One of the good things in life

Barnabas Google, Thespian

For my most recent book, I unearthed images documenting Barney Google's early career as a Shakespearean actor, before he had his big break in the comic strips.

Here's Barney Google as he is more widely known:



And here are a couple of images from the book:





You can see the entire book online, along with a growing archive of older FIMP books.

Portrait Session

How To Make Good Pictures

Now if I could only find the manual that explains why. . .

Photographic Possibilities by Robert Hirsch

I got my copy of Robert Hirsch's Photographic Possibilites yesterday. It's a beautiful book with a lot of great information for making images using a very wide range of photographic methods. Here's the book's description from Focal Press:

Focal Press proudly announces the publication of Photographic Possibilities, Third Edition, a marvelously updated resource of innovative and traditional photographic processes that imagemakers have come to trust and depend on to enhance their technical knowledge, create astonishing pictures, and raise their visual consciousness.

This concise and reliable handbook provides professional and advanced photography students with practical pathways of utilizing diverse photographic methods to produce engaging, expressive pictures from an informed aesthetic and conceptual position.

This update, in full color for this first time, offers new links between analog and digital photography by featuring clear, up-to-date, step-by-step instructions on topics ranging from making ambrotypes and digital negatives to pre-picturemaking activities that utilize a thinking system to visually realize what is in your mind's eye in an effective and safe manner.

This edition vividly showcases the thought-provoking work of over 150 international artists including Peter Beard, Dan Burkholder, Carl Chiarenza, Michael Kenna, Dinh Q. Lê, Joe Mills, Andrea Modica, Bea Nettles, France Scully and Mark Osterman, Robert & Shana ParkeHarrison, Holly Roberts, Martha Rosler, Mike and Doug Starn, John Sexton, Brian Taylor, Jerry Uelsmann, and Joel Peter Witkin as well as other major and emerging talents. Image captions explain how each artist technically realized their vision and concept.

I'm delighted to be included in the book. One of my books, "A Mime of the Times", is reproduced in full. It's got a page to itself, directly facing the Table of Contents, so I couldn't be happier about that! It's a real honor to have my work included with this group of distinguished artists.

21st Century Photography

Robert Hirsch, World in a Jar


One of FIMP's favorite photographers, Robert Hirsch, is part of an upcoming symposium and exhibition that sounds really exciting. Here's the information:

f295 Seminar on 21st Century Photography Hosted by B&H Photo

January 18 from 10:30am - 4:30pm at B&H Photo Event Space in New York City

21st Century Photography is a phrase meant to describe the type of photography in which many artists are presently engaged. A 21st century photographic approach includes the use of historic methods, alternative processes, and adaptive techniques. The decision regarding which methods to employ in a project is driven by the artistic vision of the photographer rather than the technical limitation or possibility of the equipment. Terms such as alternative, historic, hand-wrought, DIY (do-it-yourself), and antiquarian have been used to describe this type of work and while those terms can be accurate they are mostly not. The use of any one term greatly simplifies the complexities, combinations, and adaptations which are taking place while at the same time weighing the discussion with preconceptionand bias. Recognizing that photographic technology has become so sophisticated that, for the most part, it is irrelevant and, in an effort to create something new, many artists are freely inventing and combining techniques and processes from the history of photography to create a new 21st Century Photography. http://www.f295.org

F295: 21st Century Photography Exhibition at Camera Club of New York!

F295 is pleased to announce that the Camera Club of New York will be hosting an exhibition entitled F295: 21st Century Photography from January 16 - 20, 2009. This show coincides with the F295 Seminar at B&H Photo on January 18 and features work from a selection of artists who have been involved with the various F295 events over the past 2 1/2 years.

Time Machine

Big Tiny People

I've been making lots of collages recently, and some of them incorporated vintage postcards from Paris. I was swabbing the decks of my drawing table this morning, putting the new "Book of the Month" together, and I found a tiny scrap of a card. There were several people walking in the foreground, each about 3/16" high. Here they are.


These are figures from a photograph. The scrap has lost its specific reference - the landmark that was the reason for the postcard - and I'm left with these completely anonymous people. They seem very particular in some ways - they aren't from here and now - but they're also tiny fragments of incomplete information. Aren't they kind of wonderful?

Self-portrait

Self-portrait
disposable camera, 2008

My two year old daughter continues her work in photography, adding this dramatic self-portrait to her portfolio.

Apparently she is concentrating on portraiture, as her first image made with the disposable camera was this unsentimental rendition of her dad.

Her work in crayon, marker, and installation art (tending towards "scatter pieces") continues with gusto.

Teasers

If you were to dig around in my studio, shoving aside the empty Coke cans, here's a few bits and pieces that might catch your eye:


This is a detail from a linocut I just printed. The linocut includes four rats, four roaches, and seven flies, along with some other non-vermin imagery. It's part of a broadside I just finished, working with a poem by Ron Offen, to be published later this year by Pygmy Forest Press. When the broadside comes out, I'll let you see the entire print.


I've got a few etchings of the moon scattered about. These are going to be used as collage material, along with the stack of


cyanotypes that I just received in the mail. These were made from transparencies of photographs I made from my Box. All of the collage material will end up in pieces for the Zero Sum Art Project.


Speaking of the Zero Sum Art Project, the animation above is a record of the making of Zero Sum #24, which will be on display at the Agni Gallery in New York City during the month of November, as part of The Blogger Show. After it's stay in NYC, it will be auctioned off on eBay, consistent with the ZSAP rules.

I'm telling you, I'm up to my elbows in here. Lots of stuff kicking around. . .

Kids These Days

Oh my, it looks like we're heading towards the "terrible twos" around here. . .

Shadows, Strings, and the past 10 years

So, do you ever have one of those moments in the studio where you say "gee, so that's what I've been thinking about"? They're nice, aren't they. I just had one, courtesy of Judith Hoffman, an artist who does fantastic things with metal and artist's books, by way of a comment she left concerning Zero Sum #21. I had mentioned that I was enjoying working with my new box, as it reminded me of theaters, and puppets, and cameras, and she pointed me towards ShadowLight Productions, a shadow puppet theater company founded by Larry Reed. So I wandered over to YouTube. . .


and was blown away. Isn't that great stuff?! One of my favorite things about that is the flames used as the light source for the shadow puppets in the traditional production. So, after my video-watching-adrenaline rush subsided, I thought about some drawings I had made in the past.


That drawing was one of a bunch of pieces I made for a show I called the Existential Theater. I made those drawings back in 1996. At the time I was really interested in making images that had a mix of drawing from the model and drawing from casts, and I enjoyed how the viewer would bring figures to life even if they were made from disjointed parts. What I wasn't really thinking about at the time, but which I'm finding more and more intriguing these days, was the way these drawings were really a species of still-life, but a form of still-life that looked to the stage for inspiration, in the contained spaces and dramatic lighting and deployment of figures in the images. The theatrical aspect was obvious, but I wasn't as focused on the "still-life".

So in 2004, I go to this puppet show at Bard College,


a performance of "Nevsky Prospekt", by the Russian puppet theater company "Theatre Potudan". It blows me away. Just incredible. It was a miniature stage, with wonderfully beautiful and strange and delicate puppets. The imagery was frequently very surreal. And yet, as an audience member, you were fully involved with these puppets as living beings. One of the wonders was that, with such a tiny stage, the viewer was seated just a few feet from the performers, and the fact that these performers were made of paper and sticks and strings was celebrated, not hidden. Though you understood them to be puppets, the suspension of belief, the empathy you had for these objects, was just breathtaking.


The climactic moment of the production involves the suicide of the main character. This is shown by way of the puppeteer's hands entering the stage, gathering the puppet's strings, and cutting them. That cliched metaphor of the puppet's strings, so often used to symbolize being in someone else's control, here was turned around to show us the strings as the very life-force of the puppet. Which, of course, they are. After the puppet falls limp to the stage, the hands reach down and cradle the lifeless form. Gosh, it was beautiful.

I left that production just astonished. That was some seriously powerful stuff. I didn't have a place for it in my own studio practice at the time, but boy, I wished I did.

I recently became aware of a project that William Kentridge did in 2005, the "Black Box"



or "Chambre Noire". Kentridge's work has me all fired up as well, with his combination of drawing, animation, and puppetry. And in this particular project, his building of a mechanical miniature stage in which the lighting of scraps of drawings and wire, their movement through the space and the shadows they cast, the use of some images as "characters" and some as "setting", all resonates with me.

And, thinking about all of that, makes me realize how I'm digesting those influences in my own work. When I started the Zero Sum Art Project I didn't realize that I would start accumulating these strange objects in my studio, and I certainly hadn't planned on building a stage to place them in. I hadn't planned on incorporating photography, and I didn't realize that collage would play such a large role in the artwork. It's kind of delightful that these things have happened, but it's only now that I'm really seeing the relationship of those choices to a lot of things I've worked on and looked at and thought about in the past.


Zero Sum work in progress
So thanks for the heads-up, Judith, I really appreciate it!

Toddler Photography

Here we see my toddler daughter's first foray into photography, a no-holds-barred, impressively unsentimental image of her old man. Most of her energy in the studio to date has been directed towards her installations, "scatter pieces" that display an impressive disregard for creating objects with any kind of permanence.

In making this photograph, she craftily transferred some of the strategies that she has used in her installation work to raise interesting questions about authorship and the role of the subject in the taking of a "portrait". Her method involved tossing a disposable camera on to the floor in front of her subject, seemingly by accident. I was unaware that she had managed to both wind the camera and prime the flash. Upon reaching down to pick up the camera, the flash fires, and an image that certainly resonates as a portrait from a toddler eye's view is created.

That's genius, folks!

Verse 3 - Indelible Images

Here's "Verse 3", the next in a series of small collages that seem to be an irresistable byproduct of working on the Zero Sum Art Project. As with 1 & 2, Verse 3 is being sold on eBay, where you will find more information about how the image is put together and a detail of the collaged and painted surface.

Of course, "Verse 3" quotes an extremely famous photograph. There are three photographs that date from my early childhood that are indelibly burned into my mental image bank, this one being the street execution of a Viet Cong officer photographed by Eddie Adams in 1968.


Eddie Adams, 1968

As I was working with that collage, I started thinking about the lasting power of those 3 photographs from the Vietnam war. Though the subject matter is horrific, their strength is also that of the crafted image.


John Filo, 1970

There's a bunch of reasons why this photo by John Filo won a Pulitzer Prize, while


this one is relatively unknown, and the grieving figure of Mary Ann Vecchio is only one of them. It must be a terribly strange and awkward feeling to be witnessing a tragedy and on some level know that you just put together a fantastic image.


Huynh Cong "Nick" Ut, 1972

And the third image from that time that I can't escape, and that I no doubt share with many of you out there, is of course this one from 1972 of the terrified children escaping the napalm.

I've been thinking about how different those three photographs are from so much of the imagery we are seeing these days. Partly we have the dilemma of the journalists being embedded with the troops, and a much greater awareness by the military of the need to control the images being released in the media. Digital technology is also a major change - the most potent images coming out of our current conflicts are those captured with cell phones and portable digital cameras.


The Abu Ghraib photos come foremost to mind. But these photos are snapshots of atrocities, souvenirs of violence. The story they are telling includes an element of "hey, look what I just did". We can't empathize with the photographer, so our horror is doubled, at both the atrocity portrayed and the motives of the photographer. We're looking at trophies instead of journalism.


Of all of those horrible photographs, this hooded figure had to become the iconic image. It could be straight out of Goya's "Disasters of War".


"No More", etching from the series The Disasters of War by Francisco de Goya, 1810–14

Looking at those etchings from almost 200 years ago, and holding them up to what we're seeing today, it's awfully hard to believe that we're really capable of learning anything.

Box. And books in books.

Subscribers to FIMP's Book of the Month Club should be receiving "Box" in their own boxes in the next day or two.


As with the Verse collages, "Box" is partially a spinoff from work I'm doing for the Zero Sum Art Project. The imagery in "Box" starts with photographs of a 2 foot cube I've built as a stage for photographing and drawing objects that have accumulated in the Zero Sum studio. Plato wasn't very impressed with artists, as he felt that we just further obscured peoples' view of reality, and I think that "Box" would just reinforce his poor opinion of us. Sorry, Plato!


In other Book-of-the-Month news, "Thinking about Thinking" will be reproduced in a textbook about digital photography this fall.


"Light & Lens: Photography in the Digital Age is as an introductory text that clearly and concisely instructs people in the fundamental, “forever” aesthetic and technical building blocks necessary to create thought-provoking digitally based photographs and features works of 150 international artists." (from author Robert Hirsch's website, Light Research).

Robert Hirsch does fantastic work - explore his site! His "World In A Jar" is a recent installation that is really amazing.

One of a thousand reasons I love where I live.

This lion is exactly 78 steps from my front door.

50 Places Update - It's Spudnuts Time!

Since sending out "50 Places I've Already Seen" about a month ago, I've heard from a surprising number of subscribers telling me their tales of spudnutty goodness. In the book I had intentionally left out the exact whereabouts of my "places", hoping to inspire readers to fill in the blanks with their own beloved little spots. But information about spudnuts seems to be in demand, so for those of you that need a potato-flour-doughnut fix, the Spudnuts I had in mind was the Spudnuts in Charlottesville, VA, which happens to be the last remaining Spudnuts on the east coast.


Now, as our great good luck would have it, FIMP's Philosopher-In-Residence Paul Moriarty happened to be visiting our old undergraduate stomping grounds last week, and brought back confirmation that Spudnuts is still going strong.



My understanding is that as you travel west, you are more likely to encounter a Spudnuts here and there. These guys could probably give you directions.

Strolling Around

A few weeks ago I mentioned a math problem that was apparently a piece of graffiti. Sadly, as time has passed the yellow utility box has lost some of its strangeness, as the long division has been obscured by later additions to the box.



Though I must admit, the printmaker in me likes the new sticker.

Speaking of printmakers, some street art that is pretty spectacular that pops up in Pittsburgh once in a while is that of Swoon. I found this video of one of her murals through the very excellent blog of Pittsburgh's Digging Pitt Gallery.




Sadly, Swoon's work isn't something that I see on my daily stroll with my baby daughter. Which isn't to say that we don't see a lot of neat stuff. We frequently roll along Walnut Street, where my favorite artworks are the telephone poles, with their wonderful encrustations of staples and nails and such.



My daughter's favorite sculpture seems to be this fire hydrant, which we have to very carefully inspect every time we pass it:



Based on our strolls, you'd think that the next time we wander through a museum she'll be really excited about this:


Jeff Koons, Rabbit, 1986

and daddy might be more interested in this:


Kongo "Power Figure in the form of a two-headed dog", the Congo

though I must admit I'm pretty fond of the bunny, too.

I had to get up before sunrise for work to join a gathering of people excited about watching an implosion. The building was called the Intel Shell - a remnant of the dot.com bust. Intel started construction and ran out of money and pulled back leaving a half finished eye-sore in downtown.

Austin ain't Vegas. We don't get many building implosions here. Lots of people came early for the show. I overheard many people say they got up hours ahead of time to make sure they didn't miss it.

My favorite thing I saw there was this guy's homemade hat adorned with the image of the building. One reason is simply the shape reminds me of a Pope hat. He should have been pushing the button wearing that thing. I also applaud his crafty-ness and enthusiasm.

I feel like this happy guy and his hat tell you all you need to know about Austin's enthusiasm for getting rid of an old eyesore.

For anyone who still thinks they need to see a good ol' fashion implosion, here it is:

Snacks or Treats? A Quiz.

So, I was doing a little inventory in our house to see how many foods we had that were shaped like things. Here they are:



If these are meant for human consumption, they're called "snacks", if they're for one of the pets, they're called "treats". Your quiz is to identify which are for babies and which are for animals. Bonus points if you can identify which animal gets which treat.

It's semi-interesting to note that the intended eaters of these snacks/treats don't care at all about the shapes. The shapes are solely for the amusement of the treat/snack dispensers, not the eaters. This might not be the case for kiddie cereals, a source of lots and lots of food shaped like stuff, but, alas, we currently only have very boring flaky type cereals in the house.