iPhoneography

iPhone fitted with a SLR lens

iPhone fitted with a SLR lens

iPhone’s have been on my mind recently as E just had hers brazenly stolen straight out of her hand on the metro last week. I may be just a bit behind the curve writing about the iPhone when Apple have just launched their new revolutionary (and badly named) iPad, but I recently received an email from Chicago-based Jeremy Edwards with information about his From the Pocket iPhone photography project, a kind of visual diary of his city, which he is planning to publish as a series of print-on-demand books starting this year. His site comes with a kind of (dis)claimer, “All of the images featured on this site were captured using iPhone cameras. Images were processed using various iPhone photography applications only.” Jeremy calls himself an iPhoneographer and refers to photographs taken with an iPhone as a specific genre, “iPhoneography”.

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Review: Lewis Koch, Touchless Automatic Wonder

Lewis Koch, Postered road sign, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India, 1996

Lewis Koch, Postered road sign, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India, 1996

I like seeing things and I like words. There is something revelatory about the two together, an almost pentecostal feeling of seeing in tongues” Lewis Koch

Lewis Koch’s Touchless Automatic Wonder started out as a web-based project quite a few years ago (the site is optimized for Internet Explorer 5, so it shows its age) and has recently made the leap into book form. For more than 20 years, Koch has collected fragments of found text from all over the world with his camera. As someone who obsesses about what font to use every time I open a Word document, I was naturally curious to see Koch’s textual world. After a first viewing of the book, I realised that this is a much more difficult project than I had initially thought. Finding bits of quirky or visually interesting text around the world is one thing, but there is a lot more required to go beyond visual gimmickry or typology (in both senses of the word) to create a coherent photographic project that says something about the world in which these fragments of text are found.

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Frauke Eigen, Shoku

Kuchi, Japan, 2008

Kuchi, Japan, 2008

Frauke Eigen is currently showing her series Shoku at London’s Atlas Gallery. The series is “inspired by recent visits to Japan” and this comes through in both the subject matter and the approach. These black-and-white images are taken right up close to their subject bringing texture and form to the fore. These are arguably distinguishing features of Japanese photography. In general, Western art presents a framed scene where the totality of the subject is displayed, whereas in Japanese art the subject of a piece may be a small detail (please forgive this gross generalisation). This focus on texture and detail has led to some of the great series of Japanese photography, Kikuji Kawada’s Chizu (The Map) and Shomei Tomatsu’s Nagasaki 11:02, which I posted about on the anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bombings.

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Marion Poussier

Marion Poussier, The Free Movement of Desire

Marion Poussier, The Free Movement of Desire

Marion Poussier has just been awarded the Joy of Giving Something’s first artist award (they throw in $15,000 with the award which is nice). I’ve written about JGS before and I’m glad to be reminded of their great virtual exhibition space. Poussier is a young French photographer, who already has a few interesting series under her belt. JGS are showing work from two of these, One Summer and The Free Movement of Desire. I preferred the latter, which focuses on Israel, Lebanon and Iran. As the title of the series suggests, these images show how love and desire exist in the context of the Middle East. I found it refreshing to see a photographic portrayal of this region where war is not the central focus and where passion and even joy are brought to the fore. Some of these images even have a certain sense of insouciance and normalcy. Poussier’s website is a little underdeveloped but you can see more of her work there.

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Minutiae

4th of July 1951

4th of July 1951

After a period of overuse I barely give Flickr a glance any more. The proliferation of animated gif ‘awards’ for best-super-duper-gr8est-pic-ever that get handed out to anything that is posted and the intricate descriptions of what kind of strobe lights were used to take some of the world’s most boring images just makes me want to run a mile. To use an analog analogy, I think you have to have a crate-digger of great skill and patience to find the good stuff on Flickr (Mrs Deane is among the best that I know of).

But once in a while Flickr does throw something pretty unexpected at you. The level of detail that goes into these photographs by Michael Paul Smith is pretty astounding. Models fascinate a number of contemporary photographers (Thomas Demand, Naoya Hatakeyama, Naoki Honjo) and while I don’t think Murphy is driven by the same motivations, there is something inherently fascinating about this kind of photographic ‘illusion’. Check out the full set here, complete with mustachioed ‘behind the scenes’ evidence.

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‘Guerilla’ COP15 exhibition

COP15-1

On my way to the Barbara Crane conference at Les Douches, I walked past a favourite local wall for street art. Alongside an interesting portrait of Sarkozy and Carla, there was a series of photographs of protests during the recent Copenhagen summit on climate change. I love this kind of random encounter and the chance to see photographs where you really don’t expect them. More of this please (I’ve posted a couple more photos after the jump).

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Stuart Woodman, Now We Are 30

Stuart Woodman, Now We Are 30

Stuart Woodman, Now We Are 30

Stuart Woodman recently sent me Now We Are 30, a book of his polaroid photographs which is the first to be published by his imprint, Doubleplusgood Books. The book is based on a series of pictures that Stuart took every day for a year, his 30th as you may have guessed. You can get copies online from Doubleplus and they also have a list of a few bookstores around the world that are carrying copies.

P.S. While we are on the subject of polaroids, Sean Cousin is in the process of setting up a PDF magazine on integral Polaroid photography. He is looking for submissions so, for any polaroiders out there, find out more here.

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Virgilio Ferreira

Virgilio Ferreira, Uncanny Places

Virgilio Ferreira, Uncanny Places

Virgilio Ferreira is a Portugese photographer who is fond of experimenting with focus, or the lack thereof. His previous series, Daily Pilgrims, was a series of ‘portraits’ in which the subject is blurred and the background in focus (the series is currently on show at the Museu da Imagem in Braga, Portugal). In his latest ongoing series, Uncanny Places, Ferreira has experimented with a new technique involving two exposures of the same subject in quick succession (no digitalism involved, medium format film only). His aim “is to create a notion of continuity between “there” and “here”, where two points in time overlap in the same place.”  The images are unsettling and he certainly achieves the “strangeness” he is aiming for. Ferreira is a conceptual photographer and, while his ideas do not always execute perfectly, there are some interesting photographic adventures to be had in his world.

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Yasutaka Kojima

Yasutaka Kojima

I met Yasutaka Kojima at Photoquai in Paris last year. I don’t know that much about him apart from the fact that he studied with Masato Seto, a former assistant of Daido Moriyama’s and a terrific photographer in his own right. Kojima is based in New York, where I think he is still completing his studies. He is still experimenting with different styles, and I would say that he has yet to find a consistent vision of his own, but there are some nice images on his site.

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Word of the Year 2009

curator

Firstly, let me apologise for another post that looks back at 2009 given the avalanche that there has been over the past month. I took advantage of a few days of exile to the French countryside over the holidays to think about some of the trends that have emerged over the course of 2009. One thing that I have been particularly struck by is how ubiquitous ‘curators’ and ‘curation’ have become over the last year. I keep hearing these terms used in what I would consider to be unusual contexts, referring to the process by which the stuff that is sold in a store is selected (some ‘trend watchers’ have even labelled this curated consumption), a group of images are put together online, or even to someone making a mixtape. It seems that we now walk around curating all day: which sandwich to have at lunch or which furniture to buy from IKEA. Have I curated my living room or my underwear drawer (I was definitely not aware of doing so)?

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