“These are four scanned pictures of hardcopies I possess of the French nuclear test codenamed Licorne, which was fired on August 24, 1970 . The French army had these pictures taken on site. The pictures were readily available at the time at Tahiti and Moruroa military base, and mine have been quite degraded. I scanned them and tried to restore them.”
Still best known for his innovative and unique “Zuma” photographs of the mid-late ’70s, John Divola is an amazingly prolific photographer with a superb, exhaustive website. I’ve been on a huge Divola kick lately; here’s but a tiny sampling from the past 30 years. (Series are central to Divola’s work; the images here are labeled for the series they belong to.)
Dogs Chasing my Car in the Desert
As Far as I Could Get
(”These photographs were made by pushing the self-timer button on my camera and running as fast as I could away from the camera. An exposure is made in 10 seconds.”)
MGM Backlot
“The photographs in this series were made at the MGM New York City back-lot in Culver City, California in 1979/80. The lot was already partially demolished when I began and completely demolished shortly after the completion of the series.”
Abandoned Houses
The Taliban forbade all forms of human representation—from “pedestrian crossing”-style street signs, to ancient statues, to photography. But when Magnum photographer Thomas Dworzak went to Afghanistan in December 2001, he discovered a cache of studio photographs of male Taliban. They were purportedly taken for identification purposes—a small loophole in the law—but as you can see these are much more convivial and decorative than your standard ID card. Watch a fascinating short video piece about Dworzak’s finds here; it raises all sorts of interesting questions about representation, beliefs, and functionality.
Sohier photographs hobbyists and other people who have devoted themselves to microcosms in which they are in complete control.
Man working on miniature barn, Shelburne Farms, VT, 2004
Man applying tanning lotion before bodybuilding competition, Worcester, MA, 2003
Man in church basement with nativity scene, Brooklyn, NY, 2002
“Myoung Ho Lee, a young artist from South Korea, has produced an elaborate series of photographs that pose some unusual questions about representation, reality, art, environment and seeing.
Simple in concept, complex in execution, he makes us look at a tree in its natural surroundings, but separates the tree artificially from nature by presenting it on an immense white ground, as one would see a painting or photograph on a billboard.”
Pinhole photographer Justin Quinnell turns his mouth into a camera with these fun pinhole photographs. I seem to recall somebody else doing mouth pinholes several years ago, but can’t remember who. Does anybody else have a clue?
Update: Reader/photographer Jonathan points me to a video of Ann Hamilton doing something similar in “Face to Face.” Thanks Jonathan
via This is That
Keever’s dreamlike photographs are pretty sensuous, but the most interesting part might actually be how she makes them. (Kind of a problematic conundrum, no? No?)
via Metafilter
Animal Logic
Previously on YDA: Barnes’ photographs of Roman Starlings
In New York? See Animal Logic in person
Curious Expeditions (great site) has a stunning post about incredible libraries across the planet. Most of the photos (including all the ones seen here, I believe) were taken by Candida Hofer, but I hadn’t seen most of them before. Fantastic stuff.
Abbey Library St. Gallen, Switzerland
Biblioteca Geral University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal
Biblioteca do Palacio Nacional da Ajuda Lisboa III, Lisbon, Portugal
Melk Monastery Library, Melk, Austria
George Peabody Library, Baltimore, Maryland, USA
Square America, the web’s best site for well-curated vernacular photography from thee olden days, as far as I can tell, has a great new gallery up called At the Window, which should be fairly self-explanatory.
The photographs in half awake and half asleep in the water are images that peek from this shore through to the other shore. They look candid and relax, but are the labour of courage and love from an artist who is not a great swimmer. The art critic Kotaro Iizawa has commented on this series,”The visual line does not settle and leans heavily to one side, while the calm and collected colours of the photographs seem to trip up the viewer in an unstable manner. The feeling of being stranded however, is strangely comforting.”
website
via Heading East
The new issue of Seesaw magazine is now online, and the current issue features my interview with South African photographer Roger Ballen, whom I consider one of the most fascinating artists working today. He’s also a very thoughtful and opinionated man, and I gained a lot of insight into his work from talking to him, and was fascinated to hear his thoughts on the nature of photography and why so many artists using photography just can’t get it right.
Your photographs tend to always have an element of spontaneity to them, as still as they might appear.
There has to be. That’s such an interesting thing that I’ve discovered in photography. A lot of artists today use photography, and they create these sort of installations or conceptual photographs. But you remember almost none of those photographs. They just sort of sit there and you have to figure out the guy’s theory to get into the work. The reason the images don’t get inside you is because the artists don’t understand anything about photography. You can’t just set things up and photograph them and expect the picture to “zap.” It is very important that the mind feels that there is a moment of truth or a moment of authenticity. It’s really crucial, because if the artist’s hand is seen as too strong, the pictures seem either dead or contrived. The mind doesn’t believe it. The mind has to see that photograph as commenting on some aspect of truth, whatever truth means.
The most common question people ask me, especially in Shadow Chamber, is “Is this place real, did you make it, did you do this, did you do that?” The answer is, there are so many answers to that question. Everything you see in Shadow Chamber is me, because nobody else could take those pictures, even if they went to the same place as me. So it’s way of viewing the world photographically, it’s a very complex way of seeing it. Then, each one of those pictures involves thousands and thousands of subconscious and conscious steps to get to that point. Because photography is such an easy medium to master technically, especially with today’s cameras, people don’t realize that it’s not just being able to pick up a camera. When I lift that camera up to take a picture, I’ve gone through thousands of steps to get to that point. That’s what you’re really seeing; it’s a complex view of the world, through my imagination, through my experiences. It’s a science and art at the same time.
Filmmaker Errol Morris recently completed his second blog post devoted to the relationship of truth and photography. Entitled “Will the Real Hooded Man Please Stand Up,” he deconstructs a fascinating story that happened within the pages of the New York Times last year. The paper ran a profile of Ali Shalal Qaissi, the man under the cloak in the infamous Abu Ghraib photograph. The only problem was, that’s not who he was at all.
Morris is currently working on a film about those Abu Ghraib photos and the power they wield, so he’s in a unique spot to pen this essay, which I found very stimulating.
(Shalal Qaissi is unfortunately nicknamed “Clawman,” and is referred to as such throughout the article.)
one crucial aspect of the controversy – to my mind, the most crucial aspect – remained overlooked. Namely, the central role that photography itself played in the mistaken identification, and the way that photography lends itself to those errors and may even engender them.
Here is how I believe the error occurred. 1) Clawman claimed to be the man under the hood in the iconic photograph. This led to journalistic interest in him – no iconic photograph: little or no journalistic interest; 2) that same photograph was taken as partial proof of Clawman’s claim; and 3) lastly, that “proof” was further cemented in the minds of Times readers with a new photograph. The photo of a man holding a photo of the man in the iconic photo created an associative link much stronger than mere words might have. We see the man who purports to be the Hooded Man in a photograph, holding the Hooded Man photograph.
Years ago I became enamored with the writings of Norwood Russell Hanson, a philosopher and ex-fighter pilot who died at the age of 43 while flying his own plane to a lecture engagement at Cornell. Hanson, among others, pioneered the idea that observations in science are not independent of theory but are, on the contrary, quite dependent on it. In his book, “Patterns of Discovery,” published in 1958, he coined the term “theory-laden” and wrote: “there is more to seeing than meets the eye.” I would like to make an even stronger claim: Believing is seeing.
Few photographers captured the “urban cowboy” flavor of Texas in the ’70s as strongly as Houston’s Geoff Winningham. While still an active photographer and teacher, Winningham’s strongest work, in my eyes, came from his relentless prowling of Texas subcultures, notably high school football, professional wrestling, and the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. His books are hard to come by (and expensive when you do see them), but they’re ripe for reissue.
The jpegs of this work on Winningham’s own site aren’t too hot. Try these instead.
