Category: Uncategorized

baohienngo:

baohienngo:

if you haven’t gone swimming naked in a freezing cold stream in the canadian wilderness i really recommend it and it was one of the most surreal moments of my entire life ❤

this lil outing was probably one of my favorite moments of 2016. i miss my montreal friends ❤

Baohien Ngo – Untitled (2016)

This post is guest curated by @suspendedinlight.

It’s really hard to pick favourites when it comes to Bao’s work. I
really love that these have the signature hazy glow, like a daydream of
what summer could be or has been. I think what draws me to this set is
the impression that
her subjects are care-free. They feel candid, and the distance between
the lens and the subjects adds to the feeling of having freedom and
space to be. There are an abundance of photos with similar ingredients
(groups of nude women by the water) but the results
here don’t call to mind nymphs, sirens, or mermaids. In short, no
male-gaze-y bullshit. 

Source: baohienngo

Anna Reivilä – [↖] Bond #1 (2014); [↑] Bond #2 (2014); [↗] Bond #3 (2014); [+] Bond #5 (2015); [↙] Bond #8 (2014) ; [↘] Bond #13 (2106); [↓] Bond #21 (2016)

Artist Statement:

According to Japanese religious ceremonies, ropes and ties symbolize
the connections among people and the divine, as a mean to identify
sacred space and time.

Inspired by Nobuyoshi Araki’s images and their mixture of raw
violence and beauty, I study the relationship between man and nature by
referring to the Japanese bondage tradition. The Japanese word for
bondage, kinbaku, literally means “the beauty of tight binding”. It is a
delicate balance between being held together and being on the verge of
breaking.

I search spaces where nature’s elements combine to create interesting
natural tensions and continue this dialogue trough [sic] my interpretations
by extending, wrapping and pulling upon these indigenous forms. I create
a new sense of volume from the existing components.

Using ropes as lines is my form of drawing. The lines create
interactions, making connections between the elements—a reinterpretation
of the landscape. These three-dimensional drawings are physically
unstable—they exist only for the moment. By recording the process the
photograph becomes part of the piece.

Robert Smithson installed 12-inch-square mirrors to the site in his
project “Yucatan Mirror Displacements” 1969. The mirrors reflected and
refracted the surrounding environment and gave a new angle to see the
landscape. In a similar tradition of Smithson’s use of mirrors, my lines
show how shapes of the elements and the connections between them come
visible when something alien is added. I’m not only changing their
essence, but also my own point of view. Every space is different and I’m
interested how the volume of any given site can be stretched by the use
of several simple lines.

Announcing…

I’ve been working on a number of things behind the scenes, trying to
get everything all neat and tidy, standing like good soldiers in
formation so that I could roll out a bunch of new exciting Acetylene
Eyes features today.

That hasn’t worked out anything like I planned. Thus, I’m slowing my roll and taking one thing at a time.

Two things:

I’ve
always wanted this project to feature a broad cross section of
depictions of desire. Early on, you may remember I had a what I hoped
would be a recurring feature–namely, bringing on guest curators
to take the reins for a week to offer you glimpses of what other people
think is beautiful, important and sexy. In practice, that’s proven
WAAAAAY more difficult to accomplish than I could have anticipated.

I’m working to make 2017 the year where a one-week guest curatorship becomes a semi-regular Acetylene Eyes feature. (At this point the goal is one guest curator every other month in 2017.)

Without further adieu, I am ecstatic to inform y’all that I’m handing over control of this blog to the incomparable Lyndsie Alguire aka @suspendedinlight from January 8th through 14th.

Lyndsie is an honest-to-goodness Renaissance Woman–a brilliant mind, talented musician, an accomplished model and an up-and-coming photographer/image maker to watch.

Secondly, many of the ideas I have for leveling up Acetylene Eyes require resources I don’t really have. Guest curators receive a small sum for their labour. (Believe it or not, it takes a metric fuck tonne of effort to keep this beast running.)

I am also looking to produce a handful of short video regarding process with artists I admire. There’s nothing definite lined up just yet. But the cost is a daunting obstacle as the three people I most want to interview live in far-flung locales and will require travel and access to production quality video equipment.

The point is this project is something I enjoy doing and will always be 100% free. I’d just like to do more and do it better. (It’s maybe stupid, but between this and other creative endeavors I’m trying to make it so that in 2018, I’m supporting myself at least 50% between this project and my other creative endeavors.)

Point is, if you like what I do hear, please consider supporting the work done via our Patreon which you can find here or by following the Support link at the top of my page.

Author unknown – Michele ist gut für zwei (1980)

I stumbled onto @musorka‘s retro pornography motherlode for the first time roughly a month ago.

As best as I can tell he mines scans from another site and posts them to Tumblr. The volume is astounding, the quality frequently dubious. But there are some real gems if you’re willing to put in some time.

For example: if you can ignore the obnoxiously coded depiction of cunnilingus, the above is actually compellingly staged. The action is cheated towards the camera but in a fashion that sans the aforementioned awkward protruding tongue, would be something that would be easy to overlook. (In fact, I would freaking LOVE to recreate this as a fine art image.)

However, there’s actually an even more overriding reason I’m posting this on the first day of the New Year. I’m the sort of sap who makes scads of resolutions each and every year. For the last 5 years, I’ve made goals with the form of shoot X number rolls of film each month; add Y number of new photos to my portfolio by EOY.

2016 was a garbage year but excluding my goal of reading 45 books (on which I failed miserably), I did better than I ever have in any previous year–successfully completing a little more than half my resolutions.

Yet, I think my focus on completing my resolutions actually ended up causing me to post work that I don’t–in hindsight–believe to be as good as it should’ve been.

This year, I’m trying to leaven my urge to hold myself accountable for doing instead of sitting around and thinking about doing or worse trying to do. I keep thinking about Helen Levitt’s statement that photographers can talk about what they want to do or equivocating about the conceptual or whatever but unless you’re running film through the camera, you are not doing fuck all.

There’s also this story of a reporter interviewing Levitt in her apartment:

When I was in her apartment, I saw boxes of prints
stacked up. One was labeled simply nothing good. Another one was
marked here and there.

“That’s the beginning of another book,” she said about the box.

“Can I take a peek?” I asked.

“Nope,” she said. “‘Cause I’m unsure about it. If I was sure that they were worth anything, I’d show it to you. But I can’t.”

Well, she must have decided they were worth something. That book, Here and There, came out a few years later.

One of my biggest gripes about digital imaging–despite everything about the way it looks–is that it allows you to proceed uncritically. You aren’t limited by how many exposures you have. You’re limited by battery life and the size of your memory card, nothing more. What tends to follow–almost as a matter of course–is this spray and pray approach or worse a we’ll just fix it in post mentality.

Looking through musorka’s Tumblr, it strikes me that there is an argument for volume. Not in the making of good images, necessarily but in learning to use the work that went into failed images to channel into making images that succeed.

There are so many awkward expression in European porn from the late 70s and early 80s. And I’m not for a second suggesting any of these images reach the heights of lower case a art, but given that it’s porn and so much of it is godawful, the good stands out even more obviously. Let me show you.

This works for many of the same reasons this does but mostly due to simplicity.

There’s something meditated and in the moment about this one.

I have a paraphilia for braids but I also like the lower image here because of the way it’s explicit without being at all graphic. ❤

The expression in the top panel and the lighting in the lower panel on this one are both unfeigned and luminous.

This is entirely awkward except for the way his expression in the context of the way she’s guiding him creates what could perhaps be termed a ‘feminist’ porn image.

The expression of the woman with the bangs at the right is effing priceless.

No qualifications needed–these three images are all excellent.

And lastly–another example of cheating towards the camera without being obvious about it.

#1200

This is ostensibly a sex blog despite all the half-baked pretense.

It’s
a huge privilege to be able to do this. By that I mean both that it’s a
privilege, in that I enjoy doing it but I also mean something more
along the lines of: I have a job that pays a living wage; that job lets
me write my own schedule and feature which allows me the free time to
keep a queue running pretty regularly. Add a reliable internet
connection, a reasonably good laptop, shelter, clothing, food, etc. and
you’ll see the sort of privilege I want to indicate.

I take that
privilege as a challenge. To remember all this takes place in a world of
disorder, inequality, terror, etc., etc. And every 50th post gets
dedicated to a sort of cross section of current events.

Honestly,
after Drumpfldore became this country’s President Elect, it’s been hard
to be vigilant about current events. Everywhere you look there’s
gallingly inappropriate cabinet nominations.

There were misguided
effort to mount recounts in strategic states by the Green Party
candidate Jill Stein–who was a terrible candidate but who gets entirely
too much hate for aiding in Drumpf’s win, when it’s been shown
categorically that HRC’s campaign and the DNC doubled down on what
everyone but them realized was a losing hand.

In an effort to
salvage some of his legislative legacy Obama initially played nice–in
what has become something that is disturbingly commonplace for this
president. (If you want to read something that is staggeringly well
written and which also critiques Obama in a fashion independent of his
race or the way he lives his life and interacts with his family,
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ piece in The Atlantic is unparalleled.)

Then we
started to hear about Russian hacking. It’s no secret that most voting
machines are only slightly more difficult to hack than airline data
servers. Drumpf who screamed about widespread efforts to keep him from
winning continued with an accusation that he’d have won the popular vote
by a ‘landslide’ also if it hadn’t been for interference. This despite
widespread disenfranchisement in cities like Detroit, which should be
weighed against the gross negligence of HRC ground campaign there.

Everything
I’ve heard suggests that there was Russian hacking but it was more
aimed at making the polls looks like HRC was doing better than she was.
But still we’re going full tilt with sanctions against Russia–which
won’t end up amounting to anything once Drumpf takes office.

Then
there is the situation in Syria–which is likely to become Obama’s
legacy. It’s debatable whether he could’ve changed anything. And we
really cannot go in now–the scenario is entirely too cocked up.
(Whereas intelligence folks with boots on the ground and Arabic fluency
pretty much agree we need troops in Yemen yesterday, to head off a
rapidly deteriorating situation there.)

And then the Russian
ambassador to Turkey is shot by an off-duty Turkish polish officer who
starts ranting about Russia’s support of Syria’s Assad…

Everything is a mess. And the only advice I can think of is this wood cut:

image

Also,
I meant to add links for citations but I am existentially exhausted. My
partner tried to commit suicide last night–she’s receiving medical
care and is alive and we believe out of danger–but I am existentially
exhausted right now.

Thank you for your patience. Hoping to restart a queue today but definitely a new post tomorrow.