Check out Slate’s Today Pictures feature, culled from the Magnum Photos archive. It’s dedicated to Memorial Day and all things grilled.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
Department of Environmental Protection Employee, Daniel Shea
Mountaintop removal site, West Virginia, Daniel Shea
I haven’t said anything about the BP oil spill disaster that only seems to be worsening every day, despite recent efforts to stop the gush of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. I don’t have much to offer beyond the standard responses: It’s horrible. It’s catastrophic.I have no idea how the Gulf region will recover. But fortunately, I came across photographer Daniel Shea‘s blog, and he addresses this issue in a deeper, more complex way than I can at the moment.
Shea, who is based in Chicago by way of Baltimore, reminds us that this oil spill isn’t an anomaly:
Last week’s news talk was about how heavy the hand of the oil industry is when it comes to new regulatory practices, only to systematically ignore them in the future. It’s speculated that this type of paradigm is partially responsible for disasters like the current one in the Gulf. This systematic problem is exactly the same in Appalachian coal fields. Employees and citizens know the dangers of the job and accept the reality as permanent, when stronger federal enforcement and a real progress towards renewable energy sources could quickly change the industry.
You cannot talk about one without talking about the other. You cannot talk about each Big Disaster as if they are separate entities without providing context and history to explain how we came to be where we are.
Do read all of Shea’s post if you can. And peruse his series Plume and Removing Mountains, both of which address the process of coal mining and the price paid for these finite (read: non-renewable) resources.
I think I’m in love. I recently stumbled across Pop’Africana, a new fashion/art magazine with a focus on Africa and the African Diaspora whose first issue launched last month.
Also, it is very difficult to find images of Africans and people of African descent in style, fashion, and art publications. And when those images are there, they are usually exoticized, the subject’s Otherness played to the absolute hilt. Not to mention that magazines that were dedicated to black and brown denizens of style were shuttered after sadly short runs (i.e., Vibe Vixen and Suede).
It is quite refreshing to see Oroma Elewa the magazine’s founder and a wonderful photographer in her own right, dedicate herself to increasing the visibility of Africans in the fields of art, design, fashion, and photography. It’s definitely not easy to start a print publication in a media environment where magazines and newspapers are folding on a regular basis and it’s inspiring to see the passion and drive fueling this project. It is rare to read and see people from the Diaspora highlighted and celebrated instead of ignored or exoticized, so I’m excited to see the results. Not to mention that it’s just a real treat to see such sumptuous images and creative design choices; something truly original.
For more information on Pop’Africana, visit its editor’s blog (chock full of beautiful photos and musings from Elewa), Twitter and Facebook pages. (Phew!)
Stay tuned. As soon as my copy comes in the mail, I will share a few choice selections here.
Witness: Callbox Installations, New York City, 2000
The Contemporary Museum and MICA are teaming up to bring us Bearing Witness, a multimedia, multi-venue exhibit from the husband-and-wife team of Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry. The exhibit addresses violence, race relations, and media depictions of those topics. I’m so excited to see this in its various locations throughout Charm City.
From the official website:
Bearing Witness: Work by Bradley McCallum & Jacqueline Tarry is a multi-venue survey of more than 10 years of work by the husband-and-wife collaborative team Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry organized by the Contemporary Museum and the Maryland Institute College of Art’s (MICA) 2009/2010 Exhibition Development Seminar (EDS). Bearing Witness has a dual mission. First, we seek to present an exhibition that connects McCallum and Tarry’s community-based and advocacy-based projects with their studio-based and gallery-based video, painting and installations works. The shared theoretical underpinnings and art-historical context for these works have rarely been acknowledged. In presenting these projects together for the first time, we seek to reveal the layered conceptual, aesthetic and historic threads in their practice. Second, given the powerful content of McCallum and Tarry’s work—addressing such themes as urban violence, homelessness, race relations and representation—we seek to create meaningful connections between their works and Baltimore’s local issues, institutions, histories and communities.
photo by Casey Kelbaugh
Slideluck Potshow, everyone’s favorite traveling potluck/multimedia slideshow extravaganza rolled through D.C. this past weekend. And I. Wasn’t. There.
Slideluck Potshow is a simple concept—artists share and bond over homemade food and art with other artists—and it’s one that has taken off and traveled both nation and worldwide. I’m a little verklempt about missing out on the latest D.C. event, which took place Friday at photographer Joshua Cogan‘s studio in Chinatown. But don’t worry about me. Let’s just pore over these event photos together and sign up for the mailing list so this doesn’t happen again.
How does that sound?
Good?
Good.
*Or, What would you do with a New York gallery show and a $10,000 cash prize (or, if you choose, a free New York apartment)?
They’ve got my attention.
From the Artists Wanted website:
Photography is power. In a world of images, every person with a camera has the potential to define the world around us. Great photographers capture moments that speak beyond the frame. Exposure is an international open call for inspired photography. This opportunity is open to photographers of all backgrounds who are able to speak exquisitely in the language of lenses and aperture. This is your moment to be discovered.
The judges panel consists of photographer Lauren Greenfield, New York Times photo editor Maura Foley, MOMA curator Nora Lawrence, and JPG magazine founders Derek Powazek & Heather Powazek Champ. The deadline for submissions has been extended to May 31, so hop to it!
Photos by yours truly
“We’re going to write, photograph, illustrate, design, edit, and ship a magazine in two days.”
Does that sound insane to you, dear readers? Or perhaps impossible? Well, it may still be insane but it definitely is not impossible, as the creative muscle behind 48 Hour magazine proved about two weeks ago. After putting out a call for submissions where contributors had just 24 hours to create their work, the 48 Hour team culled through 1,502 submissions and produced a fully complete, 60-page magazine. It arrived in my mailbox a few days ago and I decided to share a few pages with you.
I’m not sure exactly what this means for the future of magazine publishing but I must say I’m excited about the possibilities. Check out MagCloud to pick up a copy.
We’re all familiar with that old Philosophy 101 chestnut: If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Now, let’s apply that to photography: If a person takes a photograph, projects it for one hour and one hour only, discards the photograph and never shows it in public again after those 60 minutes are over, did it actually exist?
Such is the question being raised by One Hour Photo Show, a conceptual photography exhibit that opened May 8 and runs through June 6 at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center.
In One Hour Photo, photography’s original impulse to capture a moment, to freeze and frame it, is turned outward, to the experience of viewing itself. The hour is the exposure, the moment that is captured in the frame of a temporary, provisional observation. Each work ceases to be a photograph: it erases its medium, its status as art object, as it becomes a pure moment of perception to be experienced, framed, and captured by the viewer. In this sense, the viewer becomes the camera, recording the moment on the unreliable format of memory. The viewer also becomes photography itself, as it feels its familiar constructs slip away: permanence, reproduction, ownership, control.
I’m intrigued by the ideas being presented here: preservation, impermanence, and what it means to truly be in the moment. In a time when we constantly interrupt our lives to document them on Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and the like, there’s something quietly profound about an exhibit that allows an experience to be, well, experienced, rather than mediated. In One Hour Photo Show, the only record the viewer has of what he or she observed is his or her own (shaky, unreliable) memory.
Hiroyuki Ito
Looking at four sad human dramas unfolding in front of my eyes was at least intellectually stimulating. Upon closer inspection, the random movies started to create rhythm of their own both visually and emotionally, as if John Cage was at work behind the screen.
Since my working method in street photography is purely accidental, shuffling images into grids underlines their arbitrariness.
I only supply clues, hoping that each viewer comes up with his or her own detective novel.
—excerpt from New York, New York, New York, New York
Over at the Lens blog, freelance photographer Hiroyuki Ito proffered a rare, refreshing amount of honesty about his creative process.
Often times, when photographers and other artists write about their own work, they tend to veer into the bombastic. Yours truly is guilty of this as well.
But what I like about Ito’s statement is that it frees the viewer to appreciate his images for what they are—brief, mysterious vignettes of life’s random happenstances. It is up to the viewer to decide what other, perhaps deeper, meanings and stories can be gleaned from these collected moments.
For more on Ito, check out this 2009 New York Times feature.
Via A Photography Blog, I present you Philippe Halsman’s “Jumpology” studies. Aren’t these an absolute delight?
Professor J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1958
Lena Horne, 1954
Marilyn Monroe, 1959
From the Laurence Miller Gallery:
Philippe Halsman, with an unsurpassed 101 LIFE magazine covers to his credit, had the bold and unconventional idea back in the 1950’s to ask the famous and prominent people he was commissioned to photograph for the likes of LIFE, LOOK and the Saturday Evening Post, once the formal sessions were over, to jump! The results were amazing, as each subject interpreted this bizarre request in their own unique way, often defying their typical public image. We see Richard Nixon as he floats twelve inches above the floor with a peaceful smile on his face, a far cry from the scowl many of us ultimately remember him by. And there is the rather large Jackie Gleason, in a handsome dark suit and his fingers extended wide, defying gravity as he lifts off, and from somewhere off-camera we can’t help but hear “To the moon, Alice.”
Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot, Salvador Dali, Weegee, Jack Dempsey and even the Duke and Duchess of Windsor agreed to take a leap of faith. In that era of live television along with the popularity of the big glossy magazines, one’s image was not nearly as protected and shaped by handlers as it is today. There was a feeling of innocence, a desire for spontaneity, and Halsman, with his playful and charming personality, knew he had to get almost everyone to oblige his demand: JUMP!
Halsman also published a book of these portraits, called, appropriately enough, Philippe Halsman’s Jump Book. It’s fairly pricey but it just might be worth the investment…
Danielle Scruggs is a photographer and writer currently living and working in Washington, D.C., and Silver Spring, Md. Her work has been exhibited in Baltimore and Brooklyn and published by The Washington Post, Stop Smiling magazine, FILE magazine, and F-Stop Magazine. Scruggs holds an M.A. in Digital Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a B.A. in Journalism from Howard University. She is still very much in love with Charm City, albeit from a distance.
