Tag: slide

wonderlust photoworks in collaboration with @suspendedinlight – [↑] Loom; [←] Darkness Suspending in Light; [→] Baba Yaga (2017)

I have about a half dozen or so frames from this shoot I’m still in the process of editing–but I wanted to get these out there ahead of anything else.

This shoot was one of the most fun I’ve ever had–I love working with other artists but more than anything I prefer working with friends–and Lyndsie has become one of my nearest and dearest over the last year. (She’s so amazing talented and has this freaking magnificent mind and she totally gets *it*.)

The top photo was a riff on this. It’s a bit more inscrutable than I envisioned, but the more I’ve worked with it the more that is perhaps the point of the disorienting perspective. The title cemented it; I’m all about multivalent wordplay–it can be Lyndsie’s relationship to the viewer; or, the device used to weave materials into cloth (using such a device is not an inconcievable reason for her hand’s to be positioned in that way); or the part of an oar between the handle and the paddle (betweenness or, if you will: fulcrum as tool).

To me there’s something magical about it, something witch-like. (Truthfully the entire thing emerged out of me not being able to shake the fact that she’s playing a harp and the similarities between the harp and the loom and how Lyndsie as an visual artist and musician is on both sides of that.

The bottom left was totally making shit up as I went along. Lyndsie sat down and there was something powerful and playful about her demeanor that I wanted to document. I set up the camera and was so obsessed with getting her eyelight just so (check it out–so proud of myself for that!). I didn’t see the reflection until I first gazed at the slides through a loupe.

The photo on the bottom right was based on a dream I had. We played around until we got something that felt right and we took one frame. If you look close it’s not quite in focus–my 6×9 camera took a tumble in Iceland and the focus is just a touch softer now. But it gives it this very David Lynch like haze that makes it more obviously homage to Lynch then any of the half dozen other things in the frame I meant to specifically reference Lynch. So… sometimes I’m my own worst enemy, sometimes I’m looking out for myself against my own ‘genius’ ideas.

There you have it: a peak into my own creative process.

Arthur Tress – Kent on Slide, N.Y. (1979)

As much as I like Tumblr, I think spending a lot of time on here ends up being a bit of a mixed bag. Yes, it’s reasonably on-point when it comes to keeping abreast of new work and new artists making work in lens based visual arts.

Unfortunately, the volume is such that I can’t always properly follow up on various makers.  I mean I have around two dozen names of people whose work resonated with me strongly after only a glance.

Tress’ name is on one of those post-its. I remember a while back Getty released a spate of images Tress made during the 60s where he staged children’s nightmares for his camera.

I was extremely impressed with several of the photss but ultimately haven’t made time to return to his work because it didn’t seem to fit the purview of this project. I’m now seeing my mistake.

Some of his more surrealist inflected work is nothing short of stunning. He takes a Minkkinen-esque approach as far as mood and tone but his images seem more grounded in an even-handed incisively observed eroticism. In other words, the work adopts the structure and form of a glimpse from a dream but it retains the same fluidity that inspires the dreamer to remain unaware that they are dreaming.

Lastly, Tress is clearly EXTREMELY familiar with photo history. Were I a photo teacher, I’d assign an essay wherein students could pick between Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Rodchenko or Ed Ruscha and compare/contrast with Tress.

Source: unknown

In the best case, this essentializes female-bodiedness to genitalia. (Duchamp’s Etante Donnés being a likely point of departure isn’t a good enough excuse.) Worst case–which isn’t all that different from the best case–it operates as misogynistic synecdoche.

The presentation is rather clever (mounted Kodachrome slide as a winking meta-joke on fetishization); but, not so clever as to dismiss criticisms.

(There’s maybe also a #skinnyframebullshit argument to posit.)

With these foibles, it‘s still motherfucking gorgeous. I don’t care how expensive and difficult it was to manage, Kodachrome ran circles around later color positive stocks.

And now that Fuji discontinued Astia, there is no longer a world class color transparency stock. Yes, there are good stocks–I use Provia 100, to better than middling results. And a good chrome–in terms of color reciprocity–is indisputably preferable to the best negative stock. (Whereas neg stocks compared to digital are like comparing the illumination of the sun to pitch darkness encroaching on a guttering flame.)

I mention this partly to provide context on my fetish object assertion and as a result of recent speculation that Fuji may be leaving the E-6 party in the next five years; a move that would mark the end of color positive film stocks.

Motherfucking megapixels suck at B&W due to digital only theoretically supporting 75% of the range of blacks the human eye can see. That’s why there will always be B&W film stocks. But despite still remaining grossly inferior, digital is killing color. I categorically don’t want to live in a world where representing colors like those in Steve McCurry’s so-called Afghan Mona Lisa have been rendered obsolete due to an insistence on following the path of least resistance.