reality we share. Bishop quietly celebrates the artist's natural difference and his ability to be unlike other men. I love how the artists rides backwards on the train and searches the limits of the world unlike everyone else... he squeezes through the cracks... even though he's never successful. In weird ways, I think both Lowell and Bishop, and many other people who love to create, find common ground in the subject's pursuits. I hope you like it as much as I do.

The Man-Moth

Here, above,

cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight.

The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.

It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,

and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.

He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,

feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,

of a temperature impossible to records in thermometers.

But when the Man-Moth

pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,

the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges

from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks

and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.

He think thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,

proving the sky quite useless for protection.

He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.

Up the facades,

his shadow dragging like a photographer's cloth behind him

he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage 

to push his small head through that round clean opening

and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.

(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.) 

But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although

he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.

Then he returns

to the pale subway so cement he calls his home. He flits,

he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains

fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.

The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way

and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed,

without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.

He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.

Each night he must

be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams.

Just as the tier recur beneath his train, these underlie

his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window,

for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison,

runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease

he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep

his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.

If you catch him,

hold up a flashlight to his eye. It's all dark pupil,

an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens

as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids

one tear, his only possession, like the bee's sting, slips.

Slyly he palms it, an if you're no paying attention

he'll swallow it. However, if you watch, he'll hand it over,

cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink

An hour w/ Avedon

This is a valuable interview of the late-great photog Richard Avedon. It's sad that Charlie Rose seems disinterested/annoyed/sleepy throughout, but by the end you'll have a more real understanding of how Avedon made sense of the world. Plus, it's an hour long talk, which is pretty rare.

I've seen this a couple times, and it's always encouraging to me when you watch someone so ridiculously creative and talented seem so kind and unaware of fame. It's ironic that he worked in fashion for so long, because he just seems unmarred by the falsities of material culture. Also seems like he'd be a really thoughtful friend and someone you'd want to chat with for hours.

Rose has another long interview with Annie Leibovitz -- which is not as good, mainly because I think she's blah to watch  -- but you should check that out too.

thierrylegoues

I obsessed with these -- Thierry Le Goués You should also check out the rest of his stuff. 

SF|MOMA

Man Ray Space Writing 1937

SFMOMA has great web designers. Their online multimedia exhibition of their collection is so elaborate, so you have to check it out :: Artscope . You can see the museum's entire collection in one window and scroll through it with a magnifying glass. It really shows the scope of what they have to offer... really cool pieces of Surrealism and just great photography.