Tag: B&W

Miloš Burkhardt – Title Unknown (XXXX)

You know how a movie that is just plain bad is somehow always better than a film that squandered such great potential?

That’s how I feel about Burkhardt’s work–he images have potential but almost always come off as dull in their staid repetition of the female nude as a landscape within a landscape conceit.

The above is an exception. So much so, in fact, that I question Burkhardt’s editing eye–this flatly doesn’t belong anywhere near the photos with which it has been surreptitiously grouped.

Note the subtle shadow-to-highlight gradation between foreground and background sand. With the exception of her left elbow, the image is compressed to mid-tones/shadow ranges; accentuating the curving line of her back flowing into her neck and dark cascading hair. The line of her right leg jagging the eye rightward, following the angle of her thigh

Her contorted pose reframes her face and pubis within the larger composition–the focus is definitely sharper on her face.

I love the way the one strand of her hair is straggles along the back of her neck toward her throat. And I can’t really justify it but something about the position of her hands brings to mind both Gabriel Orozco’s My Hands Are My Heart and Pina Bausch’s brilliant choreography for Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps.

Source: burki.cz

Source: Unknown (Earliest post)

Whoa. Fuck me, why isn’t this a video?

There’s a veritable treasure trove of dynamic visual potential what with the driver nearing a point when he will ejaculate onto his shirt and abdomen with his friend following suit shortly thereafter. Add to that the transgressive bonus points of being in a car and therefore implicitly in public gives the proceedings a deliciously transgressive charge.

Moreover, as a video I would be less likely to note to notice the personally triggering asymmetry between the passenger’s attention to the giving of pleasure and driver’s focus on receiving it.

…

When I was five, my military family relocated to the South Pacific. Up to that point, I had lived a relatively insular life so it really wasn’t quite the shock one might have expected.

With my father traveling around the Pacific Rim for months at time, my mother became increasingly dependent upon her membership in the Seventh-day Adventist church–especially the pastor’s family.

They had two children. Ellie was four year’s older than me, Will, a year and a half.

Will had blond hair, blue eyes and a deep tan. He could ride a bike without training wheels or a helmet, collected Smurf figurines and was the most worldly kid I had ever met. He was my first ‘friend’.

In hindsight, Will was a little off. He was secretive, volatile and detached. Of course, all that registered to me was his mom would more or less let us watch cartoons whenever we wanted.

On day, Will said we were going to play ‘Butt Work’. I didn’t know what that was but he said he’d show me. He spread a blanket on the floor of the closet and told me to lay down on it. I did.

Now take your pants off. I did.

I was embarrassed. Will slid the closet door closed. I wiggled out of my underwear.

Spread your legs. I did.

There was a click and a flash of light. I realized Will had his Spiderman flashlight. I the fingers of his left hand spread me. I fidgeted.

Hold still.

After what seemed like forever, Will extinguished the flashlight.

My turn. I scooted to the side and before I could get my underwear and shorts back on was laying naked from the waist down with his legs spread. I tried to replicate what he did to me but I didn’t understand what I was doing.

After a second or two he angrily took the flashlight from me. You don’t know how to do it, right. He grabbed his shorts and slipped out of the closet.

…

The second time Will suggested we play ‘Butt Work’, I had an erection before I could even get my underwear off. I couldn’t lay down on the ground and Will was cross with me.

…

The third and all subsequent times, when Will wanted to play ‘Butt Work’ he would shove his hand down the front of my pants and push my penis down between my legs until I was laying flat on the ground.

It wasn’t traumatic and it didn’t really bother me. Even when things progressed from spread my ass and eying anus to blowing a stream of exhaled breath onto it. This led to him using small twigs to tickle me. I didn’t necessarily like what was happening but I enjoyed the attention even if I didn’t understand what he got out of it, it was clear that he was deeply invested in the proceedings.

He never again let me try to do what he did to me to him though.

…

I can’t remember the first time he penetrated me with his finger. I did not like it but the attention he gave me afterwards was so much more focused, seemingly sincere.

…

One afternoon, Will and I had been playing hide and seek for most of the morning around my house. My father had come out and was mowing the lawn. We’d made a game of trying to sneak up on him but since he always knew we we’re coming after him the game lost it’s appeal.

I found this centipede in the gutter adjacent to my house. Centipede’s were a fairly regular siting but this one was easily four times the size of the one’s I was accustomed to seeing. I called Will and predictably, he began to poke it with a stick trying to knock it off the grate into the drain.

Or at least that’s what I thought we was doing. Instead, he managed to hook it onto the end of the stick and thrust it towards my face. I freaked out and ran but I made it maybe three strides before I was suddenly flat on the grass and dazed.

Will had tripped me. I heard the lawnmower. Will was on top of me. the lawnmower droned closer. Will pulled my shorts down around my knees and shoved his finger into me up to his second knuckle. He wiggled his finger up-and-down rapidly.

The lawnmower stopped. There was a shuffling sound and then Will wasn’t on top of me. He was sprawled three feet away.

My father put me on my feet. Roughly dragging my pants up. Hurting me. Red faced and screaming. The gist of it was what is going on, what are you perverts doing, I’m going to call your parents. Go home. I don’t ever want to see you again.

…

I didn’t understand what had happened/what was happening.

Inside the house–with the lawn left half mowed–the interrogation began. I wasn’t especially ashamed and I certainly wasn’t traumatized but I knew that to be truthful about all the specifics would be a very bad idea. I explained merely that it was a game. I refused to admit it had a name or detail the specifics.

Looking back, I realize my parents thought I was gay and they figured this was an early manifestation that they needed to discipline/scare out of me. My punishment was being grounded for three months; I would go without dinner every evening during that same time and since Xmas fell during it, festivities such as presents, stockings and the like were categorically cancelled for me.

…

As a form of protest, every night while my family ate I laid under the Xmas tree. My mother has always had this stupid fixation with the ‘country’ craft aesthetic and instead of bulbs the tree was festooned with red glazed plastic apples. I would sit with them bobbing directly above my face.

Generally, there would be some comment along the lines of me using the time productively to meditate on what I had done wrong.

Instead, I imagined the apples were real. Imagined how they might taste, if I could just reach up, pluck one and bite into it. I didn’t feel like I’d done anything wrong. And more than once the apple motif made me wonder if maybe this is how Eve felt.

Source: Unknown

There are several dozen reasons this is a really lovely image but I would like to focus specifically on its careful use of tonality.

It is meant to be scanned left to right. The skin of the male bodied partner is exposed a hair below complete overexposure and loss of highlight detail. (Making a traditional darkroom wet print, you would probably have to split grade and burn the edge in with a 4 or 4.5 filter.)

The male bodied participant is rendered an ethereal specter; his body only begins gaining form and dimension in relation to his proximity to his partner.

The right half of the frame is heavy with a mid-to-dark range of tones. The female-bodied partner’s teeth represent the only tone in from the highlight range. This balances against the dark tones of the pubic hair in the left half of the frame–in a way the skin and high heel encircle the penetrative sex act, highlighting it.

The darkest areas of the frame are in the armpits of his t-shirt, the area shadowed by her left thigh and his right forearm and her hair.

Thus the tonal composition reduces to a figure not unlike: 0>.

What is interesting to me is the discrepancies from the figure and how they actually enhance the image. If you follow the highlight of her blown out high heels suspended in midair–a porno trope I loathe but that serves here–your eye is led in the direction of his face (where his eyes are locked on his erection as it is consumed by her body); whereas, if you are following the mid-to-dark tones, your eye descends to note the way her knees hook into his elbows.

All that definitely appeals to my aesthetic sensibilities. But it’s the way that despite the emphasis on the graphic depiction of intercourse, that I am entirely preoccupied with her calm and beautifully meditative expression.

Michaela Knížová – Untitled (2008)

Besides hypnotic, I have zero clue what these images are.

The rectangular shape with the clipped edges in the frames appears to be an x-ray.

It’s less noticeable in the lower two images than the top where there appears to be a skeletal formation suggestive of a spinal column, laterally viewed.

There’s another image: some sort of samurai armor or a barrel.

The presentation suggests several layers of negatives/transparencies sandwiched to create an photographic print. (Alternative, you could print on transparencies and shoot on a light box–which is closer to the look this gives but the quality lacks the sort of wavering sharpness one would expect to see.)

Usually, I am less than impressed with this mode of image making. But this is exquisite.

And the degree of it’s exquisiteness is driving me more than a little bit nuts. There is like nothing about Knížová beyond her citing the formative influence of Joel-Peter Witkin on her work and her current enrollment in with the The Department of Fine Arts and Inter-Media in Košice, Slovakia.

Whoever she is, she is a freaking bad ass who deserves wider recognition.

Source: knizova

D. Robert Stanley – Emily (2010)

I appreciate the effect this is chasing; an ex post facto insinuation wherein the moment portrayed implicitly addresses the events immediately preceding it:

  1. The image maker stares out across an empty parking lot, a Leica M8 dangling from a strap around his neck;
  2. He hears the screen door opening to his left. A young woman–not wearing a stitch, presumably his companion–stands in the doorway, a cigarette hanging from her mouth and fumbling with a book of matches;
  3. Registering the base elements of An Image, the image maker sights through the viewfinder while pivoting, rocking focus hard right then slow left as the match head flares, drifts upward;
  4. As the flame touches cigarette tip, he triggers the shutter.

Although I am tempted to refute the assertion that this is a ‘narrative’ image–it’s not; there far are more urgent fish to fry.

Here: I want to point out once again that I dig the idea underlying this. I really do.

I am bothering to reiterate that point because I am afraid what follows may really harsh the image maker’s buzz.

First, I am very sorry but this is not a portrait. Welcome to Name That Genre, I am your host Jon Rafoto. And oh, I’m sorry you said ‘portrait;’ the answer we were looking for is: street photography. (EDIT: Unfortunately, I got a ahead of myself here and started playing fast and loose with the terms. What I meant is that the perspective of the image is closer to street photography than portraiture but I conflated how with the what and that led me to attribute (wrongly) the content to the genre of street photography. This was a mistake.)

See: a portrait preferences the subject over their surroundings. This preferences the surroundings over the subject.

Sure, I’ll see the ’environmental portrait’ call and raise with a ‘the tendency of a sitter in a portrait to acknowledge the camera’.

All that doesn’t even matter though because in this case I am holding pocket aces in ‘the camera that made this image was hand-held’. Now, that’s not to say portraits can’t be hand-held, they certainly can. But the failure to square the frame against the verticals of room 20’s door jamb to and the rightmost window edge is either shoddy composition or an effort to emphasize the pivoting pan of the photographer–suggestive of street photography.

Further, squaring the frame would have made the questionable compositional logic gallingly obvious.

That being said there are some insightful inclusions. There is an effort to include the texture of the roof as a compositional feature. As is, it doesn’t play. But the instinct to include it was excellent.

What was needed was either for the photographer to take two steps back and square the frame. Or to have a half-step left and squatted down. The former option would have shifted things even more toward street photography, the latter would have shifted it closer to portrait.

Both would have had the additional benefit of not bloody making the most annoying newbie mistake in the book–if you have to amputate with the frame edge do so in between and not at joints.

Source: goodglass01

Brooke LaBrie – Black Tape 1 (2013)

I’ve said it before and it bears repeating: if you aren’t following Cam, you’re doing Tumblr wrong.

Without question, Cam is one of the preeminent models in the Tumblr-verse. She’s extremely intelligent, has a nice voice, is six feet tall, has really cool tattoos; and when fuckwits antagonize her she spouts incredible, tongue-in-cheek mythological backstories, is socially awkward and a consummate bad ass. (I don’t feel the three things I haven’t linked require additional documentation.)

I have mixed feelings about this image. It was made with a Hasselblad 500C/M and I am all about analog photographic processes. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen Cam presented squared to the camera. (She really is beautiful.)

I am not quite sure how I feel about the tape is being used to cover her tattoos, though. I mean Cam has some AWESOME ink work.

But looking at this what stands out to me is the compositional logic to the placement of her tattoos. I mean if you suggest the body as a canvas for art, there is more than just a passing reminiscence in the lines suggested by the tape to Piet Mondrian paintings or the De Stilj aesthetic.

Source: brookelabrie

Source: Unknown

Um… so, uh… yeah: LOVE THIS. For you know, reasons and stuff.

At the same time: I hate it, omfg sooo much.

For once my objections have fuck all to do with curmudgeonly hyper-criticality. I object because I am devastated.

I have been trying and failing to make a self-portrait that is alarmingly similar to this; really, this and my idea two might as well be fraternally twinned.

But to top a sundae of injury with rainbow sprinkles of insult: this is just flat-out so, SO much better than any of my fumbled false starts and artless misfires.

And although I have no intention of giving up–I’m exactly the sort of fool for whom the prospect of defying impossibility actually serves as compelling motivation.

Of course, motivation alone doesn’t address the fact that I am not getting any younger and I will never be ripped with six-pack abs.

But my phenomenal lack of physical attraction isn’t even the most profound hurdle. This was almost certainly taken by another person. I only have and will likely only ever have–sadly: recourse to the self-timer.

Duane Michals – Even now, when he thought of her, it was her body that he missed. He wanted to touch her. from Person to Person
 (1974)

Quite frankly, Michals’ frustrates the piss out of me. His work is always so goddamn in-fucking-scrutable.

Take this. As with many of his prints, it’s unrefined, sloppy. But it works. And the reason it works had to do with the presentation.

Michals’ tends to present his photographs as a series. He also frequently imposes inscriptions on the image which tend to hijack mere archetypal readings. The inscriptions read like crib notes to the artists more than the audience. Their hurried, seemingly off-the-cuff character enact a strange sort of alchemy wherein the weary, ailing aspects of the image become assets instead of liabilities. 

For example:

This photograph is one of 15 photographs in a series entitled Person to Person which invokes Lynchian account of a relationship’s dissolution. (It’s a little Lost Highway (in structure), a little Mulholland Dr. (in content).

The image I’ve featured is beautiful–in spite of not being on speaking terms with mid-tones. Yet, what’ s interesting is the way the text colors the image with a wistful resignation.

Without seeing another image: the words re-contectualize the photo so that the audience understands that they are envisioning the lover for which the ‘he’ pines. He misses her and wants to touch his lover’s body but cannot. Something happened and they are no longer together.

As you browse through the series, the basic narrative is clearly presented in each frame. And with each additional frame, the story is implicitly re-stated and more details are sussed out.

In the end, although I really don’t want to, I can’t help but like Michals. He’s the type that prefers the prospect of two marshmallows later to one now. But unlike the rest of us, he somehow always manages to have one now and two later.

Erica Shires – Untitled (200X)

Sally Mann is perhaps the contemporary artist most associated with collodion wet plates processes.

There’s a scene in the wonderful HBO documentary What Remains; while preparing a plate, Mann mentions that collodion was originally used as a means of closing up wounds.

It’s an unsettling caveat from a woman who spent the majority of her most ambitious work photographing the specters of death.

There is always too much reverence with Mann’s work to tolerate even the slightest waste.

(Will Graham would say: this is my design.)

…

There’s no doubt Erica Shires is good. The question is: how good is she?

Her colors pop without ever supersaturating. Her compositions are at once rigorously formal and effortless. She presents her subjects with a studied yet unassuming intimacy.

If there were a list of the best 40 photographers under 40, the viability of the list could be judged based on whether or not Shires’ appears in the top 5. (Any list where she doesn’t would be utter bollocks and for whatever my opinion is worth, the top spot belongs to her.)

Source: ericashires.com