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@ Vincenzo’s Mediterranean Grill

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Cherry Creek Shopping Center Denver, CO

Accounting for Days

Lynne Tillman on Stephen Shore @ artforum

NOT LONG AGO, diaries housed private thoughts and feelings too intimate or shameful to reveal. Virginia Woolf wrote in hers daily, expatiating on yesterday’s parties, ideas, and dinner conversations. Some believe remembering can keep us sane, but Woolf succumbed to madness, and remarked on its approach in her diary.

Blogs are, oxymoronically, public diaries, where bloggers play with exposure, others’ and their own. Some use handles for anonymity, but with fingerprints in cyberspace and with erasure near impossible, nothing’s lost and everyone can be found. Billions of disclosures light up the Internet with electric abandon. While “private” and “public” have for years been theorized as permeable spaces, even illusory divisions, people once lived those separate realities. Now they have actually blurred, and privacy and secrecy are becoming quaint ideas. IDs and personal information are hacked and jacked constantly, and individuals adjust their desires, needs, and aims in sync with technology’s capabilities. In this electronic revolution, as written and filmed self-reportage and confessions choke the virtual highways, voyeurism and exhibitionism are just normal.

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The cleanest place on earth - and the dirtiest

@ The Guardian

The air quality at Cape Grim in Tasmania is officially the best on the planet - a world away from the grime and filth of Linfen in China. Photographer Angela Palmer set out to capture the essence of both places

In March, I dreamed that I went to the most polluted place in the world and then to the cleanest. In the dream, I wore identical white outfits, which were then exhibited side by side in a stark white gallery. When I awoke, I resolved to enact my dream. It seemed like madness: I was preparing for my final show at the Royal College of Art in London and was intending to show work based on CT scans of an ancient Egyptian mummy. But the sense of "mission" was overwhelming. I jettisoned my original plans: this was to be it.

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John Szarkowski, Curator of Photography, Dies at 81

By PHILIP GEFTER @ New York Times

John Szarkowski, a curator who almost single-handedly elevated photography’s status in the last half-century to that of a fine art, making his case in seminal writings and landmark exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, died in on Saturday in Pittsfield, Mass. He was 81.

The cause of death was complications of a stroke, said Peter MacGill of Pace/MacGill Gallery and a spokesman for the family.

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Rendering the Print: the Art of Photography

by Karl Lang

Digital Raw photography—the use of raw sensor data instead of a camera-processed JPEG as a starting point for photographers—is often a topic of controversy. Photographers make statements such as “my prints look good, I don’t see any need for Raw” and “I adjust my images in Photoshop®; it works just fine” or “all those controls are too much work, I just want my software to match the JPEG.” Somewhat complex and widely misunderstood, the Raw workflow was created to return control of the print to the photographer. With traditional film, years and even lifetimes were spent learning the techniques of printing in the darkroom. Modern Raw photography provides even more control with less effort, but some education is still required.
This paper will provide a foundation for the understanding of scene rendering. It will introduce the concepts, history, and tools of printmaking, and express their bearing on modern digital photography. It will demonstrate why you should invest the effort to learn the tools of Raw photography, and most importantly, it will prove there is no single “correct” way to render a print.

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A World of Scissors and Paper That’s Captured in Photographs

By ROBERTA SMITH @ New York Times

Daniel Gordon’s large color photographs, the subject of a solo exhibition at Zach Feuer Gallery in Chelsea, have several things going for them. They operate in the gap between collage and set-up photography, which is a lively place to be at the moment. They benefit from an impressive if not entirely original way with scissors that involves creating figurative tableaus from cut paper and cut-out images that Mr. Gordon then photographs.In addition, he seems motivated by a deeply felt obsession with the human body and the discomforts of having one. Not for nothing is this show titled “Thin Skin II.” He likes to depict the body in extreme situations: a woman giving birth, for example, or a man cowering under a table in a work titled “Quake.” A certain interest in crime scenes is indicated, as in the pile of little girls, seemingly dead, in “Rock Garden” and the body twisted in the corner of a suburban house in “Headless Man.”

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Seen on the Street: Photographers’ ‘Everyday Epiphanies’

Alex Webb
By MARTHA SCHWENDENER @ New York Times

When artists talk about “training the eye,” they generally don’t mean doing exercises to maintain 20/20 vision. They mean honing a set of instincts, learning to see relationships among colors or objects or spaces. The title of this small but potent collection of contemporary photographs from the Metropolitan Museum’s collection describes this kind of vision another way: seeing what is “Hidden in Plain Sight.” The show focuses mostly on versions of street, rather than studio, photography.

The artists here discovered “found still lifes,” as the wall text puts it, which resulted in “everyday epiphanies.” These are prefaced by an epigraph from Henry David Thoreau, written in his diary in August 1851: “The question is not what you look at but what you see.” Thoreau may have been speaking of nature or writing, but his dictum works well enough for photography. (It’s still an odd choice for a show focusing on 20th- and 21st-century photography, but never mind.)

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Photos show everyday life amid catastrophe

Karin Apollonia Müller,
Art reviews: Karin Apollonia Müller, Hirsch Perlman, Jimmy Baker, Bill Komoski

By Christopher Knight @ LA Times

For at least a decade, Karin Apollonia Müller has been making savvy photographs that consider the disquieting contradictions of ordinary experience, a project for which Southern California has been her muse. Müller divides her time between Los Angeles and Germany, where she was born (in Heidelberg) in 1963. Perhaps it takes an outsider to see a place with fresh eyes, because she understands the perplexing city in ways that deeply resonate.

Her seven recent large-scale photographs at the Karyn Lovegrove Gallery are as fine as any she's made. One reason is that she begins with an array of events — wildfires, mudslides, freeway catastrophes and such —that are L.A. clichés and that also make the city the nation's reigning symbol of imminent apocalypse. (Had there been a recent earthquake, it no doubt would have figured in her pictures.) But the resulting work is less journalistic or documentary than cinematic, even though she doesn't stage the scenes.

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Wolfgang Tillmans, Paying Attention

By Michael O'Sullivan @ Washington Post

The last thing you're likely to see on your way out of "Wolfgang Tillmans," a touring retrospective on the 38-year-old German contemporary photographer at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, is a photograph called "You're Not Paying Attention." Lifted from the slogan on an American flag decal shot by the artist, it could be taken as the show's rallying cry.

It's a message that could therefore more properly have been delivered at the beginning of the show, rather than at the end. If a viewer can make it all the way through the show -- idiosyncratically installed by the artist throughout 10 galleries on the museum's second floor -- without having changed the way he or she looks at these photographs, maybe even photography in general, there's little hope that Tillmans's parting shot is going to get through. Through the course of the show itself, on the other hand, the artist does his damnedest to subvert (or at least question) the very way we pay attention to pictures.

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Wish Hue Were Here

by Daniel Kunitz @ The Village Voice

For decades, people saw color photography in black and white: It was for amateurs or crass commercialism; it was emphatically not for art. Kodacolor, considered the first true color negative film, was introduced in 1942. As late as 1997, the Oxford History of Art volume on the photograph still claimed, "Color photographs remain problematic. They are central to the snapshot, but are still invariably rejected by the professional and art photographer . . ." By then this assertion was already moldy, yet it gives a sense of how reluctant people were to embrace color. In fact, by 1997, color had become utterly central to photography, in large part because of a renewed appreciation for several American photographers who came to prominence in the '70s. Two current shows presenting work from that decade suggest why our reception of color has been so blurry.

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New Life for Bruce Davidson's Classics

By Miki Johnson @ PopPhoto.com

In the early '90s, Magnum photographer Bruce Davidson suggested a project on Central Park to the National Geographic editors he'd been working with in recent years. They hadn't done a piece on the park in decades, so they agreed, but insisted Davidson shoot in color, a thorn in the predominantly black-and-white photographer's side.

"But I was a good boy and I exposed about 500 rolls of Kodachrome," Davidson says. "And they hated it." Upon hearing that National Geographic had decided to give the Central Park story to another photographer, Davidson says he "went right back into the park and worked in black and white for three more years."

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I'm back

Just returned from a week in Colorado, hope you missed me. Posting will resume now!

cheers

d

HERMAN LEONARD : Jazz Giants

Duke Ellington, Paris, 1958
@ Jackson Fine Art (Atlanta)

Press Release : Great music inspires listeners to feel. We emotionally react when we hear the hook or melody of an exceptional song. Rarely, however, are listeners given the opportunity to witness the experience of the musician as great music is being made. Distinguished photographer Herman Leonard has captured these moments in his photographs of the some of the most imaginative and expressive musicians that have ever lived. Jackson Fine Art is thrilled to exhibit Jazz Giants, a selection of Leonard's photographs of jazz's biggest legends, including Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong. Leonard's personal love of jazz music drew him to the New York nightclubs in the 1940s and 50s, but his camera was his ticket inside. He wanted "to make people see the way music sounded." The result was a simultaneous unleashing of creative power released through sound, song, and the click of Leonard's camera. His creative use of lighting, profiles, and camera angles were surely inspired by jazz's own experimental nature. Leonard's personal admiration for his subjects is evident in the photographs taken in between moments on stage. His visual record of jazz music is, in concert, the personification of a musical epoch as well as a profound body of art. The Smithsonian Institution owns the entire Images of Jazz series in its permanent collection. Devastatingly, Leonard lost over six thousand photographs as well as his New Orleans studio during Hurricane Katrina. His efforts to salvage his life's work and the story of jazz are documented in the film Saving Jazz. Leonard claims "to be present when the artist actually creates his work is a profound privilege." It can be assumed that the jazz legends in Leonard's photographs feel the same way about him.

Jackson Fine Art

James Nachtwey: TED Prize wish: Share a vital story with the world

@ TED

"Accepting his 2007 TED Prize, photojournalist James Nachtwey talks about his decades as a war photographer. A slideshow of his photos, beginning in 1981 in Northern Ireland, reveal two parallel themes in his work. First, as he says: "The frontlines of contemporary wars are right where people live." Street violence, famine, disease: he has photographed all these modern WMDs. Second, when a photo catches the world's attention, it can truly drive action and change. In his TED wish, he asks for help gaining access to a story that needs to be told, and developing a new, digital way to show these photos to the world. Help grant James Nachtwey's wish "

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The Online Photographer

The Online Photographer has moved! Apparently Mike had some issues with Blogger and has moved TOP to a new home. There are still some bugs to work out, but Mike is dilligently setting up the new space and things will get back to normal.

The NEW Online Photographer

Garry Winogrand with Bill Moyers, 1982

@ 2point8

"When I’m photographing, I see life. That’s what I deal with. I don’t have pictures in my head. I frame in terms of what I want to include, and naturally, when I want to snap the shutter. And I don’t worry about how the picture’s gonna look - I let that take care of itself. We know too much about how pictures look and should look, and how do you get around making those pictures again and again. It’s one modus operandi. To frame in terms of what you want to have in the picture, not about how - making a nice picture. That, anybody can do."

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They Needed to Talk

And family friend William Eggleston, his camera at his side, felt compelled to shoot

By Emily Yellin @ Smithsonian Magazine

The details are a bit sketchy now, but everyone agrees the picture was taken in Memphis, Tennessee, on a late summer night in 1973. Karen Chatham, the young woman in blue, recalls that she had been out drinking when she met up with Lesa Aldridge, the woman in red. Lesa didn't drink at the time, but both were 18, the legal age then. As the bars closed at 3 a.m., the two followed some other revelers to a friend's house nearby. In the mix was a 30-something man who had been taking pictures all night. "I always thought of Bill as just like us," Karen says today, "until years later, when I realized that he was famous."

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Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Photosynth

@ TED

"Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in this standing-ovation demo. Curious about that speck in corner? Dive into a freefall and watch as the speck becomes a gargoyle. With an unpleasant grimace. And an ant-sized chip in its lower left molar. "Perhaps the most amazing demo I've seen this year," wrote Ethan Zuckerman, after TED2007. Indeed, Photosynth might utterly transform the way we manipulate and experience digital images."

View demo @ TED

Photosynth Lab

Think of England

The Burry Man (Homer Sykes, 1974), which is on show at a new photography exhibition at Tate Britain

@ The Guardian

From gardening, carnivals and dog shows to more eccentric pursuits such as bottle kicking or body painting, Blake Morrison reflects on what our photographic heritage reveals about our changing national character

A photograph seeks to capture the present, but by its nature can only contain the past. However alive or "gritty" or imbued with a sense of instantaneity, the photo can't help but be nostalgic, since its subject (whether a face or a landscape) is frozen in the moment the shutter clicked - a remembrance of things past. When Philip Larkin, writing lines on his girlfriend's photo album, said that photography is "as no art is, / Faithful and disappointing", this was the paradox he tried to pin down - that on the one hand photos seem immediate and "empirically true", but on the other they commemorate "just the past":

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