October 30, 2012
iPhone ‘the snapshot camera of today’
In Creation and Control in the Photographic Process: iPhones and the emerging fifth moment of photography Edgar Gomez Cruz and Eric T. Meyer argue that their approach is to understand photography:
not as representation, technology, or object, but as the agency that takes place when a set of technologies, meanings, uses and practices align. The photographic object, in this sense, is nothing but the materialization of a series of assemblages, and the photographic object also enables or constrains other assemblages with its use and distribution. We propose therefore, to understand photography as a socio-technical network.
The iPhone is more than a single device within which multiple technologies (including phones, cameras, geo-location, and Internet browsing, among others) have converged, but is also a node of different networks that is shaping new understandings of what photography is and how it is used. The iPhone represents one of the latest developments in a long history of image creation devices, but is the first device that combines three important elements: the making, processing, and distribution of images.
One of the key elements for the success of the Apple iPhone is not directly related to photography production but to image distribution: the simplicity of uploading photos from the device to websites. They add:
T
he important thing to note is that Apple’s iPhones and iPods have short-circuited the need for expertise in computer post-processing software. Now users have the ability to download (in most cases for a small price) small pieces of software that allow one to modify photographs without having any computer skill, in an intuitive way, and upload them directly to the Web or send them by email. This is a key feature, the possibility of nearly real time distribution. The iPhone apps are thus part of the ecosystem, or socio-technical network, that is emerging during this fifth moment of photography.
October 24, 2012
Mandy Martin: industrial paintings
Whilst going through my photographic archives in relation to Bowden and Port Adelaide I came across Mandy Martin's 1980s industrial paintings.
Mandy Martin, Powerhouse 3, 1982, oil on canvas
What appealed in this expressionist representation of the industrial world were the strong and highly declarative colours---the bright blues and high oranges against the sombre tones of grey--- structured around the strong geometric forms.
Mandy Martin, Briquette Factory Site 1989, oil on canvas
October 23, 2012
Abstraction in photography
Lyle Rexer in The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography makes some interesting remarks about photographic abstraction.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, steel grill, Adelaide
Rexer says that:
The definitions usually offered of abstraction in art (principally painting and sculpture) are tendentious; that is, they attempt to demonstrate that all art in a period defined as prior or premodern leads up to the disappearance of representation from the image, and more than that, that a particular form of abstraction posses the character of historical necessity. Among artists in the twentieth century, each approach promised to vanquish all other false, partial or mistaken directions. This rhetoric of liberation, purification, culmination, and transcendence is cognate with the notion of avant-gardes generally and the Hegelian idea of history it embodies.
Rexer is referring to the Cubists, Futurists, Neoplasticists, abstract expressionists, Minimalists and modernist art critics such as Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. The end of the line in art's modernist evolution is the black paintings of Art Reinhardt.
He argues that we should look at abstract photography differently.
October 21, 2012
James Welling: Fluid Dynamics
Fluid Dynamics is a group of photograms created by James Welling by exposing wet photographic paper to light from a color enlarger. The colors in these works were created by sampling selected colors in the Wyeth photographs and “mapping” them onto digital files of the photograms using gradient maps in Adobe Photoshop.
James Welling, Fluid Dynamics, FDIM, 2012
Fluid Dynamics is part of Welling's Overflow exhibition at David Zwirner, which is about Andrew Wyeth.
October 19, 2012
Life in Your Hands: art from solastalgia
The touring Life in Your Hands: art from solastalgia is currently at Goolwa South Australia. Solastalgia is defined by Professor Glenn Albrecht as homesickness experienced without leaving home. It is an emplaced or existential melancholia experienced with the negative transformation (desolation) of a loved home environment.
Allan Chawner, Upper Hunter region, Coal Mine
Solastalgia refers to negative change in a place in which people become disempowered and separated from the very place perceived as home. Physical and mental health deteriorates due to an accumulation of adverse conditions.
The exhibition addresses issues such as drought, living under Sydney’s flight paths, the environmental stress of the barrier reef, the lasting issues surrounding the stolen generations, and the effect of ‘ghost nets’ in the Gulf of Carpentaria.
The Chawner photograph refers to open-cut coal mining in the Upper Hunter, the extent of which by the late 1990s, was in excess of 500 square kilometres and had changed the landscape in ways that older traditions of underground mining did not.
October 18, 2012
Gustave Caillebott: painting and photography
Gustave Caillebott's paintings are seen to be a radical, very modern, photography-like depictions that provide insight into the close relationship between photography and painting.The unusual perspectives resulting from the way, Caillebotte framed his windows on the world anticipate a photographic view which would only gradually evolve in that medium.
Gustave Caillebotte, Parkettschleifer, 1875,
Numerous works of Caillebotte's anticipate photographic perspective—especially in their particular angles of view and the way the images are cropped, but also in their approach to themes like movement and abstraction—that does not emerge in the medium of photography itself until later.
October 12, 2012
Jeffrey Smart: paintings 1940-2011
Jeffrey Smart, the Australian painter has an retrospective exhibition of paintings of his industrial wastelands and concrete urban streetscapes at the University of South Australia's Samstag Art Museum. They are full of bright colour, sold structure and strong sunlight.There is a precise attention to clean lines and geometric composition indicating carefully composed compositions.
Jeffrey Smart, Rushcutters Bay Baths, Sydney, 1961, oil on canvas
In many of the pictures form and structure dominate. In the manmade structures such as roadways and apartment blocks or public buildings, there is the occasional figure, which often looks as a mere compositional ploy. There is often a fence, a building or a poster stretches across the whole width of the frame that helps to evoke a sense of separation, even isolation.
Jeffrey Smart, Practice, Sydney, 1961, oil on canvas
I found the Sydney paintings of the 1960s intriguing. These were made before he left for Italy.
October 7, 2012
Galleries: The Photography Room
The Photography Room in Queanbeyan, NSW is a newly established commercial gallery space, studio and point of call for artists and students. It is run by Sean Davey and it helps to overcome the difficulty photographers have to get exhibitions in galleries.
October 4, 2012
New Colour Photography in Australia
Tim Handfield was a leading exponent of New Colour Photography in Australia in the 70s, collected for aesthetic as much as documentary reasons. As the director of a colour lab for over 20 years he pioneered and introduced new technologies, and is the master-printer behind and advising other artists. He was also among the first to adopt digital photography in the 90s.
Tim Handfield, Brick Wall & Green Plastic, Melbourne 1977-78
I know very little about the 1970s Australian New Colour Photography movement. Was there a movement akin to the American one? If so, then the photographic art historians don't seem to have written about it.
October 2, 2012
America in View: Landscape Photography 1865 to Now
This is a Flak Photo project --an online collaboration between Andy Adams and Jan Howard at the RISD Museum. The Art Rhode Island School of Design Museum's exhibitionis an overview of the style and approach photographers have brought to their interpretations of the land over the past 150 years. The RISD commissioned FlakPhoto.com creator Andy Adams to curate a digital projection of 21st-century American landscape views, complementing the Museum's America in View exhibition.
Flak Photo acknowledges that ours is a digitally networked photo culture, so the Web played a significant role in its creation and execution. The focus of the online exhibition is on current practice in landscape picture-making. "Landscape" includes urbanscape:
Catlin Teal Price, Overpass, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2010 from the Annabelle Annabelle series.
This is close to being architectural--it is making brutalism beautiful.