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May 13, 2009
The first issue of the Haphazart magazine is out---- it is produced by self-entitled freaks, fools and pranksters! It looks good in terms of the magazine reflecting the origin of this very interesting and highly active Flickr group. There is more about the magazine on pa gillet's blog, if you can read French. You can buy the text from Blurb. I recommend that you do so as this is one of the strongest groups on flickr.
The cover image is by Dom Ciancibelli whilst the Editorial Team, who gave up their free time to produce the magazine, consisted of:
Content Development - Christian Kinzler (tossthecam)
Text - Mark Sullivan (mark valentine)
Image Selection - Krystina Stimakovits (casually, krystina)
Design & Layout - Shari Baker (floebee)
On a personal note two of my photos has been included. I submitted this and this. However, I'm not sure what purpose they serve, or what point they illustrate, in the article by Mark Valentine.
The featured artists in the Haphazart magazine are PA Gillet (pa gillet;) Krystina Stimakovits (casually, krystina); Dom Ciancibelli; Mike Lusk (finsmal); Christian Kinzler (tossthecam).
There are two articles in the magazine. One is by J Neuberger entitled Haphazart! Contemporary Abstracts. The other is Searching for a Theme edited by Mark Sullivan (mark valentine). I'm not sure what they argue in these texts, since the Blurb book preview only allows you to preview the first 15 pages.
However, Mark says that his text is actually an edited version of a topic from the haphazart group - the searching for a theme thread that is entitled theatrical therapeutic thematics. In this thread it is argued by casually, krystina that:
[I've] always thought the photographer's task was to make some kind of sense or create some kind of order from the mass of visual information around..I think nothing is easier than just to shoot whatever comes your way regardless how. In fact there are thousands or millions of images just like that here on flickr. Nothing wrong with that in principle, if all people want to do is to simply share whatever they see at any or every moment of their spare time....and clearly there's room for that, but even someone like Winogrand who could shoot thousands of images every month, would in the end....(usually 3 years after shooting) make a careful and critical selection of his material.
Well that is true. Photography is an interpretation of a selected bits of the visualscape we find ourselves within. An interpretation that works within historical design conventions. casually, krystina continues:
For anyone interested in image making will sooner or later ask themselves what it is that makes an image arresting or memorable or evocative. To a large extent there will always be a mystery about that, however such images do tend to have some things in common....i.e. they have been 'composed' ...and composing means making sense or creating some kind of order of what we see - and it does not matter whether this was done intuitively or consciously. In a world where most of us are bombarded by a constant flow of images don't we want to try for our images to stand out just a very little, so that MAYBE someone spends a little more than just one second looking at it?
This introduces different styles of working photographically: ---- one working by chance or indeterminacy when we walk around the streets of a city or a landscape, or working on a specific project within specific boundaries. such as the Port Adelaide one.
The former, the haphazard one, has its roots in the Fluxus movement. However, I'm not sure whether these roots are explored, or in what depth. But it does leave us with different ways of working on the table. to mull over.
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poodly,
both were included after all!
fluxus also liked to change covers every now and then! any chance of getting the new
one posted?