"I couldn't face the prospect of my child growing up and asking me, years later, what I had done, and having to say: 'Nothing.'" Last spring Leslie Thomas, a Chicago-based architect, read a story detailing the fallout of hostilities between the Sudanese government and the rebels -- more than 200,000 dead, 2.5 million made homeless -- and decided to put together
DARFUR/DARFUR: a
traveling exhibit of digitally-projected changing images. The goal: to raise $1m with at least 24 venues in 24 months.
The photographs have been taken in
Darfur by photojournalists
Lynsey Addario,
Mark Brecke,
Helene Caux, VII's
Ron Haviv, Magnum Photos's
Paolo Pellegrin,
Ryan Spencer Reed, Michal Safdie, and
former U.S. Marine Brian Steidle.
On a sidenote, Pellegrin has just been awarded the W. Eugene Smith Grant.
posted by matteo
on Nov 2, 2006 -
13 comments
Shifting between motion and stasis, he shows a man on a horse, a scarecrow, a dog, another dog seen closer, then even closer as it faces the still camera in the last shot. Superimposed over this still photo is the orange red blast of an atomic bomb and its mushroom cloud—the first appearance of color in the film. The photo catches fire, and the image of the dog is slowly devoured by flames. As the photo turns into ashes, a prayer from the Shiite text Nahjulbalagha appears alongside it in English: “Dear Lord, give us rain from tame, obedient clouds and not from dense and fiery clouds which summon death. Amen.”
In "
The Roads of Kiarostami", his latest
short film (.pdf), Iranian maestro
Abbas Kiarostami begins with
his landscape photographs and
ends with apocalypse.
more inside
posted by matteo
on Jun 9, 2006 -
16 comments
He's so penetrating that even I sometimes can't look, because it's so painful. He brings tremendous pain into his vision, and he makes you very aware of what you're looking at.
Don Mc
Cullin thinks that
Eugene Richards is "possibly the best walking, living
photographer in the world". Richards, who has recently been working on the
War Is Personal project for
The Nation Institute, has
just joined
Alexandra
Boulat, Ron
Haviv, Gary
Knight, Antonin
Kratochvil,
Christopher Morris, James
Nachtwey, John
Stanmeyer, Lauren
Greenfield and Joachim
Ladefoged (their portraits are
here) in the
VII collective. More inside.
posted by matteo
on May 17, 2006 -
18 comments
He has
cavorted naked with Charlotte Rampling [this is VERY NSFW] and
covered himself in caviar for Marc Jacobs, but
Jürgen Teller thinks "fashion is a wank".
Teller's first solo show in Paris is entitled "Nurnberg", it consists of
a sequence of images (annoying Flash site, sorry) taken at the infamous
Zeppelintribune parade ground,
site of Nazi propaganda rallies, which was designed by Hitler's favourite builder, Albert Speer. Over several months,
Teller (.pdf) has photographed the monument, the podium and the steep, ruthless steps, all of which have been left to decay. Or not. "It wasn't really maintained, but if there was a broken step, or a smashed wall, it would be mysteriously replaced with a new one."
Teller's photographs show the delicate weeds, flowers and lichen [NSFW] that have grown up around the stone blocks. "In Germany, there is a saying about letting the grass grow over things, meaning that events will eventually be forgotten".
posted by matteo
on Mar 22, 2006 -
19 comments
The Asana Index. There are literally 1000s of asana variations in Hatha Yoga.
We are attempting to collect the most descriptive pictures of these asanas from all over the Internet, published materials, and individual donations, listing them in an alphabetical index. (via chattering mind)
posted by matteo
on Feb 25, 2006 -
7 comments
Wrestling with Diane Arbus "She set up no lights, just pulled out her Rolleiflex, which was half as big as she was, checked the aperture and the exposure, and tested the flash. Then she asked me to lie on the bed, flat on my back on the shabby counterpane.
I did as I was told. Clutching the camera she climbed on to the bed and straddled me, moving up until she was kneeling with a knee on both sides of my chest. She held the Rolleiflex at waist height with the lens right in my face. She bent her head to look through the viewfinder on top of the camera, and waited".
posted by matteo
on Oct 8, 2005 -
25 comments
Little visual miracles. For more than forty years that most American of photographers,
Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters Lee Friedlander, has recorded
modern American urban life -- with its
jumble of
people,
signs,
buildings, and
cars, and
television sets. He likes to turn
a common blunder of amateurs -- photographing something nearby
with one's back to the sun -- into a
leitmotif.
His shadow plays the role of alter ego, sticking to the back of a woman's fur collar, clinging to a lamppost as a parade of drum majorettes passes by, reclining like a stuffed doll on a chair. Clever jigsaw puzzles, his pictures frequently reveal themselves to be
laconic, austere poems to what
Friedlander has termed "
the American social landscape',' meaning mostly ordinary places and affairs. "Friedlander,"
an exhibition of more than 480 photographs and 25 books covering decades of work, runs at MoMA through Aug. 29, before traveling to Europe until 2007. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Jun 14, 2005 -
8 comments
Strand's roving gaze "My work grew out of a response, first, to trying to understand the new developments in painting; second, a desire to express certain feelings I had about New York where I lived; third...I wanted to see if I could photograph people without their being aware of the camera."
Three Roads Taken: The
Photographs of
Paul Strand.
more inside.
posted by matteo
on May 30, 2005 -
5 comments
What Was True. From the mid 1950s through the early 1980s,
William Gedney (1932-1989) photographed throughout the
United States, in
India, and in
Europe, and filling
notebook after notebook with his observations. From the commerce of the street outside his Brooklyn apartment to the
daily chores of unemployed
coal miners, from the lifestyle of hippies in
Haight-Ashbury to the sacred rituals of Hindu worshippers, Gedney
was able to record the lives of others with clarity and poignancy.
Gedney's America is a nation of averted eyes, and broken automobiles, and restlessness, a place Edward Hopper would recognize, but so, also, Walt Whitman.
posted by matteo
on Apr 27, 2005 -
11 comments
A Tale of Two Chinas, by photographer
James Whitlow Delano.
Whole
swaths of cities have vanished, to be transformed with developments that have quickly made them look more like Houston, Qatar, or Singapore than
the ancient China of our mind's eye. The old hutong, or alleyways, of Beijing that once formed a mosaic of passageways and the siheyuan, or walled courtyard houses,
have been largely razed. The old brick rowhouses of Shanghai, are now being leveled and replaced by modern high-rises.
Traditional marketplaces, residential neighborhoods, streets where medicine shops or bookstores bunched together,
are now either gone or have been rouged up as tourist destinations, part of a new synthetic, virtual version of China's incredible past.
The energy fueling this transformation bespeaks a powerful but often
blind, unquestioning faith in an inchoate idea of progress that
takes one's breath away, often literally. (Unrestrained growth has left China with the dubious honor of having 9 of the 10 most polluted cities in the world).
Delano's new book
is "
Empire: Impressions from China". More inside.
posted by matteo
on Feb 17, 2005 -
23 comments
'Falling in love with the truth'. On Dec. 10, 1956, exactly one month after
Soviet troops crushed the last hopes of the Hungarian Revolution, 13-year-old
Sylvia Plachy lay hidden in a farm cart that was carrying her toward the Austrian border. That night, Plachy and her parents escaped, finally making their way to the United States. The family settled in Queens, New York, where the teenager grew up to
become one of the
most incisive photographers of her
generation.
Many of the
photographs will be displayed this spring at the
Rose Gallery in Los Angeles, and are on view now at New York's
Hunter Fox Gallery, where
Plachy (scroll down) recently talked about the book and her career.
Her pictures "have to do with what memory looks like,' she explains. "How you remember things. Not so much how they are, but how they get translated." Oh,
she's Adrien Brody's mom and she
uses a
Holga.
posted by matteo
on Feb 8, 2005 -
15 comments
In search of lost time It was
Jack Kerouac who first defined
Robert Frank's
genius, who found in it some echo of
his own vision of a vast,
broken-down, but
still epic,
America,
peopled with
restless and lonely dreamers. 'Robert Frank, Swiss,
unobtrusive, nice,' wrote Kerouac in his now famous introduction to Frank's collection
The Americans , 'with that
little camera that
he raises and snaps
with one hand he sucked
a sad poem right
out of America on to
film, taking rank among the
tragic poets of the
world'.
Frank's exhibition,
Storylines, opens this week at the
Tate Modern in London.
posted by matteo
on Oct 27, 2004 -
6 comments
My Heart vs the Real World "He's a normal kid. He's a good kid. He's a real normal kid. And we get him to do the drums and we take him for tryouts and we do everything we can to keep his life as normal as we can make it. We've never lollypopped him. You know, mollycoddled or – we let him try everything. 'Cause if we didn't it would be a big crutch for him. We don't want that to happen.
Like I said, we waited – we wanted to have another child right away. We wanted three, we always did. We were scared to death after him. To have another one, to have another baby. What if the third one, you know – what if it were Cheryl and I? Our genes?
-- The father of Grant Skowkron, Fifteen years old, Single Ventricle, Transposition of the Major Vessels, M.V. Prolapse, Implanted Pacemaker.
Photo
grapher
Max S. Gerber has had
a pacemaker implanted because of his bradycardia. In his website, he tells the story of
ten other heart patients --
all of them kids -- with his images, and with their parents' words.
posted by matteo
on Oct 18, 2004 -
6 comments
Memories of a Dog .
Moriyama Daido's
pictures are
taken in the
streets of Japan's major
cities. Made with a small, hand-held camera, they reveal the speed with which they were
snapped. Often the frame is tilted vertiginously, the grain
pronounced, and the
contrast emphasized. Among his city images are those shot in underlit bars, strip clubs, on the streets or
in alleyways, with the movement of the subject creating
a blurred suggestion of a form (warning: NSFW images if you scroll down the page) rather than a distinct figure.
His best known picture,
Stray Dog, (1971) is taken on the run, in the midst of bustling street activity.
It is an essential reflection of
Moriyama's presence as an alert outsider in his own culture.
Moriyama is also a
toy-camera enthusiast (
his favorite is the
Polga)
. He has worked
in the US, too: "
N.Y. 71".
(more inside)
posted by matteo
on Sep 27, 2004 -
6 comments
XXX: 30 P9RN STAR PORTRAITS (a bit NSFW, obviously) by
photographer Timothy Greenfield-
Sanders, is a
book that features paired portraits (one clothed and one nude) of the top stars in p6rn, straight and gay, from legends like (
best-
selling memoirist)
Jenna Jameson,
Ron Jeremy and Nina Hartley to (ahem) rising stars like Sunrise Adams, Belladonna, Chad Hunt. The
book includes short essays on the intersection of p6rnography and culture by a wide range of writers, from
Salman Rushdie to
AM Homes. XXX is, essentially, about the much-dreaded
"p6rnification" of the culture at large,
recently featured in the New York Times.
As
Gore Vidal writes in the book's introduction, “Doubtless, sex tales were told about the Neanderthal campfire and perhaps instructive positions drawn on cave walls. Meanwhile, the human race was busy establishing such exciting institutions as slavery and its first cousin, marriage.”
(more inside, with totally NSFW Terry Richardson)
posted by matteo
on Sep 18, 2004 -
12 comments
![cavorted naked with Charlotte Rampling [this is VERY NSFW]](http://www.kunsthallewien.at/downloads/presse/Teller/09)Louis%20XV%20no.%203.jpg){kind=link}
