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Showing posts from June, 2013

From the doll's house

 

From the back, with face

Debenhams website showing sets of dress photographs, including one from the back, the face slightly turned to one side and so visible, more or less

In the doll's house

swathed

Time and space (continued). Hm.

Vanessa Winship

Interview here Like many Jitka Hanzlova street portraits of women it is usually something about the hands that reveal an interior dimension.  But in this Winship portrait form her series in Turkey, it's hard to work out if the dress is being worn or if it's the other way around. 

Houses

Wild flowers

On the building site where I go to take pictures, a year ago this hill of earth was covered with plants and wild flowers.  Except technically it's a different hill than the one that was on this spot last year.  One of the main activities on building sites seems to be moving things around on a regular basis, for no discernible reason (not discernible to me, anyway) - breeze blocks, bricks, lumber, rubble - and mounds of earth - and sometimes they get moved back again to where they once were before.  If this is left a couple of months I think it may be alive again.

Excavate

YUCHAI

TEREX

TG schoolgirl

Kathryn and Jeremy Mathis, Colorado Springs, said their six year old child Coy Mathis had come out of her shell when they began to allow her to live as a girl - but her school insisted she could not use the girl's toilets. Some comments to this story on yahoo.co.uk; - "humans are either male or female anything else is just a freak condition." - "Liberal middle class Americans with bees in their bonnets desperate to be different. Disgusting how these ones have used their own child as pawn in their egocentric game." - "perhaps this is a case of the parents actually wanted a girl in stead of a boy." - "The Parents should be thrown into Jail" - "The parents need to be taken outside and formally executed. NO CHILD of six years old has a clue about the #$%$ that these idiots spew out. It is the parents who have decided to treat this BOY as a girl - Dumb is not a word good enough to describe their crass stupidity - shoot em!"

Dorothea Lange: JR Butler, President of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, Memphis, Tennessee, 1938

Topographics photographer Robert Adams discusses, amongst other things, his admiration for Dorothea Lange in an absorbing hour long interview on MAN

nouns and verbs

Extremely wide, incredibly far away

Transition

Camera self-timer set to take two images in succession, a few moments apart - and a breeze moving the window blind causing variations in light

Shift

When using someone else's spare bedroom as an impromptu space it's finding somewhere to put the camera before setting the self-timer that is usually the most limiting factor.  With a step ladder as a makeshift tripod I thought I had it particularly well sorted but maybe not as three times as I walked into the frame ( clambered actually, over a mattress and rug, piled up out of shot) the vibration through the floor made it wobble enough to send the camera spinning from the top step and clattering onto the deck.  So, a definite thumbs up for the build quality of the little Canon S95 - (BTW the colour shift came later, when fixing the white balance). Richard Serra: SHIFT

bark

Ilona Szwarc: American Girls

Fstopmagazine website Ilona Szwarc website

Mike Brodie

Mike Brodie website From Yossi Milo website:   From 2004 - 2009, Brodie created a prolific body of work which introduces viewers to an alternative lifestyle based on the constant movement of train travel across America.  Brodie began traveling the railways in 2002 at the age of 17. Unannounced, he left his house with only a few personal belongings. Brodie returned home days later, infatuated with train-hopping culture. “Two weeks later I was gone...this was it, I was riding my very first freight train. And soon, what would begin as mere natural curiosity and self-discovery would evolve into a casting call of sorts.” Brodie began to photograph his travels in 2004 when he acquired an old Polaroid camera. “A friend gave me a Polaroid camera I found on the back seat of her car. I took a photo of the handlebars of my BMX bike and it looked incredible, so I kept taking pictures, it was that simple.” From 2004-2006, Brodie shot exclusively on Polaroid film, earning him the moniker the Pol

Samuel Fosso

  Born in Cameroon in 1962, Samuel Fosso lived in Nigeria as a small child but was forced to leave at the end of the Biafran war in 1972. He moved to Bangui, in the Central African Republic where he lives and works. His first self portraits of the 1970s were originally sent to his mother in Nigeria to show her he was all right. His later images were a play on Western clichés,  and a form of  self-empowerment with a sense of theatrical beauty.

fault-lines

The revolution in clothes equality has begun. Or maybe not.

Swedish train drivers have decided to circumvent a new policy banning them wearing shorts in hot weather - by wearing skirts instead. A company spokesman, Tomas Hedenius, said "that skirts are a perfectly acceptable alternative.  To say anything else would be discrimination,"  Despite this seeming acceptance by the company "a meeting has been arranged for September to discuss the uniform issue." http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/stockholm-male-train-drivers-get-around-shorts-ban-in-hot-weather-by-wearing-skirts-8650585.html

flower, knot & clasp

   

Olives and ice cream

A few weeks ago after not eating anything for a few days I got back into the habit alternating Rice Krispies with Fairtrade organic bananas (they tasted gooooood) and now for a while it's  olives and ice cream.  Yesteray morning there was the incredibly loud rasping call of the machine-gun-football-rattle-of-death bird in the garden. It comes around every few months, always remaining unseen, and intimidates every other bird into silence.  It's early Saturday afternoon and I'm waiting for it to warm up a little bit and for the clouds to clear so I can go watch the sky - and maybe read a book - and the regular conversations of littler birds overheard once more.

Lucinda Williams: Come On

Saw Lucinda Williams for the first time on Later in 2006 (this is the video of that performance) and finally gonna see her play live in a couple of weeks. The guitar playing of Doug Pettigrew reminds me of Neil Young at his best.

Jonathan Safran Foer: Eating Animals

I think the question of meat-eating as remarkably similar to that of slavery a few centuries ago. It is an issue of power and exploitation - and 200 years from now people will perhaps look back and think how strange that it was so widely accepted by society when so obviously barbaric.  I also sometimes wonder why I don't do anything abut it, and maybe that makes me culpable in some way, too.  Being a vegetarian is not really enough. Foer's book is a personal deliberation upon modern animal farming that cuts to the chase and addresses our relationship to (other) animals.  Un-sentimental and not intended to be particularly proselytizing the careful examination of the scale and methods and ramifications of the issue build in a measured way that inevitably calls the human race to account. On the life of battery hens: 'Step your mind into a crowded elevator, an elevator so crowded you cannot turn around without bumping into (and aggravating) your neighbor. The elevator is

Lois Bielefeld: Lydia and Lois, Brooklyn, 2009

Flak contributor; photograph with her daughter.  A posed self-documenting image that is so technically well put together as to appear to be the set of a really interesting indie film.

Jade Doskow: The Lot (Feelings of Expansiveness)

On Flak and her website here While there's a billion trillion art photography Dusseldorf-y/New Topographics-y pictures taken in this way every single day of the week, this one is kinda special

Yesh Gvul - Israel's refuseniks

Yesh Gvul translates literally as " there is a limit ", a movement which led to the growth of the Refuseniks , conscripts who, while being prepared to defend their country, refused to engage in oppression of the Palestinian people.

Richard Learoyd: Anna in Red, 2012 (camera obscura image)

Link and video

invertebrate - the sky is an x-ray

Angelo Merendino: my wife's fight with breast cancer

link here

Facing the camera

Thanks muchly to the wonderful Mr. C for getting in touch and sending a photo from our house-sharing student days (cropped to protect the innocent). 

Adrian Street, 1973

Adrian Street was a wrestler from a mining family in Brynmawr, South Wales.  This  photograph by Dennis Hutchinson shows him with his father. Describing his glam/trans persona to Wales art review website : ‘The fans hated it, but you could tell they were intrigued and I think the women were maybe a bit turned on. Nobody was doing that before me. Boy George wasn’t even born when I started’ – he remains one of his nation’s most criminally overlooked cultural icons and, crucially, in his own words , ‘a fucking good wrestler’. Turner prize winning artist Jeremy Deller recently made a documentary about Street , ' So Many Ways To Hurt You'.