obscura photos + books (@photosobscura) • Instagram photos and videos
This is a fave site of mine. The weirdest antique rummage items ever, curated on a Marcel Duchamp bottlerack level! They're all for sale...no fees format!
janet west (@killingsistergeorge) • Instagram photos and videos
Here's mid-century modern renaissance man Charles Phoenix, often pictured with his mom. On any given day he may be promoting one of his retro slide show events or selling a $39,000 1959 DeSoto. Found out about him 25 years ago while working on an aluminum Xmas tree project. One of the liveliest sites on Instagram!
Michael Perry (@sneezingcow) • Instagram photos and videos
Photographers;
There's a certain format that combines the historic with the diaristic that many long career photographers adopt. Sometimes we all feel like we have too many pics that nobody has seen.
"All photographs are accurate, none of them are truth"
- Richard Avedon 1984
Spirit photography: Beginning around the time of the Civil War,
photographers such as William Mumler andE. Buguet created images revealing supposed paranormal activity.As a sitter has their portrait taken, long
dead relatives can be seen floating behind them, objects levitate, and
mysterious forms appear without physical explanation.Spiritualismproposed that the spirits of the dead could co-exist and communicate
with the living. The photographers who participated played on the emotions of
those mourning the dead.These images
document a time when the objective truth of a photograph was not questioned.
After
the writer and curator Maurice Berger died, in the early days of the
pandemic, his husband, Marvin Heiferman started sharing his grief through images.
... Heiferman posted a picture to Instagram of an American
flag twisted tortuously around a pole affixed to a wet, leafless tree.
“I looked at it, and I thought, That’s fucked up, and that’s how I
feel,” Heiferman said recently. “I realized that there were no words
that expressed what I was feeling. But I saw this thing that did.”
Ever since the year the Daguerreotype was released to the public in 1839, photographers have been turning the camera upon themselves...
Robert
Cornelius, Self-Portrait,
Daguerreotype, November or December 1839
Often these have became famous photographer's best-known works...
Ilse
Bing, Self-Portrait in Mirror, 1931
Or even unknown photographers, later discovered after their deaths, most beloved works...
Vivian Maier: Self-Portraits Hardcover – Illustrated, October 29, 2013
Vivian Maier self-potrait circa 1950s
Artist Cindy Sherman is most well known for her Untitled
Film Stills, an analog photography series from the 1980s in which Sherman
herself uses elaborate make-up and costume to act out iconic female personas
from film, television, and consumer culture of the mid–late
20th century.
Cindy Sherman (B. 1954) Untitled Film Still #21
Sherman began using Instagram in recent years as a means of
circulating her elaborate, digitally manipulated self-portraits.
Cindy Sherman, Previously Unpublished
Artist Amalia Ulman, in response to the idea
that social media is a way to sell one’s personal “brand”, staged a five month
scripted performance inspired by “total makeover” culture.Her Instagram feed, evoking a consumerist
fantasy lifestyle, was excessive yet believably familiar.Ulman went to great lengths to replicate the
narrative conventions of similar lifestyle feeds. The idea was conceived of as
a “boycott” of her own online persona.The project was meant to highlight a disconnect between our online
personas and ourselves, to critique the ’exposure at any cost-culture’
encouraged by social media, while also implicating herself within that
culture.Ulman admitted that while much
of the new identity she created for “Excellences and Perfections” was
fabricated, there was an element of truth to her personality revealed as a
result.
NYT Art for tomorrow 2017: The Instant Image for the Global Audience
This post relates to Jurgenson p.53-82, which should be quoted in your blog post due May 9.
Agnes Martin's paintings which utilize line, grid, and transparent
layers of color that can be deceiving at first glance. Martin rejected
the idea that art should be intellectual, and believed instead that art
should come from spiritual inspiration. Her work is historically placed
within the minimalist tradition (among other artists who created art
using basic forms stripped down to their essentials) but on close
inspection her paintings become celebrations of the trace of the artist's hand. The
video below gives us a revealing glimpse at her meditative process of
painting.
Agnes Martin, "Beauty is in Your Mind", Tateshots, 2015
Agnes Martin, Untitled (Image #4) 1998
Agnes Martin, Untitled, 1960
Agnes Martin, Happy Holiday, 1999
Trailer of the new documentary by Leon d'Avigdor about the painter Agnes Martin.
The Art Channel explores the Agnes Martin exhibition at Tate Modern
"A
photograph is a photograph, a picture, an image, an illusion complete
within itself, depending neither on words, reproductive processes or
anything else for its life, its reason for being."
Roy DeCarava
Roy DeCarava, from the series The Sound I Saw
Roy DeCarava: Seeing People. Seeing Jazz.
A short documentary by Moshe Quinn
In the second half the Social Photo section Documentary Vision Jurgenson discusses the I was there, I did that sensibility as it is depicted on social media. Everything comes across with a bit of a 'sugar high'...always a bit elevated from everyday reality via the streamlining powers of abstraction. We also often see some form of nostalgia involving recent, or distant times, commonly defined as 'the jealousy the present has for the past'. Somehow we see these two ideas mutate in the official videos and album trailers of Lana Del Ray, where she seems to live in a past that never existed.
Lana's career was kick started by the viral activity stirred up by the found footage video for her song Video Games. As these videos age they seem to become a kind of dated nostalgia, one that may reflect a 2012 idea of what the 1950s mixed with 1990s should look like. That doesn't deter younger artists like Maggie Lindemann from going down a similar path...
...but maybe with more restraint and a different twist on 'camp'. Then there's an alternative sensibility that's a bit more real, complete with some comic documentary reenactment;
Thao & The Get Down Stay Down deconstruct the 'serious pop star' sensibility and offer something more organic, with a good amount of live performance and behind the scenes video on their site.
Older artists can indulge in more of an archive sensibility. Niel Young's youtube channel is an extension of his online music store, which actually called Niel Young Archive;
Dion Francis DiMucci, better known as Dion, has a sensibility more interested in now than then, but he isn't afraid to confront the past! Here he tries to remember everything possible about the tour that ultimately took the lives of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper. These were clearly the bad old days, played out in the winter hell of Wisconsin.
Between 1925 and 1954 Frida Kahlo painted 55 self-portraits. In most of
these she confronts the viewer in a full-frontal, straight-on manner.
This helps her bring you into her world. She wants you to feel her pain,
and her passion.
'The Broken column' painted in 1944
Much
of her pain was physical. Her health problems began when she contracted
Polio at age 6. At age 18 a bus she was riding in was struck by a
streetcar and she was impaled by a handrail and her pelvis, spine and
leg received multiple fractures. It was during this bedridden recovery
period when she began painting seriously. But she never did really
recover. In her lifetime she would have 35 surgeries and would wear 50
different supportive corsets and a prosthetic leg.
'Self-Portrait with Monkeys' painted in 1943
Her
damaged body did nothing to suppress the power that emanates from the
inner self here. We are left to wonder what her understanding of 'self'
really was and how she was able to so directly communicate something so
intangible.
Composition was one of her tools. Her figure is slightly off center in these, eyes toward the viewer, with head slightly turned away.
This type of composition is simple to emulate with electronic media, especially with a camera on a tripod, responding to a central pose, or a centered element, with a slight de-centering. This may evoke disruption, or it may make the image more dynamic.
This title is not an oxymoron. Despite being strangled by ads and fluff (literally, in pet form) Instagram has great potential to communicate serious visual information with captions, taken in by hundreds of people, glancing at their phones for just a few seconds. These projects can take many forms...a combination of poetry and images, a memorial to a loved one rich with universal messages, and serial visual art projects that help you feel the journey of the maker.
Milwaukee artist/poet Paul Druecke's project involves two components...picking up trash and letting the process take him to a place that inspires prose. The phone camera look gives the images an immediate, documentary feeling. The words can pull you inward to the experience, sometimes...other times they allow you to just float away.
Writer/curator Marvin Heiferman's Instagram became immediately changed by his partner Maurice Berger's unexpected death during the first invasion of COVID. It's a dialog that's healing and life affirming while indulging in mourning and celebration. Who Maurice was maybe best be described by his own quote from his December 2017 essay, Using Photography to Tell Stories About Race...
“As a Jew, I have known anti-Semitism. As a gay man, I have known
homophobia. But neither has seemed as relentless as the racism I
witnessed growing up — a steady drumbeat of slights, thinly-veiled
hostility and condescension perpetrated by even the most liberal and
well-meaning people. It was painful to watch, and as my friends let me
know, considerably more painful to endure.”
Carl Corey posts very recent photography projects on his Instagram, allowing the work to unfold as it is created. Most of his images depict the upper Midwest, although a recent Guggenheim fellowship seems to have allowed him to roam a bit further out.
Pat Grace has embarked on a project that has him creating a finished artwork every day, for 100 days. He's on day 80 as this is written. Hope they keep coming after he hits 100! The work is fresh and beautiful, with a subtle message referencing corporate America lurking within it, sometimes underneath the pigment and occasionally in the commentary.
-Only hinting at a possible reality (iconicism, mythical)
-Transforming our sense of reality by not relating to anything we consider real.
Relating to a reality that is understood as fantasy.
Sometimes Art isn't so straightforward, blurring such classification, unmasking via masking...
Confined to an apartment overlooking NYC's Washington square park, the extraordinary life of Andre Kertesz (1894-1985) would have a final period of solitary reflection. A gift from Graham Nash
(of Crosby, Stills, & Nash) who would occasionally visit the
apartment with his wife Susan, would help him objectify this emotional
journey...a Polaroid SX-70 camera, the ultimate creation of instant
photography inventor Edwin Land.
On page 18 of The Critical Eye Lyle Rexer states, "Kertesz had an
ability to find metaphors for his inner experience." Throughout his
long career Kertesz's work would embrace this, and in his last pictures
that was all that was left.
August 3, 1979
April 11,1979
December 9, 1979
January 1979
Susan Nash, September 27, 1979
"Without a sense of the life and the work that have come before, the
world of these last photographs may appear confined and melancholy. With
that background, it appears rich with the possibility of making meaning
about the most profound experiences, from the smallest things." Rexer,
p.22
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