Elvis Costello
I love single-session contact sheets like this.
(Source: 5ivegearsinreverse, via victorfranko)
Michael Chrisman // pinhole photograph
“If I were to try to develop the paper in a traditional darkroom, the image would be lost,” said Chrisman.
Instead, he uses a scanner to capture the image from the paper, and in doing so, destroys the paper image itself. “The bright light of the scanner slowly erases the image, inch by inch, as it captures it.”
Vintage Violence // Richard Mosse
Kodak Aerochrome was developed during the Cold War in conjunction with the US military. Flying at altitude with a nosemounted aerial camera, this film was able to cut through the ultraviolet haze, reading the infrared light spectrum bounced off the earth below. Chlorophyll in the landscape’s foliage reflects infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye. Meanwhile, the earth and other contours absorb it. The green camouflage netting above hidden enemy sites absorbs infrared light while the surrounding vegetation bounces it directly back into the sky. In this way, the film technology was used to reveal an enemy’s location. By reading the landscape’s heat, the military had a way to perceive its hidden enemy.
[…]
While I was in the Congo in early 2010 Kodak announced the discontinuation of the stock. Defence technologists now work in digital hyperspectral technologies. The false-colour Aerochrome was a thing of the past. I was dealing with an abandoned technology which I wanted to use reflexively, to work this military technology against itself in the hopes of revealing something about how photography represents a place like Congo, a place so deeply buried beneath and stifled by its representations.
I was especially interested in how Aerochrome perceives and makes visible an imperceptible part of the light spectrum. In almost all of my work I struggle with the challenge of representing abstract or contingent phenomena that are virtually impossible to see, or at least very difficult to put before a camera lens. This is especially the case in Eastern Congo, where my subject was inherently hidden. From the little I had learned about this conflict, as well as from my past experience working in similar situations, I knew ahead of time that my subject would elude me. Rather like Marlow on the steamer, I was pursuing something essentially ineffable, something so trenchantly real that it verges on the abstract.
[…]
Where fighting has occurred, it’s trace can be difficult to perceive. Instead of bricks and mortar, Eastern Congo has provisional shacks and a rapacious vegetation that swallows history. Instead of hellfire missiles and military barracks, there are “white” weapons, machetes that kill silently, and rebel militias concealed not by concrete and camouflage, but by the jungle itself.
The decision to use colour infrared film forms a dialogue with these specifics. The poetic associations carried by the pink and red palette are a by-product of this conceptual framework, but a very fertile one. It’s an allegorical landscape - La Vie En Rose - steeped in a kind of magical realism.
Susan Sontag pointed out that photojournalists have long avoided the ethic/aesthetic dilemma by ‘flying low artistically speaking’, using grainy black and white film to appear sober and objective while portraying human suffering. I feel that it’s equally valid to explore the camera’s full aesthetic potential. Naturalism is no greater claim to veracity than other strategies.
I was searching for a new form, or generic hybrid, that would go a step further. While making the work, I was acutely aware of the fact that infrared light is invisible, so I was literally photographing blind. The whole process seemed preposterous. I felt like the protagonist in Gogol’s Dead Souls, quantifying an absence using a meticulous scientific method while engaged in a picaresque trajectory through an impossible land.
Semester Recap
Best Moments
Name-dropped Holy Titclamps in a paper, snuck Chaplin & Keaton into two projects, and wrote my entire final today on weaponry design. No reason. Just exhausted and kept thinking about guns.
I’m ready for a few weeks of nothing much at all.
(via firthofforth)
The Quay Brothers
(top) Decor, Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, 1987
(bottom) Decor detail, Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, 1987
From After Taste: Expanded Practice in Interior Design
QUAY: In Rehearsals, we put very thin wire just slightly in front of the wallpaper and plucked them so you get the feeling that the wall and the stripes of the wallpaper aren’t stable. The space has to be in flux. Our characters always tend to enter into a space that’s powerfully in flux or is concealing its potential; they tend to be baffled by the space, it’s full of traps, holes that, if an errant subject comes into the frame, can clamp down at the click of a finger. Somebody can come along and energize a space and suddenly a wall’s released, a drawer flies open!”
(via 50watts)
“Reader, have you ever seen a fight? If not, you have a pleasure to come …. “This,” said the Bath gentleman, “was a bit of human nature;” and I have written this account of the fight on purpose that it might not be lost to the world.”
the fight // william hazlitt
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Young Stribling on the Nov. 1930 cover of The Ring
Emptyage: Generation X Doesn't Want to Hear It
Earlier generations have weathered recessions, of course; this stall we’re in has the look of something nastier. Social Security and Medicare are going to be diminished, at best. Hours worked are up even as hiring staggers along: Blood from a stone looks to be the normal order of things “going…
(Source: New York Magazine)

