Archive for April, 2009
Thursday, April 16th, 2009
A friend of mine, Negar Mottahedeh, is a professor at Duke University, where she teaches Introduction to Film Studies (as well as being a writer and thinker on film, culture, the arts and innovation, among other things). As a semester-end group project, she cooked up the idea of a Twitter film festival. What exactly does that mean, you ask? It involved setting up a blog featuring YouTube clips from various films that were screened at different hours, as well as setting up a shared Twitter account (twitfilm) and then tweeting about them as a form of class discussion. Oh, I wish I could have taken that class (or at least known about it ahead of time)!
The Chronicle of Higher Education ran this piece about the film festival on the 15th of April, and the unique in-class assignment is sure to get broader attention in the education and film community at large.
Listen to Negar talk about the festival (courtesy D21-Projektblog).
[Now.... how can I apply this to my own classes?? hmmm...]
Tags: Chronicle of Higher Education, Duke University, Negar Mottahedeh, Twitfilm
Posted in Art + Film + Design + Architecture, Photography | No Comments »
Sunday, April 12th, 2009
There are David Sedaris “lovers” and “haters”. I’m an admirer, and when it comes to this particular story, I inevitably find myself nearly on the floor laughing, tears in my eyes. I remember the first time I came across this story. I could NOT stop laughing. Reading this out loud to my mother, Fay Himes, a former minister with an over-charged sense of humor, is one of my fondest memories. Listening to my mother as she enters into one of her laughing fits is like witnessing a force of Nature. It is awe-some, frightening, and mesmerizing all at once. It’s also impossible not to laugh with her. Mid-way through my reading of this story to her, she was on one knee, leaning out of her chair, her whole face red, tears streaming down her cheeks, laugh-screams coming out of her so loudly that they pierced through your whole body. Like I said, it’s one of my fondest memories. That, and listening to her sing and play “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” off the Life of Brian soundtrack on our family, upright piano.
If you haven’t read or heard this, I hope you enjoy. [Be warned, this approaches blasphemy for some. And remember, God loves laughter.]
Jesus Shaves, by David Sedaris
“What is an Easter?”
“It is,” said one, “a party for the little boy of God who call his-self Jesus, and, you know… like that.” “He call his-self Jesus and then he die one day on two morsels of lumber.” The rest of the class, jumps in offering bits of information that would have given the Pope an aneurysm. “He die one day and then he go above of my head to live with your Father.” “He make the good thing and on the Easter we be sad because someone make Him dead today.”
Tags: David Sedaris, Easter
Posted in My Life | No Comments »
Sunday, April 12th, 2009
This last week, a painter of whom I had never heard was brought up in an indirect conversation (by Ed Ruscha, of all people). Augustus Vincent Tack was born in Pittsburgh, spent a large part of his life in New York City, but maintained a portrait studio in Washington, DC, painting the likenesses of political and military figures from the first half of the 20th century. (Self-portrait below)
What he is less known for are his abstract works that loosely reference the landscape—Nature, as a leaping off point—and aspire to spiritual, mystic themes. His abstract works, who some mention as very early examples of Abstract Expressionism, were created almost exclusively for Duncan Phillips, the wealthy steel baron who left The Phillips Collection to posterity (and our benefit). This collection, situated in DC, houses works by other painters and abstractionists including Paul Klee, Georges Bracque, Mark Rothko and James McNeil Whistler.
According to history, Tack’s abstractions were commercially unsuccessful (imagine that!), but he continued to pursue them independent from his commissioned portraits and landscapes which he made in the style of the day. That aspect to the story sounds, in itself, timeless. What paying patrons want to see is rarely what the artist him/herself would like to produce, but the economic realities of life bear down upon us all, regardless of what century we’re talking about. Thankfully, Tack kept exploring his personal work, and thankfully there was one patron for whom the abstractions were powerful, moving, and worthy of collecting.
Tack’s work is mentioned briefly in a chapter titled Nature Symbolized: Painting from Ryder to Hartley, in the book The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890-1985, published by Abbeville for a massive, sweeping exhibition at LACMA in 1986.
And a gorgeous little descriptive landscape….
Tags: Augustus Vincent Tack, Ed Ruscha, The Phillips Collection
Posted in Art + Film + Design + Architecture | 1 Comment »
Saturday, April 11th, 2009
Two weeks ago was the Palm Springs Photo Festival. I loved it. I was a panelist (hosted by Michelle Dunn-Marsh of Chronicle Books and formerly of Aperture), a portfolio reviewer, and a happy camper. The reason for my happiness? Rocks and scrubby bushes, 70+ temperatures, straight-up searing desert sun warming my lizard heart/brain, mid-century modern hotels w/ pools, and some damn fine photography.
Debbie Fleming Caffery gave an evening talk at the Annenberg Theater of the Palm Springs Art Museum. Copies of her new Radius Books title—The Spirit & The Flesh—were on hand and all copies sold out in 15 minutes! Good job, Debbie.
My favorite portfolio was by Verner Soler, a Swiss-born, Los Angeles-based photographer who has been working on an extended project that circles elegantly around themes of mortality, aging, and being far-removed from one’s extended family.
Tags: Debbie Fleming Caffery, Palm Springs Photo Festival, Verner Soler
Posted in Events & News, Photography, Radius Books | No Comments »
Saturday, April 11th, 2009
Based in Santa Fe, CENTER is a non-profit photography organization that, for years now, has worked really hard at promoting great work and creating community. Review Santa Fe—the flagship program of CENTER—has been the model for so many of the photography portfolio review events happening around the country (and the world).
Offering prizes for whole bodies of work as well as single images is the second half of CENTER’s programming. They have just announced the winners of the 2009 competitions, which you can view here. The Project Competition and the Santa Fe Prize are the two prizes awarded for whole bodies of work and have been running annually since 2003 and past winners include the likes of Alec Soth, Dave Anderson, Julie Blackmon, Byron Wolfe, Eirik Johnson, and Hiroshi Watanabe.
This year, the winner of the Santa Fe Prize is Hiroyo Kaneko, chosen by the sole juror, Charlotte Cotton. And the winner of the Project Competition, chosen by a panel of three judges, is Cori Chandler-Pepelnjak.
There’s lots of great images/photographers recognized throughout the single image categories and as honorable mentions in the bigger prize categories. Here’s a few of my favorites:
Brian Ulrich (Guggenheim recipient this year!), Honorable Mention, Project Competition:
Betsy Schneider, Curator’s Choice (Corey Keller), First Prize:
Brad Moore, Curator’s Choice (Corey Keller), Honorable Mention:
Damion Berger, Editor’s Choice (Simon Barnett), Third Prize:
Aaron Huey, Publisher’s Choice (Michael Mack), Honorable Mention:
Tags: Aaron Huey, Betsy Schneider, Brad Moore, Brian Ulrich, CENTER, Cori Chandler-Pepelnjak, Hiroyo Kaneko, Review Santa Fe
Posted in Events & News, Photography | No Comments »
Monday, April 6th, 2009
The Printed Picture, by Richard Benson (MoMA, 2010)
Reviewed in Aperture 194, Spring 2009, by Darius Himes
ISBN 978-1-57687-510-0
8.25 x 11 inches, Hardcover, 338 pages, numerous illustrations
Excerpt from the review by Darius Himes:
Benson, a photographer and master printer, has a methodical mind and approaches his subject systematically; The Printed Picture is thus, at its most basic level, a textbook—though the writing is never pedantic or stuffy. Benson developed the material presented here over the course of thirty years of teaching at Yale University, and reading his words is not unlike the experience of being in a lecture hall. Each chapter presents a class of printing processes (such as “relief printing” or “non-silver processes”), and each derivative process within that chapter is limited to a double-page spread complete with illustration and detail enlargement. Entire processes are distilled to three or four paragraphs at most—digestible, succinct, and engaging.
In the first 100 pages of this 338-page book Benson takes great pains to cover all the known processes, and offers a sturdy and admirably comprehensible outline of the fundamental approaches to reproduction prior to photography. In the book’s first four chapters he discusses relief, intaglio, and planographic printing—the triumvirate of ink-on-paper printing techniques—along with early multiple-impression color processes and such elementary printing methods as stencils, rubbings, silhouettes, and the typewriter. All these early techniques, some of which have been around for centuries (in certain cases millennia), seem to have played an important role on the inexorable passage toward the invention of photography. …
The Printed Picture will speak most clearly to those readers who have spent years in the halls of art schools and love the smell of ink and turpentine, who wax poetic at the sight of fixer-stained trays, or geek out over a mammoth-plate albumen print. By the end of the book, it is clear that materiality and man’s incessant curiosity are the central themes of The Printed Picture. The love of objects and of evidence of the artist’s hand—as un-digital as that may sound—are still both relevant and worthy of celebrating. —Darius Himes.
Tags: Aperture, MoMA, Richard Benson
Posted in Blog, My Published Writing, Photography | No Comments »
Words Without Pictures (Aperture, 2010)
Short Track, by Jake Mendel
Bird Watching, by Paula McCartney