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Showing posts from July, 2016

detail 2

strip

detail 1

site B

cement spill

Martin Hannett & Katharine Hamnett

Hannett (1948-91) and Hamnett (1947-)

Lori Nix: Subway (from 'The City' series), 2012

website and photo-eye and slate

Joy Division: Ceremony

A Saturday morning and awake at 8am so listening to a download of Desert Island Discs, with guest US ambassador Matthew Barzun . Totally suprised when he chose ' Ceremony ', covered by Galaxie 500 and found myself shedding tears. It's a song I always wondered why was never picked by anyone, and that would be in my 8 discs shortlist, twice , the Ian Curtis vocal original and the Bernie Sumner post-Curtis demise New Order version. The early live performance (4th video down) shows a band looking unlikely to be around for long but they made it,and seeing the one guy in the crowd dancing to this is something special.

Erica Beckman, Clean Plate Pictures: Jessica Lopez and Lauren Hare, 2013

NYTimes weddings

Cris Toala-Olivares: Niln, West Bank, 2009

Magnum/Lensculture awards Tear gas shot at Palestinians by Israeli forces near the village of Nilin in the West Bank.

a summer night

formers

For the last year I visited site b only to photograph the perimeter fence. I no longer could find a discrete way in, especially as a lot of houses had been built and sold and were overlooking those gaps and scalable places. Today though there was a corner down the very far end with not only a perfect person-sized gap in the fencing but it was shielded by earth from a deep excavation, so I could go in without expecting security to show up.  There are currently a lot of former works going on around that point, where wooden boxes are made ready for concrete to be poured inside to construct walls, and with rebars to provide strength.

Hole, with machinery at the bottom

In summer 2014 I visited site b regularly to photograph from inside the deep holes there. (It might have been a Murakami influence.) Then eventually all the holes were filled in and subsequently houses and roads have been built over them. But since I was last there nearly two months ago a new one has appeared.

hole, with containers at the top

hole

post-demolition soil

site b

while waiting for the clouds to change at site b

zip

sunset and pearls

elephant ears

grass after haircut

the thing that grows in the wall

not much of a garden but it's enough

Jason Eskenazi: The Americans List

From Photoeye : " While working as a guard at the MET museum in New York, Eskenazi began to ask photographers he knew visiting the Looking In exhibition about Robert Franks The Americans, their favorite image and why. In the 2 years since he quit, as he himself got back out on the road again to shoot, he complied 276 photographers answers in the unique book destined to be a classic in photography education. "Includes contributions from Mary Ellen Mark, Joel Meyerowitz, Jeffrey Ladd, Robert Frank, Martin Parr, Philip Perkis, David Alan Harvey, Bill Burke, Josef Koudelka, John Gossage, Juliana Beasley, Sara Terry, Mark Steinmetz, Vanessa Winship, Alec Soth and many more." Blake Andrews mines the data here.   The one I'd probably have picked is at number six, Plate 35 (Car accident, U.S. 66 - Arizona).  I saw it at one of the first big group shows at Tate Modern over a decade ago. It was a small, faded vintage print and didn't demand much attention in a

Asako Narahashi: Kawaguchikom, (Ever After series), 2003

yossi milo gallery

Richard Ansett: Human Puppy, Clapham Common, UK

shells on the beach

squiggle

sunlight and sky (hub)

stage

contre jour (legs)

Julia Borissova: Dimitry, 2016

collectordaily review artist website

various angles

window A

window B

Six, from 'English Hedgerows in the Autumn' series

Jack Kerouac: The Dharma Bums, (1958)

"Here, this, is, It. The world as it is, is Heaven, I'm looking for a Heaven outside what there is, it's only this poor pitiful world that's Heaven." (p. 139). I remember a group 'retreat' at a psychology lecturer's house in York. A couple of days in and getting nowhere with the slog of meditation after meditation and discretely hiding within my expression the 'fail' of each and every one, until that kind of moment seemingly described by Kerouac half a century earlier (meditating in a wood at the back of his mum's house) when the ridiculous expectation of experiencing something divine , or special, finally collapses and in the wreckage that remains just being in the no-thingy moment and finding everything is all OK and this is what it was all about after all. It was hard not to laugh.