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.
iPhoneography
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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