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| gelitin |
| Klunk Garden |
| Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, Japan |
| 2009 |
| soloshow |
photos: Kei Okano
http://www.gelitin.net/mambo/index.php
Obama Joker Poster Artist Exposed As Liberal-Leaning Palestinian
Since NewsBusters and the Drudge Report first introduced America to the Obama Joker poster — with help from talk radio host Tammy Bruce, of course — most media outlets have speculated the artist was likely white, conservative, and racist.
WRONG!
As reported by the Los Angeles Times moments ago, the up-until-now anonymous creator of the poster sweeping the nation is a 20-year-old college student of Palestinian descent with largely liberal political leanings.
Honestly, you can’t make this stuff up:
Bored during his winter school break, Firas Alkhateeb, a senior history major at the University of Illinois, crafted the picture of Obama with the recognizable clown makeup using Adobe’s Photoshop software.
Alkhateeb had been tinkering with the program to improve the looks of photos he had taken on his clunky Kodak camera. The Joker project was his grandest undertaking yet. Using a tutorial he’d found online about how to “Jokerize” portraits, he downloaded the October 23 Time Magazine cover of Obama and began digitally painting over it.
Four or five hours later, he happily had his product. [...]
“After Obama was elected, you had all of these people who basically saw him as the second coming of Christ,” Alkhateeb said. “From my perspective, there wasn’t much substance to him.”
“I abstained from voting in November,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Living in Illinois, my vote means close to nothing as there was no chance Obama would not win the state.” If he had to choose a politician to support, Alkhateeb said, it would be Ohio Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich.
How delicious: Kucinich, likely the most liberal of presidential candidates last year!
Although Alkhateeb claims he was making no political statement with the artwork, he’s plugged into the Washington debate. Though born in the United States, his Palestinian family closely follows Middle Eastern politics.
“I think he’s definitely doing better than Bush was,” Alkhateeb said of Obama. Alkhateeb’s views on foreign relations align with the Democrats, he said, while he prefers Republican ideals on domestic issues.
Alkhateeb’s assessment of Obama: “In terms of domestic policy, I don’t think he’s really doing much good for the country right now,” he said. “We don’t have to ‘hero worship’ the guy.” [...]
Regardless, Alkhateeb does agree with the Obama “Hope” artist about “socialism” being the wrong caption for the Joker image. “It really doesn’t make any sense to me at all,” he said. “To accuse him of being a socialist is really … immature. First of all, who said being a socialist is evil?”
Outstanding.
Now that Alkhateeb has been unmasked, it’s going to be fascinating to see how media outlets besides the LA Times report his Middle Eastern background as well as his political leaning.
Stay tuned.
—Noel Sheppard is the Associate Editor of NewsBusters.
Streets With No Name
http://www.sweet-juniper.com/2009/06/streets-with-no-name.html
This past winter, the snow stayed so long we almost forgot what the ground looked like. In Detroit, there is little money for plowing; after a big storm, the streets and sidewalks disappear for days. Soon new pathways emerge, side streets get dug out one car-width wide. Bootprints through parks veer far from the buried sidewalks. Without the city to tell him where to walk, the pilgrim who first sets out in fresh snowfall creates his own path. Others will likely follow, or forge their own paths as needed.
In the heart of summer, too, it becomes clear that the grid laid down by the ancient planners is now irrelevant. In vacant lots between neighborhoods and the attractions of thoroughfares, bus stops and liquor stores, well-worn paths stretch across hundreds of vacant lots. Gaston Bachelard called these les chemins du désir: pathways of desire. Paths that weren’t designed but eroded casually away by individuals finding the shortest distance between where they are coming from and where they intend to go.
It is an urban legend on many college campuses that many sidewalks and pathways were not planned at all, but paved by the university after students created their own paths from building to building, straying from those originally prescribed. The Motor City, like a college campus, has a large population that cannot afford cars, relying instead on bikes and feet to meet its needs. With enormous swaths of the city returning to prairie, where sidewalks are irrelevant and sometimes even dangerous, desire lines have become an integral yet entirely unintended part of the city’s infrastructure. There are hundreds of these prescriptive easements across neglected lots throughout the city. Click on the photo at the top of this post to see just a few of them in greater detail.
Desire lines are considered by many landscape architects to be proof of a flaw in the design of a physical space, or more gently, a sign that concrete cannot always impose its will on the human mind. But what about a physical space that no longer resembles its intended design, a city where tens of thousands of homes have been abandoned, burned, and buried in their own basements? While actual roads and sidewalks crumble with each season of freezing and thawing, Detroiters have taken it upon themselves to create new paths, in their own small way working to create a city that better suits their needs.
Academics around the world argue about whether the first paths were created by hunters following game trails. There are scientists who study ants to better understand highways. They have created mathematical models for trail formation. When the great cities were built, sometimes roads were built along ancient paths. The Romans imposed grids on every city but their own. In Detroit many of the streets are named for the Frenchmen whose ribbon farms stretching north from the river were covered in asphalt: Beaubien, Dequindre, Campau, Livernois, Chene. In many cities, there are streets named for dead men once revered throughout the land but now mostly forgotten (Fulton, Lafayette, Irving) and others named for men no one remembers.
In Detroit, there are streets no one has named. And they belong to anyone.
http://forgetomori.com/2009/criptozoology/minhocuu-e-outras-minhocas-titnicas
Is this real? If you have the stomach, click on the image to head to an image gallery and our very ordinary investigation.
So, are these photos real? And the answer, amazingly is… probably yes.
Here in Brazil we have our very own Minhocuçu (Rhinodrilus e Glossoscolex spp) which can easily grow beyond half a meter in length an almost an inch in diameter.
And it’s not by far the longest earthworm recorded.
The Microchaetidae family in South Africa is a group where all species can reach over a meter in length. This is no folk tale or cryptozoological rumor: specimens of this size have been duly recorded for over a century already.
And even those are not the champions. The title goes to the Megascolecidae family from Australia. The record: 2,1 meters by 24 millimeters thick.
The worms in the images all look they are up to a meter in length, compatible with the recorded dimensions for the many species of the families we discussed. They are probably real, though exactly from where and what species my ordinary investigation didn’t come up with. Specialists, do enlighten us with further confirmation and identification! The first image of a girl holding up one, for instance, may not be of an earthworm but of is a caecilian.
Giant earthworms are harmless, but perhaps because of their plain appearance and our instinctive disgust of them all kinds of legends are associated with them, even in places where we can’t find those “little” couple-meter-earthworms.
The most curious legend is not exactly about an earthworm, but of a worm. A death worm. The Mongolian Death Worm. It can allegedly kill its victims by either spraying a lethal and blinding venom, or sending electrical discharges.
In Brazil, where we do have our Minhocuçus, there’s also the legend of Minhocão, 25 meters in size. Like the Mongolian Death Worm, its not very plausible such a creature exists.
Earthworms over a couple of meters in length are real and they can more than make up for a mix of disgust and fascination. Not only they can harm nobody and are actually important part of the ecosystem, in Brazil they are in danger as they make really excellent fishing bait. This is no joke (link in Portuguese).
UPDATE: Identified! Well, at least the where and who for the second photo. It’s from Lisa B, available on her flickr account. As Lisa wrote in the comments below, “that image was taken in the Bellavista Cloud Forest Reserve in Ecuador, and it is indeed a real worm.” Thank you! Apologies for not including credit beforehand, I reproduced the original gallery from erueru, linked below, and I’m happy to include the sources.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/05/mimivirus
- By Brandon Keim
- May 5, 2009 |
- 2:48 pm
A virus so large and strange that it’s redefined the very concept of a virus has been photographed for the first time. It’s even weirder than expected.
The virus was originally discovered infecting amoebas in a Parisian water tower in 1992. It was orders of magnitude bigger than any other virus — so large, in fact, that researchers figured it was a microbe.
It took 11 years for the mimivirus to be officially defined as a virus, though the definition didn’t quite fit. In addition to its enormous size, many of its genes came from bacteria. Some researchers called it a “missing link” that blurred the boundaries between viruses and living cells, between living and dead.
Despite all this attention the mimivirus’ physical structure remained a blur. Like other viruses, it was made from DNA surrounded by a protein coat called a capsid, but long fibers on the capsid’s surface made it difficult to see the mimivirus’ underlying structure.
To get a clearer picture, French and American biochemists dissolved mimivirus fibers with enzymes, then used an electron microscope to take thousands of pictures that were eventually combined into a three-dimensional structure. The results, published recently in Public Library of Science Biology, provide further evidence that mimiviruses straddle the boundary between virus and bacteria.
Whereas the DNA of other viruses are tightly wrapped, there’s a large gap between the mimivirus genome and its capsid. In some ways, this resembles less the structure of a virus than of a living cell, in which DNA is contained in a nucleus, which in turn floats in cell-wall-enclosed cytoplasm.
“The new structural finds, along with previous genetic and morphological work, confirm that mimivirus is an odd mix of genes and parts found in viruses, bacteria and even eukaryotes, the organisms that sequester their DNA in a nucleus,” write the researchers.
What does this mean, then, for the mimivirus’ official status, which has caused some researchers to call for a redefinition of virus?
Perhaps that’s the wrong question to ask. Eugene Koonin, a National Center for Biotechnology Information researcher who reported last year that, in another viral first, mimiviruses can actually become infected by other viruses, was nonplused by arguments over mimivirus classification.
“They’re part of the biosphere, and that’s more than enough for me,” he said at the time.
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 6:15 PM on 02nd May 2009
It’s a familiar feeling – you park your car, head to the shops and on your return you forget where you left it.
But art student Sara Watson could be forgiven for such a lapse – because she has created an invisible car.
The University of Central Lancashire artist made the incredible optical illusion by spray painting a battered Skoda Fabia to match the car park and entrance to her art studio.
The car – which was created as part of Sara’s drawing and image making course – is reminiscent of the work of pavement artist Julian Beever whose work has caused a storm in central London.
To create his images, he uses a camera lens to look at the stretch of pavement he is working on and visualise the picture.
He then plots a drawing which will play tricks on the way in which our minds ‘read’ perspective to create an impression of depth on the flat surface of the paving stones.
Among his other works he has created a deep swimming pool realistic enough that shoppers swerve to avoid it, chalked on the street.
His lifelike 3D works of Coca-Cola bottles, sunbathing women and globes appear to spring out of the ground, ready to trip you up.
Last year, a Los Angeles-based Flickr user who calls herself Karakrio started a Flickr group photo pool titled “CD Cover Meme.” She challenged other Flickr users to “make your own CD cover” using the following formula:
1. Generate a name for your band by using WikiPedia’s random page selector tool, and using the first article title on whichever page pops up. No matter how weird or lame that band name sounds.
2. Generate an album title by cutting and pasting the last four words of the final quote on whichever page appears when you click on the quotationspage’s random quote selector tool. No matter what those four words turn out to be.
3. Finally, visit Flickr’s Most Interesting page — a random selection of some of the interesting things discovered on Flickr within the last 7 days — and download the third picture on that page. (Even better: Click on this link to get a Flickr photo that’s licensed under Creative Commons.) Again — no cheating! You must use the photo, no matter how you feel about it.
4. Using Photoshop (or whatever method you prefer), put all of these elements together and create your very own CD cover, then upload it to the CD Cover Meme photo pool.
so…
1. Name – La Castellana, Negros Occidental
2. Album Title – “Do you realize if it weren’t for Edison we’d be watching TV by candlelight?”
-Al Boliska
3. Cover Image
4. The Final CD Cover
Red represents low-energy X-rays, the medium range is green, and the most energetic ones are colored blue. The blue hand-like structure was created by energy emanating from the nebula around they dying star PSR B1509-58. The red areas are from a neighboring gas cloud called RCW 89. Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/P.Slane, et al.
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Tiny and dying but still-powerful stars called pulsars spin like crazy and light up their surroundings, often with ghostly glows. So it is with PSR B1509-58, which long ago collapsed into a sphere just 12 miles in diameter after running out of fuel.
And what a strange scene this one has created.
In a new image from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, high-energy X-rays emanating from the nebula around PSR B1509-58 have been colored blue to reveal a structure resembling a hand reaching for some eternal red cosmic light.
The star now spins around at the dizzying pace of seven times every second — as pulsars do — spewing energy into space that creates the scene.
Strong magnetic fields, 15 trillion times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field, are thought to be involved, too. The combination drives an energetic wind of electrons and ions away from the dying star. As the electrons move through the magnetized nebula, they radiate away their energy as X-rays.
The red light actually a neighboring gas cloud, RCW 89, energized into glowing by the fingers of the PSR B1509-58 nebula, astronomers believe.
The scene, which spans 150 light-years, is about 17,000 light years away, so what we see now is how it actually looked 17,000 years ago, and that light is just arriving here.
A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers).
Photographer Johsel Namkung was Born in Gwangju, Korea in 1919 where he grew up with a love for both art and music. He studied voice at The Tokyo Conservatory in Japan, and in fact, won the All-Japan Music Contest in 1940. Following the war, Johsel and his wife Mineko came to Seattle when they received scholarships to the University of Washington School of Music.
After receiving a Masters in Music at UW, Namkung worked for Northwest Airlines, who hired him because he spoke fluent Korean, Chinese, and Japanese. But in 1956, his love for photography caused him to leave Northwest to study photography and print making full time. His studies included apprenticeships, work in commercial studios, and a week-long workshop with Ansel Adams in 1958. Namkung was a member of the Seattle arts community and was close friends with artists George Tsutakawa, Mark Tobey, and Kenneth Callahan, among others.
Namkung worked for 25 years as a medical photographer at the UW Medical Center, a job that gave him plenty of free time for his nature photography. The UW’s Henry Art Gallery has held several solo exhibitions of Namkung’s nature photographs (1966 and 1973). The Seattle Art Museum held its first Namkung show in 1978, and another in the summer of 2006 at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. Namkung’s photos are in the collections of the Seattle Art Museum, the Oakland Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Henry Gallery. The Allen Center holds two photographs from the 2006 Seattle Art Museum exhibit on the 2nd and 4th floors. -http://www.cs.washington.edu/building/art/JohselNamkung
Holi, also called the Festival of Colours, is a popular Hindu spring festival observed in India, Nepal, and countries with large Hindu diaspora such as Suriname, Guyana, South Africa, Trinidad, the UK, Mauritius and Fiji. In West Bengal of India and Bangladesh, it is known as Dolyatra (Doljatra) or Boshonto Utsav (“spring festival”).
The main day, Holi, also known as Dhulheti, Dhulandi or Dhulendi, is celebrated by people throwing coloured powder and coloured water at each other. Bonfires are lit the day before, also known as Holika Dahan (death of Holika) or Chhoti Holi (little Holi). The bonfires are lit in memory of the miraculous escape that young Prahlad had when Demoness Holika, sister of Hiranyakashipu, carried him into the fire. Holika was burnt but Prahlad, a staunch devotee of Lord Vishnu, escaped without any injuries due to his unshakable devotion. Holika Dahan is referred to as Kama Dahanam in Andhra Pradesh.
Holi is celebrated on the full moon day in the month of Phalugna or Falguna (Phalgun Purnima), which usually falls in the later part of February or March. In 2009, Holi (Dhulandi) was on 11th March and Holika Dahan was on 10th March.
Rangapanchami occurs a few days later on a Panchami (fifth day of the full moon), marking the end of festivities involving colours.
In Vaishnava Theology, Hiranyakashipu is the king of demons, and he had been granted a boon by Brahma, which made it almost impossible for him to be killed. The boon was due to his long penance, after which he had demanded that he not be killed “during day or night; inside the home or outside, not on earth or on sky; neither by a man nor an animal; neither by astra nor by shastra”. Consequently, he grew arrogant, and attacked the Heavens and the Earth. He demanded that people stop worshipping gods and start praying to him.
Despite this, Hiranyakashipu’s own son, (Prahlada), was a devotee of Lord Vishnu. In spite of several threats from Hiranyakashipu, Prahlada continued offering prayers to Lord Vishnu. He was poisoned but the poison turned to nectar in his mouth. He was ordered to be trampled by elephants yet remained unharmed. He was put in a room with hungry, poisonous snakes and survived. All of Hiranyakashipu’s attempts to kill his son failed. Finally, he ordered young Prahlada to sit on a pyre on the lap of his sister, Holika, who could not die by fire by virtue of a shawl which would prevent fire affecting the person wearing it. Prahlada readily accepted his father’s orders, and prayed to Vishnu to keep him safe. When the fire started, everyone watched in amazement as the shawl flew from Holika, who then was burnt to death, while Prahlada survived unharmed, after the shawl moved to cover him. The burning of Holika is celebrated as Holi.
Later Lord Vishnu came in the form of a Narasimha (who is half-man and half-lion) and killed Hiranyakashipu at dusk (which was neither day nor night), on the steps of the porch of his house (which was neither inside the house nor outside) by restraining him on his lap (which is neither in the sky nor on the earth) and mauling him with his claws (which are neither astra nor shastra).
In Vrindavan and Mathura, where Lord Krishna grew up, the festival is celebrated for 16 days (until Rangpanchmi in commemoration of the divine love of Radha for Krishna). Lord Krishna is believed to have popularized the festival by playing pranks on the gopis here. Krishna is believed to have complained to his mother about the contrast between his dark colour and his consort Radha’s fair colour. Krishna’s mother decided to apply colour to Radha’s face. The celebrations officially usher in spring, the celebrated season of love.
There is another story about the origin of Holi. Kamadeva is a god of love. Kama’s body was destroyed when he shot his weapon at Shiva in order to disrupt his penance and help Parvati to marry Shiva. Shiva then opened his third eye, the gaze of which was so powerful that Kama’s body was reduced to ashes. For the sake of Kama’s wife Rati (passion), Shiva restored him, but only as a mental image, representing the true emotional and mental state of love rather than physical lust. The Holi bonfire is believed to be celebrated in commemoration of this event.
Holi is a festival of radiance (Teja) in the universe. During this festival, different waves of radiance traverse the universe, thereby creating various colours that nourish and complement the function of respective elements in the atmosphere.
Teenagers armed with only a £56 camera and latex balloon have managed to take stunning pictures of space from 20-miles above Earth.
Proving that you don’t need Google’s billions or the BBC weather centre’s resources, the four Spanish students managed to send a camera-operated weather balloon into the stratosphere.
Taking atmospheric readings and photographs 20 miles above the ground, the Meteotek team of IES La Bisbal school in Catalonia completed their incredible experiment at the end of February this year.
Building the electronic sensor components from scratch, Gerard Marull Paretas, Sergi Saballs Vila, Marta Gasull Morcillo and Jaume Puigmiquel Casamort managed to send their heavy duty £43 latex balloon to the edge of space and take readings of its ascent.
Created by the four students under the guidance of teacher Jordi Fanals Oriol, the budding scientists, all aged 18-19, followed the progress of their balloon using high tech sensors communicating with Google Earth.
Team leader Gerard Marull, 18, said: “We were overwhelmed at our results, especially the photographs, to send our handmade craft to the edge of space is incredible.”
Completing their landmark experiment on February, the Meteotek team had to account for a wide variety of variables and rely on a lot of luck.
“The balloon we chose was inflated with helium to just over two metres and weighed just 1500 grams,” said Gerard. “It was able to carry the sensor equipment and digital Nikon camera which weighed 1.5kg.
“However, when we launched at 9.10am on that morning the critical point for the experiment was to see if the balloon would make it past 10,000m, or 30,000ft, which is the altitude that commercial airliners fly at.”
Due to the changing atmospheric pressures, the helium weather balloon carrying the meteorological equipment was expected to inflate to a maximum of nine and a half metres as it travelled upwards at 270 metres-per-minute.
“We took readings as the balloon rose and mapped its progress using Google Earth and the onboard radio receiver,” said Gerard.
“At over 100,000ft the balloon lost its inflation and the equipment was returned to the earth.
“We travelled 10km to find the sensors and photographic card, which was still emitting its signal, even though it had been exposed to the most extreme conditions.”
The pupils’ incredible school science project has already caught the attention of the University of Wyoming in the US.
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Simon Hogsberg has just released a new photograph — as in one 100 meter long photograph. We haven’t checked with Guinness but that surely must be some kind of record. Spite the sheer size of the photograph and the morbid name, ‘We’re All Gonna Die’ it is a really amazing piece of work. He basically set up shop on a bridge in Berlin and photographed it for twenty days to put the image together. It’s great for photography of people watching. I found myself confused by the two people who seem to be together and both have a patch over the same eye. They are just past the middle. There are so many interesting shots in this long strip of a photograph. He’s put the entire photograph in a very digestible flash version here.
-http://joshspear.com
Solargraph: Justin Quinnell’s photograph of the Clifton Suspension Bridge Photo: JUSTIN QUINNELL/SWNS.COM
Stunning photographs of landmark captured over six-month period
A series of majestic emerald arcs light up one of Britain’s most iconic landmarks in this stunning photograph taken with one of the longest-ever exposures.
Solargraph: Justin Quinnell’s photograph of the Clifton Suspension Bridge Photo: JUSTIN QUINNELL/SWNS.COM
The spectacular picture shows each phase of the sun over Bristol’s Clifton Suspension Bridge taken over a six month period.
It plots the sun’s daily course as it rises and falls over Brunel’s famous structure, which spans the 702ft (214m) Avon Gorge.
Incredibly, the eerie image was captured on a basic pin-hole camera made from an empty drinks can with a 0.25mm aperture and a single sheet of photographic paper.
Photographer Justin Quinnell strapped the camera to a telephone pole overlooking the Gorge, where it was left between December 19, 2007 and June 21, 2008 – the winter and summer solstices.
His final photograph, called ‘Solargraph’, shows six months of the sun’s luminescent trails and its subtle change of course caused by the earth’s movement in orbit.
The lowest arc shows the first day of exposure on the winter solstice, while the top curves were captured in the middle of summer.
Its dotted lines of light are the result of overcast days when the sun struggled to penetrate the cloud.
Mr Quinnell, a world-renowned pin-hole camera artist, of Falmouth, Cornwall, said the photograph took on a personal resonance after his father passed away on April 13 – halfway through the exposure.
He says the picture allows him to pinpoint the exact location of the sun in the sky at the moment his father passed away.
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http://www.michaelhoppengallery.com
Abandon, by American artist Jeff Bark is a series of elaborately constructed photographs re-examining the relationship between painting and photography. Rich and seductive, the portraits in this series contain a solitary nude figure illuminated against a shadowy domestic backdrop. In the absence of direct narrative it is the introspective abandon of each subject that joins the separate tableaux. Models caught in near limbo; moments of respite and exhalation are presented in Bark’s delicately allegorical work.
Turning on its head the instantaneous nature of photography, Bark painstakingly selects his models, and intricately sculpts details and tensions in his contemporary domestic set pieces. He constructs each environment from scratch tailoring the scenarios to draw out the individual abandon of each model – the time spent constructing each set is comparable to that expended by a painter in their studio. Working with a large format camera and a long exposure time these photographs are not of a climatic instant moment but of a conflation of time; moments of abandon past, present and future rolled into one. Bark’s use of light and shadow are created manually and not digitally, and the results echo the work of the Dutch masters, revealing the contemplation of each figure in shafts of soft illumination. Bark’s colour palate however, is more in keeping with the American 1950’s adult ‘cartoon’ aesthetic. Soft dull greens and browns illuminated with dirty urban sunlight, drawn curtains filtering the chaos and noise of the asphalt jungle.
Like Ingres’ La Grand Odalisque or Oedipus Explains the Riddle of the Sphinx, Bark infuses layer upon layer of information for the viewer to digest. Contemporary urban motifs are prevalent in each image amongst the debris of American consumerism – inflatable plastic swimming pools, telephones, cigarettes, and mass-produced furniture produce seams of narrative. Influenced by Norman Rockwell, Eric Fishcl and filmmaker, David Lynch, Bark creates quiet erotic moods and spheres around his subjects with clues and hints but with nothing explicitly told. Whether gorged and satiated or lost in desire and abandon, the subjects of Bark’s large works are shocking in their honesty, yet always infused with a tenderness and vulnerability.
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The much-anticipated new series of work by Jeff Bark, Woodpecker, is full of dark romanticism. Under the cover of a manufactured night, his young subjects indulge in skinny-dipping, huffing, smoking pot, and moments of introspection echoing Bark’s own memories of his near adulthood.
The subjects of Bark’s previous series, exhibited at Michael Hoppen Contemporary in 2006, were captured in moments of self-contained abandon in formally constructed urban interiors. In Woodpecker, his subjects are pictured in naturalistic outdoor tableaux, sometimes interacting in couples or groups but always with the suggestion an internal isolation. The rich detail, vivid self-contained illumination and the complexity of the constructed surroundings in these photographs draw the viewer into the dense pictorial allegory.
Occupying a space between the classical artistic categories of photography, painting and film – Bark moves against the lure of instantaneous photography. The collaborations, castings, set construction (the swamp took one month to sculpt in a Brooklyn studio) and illusionary narrative in the series bring the act of photo taking closer towards the highly considered processes of both the Old Master tableau and the younger art of cinema. Nothing is built by Bark beyond the edge of the frame and his subjects are snatched out of real time, so the audience is viewing an enactment, a constructed diorama rather than reality. Held together in a film, cinematically constructed, dissected and reassembled – the works can be looked at as individually structurally significant, and also as part of a larger extended narrative.
In these photographs, scenes of dream-like concoctions coexist with unembellished realism. The muted moonlit tones soften the human forms and the watery illumination lends them the appearance of otherworldly creatures indulging in their private fictions, desires and escape. The images are heavy with symbolism: the swamp, at the fringe of urban sprawl is a no mans land between civilization and the wilderness: the swan, recalling the erotic motif of Leda and the swan but also signifying, light, self-transformation and the higher self. On first glance, the location is a rural idyll but on closer inspection urban debris is revealed – a pram, crates, tyres, mattresses, telephone wires, bed frames and a car are strewn amongst the rotting landscape. The corruption of the scenery is mirrored by the corruption of the youth – drugs, disillusionment, violence and sexual behavior, referencing Eric Fischl and his depictions of psychosexual malaise of American prosperity.
Jeff Bark (born 1963) lives and works in New York. Woodpecker is his second exhibition at Michael Hoppen Contemporary.
http://www.marcelogomesphoto.com
http://www.tinyvices.com/Marcelo_Gomes
How did you start your career?
I started taking pictures while I was still working at Index Magazine here in New York. Working there was like art school for me. I never went to art school because I thought I was going to be a diplomat when I was younger, I graduated the University of Iowa with a Political Science degree.
What do you think is your best work so far?
I was really happy with my portfolio of pictures for the Peace and Quiet issue of New York Magazine at the beginning of this year. And I just did a catalog for Urban Outfitters which I’m very excited about, but I think my first book is my best work so far — it’s called “Love and Before, Green and After”, it’s out on Hassla Books.
Who or what has influenced you?
I think working at Index was really influential. Seeing work from Wolfgang Tillmans, Mark Borthwick, Juergen Teller on a regular basis (they all used to shoot for us) was very influential. As well as working for an artist, Peter Halley – he owned Index back then and I learned a lot from him about New York, art, and magazines.
What is your favorite childhood memory?
Playing at the beach every morning with my sister. We grew up in a small beach town in Brazil, and only went to school in the afternoons, so everyday our mom would take us to the beach (which was basically our back yard) and we played there until we had lunch and then we’d go to school. That was really lovely.
What music do you like to work to?
David Bowie (Berlin Trilogy), Caetano Veloso, Brian Eno, Mogwai, Arthur Russell, Robert Wyatt, My Bloody Valentine (I just saw them live for the first time, it was incredible!)
What is the hardest thing you’ve ever done?
Running sprints at 5am (3 times a week for 2 months) during October in Iowa. That was by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
Three people you would love to work with:
I would really like to shoot Malgosia, I think there’s something really special about her. Melanie Ward, and I would to work on some sort of thing with Caetano Veloso, he’s actually the only person I’m still in complete awe of. I met him recently and I couldn’t quite bring myself to say anything other than, “good job, it was a show.” I mean, what a horrible thing to say!
Describe your dream project:
Shooting portraits and spending the day with some of my favorite musicians, and shooting a fashion story where I can take it easy and only shoot during sunrise and sunset for 5 days straight at a beach of my choosing!
Where do you find inspiration?
Everyday stuff, silly color combinations, my girlfriend Letícia, my best friend Zoe.
What are you loving at the moment?
I’m really into this band, The Vivian Girls, and I saw this book of photos by Andrey Tarkovsky (the Russian filmmaker) called “Bright, bright day” that’s really stunning. I started doing nude pictures sort of recently and it’s something I really love doing.
What is something unfashionable that you love anyway?
Sports. I love sports, all of them. American Football, basketball; I love watching sports. Except for golf, golf’s not really a sport.
Film or book that has had a big impact on you:
Film: Les Amants du Pont Neuf by Leos Carax.
Book: Confesso Que He Vivido (Pablo Neruda’s Memoires)
Best advice you have ever been given?
Be nice to people. Everyone, be nice to everyone.
What advice would you give to someone starting out in the industry?
Don’t be so anxious, and be nice!
Who do you think is one to watch? (for example an upcoming artist, band or designer, etc.)
I really like this magazine out of Buenos Aires called Sede (means thirst), they’re doing nice things (they’re not really a fashion magazine). And Dossier from New York, they’re really cool too. Alec and Skye (who’s a really good photographer!), they’re doing great as well! -http://www.theones2watch.com/newwave/846/
Mark Borthwick
This Renaissance man talks about his culinary skills, rock band and art—which he’ll gladly give away for free.
Photographs: David Rosenzweig
Mark Borthwick spent his teenage afternoons doing makeup, picking psychedelic mushrooms in the forest and cooking them into treats for friends. “We’d wake up every day and make each other up,” says Borthwick, now 42 , an iconic photographer and artist. “Makeup was about creating identities and indulging in the individuality in each of us.” Those bucolic, communal days have stuck with Borthwick, from England to France to his current home in NYC.
Borthwick moved to Paris in 1984, bought a small club and started taking pictures of the stylish patrons. Around this time he became close with soon-to-be influential editors of magazines like i-D and The Face. These relationships ensured that his exuberant, sun-drenched style (incorporating nature, architecture and design with fashion) was on its way to mainstream recognition. Eleven years later, the artist moved to New York City with his daughter and wife, designer Maria Cornejo, and began a series of multidisciplinary collaborations both in and outside the fashion industry.
After settling into family life, his work was published extensively in i-D, The Face, Italian Vogue and Purple, while he staged large, all-inclusive public exhibitions. Borthwick takes pride in the fact that he has never had gallery representation, instead preferring to work on his own terms with artists like Mike Mills, Aaron Rose, Sinéad O’ Connor and Sonic Youth. He favors museums over galleries: “Museums are so much more interesting, because there’s no money involved. It allows me to work completely out of context. If you don’t have a gallery, then you aren’t responsible for the business aspect of things. I just give my work away for free. Why not?”
In continuance of his generous spirit, Borthwick loves sharing his art in his live/work space in Boerum Hill. The multistory property is a legitimate creative utopia with guitars, photographs, slides, records and even friends’ phone numbers lining the walls and cluttering the floors. Just as a Borthwick photo is often identifiable by pulsating light leaking across the frame, his work environment is similarly overexposed; floor to ceiling windows let the sun pour into the apartment and further illuminate the art on the walls. Often, friends will stop by to jam or sample the artist’s well-known culinary experiments, which he considers an integral part of his oeuvre.
In 2001, Borthwick added music to his résumé and began a series of collaborations, which evolved into a group called USUN. Featuring local experimental rock musicians such as Hisham Bharoocha, the band reflects a true collective mind-set, feeding off improvisation and communal art gatherings to create serene acoustic folk music, Borthwick says. “There’s no difference in music, art, photography or even cooking for friends,” says Borthwick. “New York has been, and still is, a place where people can enter a free collaborative environment and communicate without words or genre requirements getting in the way.”
To round out his repertoire, a retrospective book about his career will be released in February 2009. Winkingly titled Not in Fashion, the book presents more than 200 vibrant images from Borthwick’s art, fashion editorials and portrait projects, along with a healthy selection of personal journal entries. “I have this new book because I realized that I needed to share content in a new way,” he says.
Borthwick’s Home COBBLE HILL, BROOKLYN
Photographs: David Rosenzweig
• That ’70s show: A stark Danish-modern chair, sheepskin throw and daises create the perfect natural tableau in the sun-drenched green house (right).
• Earthenware tea pots, wooden chopsticks and a stone mortar and pestle (above) are just some of Borthwick’s instruments in the kitchen.
Borthwick’s WORKSPACE
Photographs: David Rosenzweig
• Perfect storm: Borthwick’s studio is awash in slides of his work (left).
• The detritus is artfully arranged (above): mementos, dried flowers and notes are taped to the wall.
Borthwick’s WORK
Photographs: David Rosenzweig
• Rainbow-like sun-streaks are common in Borthwick’s photos.
• These naive, endless summer motifs seem to evoke his youth spent frolicking in the forest with friends.
Borthwicks’s career timeline
1966: Born in London
1984: Moves to Paris; starts a nightclub and works professionally in the fashion industry doing makeup
1986-1990’s: Works as a prominent alterna-fashion photographer for various cult fashion and lifestyle magazines
1994: First daughter, Bibi, is born
1995: Moves to New York City
1996-00’s: Stages major photo exhibitions throughout New York and the world
1998: First son, Joey, is born
1998: Releases Synthetic Voices, which receives the Art Directors Club (New York) Silver Prize for Book Design
2001: Starts playing music with USUN
2004: Releases Speaking for Trees, a DVD collaboration with Cat Power
2009: Releases Not in Fashion, a major career-retrospective book
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http://www.revistasede.com/eng/issues/04/01/index.html
Sede Magazine
N° 4
MARK BORTHWICK, PHOTOGRAPHER, MUSICIAN, POET, COOK. INTERVIEW IN NEW YORK
THE MOSS GARDEN, CHOCOLATE AND GINGER CAKE RECIPE
INTERNET TWO, FREE CONTENT PARTICIPATION
CONVERSATIONS, RANDOM DIALOGUES
LUCIO V. MANSILLA, CAUSERIE FROM 1894 WHERE HE TELLS HIS BEGINNINGS AS A JOURNALIST
CONTRIBUTORS: GUILLERMINA BAIGUERA, MARK BORTHWICK, NICOLAS COHEN, JULIAN GATTO, JUAN MORALEJO
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
MARK BORTHWICK, PHOTOGRAPHER, MUSICIAN, POET, COOK.
INTERVIEW IN NEW YORK BY JULIAN GATTO AND GUILLERMINA BAIGUERA
You are a favourite photographer for bands like Sonic Youth, Black Dice, Cat Power and magazines like Purple, Index, i-D, Self Service. Do you still collaborate with them?
Less. It’s a good time to give new photographers, other people a chance. Cause they’re so generous with you all the time, they give you 20 pages, 30 pages. Other people need those pages. I did, I had my turn. Cause otherwise if you keep using the same people, it’s all the same.
Which photographers do you find interesting now?
Anders Edstrom is a photographer that I really like. He’s also a very good friend of mine.
And magazines?
You know… I’m really not interested in magazines. I’m sorry to say.
You think something is missing?
The commodity, the material… Magazines are always wants and wants, needs and needs. And I don’t think magazines give you or open you up to anything. To be honest I like reading… when I was on holiday… A very good friend of mine is Argentinian, the greatest man in the world. He’s name is Carlos. He has this place in Tulúm, called Tierra del Sol. His girlfriend is argentinian as well. He has five rooms. There’s no restaurant but they cook for you everyday.
Where’s Tulúm?
Mexico, there’s Cancun, and this is an hour ride from there. We were there in the summer. We were having breakfast and there were all this magazines people left. And there were these science magazines… And I was always picking those and I understood that I don’t want to read about things that I know. And there’s no really anything that I really want to know. But I was surprised reading about some of this articles, incredible articles. I also enjoy reading about music. I like Wire, the English music magazine. Just because again, I’m curious and I get the opportunity to hear about things that existed at another time, and you feel they exist now, then you kind of interconnects with everything that we’re doing.
You have some solo records. Now you’re part of the band Usun?
Yes, with Isham Akira Bharoocha, Dave Aron and Scott Mou. It’s improv music and all accoustic. So… if I go on holidays I take the last copy of Wire. But on holidays I want to read a book, I don’t want to read magazines.
What books have you been reading lately?
I read this really heavy heavy heavy book. It was all this documents, theory documents on surrealism. And then I started to read Caetano Veloso’s one called “Tropical Truth: Revolution in Brazil “, which is beautiful but I stopped. I’ll finished reading it another time. Then I read all the cinematic book of Guy Debord, a book that just came out, which is just mindblowing.
He’s kind of heavy too.
Yes… but I like to read that kind of stuff on holiday. You’re so relaxed and your mind is just clear. Some of that always seems so relative. I went to the St.Marks table where everything is four bucks and I got the Guy Debord book and the surrealism one. It’s called something like “Le chavellier du Surrealism” and it’s this guy who wrote these essays, so students understand the basics on surrealism.
We don’t seem to have that in art these days, the radical movements. Everything seems so fragmented and individualistic. What’s your opinion on the art world today?
I think it doesn’t exist anymore, if the art world is a boutique and its like a Calvin Klein boutique in Chelsea. That you go there to buy, a material item to shop, you go shopping, it’s tax-rights off, its an investment. You can feel that. Nothing that’s material is that way, unless if you’re a believer in fulfilling yourself in with need and wants, if that’s what makes you feel good. Some people in the arts lost the goodness in their souls a little bit. But on the other hand I think it’s a very excit-
ing mood. I think it’s great to take it out of context. A person from the news was asking me the other day: You’re an artist. And I don’t feel like an artist and I don’t know what that label means. It’s not like you have an ego that wants to say: I’m a photographer, I’m a cook, a painter, a writer. That means you’re an artist? What is that mean? I like to give things, share things. That’s a really great beginning right now, and I think that’s were we are, it’s really open, and where we’re all sharing this experience together, we’re vibrating together in the same sphere somehow. That feels really good. The Dada show is really interesting for that. That was supposedly the first movement that took art out of the context, of the commodity of product. Took painting out of the context and brought it to the streets, with performances, and it was radical. You could piss on the floor and it was art. And it was true, anything could be art. So for me, if I take pictures of my son, it’s art. But my son is not a piece of art. He happens to be someone I study everyday. He’s a part of me, and makes me feel so good to document him, to be part of his life. But then I realize that if they’re pictures of him on the wall they are material objects that people can buy.
And what do you think of that?
That’s the great thing, you have to have the hability to not to think about it. I don’t sell work so I don’t mind. But it’s hard to talk about yourself, your work. Because the work is just the way you feel. But to share it… we’re given the opportunity to feel the way other people feel. I remember the first show I had in Tokyo, these young Japanese kids just seemed so simple, so wise, so straightforward, just because they felt it. Before I even attached myself to the feeling of what it was about, they felt part of the pictures, they fitted into the pictures. It was their world, it wasn’t that they wanted to become part of that world, it was already their world. So the softness, the gentleness of the pictures, I guess just let people in. Which to me… I think that taught me a lot, because there is another way of getting people’s attention, and that’s creating work that people can react to, which is something I never wanted to do. You don’t know how other people are going to interpret what you’re doing. People want to say things are more radical than they are. That’s the problem too today, cause people try to reinvent theories without existing, because there is no theory behind the feeling. It’s just something that feels good. Do we have to label everything?
No. We don’t, right?
Like starting to lose the direct contact with things?
I think that’s what’s interesting with Dada too, so many people tried to reinvent that… whether it was through the punk movement, or through fashion, or Alleged gallery in its moment… But it’s such valid proof that we’ve gone so far, we have fallen out of track.
You think that’s what happened?
Yeah, completely. Where they put it out of context, we’ve put it back into context, what was art had to become material, like this solid object, that we consume.
But some people are trying to find a way out of that.
Everyone is struggling to find a common view, but also they are in their own seeking personal path. People are continuing looking for the way and then they don’t realize this is the way. This is the way. We don’t have to fill it with all these theories. This is the way, right here right now. Why question it? There isn’t an answer, so why confuse it. In the same way, with this friend of mine Carlos in Mexico, we played this little game, it always felt so good… The second or third day there, I said to him on the beach: “Carlos, today is the day!” and he said: “Mark you are right. Today is the day!” So everyday when we saw each other in the morning for breakfast he would say: “Today is the day!” That’s it, right? That’s the way, cause there isn’t another way. If you’re looking for a way, you’re always going to be looking for a way.
It reminds me of Buddhism, to live in the present moment.
Maybe indirectly, because it’s something I never studied. But I would enjoy, later on to learn more about Buddhism philosophy. But again, I think I have a problem with deciphering information, I’m not a big literary reader. I’m dyslexic.
And how do you deal with New York, where there’s information all the time, when you walk down the street or you get into a supermarket?
I’ll tell you… it’s beautiful. I think I’m so happy to be here, that it doesn’t bother me. It’s true. That’s just my way of being, there’s nothing that’s going to bother me here. And I’m not going to entertain anything that is going to initiate an certain fear or worry. But… you have to get there… that place. When we lived in Manhattan with Maria I think we really wanted to leave. It was too much, everything was too much. Maria was working a lot, I was working a lot, then my kids are busy, everyone is busy, non-stop. But I understood really quickly that this wasn’t working for me anymore, I couldn’t live my life like this. That’s the reason why I first stopped being a fashion photographer. Because I didn’t wanted to participate in the industry, that first of all, I didn’t really believed in, and secondly I don’t believe it’s a contem-porary industry. I’m really interested in the word contemporary, just as a being participating with people within a space. Because I think the fashion world has lost it’s context in so many ways. Without even thinking about it, we’re in a position where we’re living in the now, and that’s contemporary thinking, that’s great. And I thinking having the luxury to be able to find a way, I clearly understood that New York is a very contemporary city. Even though living in Mexico, by the third week on the beach, hanging out with the local families, that we know very well, cause we go back to the same place every year; just watching the simplicity of their life, and feeling so close to them and part of how this people are living, we realize that we’re so far behind. Their life is so simple, and there’s an immediacy you get after living a few weeks there, that you’re so part of the place, you’re so inside it, that you realize: Ok, if I don’t have all these wants and needs, we surround ourselves by an idea that is initiated through that daily. But at the same time, why can’t we just be, there. Everything is just there. Everything’s just simplified in a way, and it always has been, we’re complicating things. We failed, our society failed, it did fail.
But I think with New York, the mind of the people that I surround myself with, we’re in a really good place, it’s an exciting world here right now. But you can’t participate with the world that is out there, like my wife Maria would come back from work, from her store in the city and she’d be complaining about that world. And that world is not going to harm me, it’s not going to touch me, those things are not going to affect the way that I feel. I mean, it’s the same thing with not participating reading the newspaper and watching the news and filling yourself with all the media. I used to love reading every morning for 20 years the french newspaper Liberation, and then when I was in Paris I’d get the Herald Tribune. So every morning for 45 minutes I’d read the newspaper back to back. I loved it. Every day I though I was nurturing myself, finding myself withing politics, and to find my own way, and to know where I stood. But I found myself reacting to it, and then I’d get too sad. Cause I was too sensitive to this information, cause you see all this horrific images, and that’s what hapens, we are being bombared by these images. I knew that I couldn’t live in a world where these images existed, or that I gave a chance to exist on their own accord.
And how do you do with your kids?
I don’t know… In my little world, I have to think of Maria and the kids, cause for me it’s very simple: I find my joy in their joy. If Maria and the kids are happy then I’m happy. I’d love to take my son out of this regimented idea of what education is. I did that with my daughter Bebe and she’s just an extra-ordinary child, so open and so wise but at the same time really understanding too that she doesn’t have to know everything, she doesn’t have to be… the best! I don’t like education as a competition, school as a competition, or “this is how you have to be to part of society”. I’m really against any theory that gets into that. Like at her age now, fifteen years old, she understands that she’s not interested in science, she had really hard problem with mathematics and algebra, it’s just not her. The same with me. I can’t see numbers, I can’t speak numbers, money doesn’t exist to me, anything with numbers, money, it’s just no. It’s really great to just nurture her that, to let her understand that it’s ok, this doesn’t have to be part of your life, don’t make it difficult for yourself in school. Because your parents could make your life hell, when you go through school. You nurture that daily, you don’t have to struggle to find it. Love is real, in the same way with ” Today is the day”. If we share our love with people, then we’re on the good track.
You’re optimistic about the future.
There will be shifts in our lives… But that doesn’t answer the question whether New York is a good place to be. I don’t know… it’s difficult to say. Cause I don’t really agree with the politics here, I don’t agree with the politicians, and I don’t want to be involved with it. But I am interested in having a point of view, but it’s a self-point, trying to find another way, but that way is something that we all have access to, which is getting rid of all the the ways that we’ve been told to. And life in Tulúm, or anywhere else, could be a dream. I’m not sure if North America will exist in the future, some countries will disappear and fade away. This is not a country that set by any standards a good example to the rest of the world. So this will disappear or will turn into something else.
So you’re saying that if have your group of people and friends, the surroundings could be really different and it wouldn’t really matter?
It’s really interesting and I don’t know if it’s the older you get, that you have more experiences, but you go certain places and you feel good. You arrive on the beach on holiday, or you go upstate to the country or you go to a park for tea. With me it’s outside, always outside. If you take those feelings it could be anywhere, as long as you are in peace with yourself and the surroundings, and everyone around you. I try to be with Maria and the kids outside, as much as possible, and I try to nurture that cause I think that’s really where we’re from. I’d like to get closer to that the older I get, or to be in an environment which is really outside, where the temperature is pretty consistent the all year round… I’m not against winters and summers, but I really like the idea of always living outside. All day… being one with the birds.
It reminds me of “Speaking for Trees”, the film you did with Chan Marshall from Cat Power. She sings her songs in the forest and you can hear the birds, the wind, the trees.
Yes.
And in your new house in Brooklyn you have a back yard where you invite friends and cook for them.
Yes.
You cook for everyone?
Yes.
Is it hard?
Yes… No… it’s easy, ha.
Are you the only cook in the house?
Yes. My girl was well trained but not anymore… she’s fifteen and kissing. She’s up to other things right now. And Joey, yeah, he’s alright, he’s
going to definitely take over.
When did you start cooking?
When we were kids we used to take a lot of mushrooms. You could just pick them in the fields in England, the really small ones. But you must take like 40 or 60 of them to get high, so we’ve go pick them and I would make toast. I remember people don’t liking to eat them, so I was like: “Oh I’ll make it in an ommelet or a toast with jam or garlic” and then slowly I became the cook in the house. And the house was like eight people, like a bedsit kind of place.
That was in London?
No, actually that was in the countryside. At this college I went to, but not for very long, I was thrown out.
For making people mushrooms?
Yes… I started floating there and I never went down… It’s all because of the mushrooms, ha… That’s great right? I think from that age I really liked that idea, where magic time was a good time to cook for everybody, when everyone smokes and wants to eat.
So you are a self-taught cook?
Yes.
And with photography you’re self-taught too?
Yes.
And how did you became interested with taking photos?
I was in London, partying a lot and I wanted to stop but not consciously. So I began to take black and white pictures, which I could only develop at night, when the room was really dark. So that way I stopped going out to so many parties.
But you do have some rules with photography right? Don’t you take one picture of your son everyday when you take him to school?
But I don’t see it as a rule. I take him to school every morning and we have so much fun taking pictures. But after a few weeks or a few months the pictures were all the same thing. Which is great but it became more interesting to take one picture. Not because I didn’t wanted to have a choice or about creating a rule. You know, sometimes you take pictures and there’s a picture on the roll that somehow doesn’t exist, like you question it: “Why did I take that picture?” Or sometimes the camera is sitting here and you press the button and by accident you take the picture and it is out of focus or something. And because that picture is so different from all the others, it’s the one picture that you look at. So I was always intrigued about those moments. When I lived in Manhattan I lived on 24th Street and 11th, and I got a little studio on 28th. So every morning I would walk there and walk back. And the location was where I was taking a lot of pictures at the time, like concrete walls. And I was always shooting fashion stories and catalogues, always shooting there. So I just liked this idea, I don’t know why, to not to think about what was I going to shoot, but at the same time just take a picture of something that I never photographed before. So I wasn’t thinking about it, but because I created this rule, there was never an option about taking a picture of that again. So basically what happened was that every single time I took a picture again, it became a random thing. But those random things there weren’t really that random. I’ve been photographing things on the floor: weeds or cigarette butts or newspapers, other things, other cracks, just stuff. That just became part of daily life, it’s just things that you see. You find so much beauty in those smaller details that we notice everyday, but other people don’t notice. I realized after a few months in doing it that all these images we’re finding there own importance without me initiating a relevance around them, or trying to shoot them. And also again, the idea of just surprising yourself.
You always find a way to surprise yourself?
Always… yes. But that’s because with photography, in a certain way, everything that you photograph is everything that you love to look at, so you’re vibrating at that level already. There’s a certain moment when you don’t need to do anything anymore, the documentation of it is already there cause you feel it.
And when did you start taking these kind of pictures you gave us for the magazine?
It has been in the last couple of years, just opening the back and letting the light in. If you want the pictures to get yellow, you open the back of the camera, inside the house when it’s not too bright. If you open it in the sun, it gets red and orange. I’ve been doing this for years, even in my first book “Synthetic voices” the first picture with Bebe is just that. When that happened it was a mistake, when that happened I was just like wow! It’s about not wanting to have any control of the images whatsoever. Cause what happens when you do that, is that the five pictures before that one are gone, and the five pictures after that are gone. You don’t know which pictures are going to come out. No idea. Sometimes it’s two pictures on a roll of film… It’s crazy. You realize that nothing exists, right? Cause it doesn’t exist, you see? It doesn’t. You know what I mean right? If you give importance to this objects, these things around you, and you take photographs of them, in your mind you have all this stuff recorded, and then you get the roll of film and they’re not there…
You like to hide things.
I remember once, long long time ago, I did a fashion story for a magazine, which was a girl walking with a plastic bag over her shoulders, and the editor called up and was like: “So where are the credits?” And I said: “Oh I put the clothes in the bag, so this one is Calvin Klein, the other is… It’s all in the bag, it’s the same right? You just write the name of the brand”. That’s all they want, the name written in the page.
Did they print that?
No, they didn’t get it.
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http://www.fecalface.com/SF/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=292
Fecal Face
Mark Borthwick
Written by Kate Sennert
Tuesday, 22 August 2006
Experimental filmmaker, photographer and musician Mark Borthwick became well known for his award winning avant-garde fashion photography. More recently he can be found collaborating on films with such innovators as Mike Mills, Chan Marshal and Chloe Sevigny, as well as creating site-specific installations of his photographs, mixed with drawings and texts, frequently accompanied by performances, musical events and dinner parties. His perceptive and seemingly effortless images evoke the satisfactions of home, family and harmony with nature. Born in London, Mark Borthwick currently lives with his wife and two children in Brooklyn, New York.
Borthwick was interviewed at the time of his recent exhibition, IS MY NATURE MY ONLY WAY? at The Journal Gallery in New York by Kate Sennert, editorial contributor to The Journal, V, The Blow Up and Tokion. Sennet first met Borthwick at Alleged Gallery when “he threw some clothes on me and took some pictures.” If you are in SF, you can view Borthwick’s work in the current group exhibition at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in the group exhibition, Cosmic Wonder.
Kate Sennert: I’ve been very fortunate to attend some of your dinners and performances, which have been wonderful, thank you. As an artist, it must be extremely different for you to have this kind of sensory-driven experience where you have people come over, you have plants, you have smells, you have tastes.. How do you then pick up a camera or make a film? What’s the difference for you?
Mark Borthwick: It’s all the same.
KS: So you feel like when you are doing photography that you can accomplish all those multidimensional feelings?
MB: It’s just attaching yourself to that feeling. For me, it was an enormous awakening to realize that there was a certain period in my life, maybe five years ago, for the ten years prior to that, where I struggled between the idea of Here I am today, I’m writing, the next day I’m drawing, the next day I’m taking pictures, and the next day I’m with the kids. Because there was no time, I never gave myself time to actually edit the pictures, or analyze the pictures, and question what I was doing and I realized that I never wanted to attach myself to that question. That question was never involved in the way that I was working; I was never practicing the idea of trying to understand what I was doing, what I was putting out there. I just wanted to leave it for what it was.
KS: Let it rest?
MB: Yeah. It’s the same with photographs; after a while you realize that… YOU have to see them.
KS: So, there is no separation between these disciplines?
MB: There was a separation, but there was a certain point when everything came together and I understood it. All of my friends were pushing me to do a restaurant or do something… and then the moment I stopped working commercially as a photographer, I realized that what was entertaining my life the most was the idea of bringing people together. So, whether it’s a small dinner party at home or cooking for a hundred people, it’s the same thing. It’s giving people that opportunity to share that experience.
KS: Are you doing editorial photography now at all?
MB: No.
KS: How do you feel about being able to bring this sort of “artistic picture” to people that aren’t coming to your house, or seeing your exhibition in the gallery? How are those people being reached, and does that matter to you?
MB: I had to stop editorial photography for two reasons. First of all, there’s a new wave of photographers out there and it’s their generation’s right to have those pages. I always had that luxury of being given twenty, thirty pages over and over again. And I started saying that it’s time to give those pages to a new photographer. I had my time. And I wanted to experience a way of sharing the work in a different way.
KS: More intimately?
MB: No. That doesn’t mean that I don’t want to participate in any magazine today. I got asked to contribute some pictures for the next issue of Purple, for instance, and I very happily will. But I was in fashion. I was always trying to find a new way of approaching how we use clothes, how we apply clothes, and how to attach myself to what it meant to be a fashion photographer. That was something that has always been very important to me. But I was placing too much importance onto continually putting myself in a position where I was questioning the industry. What is the importance of clothing? What is the importance of fashion? I think I lost that importance because I no longer believed in the industry itself.
KS: It must have been also exhausting to be one of the few people in the forefront questioning that.
MB: No, no, it’s exhausting in the sense that you’re continually put into a position of a student. You have these hypocritical fashion editors out there, a few of them that try to attain their rules and put that forth. I don’t believe in any of it anymore and fashion itself has become extremely unfashionable in that sense. Especially today, I think it’s amazing to hang out on stoops here, where we live and see there’s another way. There’s always another way. Magazines took such a step backwards over the last twenty years trying to close the door to the other way. And I’m always interested in the other way, and I attach myself to that, whether it’s with the clothes, the music, the cooking or just the idea of bringing people together. There’s so much joy to be had with the small little events that happen to you daily. Te last couple of days have been magical. I walk out of this place, vibrating at a pace that’s just phenomenal. There could be two or three people walking down the street, could be a kid and its mother and they sit down on the floor and… that’s very precious. That lasts forever.
Answering what you said before about reaching a larger audience again with this, that’s what I’m interested in now. I’m not trying to make it bigger than what it is, but at the same time, I’m interested to see where it can go. I like putting myself in a position where I’m back at the beginning again, and just nurture that. It’s so much less about me and so much more about communicating and listening to the audience and people around. Maybe that’s what this is about: that I gave myself the opportunity to take a step out and just listen for a while.
KS: Have you recorded any of your music?
MB: I spent a day recording right before the show (at The Journal). I’m going to open a little label called Wild Runner, so that I can share my friends’ music as well. We have been recording all of the events [at The Journal] daily. We are getting them up on the net so people can download it and listen to each daily concert for free.
installation @ The Journal Gallery
Samples of entries from the Andy Goldsworthy Digital Catalogue DVD (Volume One: 1976-1986)
http://www.goldsworthy.cc.gla.ac.uk
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Stones sinking in sand
Morecambe Bay, Lancashire
March 1976
‘This is a very physical piece. I had to move alot of stones in one day, between the tides. It wasn’t even a full day. The line of stones physically effected the place and the people who walked along the beach. People had to step over it. A horseback rider jumped over it. I revisited it several times and saw it sink into the sand and disappear. I often think of it still being there, although I know it isn’t intact.’ [AG, Penpont, 11/11/2003]
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First red pool
Morecambe Bay, Lancashire
February 1977
In the first months of 1977, AG working at Morecambe, ‘Uses iron-rich stone found found on the beach and ground into a powder (a technique that he will employ in 1987, 1992-95, 1997)’. [Time, 2000, p. 181]
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Partly stripped sycamore twigs
Ilkley, Yorkshire
April 1978
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Mud-edged trench
Bentham, Yorkshire
April 1979
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Green patch (elm)
[Leaf patches
edges made by finding leaves the same size
tearing one in two
spitting underneath and pressing flat onto one another]
Middleton Woods, Yorkshire
7 Novemeber 1980
Diary: 7th Nov Ilkley
Middleton Woods -
Collected green elm leaves
on the way – took a few
from each tree – the
only place there were any
green – back to wood
- elm leaves on ground
made green patch.
——-
AG said of this work in a 1983 documentary ‘Triangle’:
‘I wanted to concentrate that [intensity?] in a patch, I made the edge of the patch by finding say a green leaf and an ordrinary leaf I tore the green leaf in half, spat underneath the one I tore in half and pressed it on top of the other one so it became one leaf.’ [AG, Triangle, Border Television, 1983]
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Snowball
Middleton Woods, Yorkshire
29 April 1981
Diary: 29th April
Saw last bit of snow from
flat window on Middleton
side.
Collected snow – made ball
carried into wood – heavy
long way – dripping wet.
Went back to see how
it was getting on – mainly to see it
melt to nothing – as
I was leaving a man
came – I hurried across
got there just in time to see
him kick it in stream.
- hurt.
Didn’t say anything – outside
I forfeit the right of possession.
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Feathers plucked from dead heron
cut with sharp stone
stripped down one side
about three-and-a-half feet overall length
made over three calm days
cold mornings
frost
smell from heron becoming pungent as each day warmed up
Swindale Beck Wood, Cumbria
24- 26 February 1982
Diary: 23rd/24th, 25th, 26th Feb.
worked more on yesterday’s heron
feathers – extended – better
a good work.
heavy frost at first.
used stone with
sharp edge
to cut feathers
then stripped one
side to
make white
edge.
Heron smelling – had to
hold breath when plucking.
About 3 1/2 feet in length.
25th pleasant
sunny
occasional
hazy cloud.
26th cloudy, still calm.
[AG made a brief sketch to work out the shape of this work. On the adjacent page, he noted technique for spliiting the feathers:' cut with stone with sharp edge, stripped down middle - not easy!'. Overleaf, he made a much more worked up sketch across two pages.]
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AG explained his use of feather in the 1983 documentary ‘Triangle’:
‘I chopped off with a stone the bottom shaft/part of the feather and the top of the feather then peeled down the centre to reveal the white inner shaft… So in a way I killed off the initial appearance of the feather but what I hoped to get was the essential quality of feather. I won’t accept things on the surface, I want to go a bit deeper, I want to get under the surface. It would not only express how I was feeling about the particular material but how I feel about Herons and birds and that whole area. ‘ [AG, 'Triangle', Border Television, 1983]
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Slate arch
made over two days
fourth attempt
Blaenau Ffestiniog, Wales
18-19 May 1982
Diary: 19th May.
sunny – cloudy.
went same place as
yesterday.
Tried to build arch-
wide span -
built over stones
Then pulled out
colapsed 3 times
gave up – leg hurt
in last collapse.
18th May – leg still hurting but went up – wanted to rebuild arch.
rain on way -am worried – slate
goes very slippery
wanted to build an arch
with the extra tensions of
[...] – things that are counter to the way
of an arch.
[...]
stones
do not
make a
stong arch!
Arch is a very human form – unusual
for me to feed off architecture – I have
been attracted to the archs used around
Brough – I wanted to experience
the skill of making an arch.
a few dangerous slips/
movements – nearly collapsed
amazing feeling when last supporting
stone removed
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Bracken stripped down one side
pinned to ground with
silvers of bracken stalks
Brough, Cumbria
5 September 1982
Diary: 5th Sept. Swindale beck wood.
Tired after exhibition etc. However
enjoyed myself – bracken stripped
down one side
About 1 1/2 paces
in length.
Pegged with
slivers of dead bracken.
overcast – wind.
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Torn line in garlic leaves
Swindale Beck, Cumbria
9 May 1983
Diary: 9th May
Swindale Beck – garlic leaves – torn line – strange effects
happening with the leaves – subtle greens [...]
enjoyed it – much better day.
Felt good to find
something so responsive
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Elder leaf patch
edge made by finding leaves the same size
tearing one in two
spitting underneath and pressing flat on to another
Helbeck, Cumbria
October 1983
Diary: 10th Oct
Helbeck Woods
Wet earth but no longer raining
fairly calm to begin with but
now very windy – blew work
away
rain
again.
elder purple patch
the colour of the stain left
by sycamore leaves.
——-
AG said of this work in a 1983 documentary ‘Triangle’:
‘I wanted to concentrate that [intensity?] in a patch, I made the edge of the patch by finding say a green leaf and an ordrinary leaf I tore the green leaf in half, spat underneath the one I tore in half and pressed it on top of the other one so it became one leaf.’[AG, Triangle, Border Television, 1983]
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Started to rain
laid down
waited
left a dry shadow
Haarlemmerhout, Holland
29 August 1984
Diary: 29th – plane bark, body shadow
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Line to follow colour in stones
St. Abbs, Scotland
31 May 1985
Diary: 31st May St. Abbs
a line
to explore
colours
of rocks
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Carefully broken pebbles
scratched white with another stone
St. Abbs, Scotland
1 June 1985
Diary: 1st June
In the evening went to small
beach to work as the sun
went down – time the
completion of work with
sundown – broken stones
-cracked in two -not easy.
Scratched white around cracks
- made a sort of spiral which
suited this work – this is how
forms such as spirals/circles/balls
appear – out of the making and not
taken out there to be imposed
When I do that work is stiff
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Dandelion flowers
pinned with thorns to rosebay willowherb stalks
held above the bluebells with bracken forks
Brough, Cumbria
8 June 1985
Diary: 8th June Swindale. I have waited for
dandelions to appear again after the ring (4th)
It has been overcast/raining ever since. But
today sun shining! Cloudy as well
Had to wait until almost midday for
dandelions to fully open and dry out
Went off in the car searching around Brough
And change at the woods – bracken
now rising about bluebells which are
now past their peak – this work couldn’t
have been made any later in (a matter of days)
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Woven branch arch
Langholm, Dumfriesshire
April 1986
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Floating hole
Loughborough, Leicestershire
September 1986
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The Andy Goldsworthy Digital Catalogue is the result of a collaborative effort involving Andy Goldsworthy, The Crichton Foundation, and University of Glasgow’s Crichton Campus and Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII). The Digital Catalogue constitutes a unique resource: comprising approximately 3,500 images, it documents the 2,700 or so sculptures that Goldsworthy made in the ten-year period 1976-1986, and gives unprecedented access to Goldsworthy’s early working practices and contexts.
Project Background
Professor Rex Taylor, Director of the University of Glasgow’s Crichton Campus 1999-2005, and Tom Pow initially discussed the possibility of developing a collaborative project during a visit that they made to Andy Goldsworthy’s studio in Penpont, Dumfriesshire in 2001.
On that occasion, they sowed the germ of an idea: the possibility of digitising and cataloguing Goldsworthy’s Slide Cabinet Index, and of locating the resulting Digital Catalogue at the University of Glasgow’s Crichton Campus. Goldsworthy was particularly keen to support his ‘home’ campus, and it was intended that the resulting resource would be made available to international scholars and researchers through the Crichton.
Professor Taylor enlisted vital support from Barbara Kelly, Convenor of the Crichton Foundation, and from Professor Seamus Ross, Director of the University of Glasgow’s HATII (Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute), whose department has provided technical expertise and support throughout the project’s duration.
Project Funding
The project underwent three phases of development, each of which was supported with funding from private individuals and organisations local to Dumfries, all with the aim of supporting the establishment of the Crichton Campus locally, nationally and internationally as a Higher Education and Research destination. Without their support, the Digital Catalogue project would not have come to fruition.
Phase one – 2002-2003: Software Development
With funds generously given by anonymous donors, Brian Aitken is hired to develop the Digital Catalogue software.
Phase two – 2003-2004: Digitising and Cataloguing
With funds from the Crichton Foundation, Dr. Tina Fiske is appointed Crichton Foundation Andy Goldsworthy Research Fellow, and project manager 2003-2004, with support from Grainne Rice, and Helen Nisbet.
Phase three – 2006: DVD-Rom Development
With funds generously given by anonymous donors, Dr. Tina Fiske and Brian Aitken undertake the final completion phase, with assistance from Rebecca Bell and Natalie Reid.
Project Brief
The project brief focused on Goldsworthy’s Slide Cabinet Index, and the considerable collection of slides and transparencies that document his ephemeral practice. Its aims were as follows:
- Digitise the contents of the Slide Cabinet Index for the years 1976-1986 as a preservative measure
- Digitise additional images from the wider collection of slides and transparencies relating to the Slide Cabinet, to further elucidate the making and context of those works
- Catalogue the date & location information noted in the Slide Cabinet, and to augment this with reference to Goldsworthy’s publications, and new material from his Sketchbook Diaries made available for the first time
- Make the above available to scholars and researchers through the Crichton Campus, Dumfries.
It was decided to dedicate on the efforts of the project on the first ten years of Goldsworthy’s practice, insofar that material was deemed most vulnerable, and because it includes a significant proportion of early work not known or accessible to the research community. 1976-1986 brackets the period in which Goldsworthy established the principles of his practice. It is characterised by experimentation and exploration, and is prior to Goldsworthy’s gaining gallery representation in 1987.
Project Team
Andy Goldsworthy Research Fellow and Project Manager: Dr. Tina Fiske
Software Developer and Digital Catalogue Designer: Brian Aitken, HATII University of Glasgow
Digitiser and Cataloguer: Grainne Rice
Project Assistants: Rebecca Bell, Helen Nisbet, and Natalie Reid
Technical support: Mike Black, HATII University of Glasgow
Manufacturing #17, Deda Chicken Processing Plant, Dehui City, Jilin Province, 2005
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May Day V (2006), at Matthew Marks
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99 Cent (1999)
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Kamiokande(2007)
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May Day IV(2000)
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Chicago Board of Trade II(1999)
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Andreas Gursky makes large-scale, colour photographs distinctive for their incisive and critical look at the effect of capitalism and globalisation on contemporary life.
Gursky studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie in the early 1980s and first adopted a style and method closely following Becher’s systematic approach to photography, creating small, black-and-white prints. In the early 1980s, however, he broke from this tradition, using colour film and spontaneous observation to make a series of images of people at leisure, such as hikers, swimmers and skiers, depicted as tiny protagonists in a vast landscape.
Since the 1990s, Gursky has concentrated on sites of commerce and tourism, making work that draws attention to today’s burgeoning high-tech industry and global markets. His imagery ranges from the vast, anonymous architecture of modern day hotel lobbies, apartment buildings and warehouses to stock exchanges and parliaments in places from as far a field as Shanghai, Brasília, Los Angeles and Hong Kong. Although his work adopts the scale and composition of historical landscape paintings, his photographs are often derived from inauspicious sources: a black and white photograph in a newspaper, for example, that is then researched at length before the final photograph is shot and often altered digitally before printing.
Andreas Gursky was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1955. He has exhibited internationally, including Sydney Biennial (2000), 25th São Paolo Biennial (2002) and Shanghai Biennale (2002). He has had numerous solo exhibitions, including Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (1998) (touring), Milwaukee Art Museum (1998) (touring). A solo exhibition was organised by Museum of Modern Art (2001) that toured to Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, MCA Chicago and SF MOMA, San Francisco.
The scene of tribal conflicts and guerrilla incursions, Ethiopia’s Omo Valley is also home to fascinating rites and traditions that have survived for thousands of years. The nomadic peoples who inhabit this valley share a gift for body painting and elaborate adornments borrowed from nature, and Hans Silvester has captured the results in a series of photographs made over the course of numerous trips.
In this region of East Africa, the rivers that run through the dry savannas are home to abundant flowers, papyrus, and wild fruit trees, and this luxuriance becomes an invitation to creativity and spectacle. Within hand’s reach, a multitude of plants inspire fanciful and ephemeral self-decoration, and the Omo react spontaneously: a leaf, root, seed pod, or flower is quickly transformed into an accessory. As in the West one might don a hat, people create caps from tufts of grass. As one would knot a tie or scarf, they ornament themselves with banana leaves or a stem laden with flowers. These decorations are embellished with butterfly wings, buffalo horns, boar’s teeth, colorful feathers, and the like, and are further enhanced by body painting with pigments made from powdered stone, plants, berries, and river mud. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
http://www.lamaisonpresbastille.com/habit_nature.php?test=32
Member of the Rapho agency since 1965, Hans Silvester was born on 2 October 1938 in Lörrach in Germany. First photos at age 14. A graduate of the school of Freiburg in 1955, he traveled throughout Europe and began to publish a children’s book about the life of a family of squirrels: already manifested this love of nature and animals and concern for ecology that would leave more.
At the same time, he made a report on the Camargue. These photos in black and white, are accompanied by texts by Jean Giono. The work marks the beginning of success at the same time as the beginning of a long love affair with Provence, where he settled in 1962.
In 1964, he was sent to South America on behalf of a charitable organization, then he spends six months in the United States and Central America. Follows a long series of reports around the world: Japan, Portugal, Egypt, Tunisia, Hungary, Italy, Spain … without forgetting Provence.
Each trip results in a book or a publication.
A tireless traveler, Silvester made in the 90s, several stays in Rajasthan, which he brings a wonderful testimony on the lives of women in the Indian desert, and now it is up to Ethiopia and gives us to see a surprising and superb ensemble photographs of peoples of the Omo Valley in which we find humanity and goodness that characterizes all his work.
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sally mann on charlie rose(skip to 34:29)
http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/mann/#
http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/what_remains/index.html
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/mann_sally.html
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Sally Mann (born May 1, 1951,Lexington, Virginia) is an American photographer.
Mann attended The Putney School, Bennington College and Friends World College, and earned a B.A., summa cum laude, from Hollins College (now Hollins University) and an M.A. in writing.
After graduation Mann became a staff photographer for Washington and Lee University in her hometown. Her mother ran the University’s book store. Her father was the primary physician in town.
In the mid-1970s her boss, Frank Parsons, encouraged her to photograph the construction of Washington and Lee’s new law school, Lewis Hall. Mann’s first one-woman exhibition came in late 1977 at the Corcoran Galley of Art in Washington, D.C., with surrealistic images of the construction of a new law building at Washington and Lee.
Mann’s work has stimulated controversy[citation needed] beginning with her second published collection, At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women (1988). To critics, these portraits “captured the confusing emotions and developing sexual identities of girls at that transitional age, one foot in childhood and one foot in the adult world.”[citation needed], but for many the photographs portray a child’s innocence.
Her next collection was Immediate Family in 1992. These images gained notoriety for including nude photographs of her own children. Some critics called her work ‘child pornography’. Her photographs continue to be shown in and collected by most major American art galleries and museums.[citation needed]
A recent collection of work, entitled What Remains (2005), features dream or nightmare-like images made with the antiquated glass plate process collodion, of rustic scenes in the pictorialist style, some including dead and decaying human bodies. Another series in the same body of work features images of the Antietam battlefield. The book closes with a series of images of Mann’s children. Many of the images appear to have been highly manipulated – scratched and otherwise maimed for artistic intent – however this is just a result of the imperfect collodion process. Mann has admitted to not wanting to perfect this process, as she feels the unintentional streaks and scratches add something to her photographs.
Mann’s most recent works have been landscapes or “land portraits” of rural areas of Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia. Most of it is untitled, and can be found in a collection called Deep South. These images were photographed using damaged lenses and cameras, creating a ghostlike effect and producing images full of light leaks.
Mann’s black-and-white photos are shot with an 8×10 large format camera. Mann lives in Lexington with her husband and three children, Jessie, Emmett, and Virginia.
Recognition
Her works are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Corcoran Gallery of Art, among many others.
Time magazine named Mann its “Photographer of the Year” for 2001. Photos she took have appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine twice: first, a picture of her three children for a 1992 feature on her “disturbing work”[5]; and again in 2001, with a self-portrait (which also included her two daughters) for a theme issue on “women looking at women.”
She is the subject of a documentary, What Remains which covers her entire artistic career. It premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and was featured at the 2006 Seattle International Film Festival, among many others. -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Mann
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’scuse the lack of proper titling, as i was just entranced by the work and in a haste to share
but if need be, holler and we can together search for more objective labeling -tj
(do please click to enlarge)
The View from Everest
Credit & Copyright: Roddy Mackenzie Explanation: What would it be like to stand atop the tallest mountain on Earth? To see a full panoramic vista from there, scroll right. Visible are snow peaked mountains near and far, tremendous cliffs, distant plateaus, the tops of clouds, and a dark blue sky. Mt. Everest stands 8.85 kilometers above sea level, roughly the maximum height reached by international airplane flights, but much less than the 300 kilometers achieved by a space shuttle. Hundreds of people have tried and failed to climb the behemoth by foot, a feat first accomplished successfully in 1953. About 1000 people have now made it to the summit. Roddy Mackenzie, who climbed the mountain in 1989, captured the above image. Mt. Everest lies in the Himalaya mountains in the country of Nepal. In the native language of Nepal, the mountain’s name is “Sagarmatha” which means “forehead of the sky.”
The Crown of the Sun
Credit & Copyright: Hartwig Luethen Explanation: During a total solar eclipse, the Sun’s extensive outer atmosphere, or corona, is an inspirational sight. The subtle shades and shimmering features of the corona that engage the eye span a brightness range of over 10,000 to 1, making them notoriously difficult to capture in a single picture. But this composite of 28 digital images ranging in exposure time from 1/1000 to 2 seconds comes close to revealing the crown of the Sun in all its glory. The telescopic views were recorded near Kochenevo, Russia during the August 1 total solar eclipse and also show solar prominences extending just beyond the edge of the eclipsed sun. Remarkably, features on the dark near side of the New Moon can also be made out, illuminated by sunlight reflected from a Full Earth.
Happy People Dancing on Planet Earth
Credit: Matt Harding & Melissa Nixon Explanation: What are these humans doing? Dancing. Many humans on Earth exhibit periods of happiness, and one method of displaying happiness is dancing. Happiness and dancing transcend political boundaries and occur in practically every human society. Above, Matt Harding traveled through many nations on Earth, started dancing, and filmed the result. The video is perhaps a dramatic example that humans from all over planet Earth feel a common bond as part of a single species. Happiness is frequently contagious — few people are able to watch the above video without smiling.
The Galactic Center Radio Arc
Credit: Farhad Zadeh et al. (Northwestern), VLA, NRAO Explanation: What causes this unusual structure near the center of our Galaxy? The long parallel rays slanting across the top of the above radio image are known collectively as the Galactic Center Radio Arc and jut straight out from the Galactic plane. The Radio Arc is connected to the Galactic center by strange curving filaments known as the Arches. The bright radio structure at the bottom right likely surrounds a black hole at the Galactic center and is known as Sagittarius A*. One origin hypothesis holds that the Radio Arc and the Arches have their geometry because they contain hot plasma flowing along lines of constant magnetic field. Images from the Chandra X-ray Observatory appear to show this plasma colliding with a nearby cloud of cold gas.
The modern camera is a wonderful thing, but it’s nice to remember how simple the mechanism can be. You can strip away the technology until there is little left but the abstraction on which the machine is based. A simple manipulation of space, a few materials, and a couple of hand tools and the magic (physics) is at your fingertips without sophisticated engineering.
To simplify these cameras as much as possible I made them out of the 11×14 inch photo-paper itself. There is no film in the camera because the camera is the film. Like a salad bowl made of lettuce leaf, and consumed with the meal, the camera doesn’t exist after its utility is fulfilled. There is no machine. It is more of an arrangement than a thing.
Since it is color paper, sensitive to the full spectrum of visible light, there is no “safe” light recommended for darkroom work. Each paper box camera is cut, folded, and constructed in the dark and kept in a dark bag until its moment in the sun has come.
The pinhole in the brass plate is all that is needed to project an image into the inside surface of the box (more on that later), but light also seeps through the cracks and flaps of the box construction and soaks through the black tape that holds the whole thing together. The streaks and burns and flares that appear on the final image are the result of this ambient radiation and although it can be somewhat controlled, it also depends largely on “random” factors.
Back in the darkroom, the brass lens plate is folded back like a hatch-cover in the Mark I (the Rectangle), revealing the hole in the box. In the Mark II (The Square) the lens plate caps the apex of the pyramid and can be removed by tearing away the tape that holds it in place. A funnel is placed in the hole and the camera becomes like a leaky juice carton as the chemicals are poured in and sloshed around for a couple of minutes each. Rigorous adherence to optimal chemistry technique is already out the window here, so I decided not too worry too much as long as the times and temperatures were in the ballpark.
Finally, with the lights on, the whole box is immersed in a pan of water, the black masking tape is peeled off and the box is opened flat to display its inner surface.
The first design, subsequently called the Mark I, is shaped like a camera. It allows for a largish rectangle as the main image area in the center of the paper and provides an overlap of paper at the front, which I figured would help in achieving a properly squared-up and light-tight construction working by touch alone. It also uses up a great deal of paper as box flaps.
The Mark II is the design that puts the maximum surface area on the back wall of the box. The light passing through the pinhole is conical in structure and the pyramid conforms with this, wasting no paper on the front corners. It is also a little easier to build in the dark, requiring 12 instead of 22 cuts. It is simpler to align and tape up, and easier to open when done.
These are extremely wide-angle pictures. the angle of view seems to be about 170° as the image wraps around the inside of the box almost all the way back to the aperture. There is no “fish-eye” optical distortion as with a wide-angel lens because light travel through a pinhole in a straight line whereas a glass lens bends light as it gathers it. the distortion that is evident here is caused by the various planes of the box sides intersecting the sphere of light at different angles. This stretches sections of the field of view like a mercator map projection.
Like a mirror, the scene is flipped left to right, which is why a familiar location may not look quite right.
For four hundred years this device –without film– has been known as the Camera Obscura; Latin for “dark room”. If you have observed a solar eclipse with a cardboard box fashioned with a pinhole in foil you have used a camera obscura. that is what English friar and proto-scientist Roger Bacon did for the eclipse of 1247. It was considered suspicious behavior at the time, but it wasn’t a completely new idea.
Tenth century Arabian Ibn Al-Haitam experimented with the pinhole and candles in a darkened room and made some inspired deductions about the nature of light. Aristotle observed the phenomenon on the 4th century B.C. as did chinese philosopher Mo-Ti a century before that. Mo-Ti noticed the effect occurring naturally in sunlight filtering through a thick canopy of leaves. both he and Aristotle saw an individual thread of light projecting a shape other than the outline of the hole through which it had passed. Mo-Ti could not explain it, but in the 5th century B.C. he wrote, “What’s up with that?”
In the European Renaissance the camera obscura was at the leading edge of both Science and Art. Leon Battista Alberti apparently used one to reveal the geometric laws of perspective drawing in 1435, and DaVinci wrote in “Codex Atlanticus” about forming images with pinholes. In 1475 Paolo Toscanelli incorporated one into the dome of the Cathedral of Florence creating a projection of the solar disc on a floor marked as a Sundial. A few years later the new St. Peters Cathedral at The Vatican was built with a similar pinhole in the dome. After two years of observation Pope Augustine revised the Roman calendar which had drifted two weeks out of phase from the farmer’s seasons by its rounding off of a fraction of a day a year for a thousand years.
In 1558 Giovanni Della Porta was credited with inventing the camera obscura because his writings and demonstrations were the first introduction to the phenomenon for so many people. It was astronomer Johannes Kepler who coined the term “Camera Obscura” around the turn of the 16th century and made the first portable one. Artists immediately took it up as a drafting tool. It has been reasonably argued that both Vermeer and Carravagio used the camera obscura to achieve perfection in the rendering of perspective, but just who used one and how much is an open question.
In 1850 Scottish scientist Sir David Brewster made one of the first photographs with the camera obscura and coined the term “pinhole” camera, but the advantages of glass optical systems were well understood and so today the Pinhole Camera is most often seen in the hands of students, although there are some esoteric applications in scientific research and the surveillance/security industry.
