philadelphian walls

Labels: photography

Saturday, January 10, 2009
4:01 PM
2 comments

boston textures I

Labels: photography

Sunday, October 19, 2008
10:22 AM
0 comments

i see a darkness

Labels: photography

Friday, October 03, 2008
6:09 PM
2 comments

recent visual output

Over at Flickr, my "Mold Patterns" set has been updated with a few photos of a revolting / magnificent spore colony in an old thing of leftover soup; the "Notebook on Cities" and "Notebook on Entropy" sets have also seen some activity.

And I also thought some of you might enjoy seeing some of my recent stabs at the art of poster design. As you can see, I'm all about the yellow lately:

Chicago-area residents who love the drone may want to note that the show the first poster is advertising is still yet to come.

Labels: design, output, personal, photography

Tuesday, April 03, 2007
8:35 PM
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Houston 2007

Just got back from having spent a few days of my Spring Break in Houston. I had a good time, not least because I got to dust off the (new!) camera and take some pictures. Houston has some lovely rusted surfaces which made nice additions to my textures pile, but for those of you interested in seeing the Houston pictures that are more along the lines of the sorts of things normal people photograph (people, buildings, sculptures), I've arranged them for you in a Houston 2007 set.

Labels: output, personal, photography

Wednesday, March 28, 2007
12:00 PM
2 comments

in the spirit of scientific / aesthetic inquiry

For the last month or so, I have deliberately been letting a bagel and few pieces of bread go to mold in the back of the cupboard.

Today my experiment came to an end and the bread went into the garbage. But not before I grabbed a few scans of some nice mold-abstractions.

Hello Flickr set! [View full size for the best look at the weird details.]

Labels: photography, projects

Saturday, November 11, 2006
12:57 PM
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welcome to the pleasuredome I

I've been enjoying my East Coast Tour, despite the fact that I haven't been able to do much in the way of blogging. It's been a bit of a whirlwind—yesterday Lex asked me how many different beds I've slept in on this trip and my count came to nine.

So much experience in so short a time has left me with a lot I want to write about; I'll try to handle it a little bit at a time over the next couple of days rather than doing one big "recap" post. (I'm also hoping to do my normal end-of-year year-in-review posts sometime soon, probably not until I'm back in Chicago next week.)

Anyway. One of the most fun things I did on this trip was go out to Asbury Park, NJ, with my old friend Cathy. Both Cathy and I have been spending a lot of time this year posting photos to Flickr, and we really wanted to take a daytrip to someplace where we could do some photo-trawling. Asbury Park is a good choice: it has a boardwalk that has fallen into a state of disrepair, including, at one end, an enormous pleasure palace, which has been abandoned and fallen into grandiose ruin.

My photos from the day will be living on the flash card until I get back to Chicago, but Cathy's put forty-three up in a set. It may interest Raccoon readers to note that I am the figure in the mask in the Arbus-inspired photos at the end of the set.

Labels: personal, photography

Friday, December 30, 2005
11:24 AM
0 comments

imagemakers

Here is a Doubletake Magazine interview with filmmaker Wim Wenders, in which he discusses Huckleberry Finn, Michael Snow, Edward Hopper, the Kinks, and comic books.

Also: photos taken by Wenders while location scouting in the West.

Speaking of photographs, I've been looking lately for examples of photographers writing about photography.

This biopage on photographer Edward Weston suggests that Weston was also a prolific writer:

"Weston kept very detailed journals or 'Day Books' of his daily activities, thoughts, ideas and conversations. His first publication of these writings, From My Day Book, appeared in 1928 — others were published after his death.

I would like to read excerpts from some of these day books, but they're out of print (and used copies are prohibitively priced). A perfunctory Google search doesn't turn up much, either.

Labels: art, photography

Thursday, January 17, 2002
8:01 PM
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various small fires

My computer problems seem momentarily solved, so I can return to posting.

Doing some research on photography recently, I was reminded of how much I like the photographic books of Ed Ruscha: books with titles like Thirty-Four Parking Lots or Various Small Fires. The photos in the books depict exactly what is indicated by the titles, in as artless a fashion as possible: raw documentation.

In a 1965 Artforum interview, Ruscha remarks:

"I think photography is dead as a fine art; its only place is in the commercial world, for technical or information purposes. Thus [Various Small Fires] is not a book to house a collection of art photographs—they are technical data like industrial photography."

Arcana Books has descriptions of some of Ruscha's books (as well as photos of some of the covers) on this page.

Labels: art, information, photography

Monday, January 14, 2002
2:15 PM
0 comments