SubscribeNovember 1st, 2011
just because
taken by peardg
October 4th, 2011
Lynne Cohen, photographer
Clearly a visual savant, I find the work of Lynne Cohen so beautiful that it frightens me.
I’ve been thinking about my fear. It has something to do with her obsession with order and clarity.
It feels violent; deeply inhuman. Even when she uses subjects that come in at me through my personal history, my loves and memories, still there is something so orderly about it that it undermines comfort even while remaining supremely beautiful.
Even colour, while she doesn’t seem to use it that much, takes on an edge. I mean, really, who thinks like this? It amazes me, and makes me wonder what she must be like as a person. Who can make red cold and green lonely?
August 31st, 2011
just because
photograph by Steve Irvine
The caption at National Geographic reads:
July 2011
Canada—Fluttering wings leave lacy trails as moths beat their way to a floodlight on a rural Ontario lawn. The midsummer night’s exposure, held for 20 seconds, captured some of the hundreds of insects engaged in a nocturnal swarm.
Can you imagine! This is what our night skies always look like and we just can’t see it without the aid of technology.
August 17th, 2011
Lee Miller and her work’s guard dogs, seeing sideways through a camera, through presentation
I spent a good part of the day yesterday at the Vancouver Art Gallery’s surrealist exhibition. Much to talk about but here I just want to recount my introduction to Lee Miller.
Doing a little reading about her now. Wowzers! What an amazing person and what timing. For example, on the day Hitler’s death was reported she happened to be living in his private apartments in Munich. She took a photograph of herself taking a bath in his tub.
Looking around I found this site. Iconic Photos is a a site that lives up to its name. It presents and speaks about “famous, infamous and iconic photos”. It’s really rather interesting. But what I want to share here is one of the comments in this particular entry.
Here’s the comment.
I am the rights manager of the Lee Miller Archives. It has been brought to my attention that the image above have been illegally used on your website.
Although we appreciate your enthusiasm and interest in Lee Miller’s work displaying her work with no credit line, at this size and no permission contravenes the copyright law. We require you to remove the image from your website immediately.
You should note you are also forbidden to store these images on an electronic retrieval system, or use them in any way in connection with any other public purpose.
I look forward to receiving your reply by return.
The comment author is listed as Kerry Negahban.
I had intended this post to be about something else, but when I read that, it struck me so forcibly in relation to what Miller’s photo says that the juxtaposition became my own little surrealistic feeling.
So the first question is what does the photo say? The picture received a number of negative comments, and even today, the idea of her pictures as not political still seems to surface. This does not surprise me since the juxtaposition of the personal in the political and of the collective in the individual seems to be missed by much of society.
These photographs were exhibited at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery in Sydney in 1999. Looking at the collection as a whole one is struck by the political forcefulness of the images. In this series Miller contrasts the clean, almost poetic destruction of buildings and monuments with the human corpse’s prolonged and visceral process of decay. Miller seems to dwell on the wounded body of the soldier as a new kind of aesthetic icon, turning from the ruinous and erotic body of Surrealist aesthetics to the fragile masculine body of war. In contrast the photograph of herself in Hitler’s bath creates a more subtle dissonance in relation to the shock effect of much Surrealist photography.
This is a note from Chapter 1 (Introduction: Disturbing Subjects: Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis) in Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis by Natalya Lusty.
So unlike some of the then-current reception of the 1945 photograph, this is not mere sensationalism. It’s more of a feeling of the mundane in the aftermath of the social ecstasy of war. She had, afterall, a surrealist sensibility, and one filtered through the lens of a female ex-Vogue model and photographer, now war correspondent – and after a period as Man Ray’s partner.
At the moment of taking her bath in Hitler’s tub, she’d recently come back from photographing Dachau.
She didn’t get over what she saw and experienced.
That SS guard dead in the water: Hitler’s bathtub.
I’m a little appalled that I hadn’t heard of Lee Miller before yesterday. It seems as if her work isn’t getting the time or exposure it deserves, if we are to gather “deserve” implies “what society can learn”. So Iconic Photos published her picture, as have a few other sites, and so I got to see it, and learn more about Miller and her vision. (And buy a few more books for my collection – yeah!)
What Miller does, like all surrealists, is see sideways. It seems ironic, in a bathing-in-Hitler’s-bathtub-post-Dachau kind of way, that Negahban seems to have learnt nothing from the collection she guard-dogs. It’s almost as if Lee Miller’s collection is being held in such a way as only approved people can enter the kingdom. Maybe not intentionally, but possibly it is so. I wonder what Miller would have written on Iconic’s comments had she lived to see her work hit the web? I expect it would have been very un-Negahban.
August 14th, 2011
image, modernism, knowledge
I found a mention of the modernist photography exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and started tracking images, photographers, other sites, because of this.
In the Daily Beast article that goes with the picture there is the sense that this view of American reality is something topical today as it was during the Great Depression. I agree, but what else to see in such an image? Many things, of course.
The thing about modernism and its reliance on structure to guide content and its resultant meaning, is that like a sonnet, meaning is as much in the rhythms and rhymes of the image layout as it is in the black-white / poor-rich content. If we could, for a moment, ignore what stands for our current “knowledge” of race/class relations in North America, and concentrate on the image itself, what would we come to know?
I searched Bourke-White and saw this.
There is so much we assume about our past. This man, I mean check out that dagger-through-an-Asian head tat on his upper chest. How do we read what it felt like for him to need this picture on his skin? Do we relate it to the hatred sw0llen by the Pearl Harbour act of war? The probable timing of the photograph suggests it. But this is content again. What about the slant of the hammer; the vulnerability of his little finger and that dark polished nail resting near the daisy nipple?
If what we do is what the Daily Beast writer suggests and apply modernist insights to our current world, what would we come to understand?
I went to Imogen Cunningham’s site and saw this.
I wonder what it was that Cunningham understood in those dresses? I love it, and partly I was drawn to it because of a photo taken by a friend who lives in Paris that is deeply reminiscent, although I suspect she hadn’t seen Cunnigham’s work prior to taking her pic.
But what does the long coherent line across the top of the photo “mean” in its contrast to the boxy shapes in the lower left? That’s what I want to know. Not the empty shapes of the dresses meant to evoke the feminine or the dark, but reflective doorway. Not the content. Not yet. The form first.
Frederick Sommer came next.
Like the tattooed man’s knifed-Asian tat, this photo of dead coyotes suggests the human awareness of death. But it’s the form in modernist poetry that says something about the sense and sound of that obsession.
Those tails, the touching cranial vaults: what do they say about how we feel death. There’s a sense of humor there don’t you think, that goes along with the gothic sensibility. Why did the photographer crop the photo in this way? That’s the question to be asked. It’s like a poem. Where do the line endings come?
Anyway, that’s enough. I need more coffee and I think a bowl of green beans and mushrooms for lunch.
August 12th, 2011
Wittgenstein, the photographer
Wittgenstein’s Camera is a “research feature” over at the University of Cambridge’s website.
To mark the 60th anniversary of his death, an exhibition exploring Wittgenstein’s experiments in photography, and how they relate to his philosophy, can be seen at the University’s Photographic and Illustration Services…
Like his cousin Charles Darwin, Galton was fascinated by genetic traits, particularly the commonality of certain physical characteristics which for him represented the potential, higher or lower, of a person’s moral integrity. Galton used the process of composite photography to try and illustrate his argument by overlapping photographs of faces, in the hope of revealing the physical elements that ran through the groups of people he selected.
Wittgenstein had little interest in genetics, but he did have a love of photography, and employed the same technique some 50 years later, with a very different purpose. “Galton was aiming for enhanced sharpness and clarity,” explains Michael Nedo, Keeper of the Wittgenstein Archives. “Something which you could not see in an individual picture, but if you superimposed a number of pictures then it would become clear. Wittgenstein was aiming for different clarity expressed by the photography of fuzziness.”…
The exhibition ‘Wittgenstein and photography’ runs at the Photographic and Illustration Service on the New Museums site until the 15th August.
I cannot tell you how much I wish I could pop over there to see this. Bugger poverty.
July 19th, 2011
just because
You know I’m not sure what it is about this photo that caught me. I had to connect with the photographer and ask her permission to post it, I liked it so much. It feels, somehow, full of hope. No idea why, but still, I suppose I don’t need to know.
taken by Aja Dawn
July 15th, 2011
just because
This is exactly how I feel today. Going for a walk. See you later.
taken by peardg
July 9th, 2011
just because
I was browsing and found (via Lilian – thanks!) Vaido’s photoblog. My goodness there are some wonderful photos over there. Go take a look if you have time. Here’s an example.
Kiired ajad, vaiksed ajad / Fast times, slow times
June 24th, 2011
just because
Pictures courtesy of George.
Thanks George. Feel free to go take more.