Wednesday Work: Hiroshi Sugimoto

Circling around to the grand unvieling of our big news, in excited anticipation we would like to "set the stage" with images from Hiroshi Sugimoto's theatre series. Shot with a large format camera in the late 1970s/1980s - Sugimoto captured in a single image the entirity of a movie watching experience. (So it is not an empty theatre or a blank screen, but a theatre which has both been filled up and emptied out, and a screen with a whole movie playing over top of it - over exposing the negative film to create an empty white glowing box). Experiments in time, but also begs to question: what does it mean to experience a thing?

Sugimoto has this to say about his work in the theatre: "I'm a habitual self-interlocutor. Around the time I started photographing at the Natural History Museum, one evenig I had a near-hallucinatory vision. The question-and-answer session that led up to this vision went something like this: Suppose you shoot a whole movie in a single frame? And the answer: You get a shining screen. Immediately I sprang into action, experimenting toward realizing this vision. Dressed up as a tourist, I walked into a cheap cinema in the East Village with a large-format camera. As soon as the movie started, I fixed the shutter at a wide-open aperture, and two hours later when the movie was finished, I clicked the shutter closed. That eveing, I developed the film, and the vision exploded behing my eyes."

Hold on tight to your seats, dear readers, the vision is about the explode behind your eyes - our experimenting towards realizing a vision and the grand unvieling - next, Wednesday Work.

Read more about Hiroshi Sugimoto and see more of his images, here.

Wednesday Work (Thursday Throwback?): Carleton Watkins: Yosemite (1863)

This past Saturday was "National Record Store Day", did you all attend to your neighborhood favorites? After feasting on bagel sandwiches overflowing with mozzarella cheese and marinated basil and tomatoes, we stumbled into a fairly new used records&books on 9th, down in Philadelphia's Italian Market. I couldn't decide on a record. But I did pick up a few used books. One, Susan Sontag's novel "America", has this Carleton Watkins image above on the back cover, and I was reminded: Susan Sontag can write, and: Oh wow - look at that photograph.

Carlton Watkins' photographs do what all good photographs should do (in my hungry opinion), they elicit adventure, they call for ambition, they show the viewer how much and how big it is out there - all the while without bringing with them any fears. There are no fears of falling in Carleton Watkins' photographs. We are viewing great feats of nature, but never are we at the cliff's edge. There is no physical danger here, nor is there chance of psychological or emotional harm. There are no others in Watkins' photographs with which we are to compare ourselves. We are not being watched or watching. The land is ours and ours alone, and the land is there to be taken.

Evading many of the trappings found in traditional formal photography, the rectangle or square, the whole thing placed behind glass - Watkins shot for stereoscopes (the View-Master, its like that), his images were cut down, placed in circle shaped mattes.

Watkins' worked on what he loved. He worked and worked and worked. He made photographs. I can't imagine he was thinking about a market, or an audience, (I could be wrong here, but let me have the dream, pretty please....)

I WANT TO BE (like) CARLETON WATKINS.

Follow your spring dreams readers. And read up on your history players. You can't hustle unless you know the game. These are my words of wisdom: T-Dubbya OUT.

(Carleton Watkins, photographs and info - here.)

[Aaaaand, if you're not into throwbacks (but really, either way) give this guy a listen: Hennesy Youngman]
Seriously.

Defy Monday: Bunny Up

Source

Wednesday Work: Yamini Nayar

Do you see that little eye? From Nayar's website: "Yamina Nayar's work explores an intersection found between photography, sculpture, and the constructed moment. Her large-scale photographs are made from sculptures built in the studio on tabletops from found and raw materials, and documented with a large-format camera. Nayar's works draw from historical sources of art and architecture, and fabricate structures that explore the natures of experience and memory in a contemporary moment. Once recorded, the structures are disassembled and discarded. Only the photograph remains, as an object and entry point into a moment held together for the lens." This is my kind of work!

Yamini Nayar

Awesome Bike CUBBY!

That's all.

We have an awesome bike cubby - in our house! And I want to keep it forever (the bike cubby that is - not so much the house, not forever).

Is it spring where you are yet?

Don't forget your helmet! Where's your U-lock? Do you have your lights? both front and back? And while you are preparing, brush up on your bike safety, here.

Yippeeeeee for fresh air commutes!