Fell

and that's all I have to say about that...

Snap the Vote

I voted this morning. The experience can best be described as a kind of contained and giddy chaos. The lines outside were long. Inside were patriotic cupcakes for sale and smaller, tighter lines full of folks eyeing their papers and cellphones as they waited in que. My name was missing from the roll books so I had to vote with a paper absentee ballot. Even Barry Scheck, one of O.J's attorney, was in line to vote. Happy election!

A Frank View of Politics

As we prepare to vote with a hopeful eye towards the imaginable future I thought it worth while, personally at least, to take a peek backwards. Few have described the theater of American politics as pointedly and as poetically as Robert Frank did in the pictures he made in 1955 and 56. These pictures, from the similar and comparatively quaint by comparison, Eisenhower era, are taken from his seminal book The Americans. While many of the pictures in this book are fiercely political I chose a few that were literally political in subject matter.

Snappy Halloween

Political Haiku Karate

Most political ads have a few things in common. One of the denominators is that they are typically made on the cheap. For various reasons a lot of money is not usually spent to make them. This can lead to one of two things. Either a commercial that looks and feels like one of those late night ads on cable that tries to sell you crap that you don't need or, on occasion, the budget constraints act beneficially much like the tight and concrete rules of writing Haiku. It might guide the author towards something more simple and elegant. The Barry Goldwater Daisy ad is one of the best known examples. I think this one for Obamba is pretty great. It has a sense of humor and uses one still image, some simple music, a little copy and a revealing wink to strike a damn strong blow.

Meat in the Yard!

I thought it only appropriate, with Halloween approaching, to show some of the great pictures by Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Both his pictures and name make him an easy choice for the holiday. Meatyard, born in 1925, was a practicing Optician who lived with his family in Lexington, Kentucky until his death at 47 in 1972. His collaborators were his family and neighbors.

Telephoto. Tell a friend...

The Expo is back in town again. I recently returned from the Photoplus Expo at the Jacob Javits Center. The big, HUGE, once a year trade show for all things photographic. It was my first visit to one of these kinds of events and while it was fun it was also a bit overwhelming. Anyone and everyone who makes or sells a product related to the photographic industry had all their baubles, toys and trinkets on display. There were giant printers, thousands of cameras, kazillions of megapixels, and, yes, even gymnasts on display.??? It was fun to handle some of the new cameras and to get a peak at the latest release of Adobe's CS4 Photoshop.

Shabam! Pow! Blop! Whizzz!

For your viewing pleasure. The incomparable Serge Gainsbourg. What a great song. I love the meager try at lip synching, the awkward direction and the happy sincerity of the whole thing." I'm guessing they made it in one take and spent a few hundred bucks.

Fone Fractions

The camera on my phone periodically likes to fracture and then reconstruct the pictures that I take ??? I do not know why or how but I rather like them.

Layer Slayer

I saw a wonderful show of new photographs by Richard Benson last night. The show runs at Pace MacGill until November, 29 http://www.pacemacgill.com The photographs are all color landscapes. They were made with a simple Canon 35mm digital camera. What makes these pictures especially unique is the way in which they are printed. An excerpt from the gallery's press release gives some explanation and description:

"For Benson, the relationship between a picture's content and the method by which the picture is made is paramount. He uses an ink jet printer configured to print a single image in successive stages. A skeleton of pigment is initially laid on the paper, and color is gradually added each time it subsequently passes through the printer. Benson literally builds his photographs..."

A final print might travel 9 times thru the printer. To keep the image in register is no small feat. Benson had to make his own machine parts and graft them into the guts of the printer. The prints are essentially made in a fashion similar to the way in which a painter would construct a painting. They have a unique tactile quality that makes them unlike any others. I love that he is making "traditional" pictures by fully embracing all aspects of contemporary digital technology. And then using a contemporary ink jet printer to make prints that are made in layers the way images had been made before the advent of photography.

A Picture Problem

Gary Winnogrand speaks! This is a small piece I found on You Tube of a larger story that Bill Moyers did on photography. Winnogrand's personality is refreshingly unpretentious and charming. Like some stranger you might accidentally end up having a nice conversation with in a city park. He seems to be representative of a kind of artist that most likely does not exist today. He comes across as extremely smart and is possessed with an endearing personality and the native New York accent of some long forgotten, kooky uncle who smelled like cigar smoke and garlic. The art world is such a polished, professional and buffed down industry today that you wonder if someone like him could navigate it and find entry. He also had a great head of hair to boot!

Pick It!

A few snaps from a beautiful day of apple picking in upstate New York.

Chatterbox

Fun with Google images! It's been said that there are more pictures in the world than there are bricks. These days I'm guessing that there are now more pictures in the world than there are grains of sand. I found these before and after illustrations on the web site of a dentist who specializes in cosmetic dentistry.

Snacking In The Library

Most folks know that the Library of Congress houses an extraordinary collection of photographs that cover the life span of the medium. http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/catalog.html
A good deal of it is pedestrian and much of it is historical but some of it is by the better photographers of the 20th century. What a lot of people don't know is that a good bit of the collection has been scanned and digitized and is available as large, excellent files that are a few clicks away. There are images here by Walker Evans,( the first two above) Lewis Hine, (the third image above) and many others. Sadly the Atget's, donated by Abbot, do not exist as large tiffs. There is a legal page that details the rights and restrictions of these images and goes into some detail of what you can and can not do with these files. While I would never encourage anyone to do anything illegal I do think that, if one was so inclined, one could, with some basic Photoshop skills and a decent Epson printer make quite a few lovely prints from these scans for their personal collection.

Burn After Reading

I recently saw the Coen Brother's movie "Burn After Reading" and it is flat out great. Regardless of some of the recent reviews. It's true that the Coen's do seem to be re treading some of their previous material. In this case we are again treated to an assemblage of slightly pathetic bunglers who, while desperate for money to alter their current station, find themselves in circumstances beyond what they had imagined. Things quickly and spastically spiral out of control. Still, I'll take a well crafted Coen Brother's re tread over 90% of anything else out there. The casting, writing and cinematography are great. The smaller roles are particularly well acted. The brothers have a knack for accurately portraying our cultures contemporary obsessions, packing it tightly into a stick of dynamite and adding a match. In "Burn After Reading" it is fitness, secretive bureaucracies, tell all memoirs, sex, relationships and bottled water that are used for gun powder. KABOOM!

Brakhage and Baseball-The Yankees are eliminated

Well it was bound to happen. Eventually. This will be the first time in 13 years that the Yankees did not make it to the post season. I thought it only fitting to recall Aaron Boone's great home run from 2003. I'm pretty sure Stan Brakhage never made a film about baseball but if he did perhaps it would look a bit like this.

Pictures from a day-Day of the Dentist

Oh the miles of smiles.....