J. G. Ballard

"We take ...our everyday external reality very much for granted: the room that we sit in, the streets around us, the virtual space of billboards, and movies and TV ... we take all this for granted. But in fact it is, literally speaking, an illusion generated by our central nervous system. It's as much a virtual reality as the one the cyber people are working on ...Within our minds all these different planes of spatial reality are intersecting."
(J.G. Ballard, KGB 7, KGB Media, 1995)

Paul Graham

"Like painting, most software is intended for a human audience. And so hackers, like painters, must have empathy to do really great work. You have to be able to see things from the user's point of view.

When I was a kid I was always being told to look at things from someone else's point of view. What this always meant in practice was to do what someone else wanted, instead of what I wanted. This of course gave empathy a bad name, and I made a point of not cultivating it.

Boy, was I wrong. It turns out that looking at things from other people's point of view is practically the secret of success. It doesn't necessarily mean being self-sacrificing. Far from it. Understanding how someone else sees things doesn't imply that you'll act in his interest; in some situations-- in war, for example-- you want to do exactly the opposite. [4]

Most makers make things for a human audience. And to engage an audience you have to understand what they need. Nearly all the greatest paintings are paintings of people, for example, because people are what people are interested in."

from http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html

Erwan Frotin

fantastico

Harm

amazing work

Kent Rogowski

Totally awesome idea.

Joel-Peter Witkin

Mr. Witkin's work has always fascinated me. It exists in that same realm of experience as Story of the Eye by Bataille (which changed me forever), The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosiński, the works Hieronymus Bosch, Francisco Goya, and Pieter Breugel. I always imagine these worlds as the everyday turned inside out. All those dark crevasses between our liver and kidneys, the folds of our intestines, their moist accumulations thrust out into the open.

I can't recall who said it now (thought it did come out of Conversation with Contemporary Photographers) but a photographer said, and I paraphrase, that photographs should show us what we cannot see in real life. Of course there are obvious refutations to this statement, but when it comes to 'fine art' photography the observation opens up a very appealing lens of understanding. From what I have read of Witkin he is, among other things, very interested in suffering and pain -- two states which are singularly personal experiences. We cannot know or see the suffering and pain in other people, or animals and plants for that matter. The experience cannot be expressed adequately through language (the wonderful book The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry analyzes the inexpressibility of pain and how in experiencing it a person's world is contracted until noting exists but the pain and its source) nor through conventional documentary photography (do we truly feel the pain of a napalm victim when we look at photograph of them?). Witkin, with his symbolic props and art historically referenced tableaus, seems able, at least for me, to tease out and make visible that timeless and epic suffering. Perhaps because he is able to extract that suffering from the individual/situation in the photograph and present it as Suffering in the universal Plato-esque sense, that it becomes so much more powerful to the viewer.



Abundance, Prague (1997) Joel-Peter Witkin



Satiro (1992) Joel-Peter Witkin



Corpus Medius (2000) Joel-Peter Witkin



Ars Moriendi (2007) Joel-Peter Witkin


This one reminds me of this print I bought years ago. It pictures a traveling prince (or so I gathered form the other images I bought from the book/series) and three princesses buried up to their necks in the ground. Swirling hair just like these heads. The prince looks just as serenely contemplative as this woman, and the princesses just as helpless and possessed as these heads. Do you know the Ronald Dahl short story about this man who agrees to prolong his life by being preserved as merely a brain and a a set of eyes? He is fully conscious but unable to express himself in any way. He is married to a woman who turns out to be a vindictive and cruel, elated at her chance, finally, to take out all her pent up frustrations on the brain in the petri dish. In the last scene I seem to recall that she blows a plume of cigarette smoke into what is left of the man. When they were married he'd never have let her touch a cigarette.

Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932)

These images were created by Blossfeldt for his students and their study of botany, yet they are done with such attention to natural form and cycles, and with such tenacity that they transcend the world of scientific documentation (no impassive Becher here) and enter a realm of awe and marvel. I cannot help but compare them to Robert Mapplethorpe's overly aesthetic and sexualized lilies (and who can look at those anymore without a smirk?), and Nobuyoshi Araki's lurid, paint besmirched blossoms. The comparison may be entirely unfair and inappropriate, given that the intention behind the works seem so different. But that said, Blossfeldt's plants are photographed not only in their blossoming prime, but also as buds, as wilted husks -- they present an acute awareness of the life cycle, with reproduction at its core. Perhaps the images are not so different after all.





Karl Blossfeldt
Plate # 31: Aconitum anthora (magnified 3 times)
Photogravure, printed in 1928.



Karl Blossfeldt
Plate # 27: Cajophora lateritia (magnified 5 times)
Photogravure, printed in 1928.



Karl Blossfeldt
Plate # 8: Equisetum hiemale (magnified 10 times)
Rhamnus Purshiana (magnified 25 times)
Equisetum hiemale (magnified 10 times)
Photogravure, printed in 1928.


All poached from this site.

Excepted from A Conversation with Kai-Olaf Hesse posted by the esteemed Jörg Colberg.

"For example, take Joel Sternfeld's burning pumpkin stand (on the cover of American Prospects, photographs which I really love!), take the irony of the situation away, and you have a "deadpan" photograph in terms of the internal organization of the image. On the other hand, if you happened to come across the scene in real life, you wouldn't need a photograph to “get” it. Compare this with, say, Lewis Baltz' "New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California". If you don't take such a photo, no one would look at, much less think of what happens there... know what I mean?"

This seems to present a very interesting and pertinent divide between two kinds of photographic images: on one side are the images made from situations which if encountered in real life would cause all those witnessing it to whip out their cell phone cameras, and on the other are those, shall we call them, mundane images that often rely more heavily on context and/or theoretical underpinnings.

Of course there are all manner of images that do not fit comfortably in either of these categories, but such nuances are too much for me at this point in the evening. Night night.

Wikipedia and Aesthetics

"Aesthetic judgments usually go beyond sensory discrimination. For David Hume, delicacy of taste is not merely "the ability to detect all the ingredients in a composition", but also our sensitivity "to pains as well as pleasures, which escape the rest of mankind." Thus, the sensory discrimination is linked to capacity for pleasure. For Kant "enjoyment" is the result when pleasure arises from sensation, but judging something to be "beautiful" has a third requirement: sensation must give rise to pleasure by engaging our capacities of reflective contemplation. Judgments of beauty are sensory, emotional, and intellectual all at once."

BEAUTY
1) sensory experience
2) the personal experience
3) engagement in reflective contemplation

body, soul, mind?

Mary Kelly

From the UCLA website:

"When the artist is no longer positioned as "the one who knows" (or feels foolish if he/she doesn't), but as the one who listens, he/she learns how to make the work speak more effectively. Likewise, for the teacher, it is not a matter of explaining, but structuring. Although I use a particular methodology, combining semiotics, psychoanalysis and discourse theory, I would not want to be prescriptive in this regard. What seems important educationally is to make the experience of the visual, which is so often assumed to be outside language and, for that reason, also a source of unconscious anxiety, pass into discourse."

-Mary Kelly

Geoffrey Cottenceau and Romain Rousset

Above images by Geoffrey Cottenceau. Remainder by both Geoffrey Cottenceau and Romain Rousset.









All from www.gneborg.org.

Steven Tourlentes

Beautiful photographs of prisons throughout America. These images and text from the Museum of Contemporary Photography.


Wyoming State Death House, 2000



Prison, Blythe, CA, 1996

Iturbide

I was just rereading an interview with Graciela Iturbide in Conversations with Contemporary Photographers. Although I a had read the piece several years ago countless times (I was working as the art director for the publisher who put out the English version), I had never taken the time to look into her work. Her approach to photography is singularly mystical in a way that seems to escape cliche. This is especially impressive because much of the work that brought her fame was taken in the indigenous areas of Mexico. With the democratization of photography, the tropes of travel photograph have become so familiar as to border on the nauseating. Yet somehow, perhaps because of her dedication to spending a great deal of time with her subjects and immersing herself in the culture (I believe she spent close to six years working on the Zapotec series), and her acute awareness of the aforementioned pitfall, she has created some very timeless images.

Short Men, Horses, and Russian models

I saw this morning that Foxwoods Casino has recently signed an agreement with The Hong Kong Jockey Club allowing simulcasting of our esteemed horseracing outfit's horse races. Now, I've only been to the races once, but it seems to me that the operation has more than enough pomp, glamour, and residual colonial stuffiness to lend to Foxwoods.

My sole visit came about when a friend asked if I wanted to go see her horse in action. She had come into ownership of the animal through her father whom, having reached his Jockey Club enforced horse quota, started buying horses for his six children. Upon arrival we were duly ushered into the VIP viewing box and passed into the loving care of a meaty, red-faced New Zealand horse trainer. The man did a fantastic job of taking care of us. Endlessly patient with my ignorant questions, he explained to us the basics of horseracing: breed origins (mostly New Zealand and Australia), female jockeys (many in New Zealand, none in Hong Kong), jockeying as a career (very profitable, esp. in Hong Kong), and other such succulent factoids (as was the case that day with my friend's horse and jockey, it is not unusual for the race to be the first time when horse and jockey meet--so much for "Sea Biscuit").

We were also introduced to the jockey, a small wirey Frenchman with a cartoonishly large nose and Cheshire smile to match it. Smart as his whip he strutted about flinging witticism at whoever cared to catch them. His calm, solidly self-assured cockiness was not the kind one usually associate with men of short stature--that bravado that is both used as a distraction from their height and a defense mechanism against the unfair discrimination that has undoubtedly been dealt them throughout their life. It got me to thinking--I am hard pressed to come up with another profession where a man is so publicly celebrated for being short. Certainly there are instances where men have achieved fame (Hitler) and fortune (Tempelton) despite their height, but for it? These men, at least in Hong Kong, can make a very fine living and most find themselves circulating in the upper echelons of HK society, a barely legal Russian model on either arm. Someone needs to spread the word.