.jpeg)
From the exhibit at the Chazen Museum of Art in Wisconsin:
A resident of Wisconsin for more than thirty years, Conniff has focused much of his artistic energy on the rural Midwest, exploring the interdependent relationship between land and people. For the past fifteen years, Conniff has also been making pictures of rural Mississippi, again focusing on elements of the landscape that resonate with a universal sense of aesthetic familiarity. As he explains, "I am interested in work that defines and protects the vanishing, commonplace beauties that let us know we’re home."
Wild Edges: Photographic Ink Prints by Gregory Conniff is an exhibition about beauty and its necessary place in daily human life. Most of the pictures in the show were made specifically for the exhibition. All are printed in a rich four-black ink process that evokes the sensuality of nineteenth century photographic materials. In Conniff's affectionate and intelligent work, there is a visible connection to the history of landscape art, reaching back as far as Claude Lorrain and seventeenth century Dutch drawing. Conniff is also a leading practitioner of a new pastoralism that is casting a contemporary eye on the current state of America's open land. Postmodern in the best sense, Conniff's pictures address the timeless human need to see beauty in the world that shapes our lives.
From 5B4:
Conniff pursues beauty, as he describes, with an awareness that without beauty in our everyday lives we are evolving in ways that will potentially lead to a loss of fulfillment in our lives. He argues that we are hardwired with a need and that we are being denied that need.
In this day of issue oriented art, beauty is often something that is allowed to enter the work, but an artist that directly searches it out in its classic forms(without irony) is usually considered a kind of dinosaur. Conniff is a dinosaur, he probably wouldn’t take that as a disparaging term and he shouldn’t. These are not groundbreaking, original works featured in this book. They owe a lot to painting and art history and appropriately, he mentions George Innes of the Hudson River School of painters in his essay. But his versions are at times stunning. What I do know is that he is capable of exciting the viewer even though they may, at first glance, feel very familiar with what he is placing before us.
Take a look at this portrait by Timothy Archibald and imagine what sort of man this is. What is the photographer saying about him? What is he trying to say about himself? What does he do for a living? Why is he holding that gun? Read the rest at Gallery Hopper
From State of the Art 
This lab is the oldest existing we know of at present (thanks to the receipts, the chemicals can be dated back as far as 1840-41)...
In Petiot-Groffier’s lab, we are able to rediscover all the chemical products and utensils used in the darkroom to prepare the photographic plates and to develop the images taken: 450 flasks, 500 books, ancient large format cameras, accessories (to take, prepare and develop the images), empty plates, as well as negatifs and prints by Petiot-Groffier himself. An exceptional ensemble which allows us for the first time ever to enter a darkroom of one of history’s first photographers... more
via Gallery Hopper I love this selection of photographic grids by Mark Luthringer - his Ridgemont Typologies - typologies of our mundane world. In a way they also make me rather angry as they highlight so strongly the generic and homogenized nature of the environment around us and the pathetic level of thought and imagination that goes into designing not just the buildings and places we live and work in, but the objects we use everyday.
Good design, good architecture isn't just about looking pretty or pleasant - it's about the quality of life we chose to live. These pictures highlight so much of the the creative and imaginative malaise that afflicts so much of our society.
"The typological form achieves an uncanny synergy and resonance with this subject matter because it mimics the mental images I suspect many of us form as a way of ordering the chaos of abundance that surrounds us. We can’t help but form in our heads lists, groups and categories based on product, brand, price point, style, market segment, country of origin, etc.
To see one of these turned into a group of images lined up together can be unnerving, though. In print, they confront us in a way never possible when they're just in our heads. We are presented with order, and while it is often an absurd, seemingly pointless order, it is one that we recognize immediately". Mark Luthringer
Petiot-Groffier practiced daguerrotypy in 1840, after which he traveled to India. In the 1850s, he began to use albumen and collodion, and later came to prefer the calotype process with which he produced his best work.
In the year 1854, Petiot-Groffier had become a founding member of Societe Francaise de Photographie, and that summer, he traveled with Baldus through Auvergne in central France. At the time, Petiot-Groffier was a sugar beet-refiner, inventor, entrepreneur, and politician, and he had renewed his interest in photography. During this trip, he worked in very close collaboration with Baldus, who was twenty-five years his junior. Despite their age difference, Baldus considered Petiot-Groffier his "best student." Together they worked their way through the countryside, carefully choosing motifs together, such as thatched huts, forest scenes, and generally the physical character of the Auvergne area. Baldus had never directed his artistic vision towards common architecture or unpopulated landscapes, and so much of the subject matter from the Auvergne journey was new compared to his prior photographic experience. Certain prints are signed by both photographers, and because of their extremely similar styles - even considered identical, at times - it is difficult to tell their work apart from one another.
"There has been much discourse and discussion on The Landscapist regarding truthin photography and words with pictures. Recently, I mentioned an intro essay by Mark Kingwell from the book Burtynsky - China titled, The Truth in Photographs, in which Kingwell deals rather nicely with truth.
Here's a passage which struck a chord with me - Photographs are not multiple depictions of some single reality, waiting out there to be cornered and cropped, and somehow regulating, even in cornering and cropping, how/what the image means. Rather, photographs offer multiple meanings. The presented image is not a reflection, or even an interpretation of a singular reality. It is, instead, the creation of a world.
Yikes ... holy cow ... scratch my back with a hacksaw - I don't know if I have ever read/heard so simple and direct a statement which seems to encapsulate the core/root idea of Art.
In the case of picturing, one is not capturing the world, one is, in fact, creating aworld (my world and welcome to it). The phrase 'creating a world' explains, on so many lelvels, good Art - again, in the case of picturing, so many are creating one-dimensional worlds which are filled with the already-known. Worlds which are shallow, not deep. Worlds which are impoverished, not rich. In short, worlds which display no imagination, which we all know, because Mr. Einstein said so, is more important than knowledge.
Imagination - the source of all creativity and originality - is the single most important tool in a photographers kit - both for creating and 'reading' worlds. Think about it. More on imagination to come."
"What you're looking at (above), I'm afraid, is a potentially historic image.
Specifically, the photo above -- taken by embedded photojournalist Michael Kamber two weeks ago during a fateful patrol in search of missing American soldiers -- could well become the last visual evidence of U.S. casualties in the Iraq war.
In a message to colleagues earlier this week, Michael shared his personal thoughts about the new military restrictions on photographing American wounded in Iraq. He writes from Baghdad:
The embed restrictions have tightened up considerably since I was last here. You now need written permission from a wounded soldier to publish his photo if he is in any way identifiable. and even if his face is not visible. If unit insignias or faces of others soldiers are visible, that also disqualifies a photo from being used, according to one of the highest-ranking PAO's [Public Affairs Officer] in Iraq. As I'm told, the wounded man's family can figure out who he is from the other people in the picture.
"LANDSCAPED BUSINESS CARD by Tur & Partnersby Tylene
With all the business cards we’re being inundated with this week (the downside of trade-shows), its nice to find business cards that stand out from the crowd and add a little greenery to your day. Here’s a clever and useful little business card design that perfectly expresses the mission of the company it represents:landscape architecture firm Tur & Partner. Add a little light and water to this seeded business card and in a couple days, you’ve got yourself a professionally landscaped miniature garden. Seeds embedded into the card sprout right through the holes in the plan printed on the card. This creative card was designed by Jung von Matt of Germany."
"War Dead Honored On Memorial Day
WeekendARLINGTON, VA - MAY 27: Mary McHugh mourns her dead fiance Sgt. James Regan at "Section 60" of the Arlington National Cemetery May 27, 2007. Regan, an American Special Forces soldier, was killed by an IED explosion in Iraq in February of this year, and this was the first time McHugh had visited the grave since the funeral. Section 60, the newest portion of the vast national cemetery on the outskirts of Washington D.C, contains hundreds of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Family members of slain American soldiers have flown in from across the country for Memorial Day. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)"
"Dr. Gould and Dr. Richard Lewontin soon elaborated on the importance of how organisms are built, or their architecture, in a famous paper about a feature of buildings known as a spandrel. Spandrels, the spaces above an arch, exist as a necessary outcome of building with arches. In the same way, they argued, some features of organisms exist simply as the result of how an organism develops or is built. Thus researchers, they warned, should refrain from assuming that every feature exists for some adaptive purpose."
---------------------
There are four or five accepted and cognate meanings of spandrel in architectural and art history, all relating to the space between a curved figure and a rectangular boundary — such as the space between the curve of an arch and a rectilinear bounding moulding, or the wallspace bounded by adjacent arches in an arcade and the stringcourse or moulding above them, or the space between the central medallion of a carpet and its rectangular corners."
-------------------
"In the context of evolution, a spandrel is a metaphor for characteristics that are or were orginally side effects and not true adaptions to the environment. This metaphorical meaning works no matter which kind of architectural spandrel is referred to: the spandrel is the un-designed gap between other features, which is then often exploited for a use of its own."
(Tim Atherton)
