incarceration // liberation

So much depends on who holds the key.

drive by

An animated gif -- or cinemagraph -- by Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg. Via Gawker »

final dispatch

Diary (2010) from Tim Hetherington on Vimeo.

Photographer Tim Hetherington, the maker of this short film and the director of Restrepo, was killed today in Misrata.

getting the job done

Denco.

hoops

holga.

colorama

The Eastman Kodak Company has donated its archive of Colorama images — the huge panoramic photographs that were displayed as advertisements in the Main Concourse of Grand Central Terminal for four decades beginning in 1950 — to the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, the museum announced on Friday. Coloramas, towering backlighted transparencies that were 18 feet high and 60 feet wide, were promoted by Kodak as “the world’s largest photographs.” More than 500 were publicly displayed, for runs of three weeks each.

They often contained idealized depictions of American daily life, usually showing a Kodak camera being used to photograph a family, activity or beautiful scene. The archive gift includes display images of all Coloramas, including those that were never displayed, along with research documents, negatives and other prints and files. An exhibition of 36 Coloramas, focusing on the 1960s, will be on view at the Eastman House from Saturday through Oct. 17.

From Kodak Gives ‘World’s Largest Photographs’ to Museum in today's New York Times

Viewing the Kodak Coloramas one might conclude that America is white, heterosexual, well-dressed, and travels a pristine world where there is no squalor or company other than our own white, heterosexual, well-dressed selves.

Rather than the diverse colorama that we really are.

Still: Stunning.

ruby shoes, take two

Tomorrow I hang up my wings and leave the road I've been traveling for the last four years, if you count the time I've been working this gig; or ten years, if you count the time I've spent in this place.

Within a week I'll be schlepping a U-Haul to Boulder, Colorado to start something entirely new in a place that's utterly familiar, and yet wholly changed.

Or maybe that's me.

Either way: I'm going home.



Related: ruby shoes, the first »

speaking of Kansas (before the Twister hit)

This really would have been a lovely shot if I had had color film loaded.

Austin, TX
holga.

contained.

Port of Seattle.
holga.

made.

Photo: Julius Shulman

This was a happy house.

Cil Rockwell, earlier today, signing my copy of Gary Gand’s Julius Shulman: Chicago Mid-Century Modernism.



Mrs. Rockwell was referring to the home we were standing in; the one her husband, Deever Rockwell, designed and built; the one they shared together with their four children ("a symmetrical family") before the children grew up and moved away and they sold it to the nice couple from LA who own it today.

We were there at the invitation of Chicago Bauhaus and Beyond for the release party of the above mentioned book, and we spent our afternoon collecting signatures of the owners of several other Chicago Mid-Century Modern homes, who were also there, whose homes were also photographed by Julius Shulman near the end of his life.

Photographed. Not shot.

Julius Shulman, we learned today, didn’t shoot photography. “No guns,” he would say. He made an image, painstakingly, using a 4x5 view camera, taking on average two hours per frame.

Gary Gand and his wife Joan were friends of Shulman, and we have them to thank for coaxing the master into capturing what may be the only photographic collection of Mid-Century Modern Residential Architecture in Chicago. The story of how they did that is in the book.

Mr. Rockwell was there today too, and kindly signed my book when I offered it to him as though at a yearbook signing party. He also answered my star struck question about what it was like to study under Mies at IIT. (As you may have guessed, it was “extraordinary”, but he made more time for the grad students than the undergrads.)



The home Rockwell built on the bluff alludes fondly to his professor’s Farnsworth House, but unlike the unrelenting steel frame of the house on the Fox River, this one is anchored to the earth through an extraordinary application of red flint. The small vibrant stones run through the concrete forms that anchor the corners of the glass box, and chisel out the terraces against the steep wooded bluff that leads into the ravine at the back of the house. The same red flint runs through the polished floors of the home, and transitions effortlessly to the aggregate walk and the loose pebbles of the courtyard.

About those loose stones: Mrs. Rockwell told us that one winter a gentleman was using a snow blower in the courtyard when he kicked up some pebbles and sent them shattering against one of the large glass panes. The entire wall rained down in cold, brittle shards. They patched it up with neoprene and duct tape while they organized a repair.



I asked the new owner if she had heard the story of the pebbles in the winter. She had. “The first thing we did was get rid of the snow blower,” she said. “We shovel our snow.”

Another cold winter story: the glass walls aren’t Thermopaned – “We didn’t even think of it,” said Mrs. Rockwell. “Oil was so cheap.” So in the winter time when the frost moved in they would move the mattress to the living room and sleep in front of the fire.

“That was nice,” she said, her smiling eyes deep pools of memory.

A happy house.

empirical

"Lightning Fields 013" (2006).
Gelatin silver print, 59 x 47 in.
Hiroshi Sugimoto

In 1831, Michael Faraday’s formulation of the law of electromagnetic induction led to the invention of electric generators and transformers, which dramatically changed the quality of human life.

Far less well-known is that Faraday’s colleague, William Fox Talbot, was the father of calotype photography. Fox Talbot’s momentous discovery of the photosensitive properties of silver alloys led to the development of positive-negative photographic imaging.

The idea of observing the effects of electrical discharges on photographic dry plates reflects my desire to re-create the major discoveries of these scientific pioneers in the darkroom and verify them with my own eyes.

From Hiroshi Sugimoto's artist statement regarding his Lightening Fields.

Related: hiroshi sugimoto at sydney art biennale 2010 »

small thing. big world.

waiting
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

The artist Magdalena Abakanowicz requested permission to use my shot of her Agora installation, which I snapped the night of Obama's acceptance speech in Grant Park.

A small thing, but it threw open a window that let fresh air and sunlight into a day that has been crowded with frustrations and concerns.

Big beautiful world.


An update -- the plot thickens: looks like it may hang in an exhibit at the U.S. ambassador's residence in Poland.

Prom

Saturday around 3.

feels like.

Sandwich, IL
holga.

Thanks Gapers Block »

rhymes with geometric

Freshly showered in Hell's Kitchen
holga.

cf. earth girls

Flowers are easy. I suspect they trigger the same reward center in the brain that Platek and Singh uncovered in their waist-to-hip-ratio study. It’s hard to deny they’re sexy. With petals unfurled and stamen at the ready they’re also undeniably fecund -- fecund being one of those reproductive terms that is not the least bit sexy.

I try to avoid shooting them for same reason I don’t shoot and post naked people.

But when they spread wide just outside your kitchen window in the dawn and the dew, you kind of feel like you have to pay them the courtesy of your attention.

landline

ORD, Terminal 3 (I think).

holga.

shuttered

Patio from the Castle of Vélez Blanco (1506–15), Spain
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

holga.

corn.

Grinnell, IA

holga.

another day another dollar

holga.