We're featuring the Lyon based, Portuguese photographer Christian Chaize on 20x200 in the next few weeks. I can pre-announce because the cat's already out of the bag (Our Chaize image, not the one above, was featured in the Febrary Domino magazine). Chaize's images have an easy appeal, are also interesting studies on time and group dynamics, and are the perfect antidote to a cold winter's night.
One of the great pleasures in life is jumping into a car and just driving for a couple of days or weeks with no particular destination in mind.
I don't know the story behind Patrick O'Dell's Natives (shot for Vice Magazine), but I'm guessing he hopped into a car and ended up on a reservation somewhere way out west. Feels exactly right and I like it because of that.
The rest of the portfolio can be found here.
My son Gabriel who is 22 months old had growing pains last night. At some ungodly hour he started, began moaning, and then sobbing loudly. When we asked what was wrong he simply cried "hurts" and pointed down at his legs, a much simpler and direct diagnosis than is found in medical literature which describes these pains as "non-inflammatory musculoskeletal pain syndromes, non-articular, inter-mittent bilateral aches" (but so far provides no clues as to why they occur).
Holding Gabriel's legs tight made him feel better; his moans dissolved into whimpers, and he faded back into sleep. When we would let go of his his legs, even in slumber, he would guide our hands back. I have foggy memories of my own growing pains and I have no idea if someone held my legs, but I distinctly felt the rush of sense memory so I think it must have happened. And in those half remembered moments in the middle of the night you also get the impression that this memory will be passed on through some subterranean reptilian channel. And I wonder which is the deeper comfort: knowing on some primitive level that someone is there to hold your legs at night when they hurt, or being the person who was able to be there?
South African photographer Pieter Hugo has produced yet another intriguing punch-you-in-the-gut project titled Nollywood. It's a collection of portraits of actors in the Nigerian Film Industry recreating typical scenes from Nollywood movies which are produced by the thousands often direct to video. I haven't seen many Nollywood films but what I have seen reminds me very much of pulp-filled Mexican cinema of the 60's of the 70's which were filled with stories the extreme and the macabre. I grew up on the Santo series for example in which El Santo a masked hero would battle vampire women, martians, the blue demons, and of course (always) the armies of the undead. There were similarly extreme Mexican westerns, telenovelas (soaps), musicals, and science fiction. All were making movie magic and capturing the popular imagination of millions of people with the slimmest of budgets and improvised props. These were not mainstream films, but rather pulp shown on late night TV and later distributed by video. The pulp Nollywood films I've seen are similar. If you had undertaken an analogous photography project in Mexico 30 years ago you would have ended up with many similar archetypes— images influenced by Western cinema, but made uniquely local and encoded with popular mythologies.
Pieter's work also always brings up questions of race, identity, and of the photographer's gaze and this project like so many of his projects provokes questions, demands attention, and is at once intriguing, maddening, and exhilarating.
Related: Stefan Ruiz and Pieter Hugo worked together at Colors Magazine for a few years and intentionally or not they seem to influence each other. Check out Stefan's project called Telenovelas in which photographs the stars of telenovelas on the Mexico City sets of their shows.
Via my work with 20x200 and Hey Hot Shot I see the portfolios of hundreds if not thousands of photographers, and I'm struck by is how very few photographs—even photographs by very good photographers—are truly memorable. Juliana Beasley has a knack for taking memorable photographs often of subjects who live in the underbelly of society (drunks, strippers, the insane, and the unloved). When I first encountered Beasley's project "Rockaways" a few years ago I think my impression was that the images were striking but that the work showed little compassion for their subjects. But over time the portraits of broken men and hard weary women photographed in harsh light worked their way into my subconscious. I realized my original assessment was completely off base. I mistook her bracing clarity for sarcasm. Many of the images are simply unforgettable. They stick with you. I've since been impressed by the range of Beasley's work and her ability to tell stories most people don't want to hear. She recently started a blog and I'll definitely be following along.
Note: The image above is from Beasley's series on Cambodian land mine victims, it came to mind today while watching this tangentially related but equally courageous story on Cambodian Sex Slavery by Nicholas Kristoff in today's New York Times.
Dear Santa Claus,
I miss you. Why are your presents so beautiful? Why do you... why do you...why do you live in the North Pole? I want you to live closer so we can be friends. I had a very good idea, I would like to give you a Christmas present. Maybe a guitar. I hope you like it.
Raul Andres
Age 4 and 17 days
Dec 24, 2008
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Update:
a few hours later:
While browsing the brand new Radius Books website I came across a a photographer named Debbie Felming Caffery whose work I did not know, but now feel I should have known. She's a super story teller. The images above are from a portfolio titled Night Life in a section of her website titled Other Worlds.
In my file cabinet I have several folders dedicated to letters. There is a section for letters received, a section for unsent letters, another for half-finished letters, and one labeled 'unwritten letters' containing fragments of letter ideas.
In the spirit of the Unwritten Letter file here are a few of the unwritten blog entries I started over the last two years... partial ideas for posts. Here are a few I wish I had fleshed out. I can't recall writing most of these and have no idea how I was planning to finish them off.
2008.7.16
It's 1951.
You're directing Clash by Night, a B movie but things could be worse. Marilyn Monroe is starring. No need to push her down the stairs as you had done to Peter Lorre.
It's been twenty years since M, seventeen years since defying Goebbels and losing your wife to the Nazis. The Americans will come to know you for The Big Heat, but that's two years away and eight years after that you'll direct your last movie. A horror flick. For the next 16 years after that you'll try to make another film but will never will.
2008.01.18
Overheard:
guy bullet pants: I'm gonna call that bitch Happy Meal.
guy puffy jacket: Grins is fine enough for me.
guy bullet pants: I got it. We call him Emoticon.
2007.11.13
A modest proposal. It's not a stretch to say that museum websites are generally, terrible. They are over-designed or under-designed, are often overproduced, and generally lack the very thing people are coming to find within them- pictures, audio, and video of the items within the said museums. Instead of all the Smithsonian and MOMA and everyone else reinventing the wheel with each website, why not spend some money to license a version of flickr that can be customized for all museums. Include all the normal flickr-like features substituting institutions for users, but with organizational levels beyond mere commenting and single institution-set making. Give it depth. Allow for scholarly documents to be attached to images. Allow wiki-style editing of explanatory text as well as official texts. And allow connections to be made between objects/images. Allow users to curate collections, and allow any and all organizations that play by certain rules to join.
2007.10.01
The best images I think are sensual, not sensual in the libidinous modern sense of the word, but in the original meaning of the word... that they provoke the senses and give us shorthand for experience... (Aside: Milton coined sensuous to avoid the sexual overtones that were attached to sensual, but sensuous was also soon co-opted as shorthand for infused w/ sex)... Sometimes all I need to get through the day is one great image, something to hang onto before I close my eyes at night. Here is today's image:
[there was no image]
2007.06.27
http://vimeo.com/212286
http://vimeo.com/202466
2007.03.16
I walked into the kitchen tonight and found my wife sitting alone at the table and upset. "What's the matter?" I asked. She tells me the story of 3 young friends of friends who died in a car accident, one was killed on impact, 2 others were burned alive while people tried in vain to rescue them. I noticed she was holding our new baby's socks. "You raise a child for twenty years and then THAT?" she said quietly.
2007.01.29
Sometimes it takes half a lifetime to think of a retort. Twenty years ago today after a longish hike in the Welsh countryside I walked into a pub and met a man who said
Christopher Handran, in his project Happy Birthday To Me rephotographs his own birthday snapshots using macro lenses he modifies himself. The results are intriguing and evoke Gerard Richter's candle paintings. At the risk of sounding arty, for me they also speak to the gauzy uncertainty of memory and the mutability of time. I like 'em.
I'm not really a podcast guy, but my friend Julien has turned me on to an excellent site called Trucker, Shuckers, Freaks, and Geeks. Check out this episode on Johnny Cash Sound Alikes to get and idea of the flavor of the place. Good stuff in my book.
Julien is the only person I know who has inspired a song poem.
Virtually every traveling photographer I know takes pictures of the roads on which they journey, but some do it better than others. Bert Teunissen has a great little show right now titled The Road, that is simply that, pictures of roads he followed while shooting Domestic Landscapes... The show can be seen here in New York at the Wizenhausen Gallery or online at Bert's website.
I've met Bert a few times via 20x200 and he seems to have fashioned a rich life for himself. As I say around the house about people I admire and respect, "He's my kind of human being."
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There are many similar/related projects but I was reminded of John Divola's Dogs Chasing my Cars in the Desert (main site), which is one of my favorite books.
Perennial Heading East favorite Abelardo Morell is showing at the Bonni Benrubi Gallery this weekend with large 50"x60" prints of his camera obscura work. It's certainly worth the trip uptown.
Related: Pinhole Camera Art Project, A Natural Camera Obscura in India, Car Camera Obscura, A camera so big you have to get inside...
A little inside baseball here. On 20x200 today we released a super new set of five prints by one of my favorite local artists, Jason Polan. The set includes drawings of dinosaurs, birds, rocks, sea creatures, and bugs from the American Museum of Natural History. I think they're awesome and if my kids are any measure, they are perfect gifts for children. I got involved in creating 20x200 because this is the kind of thing I believe in getting out there in the world. With 20x200 it's sort of a hair club for men thing — "I'm also a client".
Also if you have kids in the under 8 set on your Christmas list, my wife's new little T-shirt shop has some really fun offerings based on our son's obsessions (think diggers, robots, garbage trucks, etc) and a few based on my obsessions (polaroid cameras, record players, foosball tables). The designs are from old technical and, instruction manuals, and so on and were essentially dictated by our kids. They didn't want "cute trucks" or "colorful trucks", they wanted their shirts to look "like a real thing".
The name by the way came from our son's first obsession: blue cars. After "momma","dadda", and "dog the first modified noun out of his mouth was "blue car". For months he would point out blue cars in the street. Eventually he began looking for "two blue cars" which gave him particular pleasure... hence the name. The kid above is not my son btw, it's a kid named Max.
