Melting Ice on Gunnar's Land by Olafur Eliasson

Sure Olafur Eliasson is famous for his blockbuster art projects like Waterfalls that currently graces this fair city, and sure his big museum installations are thought provoking and spectacular, but I am most moved by this artist's photographs which are usually presented as series in a grid. They are simple and soulful and for me at least are humanizing. There are several photo series on the official Eliasson website, although they are shown in horribly small image sizes. If you are interested you are better off seeking out his books.

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Note to artist's everywhere. Show decent sized pictures of your work online. It's 2008, time to size up.

Lizards

Shovel Books

Wee Willie Winkie

I pointed to Denis Dailleux's Cairo work last year. I'm happy to report that this excellent photographer now has a new website with many more bodies of work online. If these images don't inspire deep wanderlust, well, you just don't have wanderlust.

Last Year's Entry: Cairo

My grandfather made ladies shoes. He didn't physically make them himself, he would cross the border and buy good ladies shoes in Laredo and then have a network of local leather men and cobblers make meticulous copies which he would then label with his Rudy brand (He was also a loan shark on the side). Everyone said his shoes were better than the originals. The leather was better, they lasted longer, etcetera. So some days he would drive around Monterrey and meet with men who tanned leather, cut leather, or dyed leather or who stitched shoes, or fitted soles, or manufactured shoe boxes. Some days he would drive around to the various shoe stores in the surrounding villages making deals for his shoes, and some days he would collect money or collateral from the people who owed him. I used to love to make the rounds with him always up front in those big wide seats of his 70's era Cadillacs or his stylish Ford Elite listening to Pedro Infante on the radio. We covered hundreds of miles on our summers together crisscrossing Monterrey and 50 miles in every direction. My memory of that time is dreamlike. This was pre-Nafta Mexico in the 70's before everything started to look like everything else and many of the things I saw burned into the brain forming the foundation of my visual memory palace. I mention this, because Graciela Iturbide's images remind me of my memories and recalling people and places I saw on street corners and in markets maybe for a few seconds but who were unforgettable. There is not one good site showcasing the range of Iturbide's work, but you can find some of images here and here. If you are really interested, her books are a better bet.

Still from the movie
I saw Man on a Wire last week and the documentary has lingered with me. The film has several annoying elements: the main character is basically a mime (he's not actually a mime, but let's just say he has a mime-like personality, and who among us does not discriminate against the mimes), the film uses cheesy low-fi reenactments mixed with archival footage (a technique more suited to television than film), and the movie has been overpraised (always suspicious), but despite all that I can't deny the movie's resonance. It's a tale that touches on the act of creating art, mortality, creation, destruction, and ultimately vanity and betrayal which is more than I can say for most films I've seen recently. The filmmakers never mentioned 9/11 as the connection is implicit: the planning that went into this performance was the poetic inverse of the planning that went into the towers' destruction and perhaps this is why the film inspires such emotion in its audiences (many in our audience jumped to their feet and clapped at the end). A. O. Scott wrote in his New York Times review,

"It is easy to imagine that, in contemplating the scale and solidity of those brand-new towers, Mr. Petit saw them at least partly as the vehicle of his own immortality (whether or not he survived the crossing). No one looking up at the New York sky on a hazy morning 34 years ago and seeing a man on a wire could have suspected that the reverse would turn out to be true."

Go see this film if you have the chance.

Related: Philippe Petit's Wikipedia page which includes scans of the the famous New Yorker covers he inspired. Also read Paul Auster's Red Notebook which contains a great short story inspired by the walk.
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While browsing around for this article I found a neat little homemade site called Walking Art with many examples of epic walks. The site fails to include the great walking artist Hamish Fulton who is an artistic inspiration and whose family has been very kind to my family.

They are building a building in the vacant lot next to the firehouse we call home. Rather they were building a building. One morning 2 backhoes trundled in and dug a hole about 15 feet deep and 20 feet wide. Workers put up a big fence blocking the lot from the street, and then everyone left. The diggers rumbled away and the lot has been quiet ever since. Two months have passed and... nothing. We have back door onto the lot so we can go out there, not that there's anything to do. If we were smokers it would be the type place we would excuse ourselves for a minute or two to have a cigarette.

I don't smoke, but I do eat plums and drink coca cola. My family has been visiting my mother in law all week leaving me here alone. You can live alone for 20 years and never notice silence, but after 4 years of marriage and 3 years with kids, the silence is heavy. So all week I keep finding myself venturing outside with a coke or a plum in one hand and chair in the other. Tonight it was a plum.

People who study plums trees are called pomologists (Pomology is the study of fruit trees—not specifically plum trees). Can you imagine how great it would be to have a business card reading Your Name, Pomologist. (I've always imagined the Pomologists have an intense rivalry with the Olericulturists who study vegetables and who take pomological abuse in silence: "You study the radish?! Celery?! Cucurbits?!! Live man, for once in your life, live! Get your head out of the dirt and consider the glory of the peach and the pomegranate! Persimmons! We KNOW the persimmon. Go now, enjoy your arugula. Be gone.") Many Pomologists think the plum tree originated near the Caspian Sea in the Caucasus Mountains, but nobody really knows for sure. I've seen plum trees in the Hunza valley in Pakistan and a man there told me his valley was the site of the Garden of Eden and that it wasn't an apple that Eve ate but a plum. He also claimed to be the bastard son of the Mir of Hunza and to be one hundred and three years old, but that's another story. Anyway, I was sitting there in the dark, I ate my plum, and then I said out loud to no one in particular, "There are sweeter things." With that I finally felt the day was done and it was time to start dreaming of tomorrow when the house would be quiet no more.

Untitled (Baltimore) by Paul Fusco


by Martin Johnson

As sort a quiet coda to Paul Fusco's profoundly moving RFK Funeral Train Exhibition which closes this week at Danziger Projects, Square America (a photographic ephemera site) released a set of found pictures of RFK's funeral as seen on television which the the site has titled What Was On (June 1968). I was one year old in 1968 but the pictures evoke images of my childhood living rooms, some of my first memories. Both sets of pictures in very different ways evoke the emotion of that year and need of the photographers to hold on to those emotions.

If you didn't get a chance to see the Fusco exhibition first hand, Aperture is re-releasing an expanded version of his book. It is available for pre-order. I can't wait for mine to arrive. The Square America guys are releasing their own book titled "Who We Were: A Snapshot History Of America", no pre-release link yet.

Every year or so I look for an excuse to blog about Konstantin Melnikov's architectural masterpiece, his own home. This year's excuse is that house now has it's own website: Melnikov House and that Melnikov's wikipedia page has been considerably beefed up with many good links including one to the Russian Avant-garde Heritage Preservation Foundation (which led me to the excellent Russian Utopia Depository of Paper Architecture). This web meander started because I was looking at Richard Pare's work online. Pare spent 14 years shooting architecture in Russia for his celebrated book/exhibition The Lost Vanguard: Soviet Modernist Architecture, 1922–1932.

You can read more about Pare's work in the NYTimes or via this interview. Also of interest for Melnivkov fans is this obituary of his son Victor who was a well known painter. Now off with you until next year when I'll be back with more Melnivkov updates.

1. Bite the apple.

2. Pass the apple.

3. Wait for a bite.

4. Receive the apple.

5. Repeat steps 1-4 until done.

6. Break open the core.

7. Consider each seed.

8. Go start the day.

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The same but different: First Hour, Eating Apples

The George Eastman House has joined the flickr commons and has included a set of early 20th Century autochromes which have been a source of fascination and inspiration for years.

Flickr Commons is a fantastic idea. My wish is that the whole thing could be taken further. Imagine an open source version of flickr dedicated to showing artwork and photography from public institutions in which users had the opportunity to contribute scholarly work or to group images into collections.

Note I did a quick and dirty color correction to the images I've posted above.

Related: Early Color Photography

Continue reading "Approaching Coney" →

Are You Me? (03 Hangul) from aufdemweb on Vimeo.
My wife's cousin Erica is a video artist. I love this video which is part of a set video poems between herself and the artist Xana Kudrjavcev-DeMilner.

When I was a teenager my heros were great travellers like Eric Newby and Sir Wilfred Thesiger. The Guardian has a short account by Eric Newby of meeting Thesiger on the road. Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert who pointed to this link also provides his own account of meeting Thesiger as well as many good links.

Related: Eric Newby

Girl on phone: Why? So you can go home and read Vonnegut and be depressed?

Girl on phone: (Long Pause from 9th floor to 4th floor)

Girl on phone: Oh. My. God. Martin you are not being artistic you are being antisocial and gloomy. LIKE ALWAYS.

Girl on phone: You stay home with Kilgore Trout. I'm going to a party. I'm eating ice cream. I'm going to join the human race. Goodbye Martin.

It's hard to image a more hostile working environment for a Western female photographer than a Pakistani brothel, and yet photographer Kate Orne has managed to make a series of compassionate even tender photographs in red light districts there. Powerful stuff.