ghosts in the mirror 1
Spent a family Thanksgiving up in Boonville, Anderson Valley with Sam and Angela Schillace. As ever, the locality is, for me, one of few fragile traces of somewhat indeterminate and agricultural pasts, juxtaposed with major investment in business futures. An old (cultivated) apple tree in the nearby field, railway carriages in the town converted to [...]
Rotterdam
Westmalle Tripel – the classic. Here in De Witte Aap – a rather fine bar in Rotterdam. Attending the International Advisory Board for the Mayor of Rotterdam – Link
Big Sur CA
One of those staged viewpoints. We are little different from the days of the Claude Glass – a tinted convex mirror through which the tourist or artist of the picturesque and sublime could see a composed and painterly image. Now we have the wide angle lens, saturated color (after Fuji Velvia), and the LCD of [...]
Anderson Valley
Boonville, Dan’s radio station. Fuji Fortia (super saturated color transparency for the tastes of the Japanese market), old stock. Casado pinhole camera.
Howick – The Bathing House
In the tracks of northern antiquaries, summer 2007 Part of the estate of the second Earl Grey (1832 Reform Bill) on the Northumberland coast, UK.
post mortem
Photographs taken after the death of a child were popular in the mid nineteenth century. Daguerreotype, 1850s, eastern USA.
Bamburgh UK
Site of the court of the Kingdom of Northumbria – at its height in the seventh and eighth centuries.
Patrick Roddie at Burning Man 2004 – corporealities categorized
Photographer Patrick Roddie has just posted his images of Burning Man 2004 – [Link]. The categories of this epic exploration of corporeality: blue – chests – children – couples – dust & dance – etc – feet – hands – hips – masks – me – men – meta – music – night – paint [...]
the look of history – New York after 9/11
So just as I was finishing my short comment today about images and the physiognomy of history [Link] under the question – what does historical change look like? Al Bergesen (in Tucson) sent me this picture of the New York Skyline … my son is a photographer and took the attached image of the NY [...]
Cuba – on the verge – the physiognomy of historical change
Meg’s comments on the photos of the apartment in San Jose, and her story of small town America were about the way everyday things can be almost too painful, too intimate – because of their personal associations yes, but, also because of their attachment to temporal loss. It makes us think of how we look [...]
Graflex Speed Graphic 1947 – media archaeology
I have decided our lab needs to take seriously the materiality of media. Not just the picture – but its texture, style, feel, ambience, aura, substrate – and its instrumentality – how it came to be made, by what means, agency, mechanism. So I have been buying old cameras. The Graflex Pacemaker Speed Graphic arrived [...]
media archaeology – Laurence Olivier recycled
Laurence Olivier has been resurrected for a film role. A new movie – Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow – uses old footage of Olivier, with dubbed voice, as the villainous leader of killer robots threatening civilization. The style, judging from the trailer, is wonderfully retro and noir – looks very reminiscent of Fritz [...]
the look of the past
A moving event this afternoon. A celebration of the life of a family friend, Barbara Levin, who died last week. It was at her home in Portola Valley, where her son Dan Levin, Naomi Andrews and their daughter Maya now live. She loved food, travel, living life to the full. What has stuck with me [...]
media archaeologies – Iraq
Jack (Mitchell) in my Classics Department here at Stanford came out with a great point about all the imagery of abuse coming out of Iraq. [Link] The digital image has a material force – the image itself, maybe borrowing its authority from the materiality of analogue photography, affects. The image is pre-discursive – that is, [...]
archaeology and photography – splinters in the eye
Last Thursday I was commenting on digital manipulation [Link] This got me thinking again about two recent collections of David Carson’s photography – The Book of Probes and Trek. Superficially there is a lot of play in these on focus and resolution – abstraction in a dissolved image, recognition that there may be something in [...]
tipping points
On trust and digital photography – Sam put it this way – and very effectively – Yes, but I think this is the central point of all this – that sometimes, a big enough quantitative change in the ease of doing something makes a qualitative impact on some social action. I think you see this [...]
ghosts, abandonment, ruins
From Phil@philosophistry – ghost town gallery.com – a gazeteer of ghost towns. You can send virtual postcards through the site. See also my comments last August on photographs of archaeological ruin.