Tag: monochrome

Ellsworth Kelly – Cité (1951)

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
By James Wright

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,  
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.  
Down the ravine behind the empty house,  
The cowbells follow one another  
Into the distances of the afternoon.  
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,  
The droppings of last year’s horses  
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.  
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

Source: sfmoma.org

The Malezine – Untitled (2016)

The longest bridge in Iceland, Skeiðarárbrú, was shut down permanently several weeks back.

Built in the mid-to-late 70s, it was the final section of the Ring Road to be completed.

It bridges the Morsá–a river formed from glacial run-off and melt. The flow has ebbed and river is perhaps a generous term–it’s really more of a wide-ish rapidly running stream these days.

Iceland has a reputation as the land of fire and ice due to all the indigenous glaciers and volcanoes. The closing of the bridge stayed with me because the topic was introduced while discussing impermanence.

See: the area between Kirkjubæjarklaustur and Skaftafell will almost certain be completely washed away during the next major eruption of any of the volcanoes in that area.

I think part of why it stuck with me is that I’ve not been in a very good place mental health-wise. I’ve spent a lot of time pondering tumult, upheaval and trauma as endings. But as the saccharin pop sentiment notes (correctly, it should be added): every new beginning comes from some other beginnings end.

I’m not sure the above is any kind of masterpiece. (I’m typically not all that impressed with photo montage–my beloved Yves Klein, notwithstanding.) But, despite the ubiquity of ejaculation as a signifier of completion in pornography, I’m always felt that it has potential as the subject for fine art work.

In order to achieve that end, however, you have to recontextualize it so that it ceases to represent only an ending.

The above freezes the moment of propulsive ejaculatory force in perpetuity–a volcano forever frozen mid-eruption.

I’ve always said that if I ever shoot a hetero porn scene, I’d want the boy to come within the first minute of the scene–prematurely as it were and then let the scene demonstrate how sex in the real world is about using your words to communicate wants and needs and to negotiate expectations, disappointments, frustrations as well as passions, pleasures and desires.

Source: themalezine

Txema Yeste – Extase featurig Stella Lucia for Numero (2016)

The image above does not really fit the format of this project. I’m including it anyway.

Why? Well, first of all, it’s more or less embedded itself in my subconscious. There’s something both beautiful and sinister about it.

Also, I really don’t care for snakes. To the extent that whenever a photo of a snake slithers across my dashboard, I physically cringe–every damn time.

It’s not an intrinsic or irrational fear–I came about half a second from stepping barefoot into a nest of copperheads when I was a wee one. I remember it very distinctly because of the sudden sharp stop from my father that despite the fact that I normally did not give a fuck what he said his voice left no room for anything except to stop dead in my tracks. I saw it a second later–a big momma copper head ready to strike, her babies relatively oblivious nearby. I was instructed to back away slowly. Took half a step and then was suddenly yanked back several yards.

I also remember connecting that memory with a scene in a PBS educational series where an Indiana Jones type character had to proceed through a tomb and there was a pit of snakes and the viewer was informed that a certain number of the snakes were venomous while the rest were harmless. The idea being that you could calculate the risk of clamoring through the pit if youw ere so inclined.

So snakes are one of the few things where something in the real world has crawled into my dream world. Any dream where I am outside and there are leaves on the ground or visible tree roots, my brain is automatically wary of snakes.

And ring neck garden snakes or corn snakes are great–and I have no qualms handling them. It’s just coming upon a snake unexpectedly always makes me very antsy because I’m not so great at determining if their venomous or not. (Same way that I’d love to forage for mushrooms but there are too many that I just can’t tell the super poisonous ones from the edible ones… so I just don’t mess with it.)

The snake in this image is some sort of boa constrictor or python, I think. But it’s shot in such a way that you don’t immediately know that.

It’s also a narrative image–what the narrative is, is ambiguous; but it is better for such ambiguity. (Also, there’s not many interpretations that aren’t somewhat surreally unhinged.)

As much as I don’t care for vertical oriented images, this is an example of an image that would only work as a skinny frame.

Source: photographicpictures

Prue Stent – Untitled from Four (2015)

I’m enormously fond of Stent’s work; although–I have to admit–the image above surprises me.

I think of Stent as working exclusively in color. Almost by definition, fine art photographers tend to work in B&W or color, rarely both.

Perhaps that’s not an entirely fair characterization: most fine art photographers make a name for themselves as a color photographer (i.e. William Eggleston) or B&W (i.e. Mark Steinmetz). [If Eggleston has worked in B&W, I haven’t seen any of it. Steinmetz does have color work but I tend to agree with him that it’s nowhere near as accomplished as his B&W work. The only photographer I can think of who I’d be hard pressed to pick just B&W or just color from their oeuvre is Jeff Wall–and I might end up picking the B&W with him, actually.]

That’s why Stent working in B&W surprises me: one would expect the results to be more of a curiosity; whereas her B&W tends to be audacious in it’s formal innovation as well as incisive in scope and execution.

What’s even more impressive is that–unless I’m mistaken–Stent is working with digital exclusively. I took the above image and parsed it according to Ansel Adams’ Zone System (much as I did with this image by Davide Rossi).

The way she’s using light and shadow to create depth and dimension is straight out of classical oil painting. (For example: I’ve only been a photographer for eleven years now. It’s just within the last year that I’ve begun to understand the interplay between light, shadows and depth of field used in combination to create the illusion of dimensionality in otherwise 2D representational spaces. In other words: Prue Stent is actually a good bit more brilliant than I initially assumed.)

Jim Malucci – Nereyda Bird for Lui Magazine (2017)

This is a veritable cornucopia of textural exquisiteness.

The chicken wire. Also, the shadow it’s casting.

The water droplets on Bird’s skin–and the variation in appearance: highlight aliased with shadow against highlight, shadow aliased by highlight on shadow.

The mottled refraction of light in the pool’s water.

Brick, concrete made to appear macadam-y.

Palm fronds.

There’s some compression going on that I suspect was introduced in post. Nereyda is noticeably separated from the water by noticeably dodging the exposure around her left side.

A remote flash unit bringing the trees in the background up a little would’ve helped make it pop even more.

The thing that I don’t understand here–and it’s really a small criticism–but with the depth of field the range of sharp focus seems to start on the shadow cast by the chicken wire–so behind the plane on which Nereyda’s face is positioned. The shadow of the chicken wire is all that is needed to convey what it is and how it relates to the overall image. I think I would’ve preferred a shallower depth of field combined with closer attention to her face. The location scans clearly whether it’s in focus or not and I think that it would’ve been better to trust the texture to sell the image than to salvage the concept of the image with selective editing that would’ve been unnecessary if the original image were made with a slightly different set of creative decisions.