“If you have something to say with a camera then show it ...otherwise it’s better to bake a cake.” – Jason Eskenazi Steve showed several pictures taken in his recent travels back east including this high contrast image of an old bridge in Boston Harbor. John Holmes showed several high contrast images taken with his iPhone. John wll follow up on these with his leading a whole session in several weeks on "iPhoneography" We discussed an article in the LA Times by Geoff Dyer "A Gursky's Eyeview from Nowhere" (10-18-15) that pointed out some lessor know factoids about his work. First, how Gursky created (or at least emphasized) a genre of photography that because of it's scale has essentially a "no point of view" aesthetic and at the same time drawing attention to "repetitive elements" in his scenes. His pictures are large, staged and stitched to accentuate his perspective. Second, because, in part, with his fiscal success, he has spawned a group of photographers emulating his work...a so called "school of Gursky." Lastly we discussed the picture above by Thomas Demand on display at the FotoMuseum in Antwerp and the article by Teju Cole in the NY Times "When a photograph is the last trace of a destroyed work..." (10-18-15). The picture above is not shot from nature but rather Demand created a 50 foot steel encased "diorama-like" nature scape" he populated entirely by hand...each and every leaf. He then lit and shot the scene...then destroyed the work so the only remaining visual is the photograph he produced. His point could be that photography is largely a memorial art form...selecting a moment in time to capture.
This led the author's move to art that has been destroyed by acts of war or natural disasters but has prviously been captured in photographs. He then notes the Institute for Digital Archeology that is trying to capture disappearing at and architecture lost in current conflicts eg Isis destruction of historical icons in the middle east. "In these all-seeing days, the traffic between memory and forgetting becomes untrackable."
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
|