Soldiers Wanted

I simply like these (via State of the Art) - Soldier Portraits by Ellen Susan

"Soldiers Wanted. If you are a soldier or know one who might want to participate in the Soldier Portraits Project, please get in touch at mailto:contact@soldierportraits.com or call 912-228-0336. You can schedule a time to be photographed and/or ask any questions you might have.

All soldiers who want to be photographed will be. There is no audition or selection process. The only requirements are 3 and a half hours of your time at my studio in Savannah, and the ability to sit very still for up to 30 seconds. You'll receive a unique, one-of-a-kind photograph to take with you when you leave.

I look forward to hearing from you. Ellen Susan"

From State of the Art:

Susan says the project took shape after she and her husband, journalist Rob Walker, moved to Savannah last year and found themselves surrounded by soldiers from nearby Fort Stewart and the Hunter Army Airfield. "I started seeing soldiers in uniform at the grocery store," she recalls. "And I read that many members of the 3rd Infantry Division were being deployed to Iraq for the third time. This was startling. The kid in front of us in line at the Best Buy was probably on his way back to Iraq. And looking into the face -- often impossibly fresh and young -- of someone like that and connecting that face to what we hear happens there was a big change for me in the way I thought about soldiers, and I wanted to make that concrete."

Susan had already begun experimenting with the notoriously arduous collodion process. "I always loved looking at photographs from the wet-plate era, but I didn't understand what made them look the way they do," she says. "When I realized that some contemporary photographers were practicing it, I started seeking out their work. What really impressed and excited me were not the prints but the hard images -- the ambrotypes and tintypes. They are fantastic physical objects."

She says the Civil War-era process lends itself to her modern subjects: "First, the process is primarily sensitive to ultra-violet light, and that means that tones are rendered in a way that is different from standard silver processes. Second, the plates show a great deal of grainless detail. And probably most important is the necessarily long exposures (5 to 30 seconds), which cause the subject to engage with the picture-making in a fairly intense way."

I also like how she presents the pictures next to the soldier's simple questionnaire.

PS - I really like the site as well - clean, simple and good looking

Bart Michiels - The Course of History

(Cannae 216BC, Paulus' Death, 2004)

I mentioned Bart Michiels the other day in a post about Pictures of stuff that isn't there anymore but I only included a couple of pictures.

(Monte Cassino 1944, Monastery Hill, 2004)

I've been looking through his stuff a bit more since then and I must say I really quite like it. As much as anything, the scope of his project - from Thermopylae to Hastings to The Hindenburg Line to Monte Cassino.

"The Course of History. It is the lesson we never learn. When we and our elected leaders repeat the mistakes of the past, we will stay on the course of conflict. Or is warfare a natural component of our civilization, a necessary evil imbedded in our genes doomed to be repeated endlessly?

At the dawn of the new millennium I had lived for more than a decade in the US since leaving Belgium and I wanted to reconnect with my European roots. What experience was so European and not American? For centuries, from Caesar’s legions to the armies of the Nazis, my native country saw war with all its faces : invasion, occupation, terror, chaos, hunger, atrocities, destruction and collapse (of industries). After two world wars, those experiences have shaped what Europe thinks today, still affecting the generations and civilian life in modern Europe.

(Gallipoli 1915, Suvla Bay, 2005)


The photographs in The Course Of History are landscapes of the worst killing fields of Europe, of battles that were turning points in our history, defining our future. My approach to the subject comes from the loss of innocence in nature and the dichotomy of it : beauty and evil. Though they all have a violent history in common, our perception of these landscapes can be peaceful and serene. So, is our sense of place associated with memory and the understanding of the landscape fraught with misreading?

With little or no evidence of battle left on the land, I tried bringing back reference to it by finding happenstance traces and features on the land that refer metaphorically to combat, such as holes dug in the sand by children at Omaha Beach (Easy Red), or tractor tracks cleaving through a field of crops like tanks once did (Verdun, Le Mort Homme). In ‘Cannae’, the ground is strewn with small rocks that refer to the numerous dead (48,000!) in the largest single day defeat in the history of Rome.

(Hastings 1066, Fyrdmen, 2005)

During the long battle of Passchendaele, a battlefield not far from where I grew up, British and German soldiers died in horrible conditions, drowning in the muddy clay fields of Flanders (‘Passchendaele, Tyne Cot’). At Waterloo, I found in a grass field a patch that was flattened. It was also the very spot where Napoleon’s elite troops and cavalry fell on the ridge, sealing the fate of the emperor."

(Passchendaele 1917, Tyne Cot #1, 2005)

Karin Apollonia Müller

I only really know Karin Apollonia Müller's work from her monograph Angels in Fall (quite hard, to find see below). It isn't your usual photographic take on Los Angeles - at least not in my experience. Interestingly, although it's in colour - albeit generally very muted, veiled colour - it seems to have a certain afinity with Robert Adams black and white studies of the Los Angeles, such as Los Angeles Spring or California: Views of the Los Angeles Basin.

(Robert Adams)

On Müller: As a foreigner, Müller's "visitor" status in Los Angeles is expressed by a sense of alienation and beauty. The desolate beauty and latent sense of danger inform Müller's images, which reflect the fleeting and ephemeral movements of Los Angeles. People sleep on the ground, gather on the beach and go about seemingly ritualistic movements within the haze and smog of the Western sky- operating in a biscuit colored sublime. The figures are faceless, alone, sometimes appear homeless and often disengaged from the sprawling city scape that surrounds them: a traffic cop is still among stopped traffic, a homeless man carries his mattress near a freeway and surfers sit alone, submerged in the ocean, tiny toy soldiers engage in mock war games.

One thing I do like about many of here pictures is that the veiled nature of them causes me to be a bit more attentive and to give them the time and attention they seem to deserve. This is work I would certainly like to see first-hand hanging on a wall. I also think it's an interesting little twist on the Contemporary Colour approach to things (and also has something a bit in common with Paul Graham's American Night series, which came out about the same time - interestingly, the work of another exile).

(BTW, it's hard to find many good reproductions of her work online)

Blindspot 35 - what works and what doesn't

IMO of course...

The latest issue of Blindspot turned up the other day, and while it's not my favourite issue ever, it certainly has some thought provoking stuff and is certainly worth the cover price.

I particularly like the Jason Evans' work:

as well as that of Rinko Kawauchi:

and the individual images by Jason Fulford:

But there are a couple of portfolio's that reminded me certain things that just don't seem to do it for me.

One was Alpine Star by Ron Jude. This is all black and white pictures which have very obvious grainy looking halftone dots because the are enlarged prints from newspapers, culled from stories in Jude's local newspaper. I can see the idea behind this - ti's a reasonably interesting concept - and I would probably find looking at the show, on a gallery wall interesting - once. But I've seen this technique used before several different times, and for me it really just doesn't work. Occasionally, perhaps when used in conjunction with something else, or when used for specific purpose - say the photographs in Sebald's novels - it works. But as a whole series of images I've always found this approach is, for me, like nails of a blackboard.

The other thing was some (and only some) of Jason Fulford's work. Now, I like Jason's work (and love his publishing projects at J&L Books), and there are individual pictures in here I really like. But what I'm having a harder time with is the composites or collages - such as the one adorning the cover above. It's not the way the composites go together - the choice of images to combine - that usually seems to work and can be intriguing and interesting. I think it's more to do with the two-dimensionality of them. In a way what appears to be their digital nature. It's not just that they are flat, but it's almost as if they are more than flat. Add that in with the fact that they also appear in a way as just a set of Photoshop layers and I think it really has to do with their physical nature as objects rather than their content.

(Jason Fulford)

It might seem a simple and possibly unnecessary thing, but if you compare them with say the work of Masao Yamamoto, one thing that comes across to me - even in reproduction - is their physical nature, as well as what the pictures are actually about. The two things are intimately bound togehter. They physically overlap, the corners of some curl, they may have a few creases, or glue bubbles. The prints are often also not quite 100% square and even - whereas the digitally made ones seem so rigidly bound by their edges - more so than an individual print. Somehow (and I'm not quite sure why) this makes a big difference for me. The same could be said of David Hockney's "joiners". I've seen digital versions people have made using the same technique, and it's not just that they don't ever have anything near the skill and genius of Hockney, it's also to do with their physical nature. You know Hockney's are made of hundreds, if not thousands, of 4x6 pints all glued together. You know if you saw them first hand you could see that, and that if you ran your hand over them, you could feel that.

(Masao Yamamoto)

Which for me is interesting, because for "straight" photographs, I'm not overly enamoured by the tactile nature of the print. It can be nice, but it's not usually essential for me to experience the physical print as a Pt/Pd print or and Albumen print or such - it can add a bit, but it's not the main thing (although I'm a little intrigued by Stephen Gill burying his prints in various locations around London and digging them up later to use, making use of their decay and damage). But it seems for work that moves into the area of constructs, or collages or combining images, I'm drawn quite strongly to some kind of physicality of the work, its three-dimensionality, and that I usually find it doesn't quite seem to work when it's done digitally.

Contemporary American Color Photography Pt.II

I've had a a few responses to the original post Contemporary American Color Photography which seem to have been missing the point of what I was trying to make. Now, this is probably down to my poor writings, but I wanted to try and pick up on what they said

I wasn't talking about B&W vs. Colour (although I used that as an illustration)

nor about tradition versus non-tradition

nor about the need (or not) of being uniquely "original"

It was simpler (I think) than that - the problem is more like working within a tradition when you either don't realise it, or you don't have a very good idea of where that tradition stands right now.

I'm not saying working within a tradition is a problem (and I don't think Christian was saying that either?) - far from it.

Rather, it can become problematic to be "working within a tradition" while not recognizing that the tradition has perhaps become moribund and rather hidebound and possibly reached something of a dead while at the same time thinking - and to some extent being encouraged to think - that it is still new and fresh and cutting edge.

Which I am starting to feel is the case with a lot of what Christian broadly labeled as Contemporary American Color Photography. A lot of what is currently Top of the Pops in galleries and museums and the latest monographs and certainly on the internet (and yes, on blogs like this) is in many cases now some fairly limited variations on a theme whereby "Most photographers working in this genre are pursuing aesthetics and concerns that were initiated in the 1970s, and have changed very little over the past thirty years."

Sometimes (though not always by any means) as you look around at it, it's become almost as formulaic as a Zone aficionado's photos of Half-Dome. In a way the New Color has actually become Old Color, but nobody really wants to say that too loudly - rather like ageing rock and rollers.

So, I think it's very much about awareness of where one stands in relation to the work that's gone before - and your own context within that.

Now, when it came back to my own work that I cited as a personal example - Traces - my decision to use black and white rather than color wasn't based on trying to somehow step outside the current tradition and avoid it, but rather that in retrospect, part of what went into making that decision (and only one part of it) was probably the realization that among lots of other things, the colour experiments I did resembled an awful lot of what I see in the galleries, museums, monographs and especially what crosses my screen here - some of it hyped as the next great thing - yet with not an awful lot to distinguish it from what has gone before since Eggleston and Shore and Ghirri in the early 70's.

Yes, there is lots of very good work among it - and it's exciting to find it. But in the end, I didn’t feel what I could do in colour in seeing this place would be able to measure up to that (and I very much do enjoy doing colour work). I felt that I could certainly do more in B&W - but whether that's ultimately the case isn't my call though.

(Photos from Immersive Landscapes and The Yellowknife Project)

Get your Terri Weifenbach Polo-T here...

Hmmm?

Do you think you can get them in Eggleston or Gursky as well?

Myoung Ho Lee's trees

I came across this on Lensculture - When is a Tree Not a Tree, the work of South Korean artist Myoung Ho Lee (longer article here).

Trees have (for obvious reasons, I think) been a staple subject for photographers from the beginning - I think of some of Atget's, or Sommer's or Friedlanders trees for example.

It's certainly an interesting take - as well as an awful lot of work. I do think it is worth looking at - as Lensculture says:

Simple in concept, complex in execution, he makes us look at a tree in its natural surroundings, but separates the tree artificially from nature by presenting it on an immense white ground, as one would see a painting or photograph on a billboard. The work demands thoughtful analysis.

The one problem with this kind of work is that it is indeed so simple in concept that it can actually be spoiled by what comes after. If Myoung Ho Lee goes to just keep taking more and more pictures of trees, or even worse, more pictures of things with big white backdrops, then I think this work will suffer as a consequence. After something like this the artist can sometimes have a hard time reinventing themselves.

Oh, and in a way, it also reminds me of some of the "tree" work of Rodney Graham:

(Last Picture: Rodney Graham)

Contemporary American Colour Photography

Or should that be Contemporary American Color Photography?

One slightly recurring comment I've had about my Traces project is that some people wish I had done it in colour.

(top two pictures from immersive landscapes)

I'll admit there are few pictures in it that might have worked quite well in colour (though to my mind, rather obviously so - close to the old National Geographic "put a red jacket in the scene" thing) - bright orange utility flags, left behind Christmas Lights, dahlias against a chain-link fence etc.

Though in the end I also came to see that most of what I wanted to do - how I saw it and how I wanted to show it - depended much more on black and white.

In fact at the start of the project I went through some of my usual schizophrenia - colour or b&w? colour or b&w (in fact on a previous project I used both side by side for some time before deciding). But in the end I felt that many of the colour pictures would end up looking like any one of the dozens and dozens of other urban explorations (many of them quite excellent btw) that I come across almost every day online or in print.

So when I read something Christian Patterson said the other day, it really struck a chord, He picks up on an earlier analogy of his (often used in depicting the history of art) of the history of photography as a tree:

It is my belief that most contemporary American color photographers are not only working with a medium, but they are also working within a tradition, or a way of seeing...

...So what part of the tree is contemporary American color photography? I am beginning to think that it is really only a branch. And what part of the tree is most contemporary color photography? I am beginning to think that it is really only a twig...

...I am writing this for a number of reasons, one of which is the overwhelming current practice and art-world presence of what I can only describe as “straight” contemporary American color photography. Most photographers working in this genre are pursuing aesthetics and concerns that were initiated in the 1970s, and have changed very little over the past thirty years. Different photographers incorporate different approaches, and embrace or abandon concept and/or narrative to varying degrees, but aside from subject matter, there is often little else that distinguishes the work. The nut doesn’t fall far from the tree...

(My emphases above. read the whole thing here)

As Christian says; "I include myself and some of my own work in this assessment." and so do I. Many years ago I became seduced by the New Color work. First it's British offshoot - Graham and Parr and Waplington. The the likes of Shore and Sternfeld and Eggleston and then the Continental brand - Struth and Gursky and Essers and so on to the many of practitioners today - totally captivated and enthralled. And I'm still thrilled by it, when I see good new work or re-visit the old (and in this context, this stuff is barely as "old" as I am... which may in itself be significant?). But Christian's point clarified something I had been mulling over for some time - "Most photographers working in this genre are pursuing aesthetics and concerns that were initiated in the 1970s, and have changed very little over the past thirty years."

Which in the end was one reason (though not the only one, and probably not the main one) why, in the end, I decided to do Traces in black and white.

Lewis Koch Pt.II - Notes from the Stone-Paved Path

I mentioned Lewis Koch's Garageography 3.0.7 the other day. While hunting around for more information about his work I came across an earlier project of his which I really quite liked.

1mag3 had a link to Notes from the Stone-Paved Path:Meditations on North India.

"The significance of Koch's superbly printed images lie in precisely not reproducing the tourist mentality toward that over-exoticized land, India, as found in much color photography by both Indian and Outsider alike. Dayanita Singh, a prominent Indian photographer, has bemoaned the fact that some ofher own work caters to Western eyes. And reviewers have pointed out that Robert Arnett's recent book India Unveiled still treats us (in his text) with the Eurocentric myth of the Aryan invasion of India in 2500 B.C. and (in his photographs) with hot, vivid color we Westerners usually associate with India. But Koch's self-conscious personal documentary aesthetic eschews color; shot in black and white, they ignore the stereotypical exotic National Geographic subjects. Instead, this photographer, working within the "snapshot aesthetic" of street photography (whose purity he "ruins" with his textual asides), frames the seemingly banal, the lucky finds, the neglected, and the accidental occurrence. It is almost as if we are seeing India through an Indian flaneur's eyes. This is hard to do given the daunting accretion of texts and documents, fantasies, legends, jokes by indigenous and foreign peoples concerning that vast land. Koch reminds us of this by pairing some of those diverse textual fragments with his images."

Now the above is a pretty ambitious claim. While channel surfing the other day I happened on the TV programme Travels to The Edge with Art Wolfe where he was in Allahabad and Varanasi photographing all the pilgrims converging on the Ganga and it was rather repugnant - vapid, condescending, superior. For me, Koch's work appears to be the polar opposite. Either way I certainly get a feeling (and I've only seen it online) that we certainly see India through flaneur Lewis Koch's eyes - it's as much about Koch as it is about the place and the people - and in that way seems honest.


You can also see a lot of the book here laid out page for page(click around and you can increase the size etc). And there is a link to the exhibition here

Michelangelo Antonioni

Blogs all over have been paying tribute to Ingmar Bergman on his passing - and now the world of cinema has lost another great - Michelangelo Antonioni who died at 94.

There are lots of obituaries online - the Guardian is a good place to start known for Blowup and Zabriskie Point as well as his earlier films like La Notte.

Now as much as Bergman may be a giant of cinema and hugely influential on a wide variety of artistic endeavours, I've always personally preferred Antonioni.

Here's some of what John Berger says about one of his earliest works, (full essay here, from The Shape of a Pocket) - a nine minute documentary film, Gente del Po, made in the 1940's:

Michaelangelo Antonioni comes from Ferrara—in the simple sense that he was born there, but also, in a more complex way, because the city or its spirit is invariably present in his work...

...Whoever says Ferrara, says also the river Po. Other places are more intimate with the river—Cremona, Torino, the little town of Paesana near its source, but Ferrara is its monument, its mortuary headstone. After Ferrara the river begins to negotiate and finally join the beyond. This dimension of the beyond is marvelously held at the end of Antonioni's first nine-minute documentary film, Gente del Po, made between 1943 and 1947...

In Antonioni's film the river is a chief character, defined by her colossal will, but not her impatience, to reach the sea. When she does, the sea, instead of embracing her, gives her a leg up and she clambers into the white bed of the sky.

The other principal characters in Gente del Po are the captain of the tugboat, hauling five barges down the river, the captain's wife and their daughter, who is down below in her bunk for she has been taken ill. The mother goes ashore to buy a remedy for her daughter in the chemist's shop of a poor riverside village. The tugboat is called Milano and the river is constantly reminds the villagers of elsewhere. This was twenty years before Italy's postwar economic miracle...

...This first, brief, black-and-white film without spoken dialogue is prophetic in another way too. In it we today recognize Antonioni's special way of framing his shots—as though the focus of his interests is always beside the event shown, and the protagonist is never centered, because the center is a destiny we do not understand and whose outline is not yet clear.

Essentially his cinematic handwriting hasn't changes since he began making this first film when he was thirty-one years old. An immense evolution is to come—including that of color—but the same vision, the same pair of eyes was already there in 1943...

...Those who admire Antonioni's films often say that he narrates like a novelist. Those who criticize his films often accuse them of being abstract, over-aesthetic,
formalist. It seems to me that if one wants to enter the world of his imagination, one should first think of him as a painter. Human behavior and stories interest him, but he begins with what somebody or somewhere looks like. His most important perceptions are pre-verbal. (This is perhaps why he can use silence so well.) Kieslowski, for example, is a real novelist of the cinema because he thinks about the consequence of actions. Antonioni gazes at the silhouette of an action, with all the painter's desire to find in it something that is timeless. I would often go so far as to suggest that he often forgets the consequence...

...Antonioni's films question the visible until there's not enough light to see anymore. The visible may be Monica Vitti or Marcello Mastroianni or a river bank or a ship's hull or a tree or a tennis court. Unlike a true painter he can't touch their image with his hands; he has to worry it in other ways—by lighting, by movement, by waiting, by a kind of cinematic stealth. His purpose is to make us peer into his films as one peers into the Po as it flows, as Monet peered into the depths of the lily pond, as one walks peering through the fog.

The hope which, I believe, sustained him as he made each film, was that, as we peer, something will come to meet us, something that almost escaped him, something so real it doesn't have a name.

Halfway through Gente del Po a peasant on the river bank sharpens a scythe and a line of women, dressed in black, rake hay. One of the women straightens her back to gaze at the river as the barges pass. She is young. She is like nobody else. She has slightly protruding white teeth when she smiles. And she smiles, because whilst she gazes at the wide river with its colossal will to reach the sea, something comes out to meet her. We can read it on her face. But on the film we can't see it.

Frank Gohlke

Via a post over on the Large Format Photography Forum I learnt that Frank Gohlke now has a website up (it's interesting how many well known photogs don't - too busy with commissions I guess...).

Gohlke is one of the founding fathers of the New Topographics movement and has gone on to produce bodies of work from the Mount St. Helens eruption, to tornado aftermath in Wichita Falls, Texas, to gentle photographs of the Sudbury River all with his own particular and unique take on the American landscape.

I've always likes the Mt. St Helens pictures, but I'm glad he has some of the Sudbury River pictures here (all done in 5x7 colour I think). This is (or at least was) his own neighbourhood, and they a really a labour of love. I have a copy of the small paperback of the project, and I think you can still find it cheaply. It's well worth hunting out.

Living Water is about a place and about Place, about a river and about Rivers. Its subject is the Sudbury River in eastern Massachusetts, but the river is bound up in something larger and less tangible: the process of discovery and creation through which we come to be at home in our particular parts of the world. I moved to Massachusetts from the Midwest in 1987. Disoriented and ill-at-ease in the crowded spaces of the Northeast, I began photographing a small river near my home. What started as a stay against confusion quickly became my chief preoccupation, as I penetrated the dense growth of human and natural history fed by the moving water.

(btw, needless to say that the originating post above generated the usual he said/she said argument as the Guild Photographers claim "this guy's work is crap, boring, didn't he ever learn the rule of thirds" from their pedestal built of Weston's and Adams' bones, while the Art Photographers cry foul from their ivory tower "you just don't get it, open your eyes and your minds, don't you see this guy is one of our heroes" - which, even though I find it hard to resist, gets a little tiresome. Just don't show me one more fracking Spanish Colonial Cloister full of light and shadow...)

Oh, and Gohlke's website - it kinda sucks (okay, maybe that's pot and kettle time), but the layout crosses the line from clean and simple to boring, and the image reproduction just doesn't quite work. Which I put down to the outfit that built it for him.

I also note Gohlke's printing some stuff via inkjet - based on the website production values, I really hope he's got himself a good printer - much of his stuff would look great as really great pigment ink prints.

BRICK magazine

I picked up a copy of my favourite literary magazine - BRICK - the other day and discovered (like many such magazines I imagine) they were having financial woes. So for now, they have found some sponsors and supporters, and also seriously expanded their circulation in the US.

I don't know if you experience the same thing as I do, but go to the "art magazine" section of a major bookstore and newsstand, and there are may half a dozen good photography magazines if you are lucky, but probably two or three shelves of literary magazines. I never quite knew which to pick (and many of them looked terribly boring) when I was browsing them until I started reading BRICK. Now it's probably the only one I get regularly (okay, it's only out twice a year...).

It always has some good articles and pieces in it (especially, though not only, literary non-fiction). Michael Ondaatje is on the editorial board (among others) - in fact the current issue has a delightful conversation between Ondaatje and Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche - whose book Half of a Yellow Sun is awaiting me at the library. As well as Arnold Schoenberg’s dictates on art, Jim Harrison has his fill, and more.

The other nice thing about it is that it frequently has some interesting photography tucked into it here and there (in this issue, among others, by Martin Helmut Reis - though I couldn't find the particular ones online).

Although my favourite in this edition is Peter Glassgold's translation of William Carlos Williams The Red Wheelbarrow into Old English:

Seo Reade Hweolbaerwe

swa miċel hangaþ
on

Readre hweol
bearwan

Glasiġre of reġen
Wætere

Be sidan þæm hwitan
ċycenum

(read the original here)


So maybe look out for it on your local US (and Canadian) newsstand if you are across this side of the Pond - or even buy a subscription.

(Two B&W photos - Martin Helmut Reis)

Garageography 3.0.7 - Lewis Koch

Lewis Koch sent me some information about his latest work Garageography 3.0.7

It's pretty funky. The website itself is pretty cool - it has the potential to be annoying, but in fact works really well... just be sure to keep your mouse roaming around looking for hotspots - little arrows, crosses and stuff that allow you to peer closer at things. Actually, this is one of the better virtual exhibitions I've seen.

GARAGEOGRAPHY 3.0.7 translates Lewis Koch's third project in his private garage in Madison, Wisconsin (USA) to the Internet. Through its various digressive layers, the site presents a text-based cabinet of curiosities within the confines of a simple wood frame one-car garage. The installation includes a video poem, a photographic frieze, hand-stamped leaves, bumperstickers, a hand towel, a unique jigsaw puzzle, and various found objects, as well as material that normally resides in the garage space. Using Tristan Tzara's 1934 text When Things Dream as its basis, the interactive installation is revealed via photographs, text, animation, sound, and video. The physical installation was mounted last year in Madison, April-July 2006. This new, virtual work also presents segments from Koch's two earlier garage projects, Duct Tape Works (1993) and Garage Interiors (1983).

Rather makes me smile as I go around it. In some ways it reminds me of a life-sized piece by Joseph Cornell. I think Lewis' take on things resonates with a lot of the way I see things - for one thing, "elevating" the humble garage to a piece of art.





Oh, and Lewis also kindly bought one of my alleyway prints - I'll look forward to perhaps seeing it in a future installation... :-)

"TRACES - Alleyways & Spandrels" new website

Well, I finally got around to putting together a selection of work from the first phase of my current project TRACES - Alleyways and Spandrels

There is a small text section as well here

"The principle of exchange states that every contact leaves a trace – that with contact between two things there will be an exchange. I see this as being not only the exchange that takes place between inhabitant and place, but also between photographer and place – the trace of light on film – an exchange...

...Over time in a new city, trying slowly to make sense of it, I eventually became aware of the suburban alleyways (this city has almost 1300km of alleys), seeing them as being un-regarded or hidden routes and pathways through the city. Essentially unnoticed and much of the time un-peopled. Yet full of the evidence of people. Things left over. Things to be discarded. Things waiting to be used. A different viewpoint on peoples lives. Back yards often seem less regarded than front gardens (though not always). Back gardens are frequently more “relaxed”, off-guard, and by the time the alley is reached, it is dustbins and recycling boxes and left over bricks and spare siding. Though every now and then this is punctuated by a garden of beauty and pride..." more

I still feel like there's more I want to do on this project as the summer progresses through into autumn, but I'll have less time for that... and I also want to work on the second main aspect of it, which is the "bethicketted" wild places and routes within the city. We've got over 1100km of alleyways and 7,400 hectares of green-space (Central Park is only 340) - so there's plenty to keep me going.

It's still a bit rough and I'm sure there are all sorts of typos in there too. But I really wanted to get it up and out there (one of these days I'm actually going to have to pay someone to make me a real website... my favourites are always the simplest, but it seems hard to find someone to do those well - dosh aside).

Website location is http://www.timatherton.com/ (same as link above). It uses a small amount of flash, but not objectionably so imo. If you don't have flash it has a sort of clunky html version.

(and finally, many thanks to Struan Gray for the idea of spandrels)