February 2, 2009

Thobias Fäldt

m1.jpgSome photographers have stories to tell, some find stories to tell, and some, I think, have internal compasses that are a few degrees off the norm, and are able to create stories, or at least the beginnings of stories, wherever they point their cameras, suggesting narratives, but never finishing them. Thobias Fäldt, a Swedish photographer, is in that last category. His images might not hold together as projects but individually all invite questions and are recognizable as the work an appealing, often humorous, off kilter vision. Fäldt's website is maddeningly obtuse, but contains many gems like the image above, titled White Visitor.

February 4, 2009

Joe Ades, RIP

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This is Mr. Ades here in Brooklyn a few months ago. He was always up for a chat about his business, his life, or the things he saw on the street. But the minute customers would show up, it was back to work. I last saw him about a week on a very cold day, occupying his regular spot in Union Square, making sales.

NYTimes Article, The Vanity Fair Article, David Galbraith's De-mythologizing Eulogy (via kottke), photos

February 4, 2009

Mark Ruwedel

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It would be hard not for me to love Mark Ruwedel's evocatively titled new show Westward the Course of Empire in which Ruwedel photographed the sites of abandoned railway lines in the American and Canadian West. It opens tomorrow at the Yossi Milo Gallery. This new series jibes nicely with Ruwedel's Earthworks portfolio in which he documented the mark of man on the earth (shooting burial mounds, old footpaths, earth art etc), and the effect of time on those marks.

February 11, 2009

Used Book Store

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I love used book stores, but
there is always that forlorn melancholy
Of knowing that one day your copies
of Arabia Deserta, Stock Photographs: The Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo, and
The Voyage of the Beagle,
will one day be jumbled amongst
someone else's cook books, Judy Blume,
and, God forbid, self help literature.

So I write notes in the margins.
I hide pictures between pages.

If I'm feeling magnanimous, I'll tuck a dollar near the good part of the story.

Sometimes I circle words leaving secret messages.

I see these things as little whispers
to the people of the future.
I want to let them know that
that these books too once had other lives.

February 16, 2009

Rusyns - Lost Homes

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I know I'm late to the game in pointing out a project by Lucia Nimcová titled Rusyns: Lost Homes which documents an obscure Slovakian minority who were displaced when a dam was built and their villages inundated, but it's nicely done project and worth checking out if you haven't seen it. I only wish there were more photographers and more connections between images/maps/audio etc....

February 21, 2009

Greetings from Costa Rica

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February 21, 2009

Li Wei

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Li Wei is a Chinese photographer born in Inner Mongolia (part of China). He documents the region of his birth in a project titled simply The Earth. I've travelled through the region several times and have a great affection for the harsh emptiness of the land and the warmth of the people. His photos bring some of that back to me.

February 21, 2009

Typology of People in Central American Beach Towns

I'm going to start with:

Guys who look like Kenny Rodgers
Guys who look like pirates
Guys who look like Kenny Rodgers trying to look like a pirate...

to be continued...

February 27, 2009

Ellen Carey

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While I rarely link to purely abstract photography, I appreciate the difficulty of creating abstract images. In many ways, especially in photography, creating meaningful abstraction (minimalism also), is a more difficult than creating traditional images.

I recently saw one of Ellen Carey's "Polaroid Pulls" and was struck by her work's lushness, resonance (her process echos some of the very first experiments in photography) and irony (especially now that Polaroid is fading out of existence and chemistry is being replaced with pixels and bits).

Links: A nice online exhibition of Carey's work., Carey's Website,

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