Tag: analog

Untitled shot on a Mamiya 645 by Heidi Systo

Every now and again I crush hard on internet famous photographers. For example: Kimmie Eliot Fung, Traci Matlock (aka Rose) & Ashley MacLean (aka Olive) and Lynn Kastanovics.

With Ms. Fung’s shift to more textile oriented work and Traci and Ashley’s ‘breakup’ the last three years have remained crush-less. (Even if Ms. Kastanovics never chooses to exhibit her work again, she will always hold a place in my heart not unlike the one occupied by Francesca Woodman.)

But the drought ended when Muss4You posted this photo created by Pratt undergrad Heidi Systo.

Ms. Systo describes herself on her website as:

[A]n artist living in Brooklyn who uses medium format photography to explore issues of identity and voyeurism in the era of social media.

She is who she appears to be.

As far as artist statements go the above hits all the right notes: simple, unadorned and streamlines.

So I was surprised to find another expanded statement on her Flickr profile:

Since the era of social media, photography is more accessible than ever. From the perspective of teenage girls it is a tool used to gain attention through provocative imagery posted on sites like Facebook, Flickr, ad [sic] Tumblr. My work explores the relationships between photographer, photograph, and ultimately how it is consumed at various levels in the realm of social media. I portray these attention seeking girls at different levels of development, from passive and curious, to sad and aggressive. As an artist, I am shifting the power away from the viewer and on to the subject. No longer an object to be either discarded or idolized, she now becomes a window into the unsettling viewer’s gaze.

This again towers over most undergrad artist statements—which suffer from the default ego-tripping blather setting; but a young artist whose work is so precocious, edgy, technically savvy and stands on its own, doesn’t need to be explanations.

Unless the statement is meant to reveal the artist is fully aware of what she is doing—and given the swaggering confidence of the photographic voice, doing so seems unnecessary/redundant. (Then I am admittedly kinda anti-artist statement…)

Regardless, I cannot recommend her work highly enough. Definitely check her out. Just don’t tell her I sent you. The lesser known fourth law of thermodynamics holds that: beautiful women render [me] incapable of managing fuck all more than stuttered, incoherent ramblings.

I’d rather not come off like a total heel to someone whose work I admire so much.

Ilina Vicktoria

An increasing number of image makers claim to have been disproportionately influenced by Andrei Tarkovsky; few benefit from comparison. (Only two come to mind: Bela Tarr and to a greatly diminished and inconsistent effect Gus Van Sant.)

I am not sure Ilina Vicktoria espouses Tarkovskian influences but considering this famous still of Anatoliy Solonitzyn as Pisatel in Stalker crowned with twisted tree branches bears more than a passing resemblance to the top image, I’d say the odds are good she does.

Her angle of view and scale are different. Also, in her photo the branches serve less of a crown than a mobile artfully counter weighted with Siberian dogwood berries. (Also what is with that distorted blob: is it a light leak? How is it’s position so freakishly perfect to balance out the baseboard/floor and curtains at the lower right edge of the frame? It’s slightly unnerving given the clear Stalker reference—a film notable for being shot twice due to the lab ruining the original footage.)

Something deeper links Vicktoria to the famed Russian auteur, something more than similar content and shared nationality, something more like an attitude toward the image. An attitude built upon a belief of what images are meant to do.

Tarkovsky tries to say something about this attitude but his explanations skew all-to-readily toward justification and abstraction. But it wasn’t until searching for the aforementioned still of Solonitzyn for this post that I stumbled upon this awesome article on Stalker. In it, Brecht Andersch describes the effect Tarkovsky’s films achieve as follows:

The members of Tarkovsky’s audience, if only subconsciously, are brought to awareness of their own hidden depths, of the calling of the soul, of the imperative quest for the sacred. To see his films is to experience the process the Russian filmmaker described as “scales falling from the eyes”.

And that is how you can spot the real Tarkovskians even from low orbit: they are less interested in creating beauty as revealing it was there all along. (Not at all unlike Michelangelo trying to free the form which existed within the stone with his Unfinished Slaves—I can’t help but think Tarkovsky had these monumental sculptures just as much in mind as he did Acts 9:18.)

The question I am left with is: how the transcendence of discovering what is in plain sight instead of manufacturing spectacle can be applied to the visual depictions of sexuality (which is itself a pathway to transcendent experience.)

(Kudos to youarecordiallyinvitedtopissoff for once again bringing another mindblowing photographer to my attention that I never would have otherwise found.)

Source: 500px.com

Vintage porn doesn’t really do much for me. This is probably due partly to my aversion to cockamamie retro-equals-hip cults and partly to knee-jerk nostalgia irritating the piss out of me.

I dig this though for a variety of reasons.

First, although this isn’t a regularly employed position in porn position bingo, the composition is handled sensibly. It’s maybe even a little innovative—allowing an unobstructed view of the action without being intrusive.

Second, their interaction is awesome: her bliss-stoned expression, his head down focus on his prick penetrating her; the way his hand right hands grasps her left inner thigh, and her hand holding onto his side turns me on.

As a photograph: yeah, it’s a little underexposed. But I’ll take an underexposed emulsion over the god-awful, de-saturated digital images profligate on the Interwebz any day of the goddamn week. Analog brings sexy back and gives not a single fuck about millions and millions of bullshit pixels.