Ha! Hold my Brain; be still my beating heart

Charles Freger Wilder Mann

Charles Freger Wilder Mann

Charles Freger Wilder Mann

Charles Freger Wilder Mann

Charles Freger Wilder Mann

more, 

Charles Freger

Sleep of Beloved: A Haiku

Paul Schneggenburger

In long exposure

fell in love with a couple

while they were asleep. 

Paul Schneggenburger 

Paul Schneggenburger 

Paul Schneggenburger

Visit Paul Schneggenburger at his website, here. 

Just "One More Day" at Napoleon; Write Up by Chip Schwartz @ Knight Arts

Knight Arts

Surely every one of us has our trials, and with a title like “One More Day,” this exhibit could also serve as a sort of mantra for hope. - Chip Scwarts 

 Read the rest, here. 

Febraury 2013 @ NAPOLEON

Christina Roth & Tamsen Wojtanowski: One More Day: An Essay by Jennifer Zarro

Christina Roth & Tamsen Wojtanowski: One More Day An Essay by Jennifer Zarro I began writing this essay on December 21, 2012.  As it was widely known, this was the last day of the Mayan Long Count calendar.  The world didn’t end but a new b’ak’tun has begun.  December 21st was also the day the NRA … Read more at Napoleon...

Thursday didn't have a chance...

Pizza Brain

+

Jamie Warren

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I had a lucid dream last night where local Food’lebrity Pizza Brain and Jamie Warren’s “Self Portrait as Lasagna Del Ray by thestrutny” had a baby, and it came out as Eat My Face!, well-known member of the Garbage Pail Kids Clan. 

It took place in an all-night dinner on a long forgotten road, not unlike those photographed for Alec Soth’s series “Sleeping by the Mississipppi”.

I was sitting in a corner booth drinking all-night coffee, next to a pay phone that rang rang, but every time I answered it was just Roger Rabbit laughing uncontrollably on the other side of the line.

Alec Soth

Near the end, I garnered my ability to control the dreaming, then tiptoed around the baby-making and out the door.

I  was met with the blazing glory of a southwest sunrise breaking just over the horizon.

To say it mildly, upon actual waking, Thursday didn’t have a chance. 

John Divola

For some amazing work, check out these artist's websites.

Jamie Warren

Alec Soth

John Divola

They will set your dreams on fire. 

Wednesday Work: Jeffrey Stockbridge, "Kensington Blues"

Front Street

Jeffrey Stockbridge

Dolly

Jeffrey Stockbridge

Dennis

Jeffrey Stockbridge

I moved to Philadelphia in 2006, and before moving here took a lot of photographs of the people and places that made up my community. After relocating to the big city, I found myself unable to make the same kinds of images. I wasn't from Philadelphia, I didn't know how to approach those things I saw on the streets. Conscious of my outside perspective and my outsider status, I took my personal  work to the studio. It was a good move for me, though my interest in street photography lives on. Now, I like to see how others are able to do it. 

Since living in Philly, there have been photographers here making big headlines for the work they've completed in the neighborhood. Most notably, the work of Zoe Strauss. Strauss is born and raised Philadelphia, so the work, in a way, seems right and just. That being said, I am always left wanting more when viewing Strauss work. Asking myself who are the people in the photographs, and more, are the hard-luck portraits made of them helpful or hurtful?

I was turned onto Jeffrey Stockbridge, and his series Kensington Blues by a student of mine. Stockbridge works more like a Jim Goldberg, with his series chronicling those he comes across in the Kensington neighborhood via photographic works and interviews. Stockbridge talks to the people, he transcribes their stories, we are given more information. I enjoy the information. I enjoy hearing the individuals voice. It makes me feel less like I am taking from them as a viewing audience, makes me feel less like a voyeur. It feels more fair. 

Being a photographer myself, I know what the camera can do, the potential for it to take away from its subject. It is an argument I have with myself and photographs at large, often. Stockbridge helped me to articulate the side of the argument I am on. 

Plus, I live in a row home right down the street from many of his shots.; so there is that sensation - oh! look ma! We're on TV!. 

Check it out, here Kensington Blues. 

Manuel Alvarez Bravo

Manuel Alvarez Bravo - Fallen Sheet- 1940s

Manuel Alvarez Bravo - Somewhat Gay and Graceful - 1942

Manuel Alvarez Bravo- Laughing Mannequins - 1930s

I can't find my mind, can you? After a particularly busy start to Fall (... a particularly long break in blog posting...) and a particularly long night - nothing makes me feel better on this lovely lost Sunday afternoon then to look at the surrealist photographs of Manuel Alvarez Bravo.

What to say? Born in 1902 in Mexico City with the last name BRAVO - there is nothing more that needs to be said. (Read more about all those details, here.)

Wednesday Work: Iain McKell

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Iain McKell - The New Gypsies

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Simply gorgeous.

Makes me hungry.

You?

See it at Clic Gallery, NYC. Opening August 29th through October 2nd.

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Wednesday Work: The Collective Unconscious

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Last Wednesday's post on Jon Rafman got me thinking. Rafman, to remind you, collects images taken by the Google Street View team and re purposes them as his own through the action of editing. His message is made his by those images which he chooses to include, and those images which he chooses to exclude. In this way you could consider images part of a universal visual language, ie. the same ways in which we choose existing words from the communal dictionary to create a thought that is uniquely ours - we choose images from a world of communal sight, to create a thought that is uniquely ours....right?

As a photographer, I make images. As a photographer, I take images.

"I think, therefore I am." To update Descartes, perhaps the statement should be, "I photograph, therefore I am."

The distinction of who is a photographer and who isn't these days seems a bit silly doesn't it?

So, I started thinking. Thinking about knowledge and the freedom of information, and the collective unconscious, an idea proposed by psychiatrist Carl Jung. In his thesis Jung states, " in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche, there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes," Meaning, beyond those things we learn and experience, there are things that we. all. just. know. , regardless of our individual experiences.

Where am I going with this? , Here - When you are dealing with a medium as popular as photography it is hard to say what is -artist- and what is merely a function of being -human-. It is difficult to ascertain true authorship.

Which brings me, Here - back to today's Wednesday Work! There are many lovely blogs, websites, and projects out there started by individuals but whose ownership of can be claimed by many.

The first I would like to share with you today is a collection of images, constantly growing and continually curated by Philadelphia artist, Heather Veneziano. The images appear web-based and cross over large time frames, continents, and original intent.

The image above, and the the three to follow all posted on August 12, 2011, at Heather's blog: an odd kind of sympathy.

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The second project I would like to introduce today is of the same vein, but working the concept from the other side. Take Picture Don't Steal, and interactive photography project developed by UK-based art director Matt Greenwood, calls on the want of the passer-by. Greenwood places disposable cameras, affixed to street poles, with the simple instructions "Take Picture Don't Steal". Greenwood then collects the images and posts them to the TPDS website. With cameras in place in Miami, FL, NYC, Toronto, the UK, and other's popping up around Europe, a different kind of pictorial collective unconscious is growing.

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And all of this not yet to mention Facebook or the growing number flickr/picassa/tumblr accounts! Writer and critic Susan Sontag nailed it way back in 1977. In her collection of essays, On Photography, Sontag surmised "recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced amusement as sex and dancing-" and to think, Sontag was merely referring to photography since the advent of roll film and the point and shoot! Now we've gone digital...
What to do with all of these images?

The fate of the photograph - unclear - but to take one more Sontag quote out of context, another from On Photography, Sontag states "the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it."

Where do you find yourselves today, dear readers? On the side of the glass-half-empty or the glass-half-full? (I know - Oh so serious...)

Well, I am feeling optimistic and at the chance of invention, I feel the exhilaration of inspiration.

Take that energy and run.

See more of an odd kind of sympathy, here.

And more of Take Picture Don't Steal, here.

A Thursday...for shameless self-promotion: The Future of Love

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The Future of Love
(-or- The Story of Cap't Capianna)
by Tamsen Wojtanowski
5"x8". soft cover. 19 pages. 2011.

See it here.

Wednesday Work: June Yong Lee

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I am a lover of film - good ol' fashioned hard and slow and wet photo process methods. The true power of digital - well beyond the fact that is is "easy" (I am aware of the misnomer) - is the power of digital photography as a new media, a new way of seeing the truth that lies before us.

That is precisely what June Yong Lee does with his series, Skin. Taking photographs of an individual's skin, but digitally removing the skin's form as it sits on an individual's frame- we see the skin only, the skin anew, as a vast landscape that begs to be explored.

See more of June Yong Lee's work, here.

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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.

Reminder: Abelardo Morrell at the PPAC, TONIGHT!

Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, Visiting Artist Lecture, Abelardo Morrell, Tonight!

Wednesday Work: Abelardo Morrell - Coming to Philadelphia!

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Abelardo Morrell is coming back to Philadelphia!!! -> To the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center (PPAC) on November 18th, 2010 @ 7:00pm!

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I had the pleasure of hearing Morell speak at the PMA in the Fall of 2006, at the onset of my graduate study. I had studied photography in undergrad, had made many photographs, and thought a little bit about the life of those photographs in the world - but I had never thought about the stuff that comes before the photographs, before the images are made, at the moment when they get caught. I had never thought about the mechanics and the machine involved in the act of making a photograph.

Had definitely never thought about it as another way to manipulate the image. *** This is what excites me.

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Abelardo Morell opened my eyes, with his images yes - but with his process double yes. To make these images posted here, Morell used rooms across the world (hotel rooms, gallery rooms, abandoned rooms, etc.) to make simple cameras, Camera Obscura. He made the rooms themselves into the camera by covering the windows in the room with light tight material and removing a one inch square in the center of the window in order to create a simple lens.

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Photography is the capture of light. The capture of light is done so by the camera. The camera is a glorified box used to hold light, let in by a little hole (the lens), until it can be recorded onto the light-sensitive material.

The earliest camera - the Camera Obscura - and the "cameras" Morell creates do not have the mirror system of the modern camera, the mirrors which flip the image over for our eyes to see the right way - therefore the images made in this way are upside down.

Morell's images of hotel rooms made into camera obscura contain not only the room which Morell's view camera sees, but also the image of what the room itself "sees" outside of its window, the image made by the camera obscura along the back walls of the hotel room. These light images of what the hotel room "sees" are cast as upside down images.

Sounds really complicated right?

Maybe, kinda.

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Check out more of Abelardo Morell's work at his website, here. See his process here. Learn more about the Camera Obscura and the basic science of photography, here.

Go to the PPAC's website here.

And attend Abelardo Morell's Artist Lecture & Book Signing

at the PPAC

on November 18th, 2010

at 7:00pm

here: Philadelphia Photo Arts Center

The Crane Building

1400 N. American St.

Philadelphia, PA.

Whew! Sometimes I exhaust myself...

PS Get outside & enjoy that weather - - NOW!

Blogger Alert!: Crochet Bloke

(http://crochetbloke.blogspot.com/)

Newly enamored with Crochet Bloke's blog - this is a red skull crocheted from butcher twine. Combine this post with others detailing how to cook fried flowers and lots of beautiful pictures - you've got my attention. Visit Crochet Bloke's blog, here and check out his Mr. Boo and Pumpkin Head patterns just in time for the holiday!

Wednesday Work: Wafa Hourani

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Wafa Hourani is a Palestinian artist combining sculpture and photography is his current body of work, Future Cities.

Paraphrased from a fellow blogger,

"Future Cities deals with the social, political, and economic realities of Palestinian life to develop grim and apocalyptic predictions for the residents of the West Bank.

Each building is a miniature light-box illuminating glimpses into the private lives of the residents through film strips placed in the windows, an unnerving reminder that this science fiction horror is, for many, an everyday experience. "

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While I applaud the ability to be real-world pertinent/political, I mostly enjoy this work for it's whimsical object-hood. Thinking about the process, and how much fun it would be to make this little world. I love the nuance the photographs of the darkened world create, but am very interested in the array of bright colors used on the models you can seen when shot in daylight.

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I can imagine the working process, but find myself curious about the thought-process. Did Wafa Hourani think first of the concept then make the model, or does Hourani enjoy model making and after constructing a few, come up with the concept.

This is something I struggle with often. You creative folks out there - what works best for you? Plan or action? Plan to action? Attack and clean-up?

Regardless, *Cribs* Goldfish Edition - yes, why I would love to live here. (Those of you in Philly, does this remind you of the secret garden?)

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I want ice cream.

You can read more about Wafa Hourani here, and here.

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