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Photo

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 10:55:59 -0700

ozu — color ‘pillow shots’

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 10:47:19 -0700

ozu — color ‘pillow shots’

On Francesca Woodman

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 16:48:00 -0700

‘There is a way I feel, or simply want to feel, that she wasn’t made for the city. The City, as in New York. There is so much less melancholy in the merging of her figure with a field of mud or the roots of a giant tree, as in images dating from her high school days, than in the sense of caged wildlife that her later pictures radiate. I prefer the child raised by wolves, the genius daughter of the Venus of Willendorf, to the sadder and perhaps more “relatable” figure she cuts when she gets a bit older — a brilliant and misunderstood young woman trying to make it and failing, a brilliant young woman in New York looking for love and not finding it. The crumbling interiors in which she liked to work evoke a life in the lap of Miss Havisham. Which is to say, they capture the soul-state of a free spirit trapped in embittered and forgotten interiors whose long-decayed romances and salad days parallel the (no-less-miserable-to-endure-because-deserved) decline and sexual misery of Occidental culture.’

— from this, by Ariana Reines

Photo

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 15:58:00 -0700

somewhere north of santa barbara

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 23:49:00 -0800

somewhere north of santa barbara

Photo

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 16:46:58 -0800

Photo

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 16:46:29 -0800

Photo

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 16:34:15 -0800

ferry, san francisco - sausalito

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 16:31:00 -0800

ferry, san francisco - sausalito

Photo

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 16:24:31 -0800

neophytou: Prada typeface by Alias

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 15:56:08 -0800

neophytou:

Prada typeface by Alias

berlin, 2007

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 22:53:00 -0800

berlin, 2007

(1) david luraschi / (2) from ARTnews 1-13

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 23:39:30 -0800

(1) david luraschi / (2) from ARTnews 1-13

Richard Long's Textworks

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 23:36:24 -0800

Richard Long's Textworks

Save everything

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 23:20:00 -0800

the only photographers that mean anything to me are the time collectors. sentimental at the core. moved by the beautiful or profane, and unmoved by little else.

what the time collector won’t tell is the difficulty of forgetting, once the perfect image has been made. ‘perfect’ is relative. accidental double exposures shot at frame 37, merely layers of orange, once told a story better than i ever could.

time collectors are driven to save everything. to tease out truth from a photograph shot at f/1.4, or five hundred polaroids of mountain ranges. to unearth david caspar friedrich by way of the sea.

as this sort of photographer the past is always present. it’s what rises to the top, even as files lay dormant on hard drives. the past is that dust that gathers over your vision while unfocusing your eyes in the sun.

‘saudade’ is a word that needs little explanation. an image can always be recontextualized.

time collectors seek universality, constancy, relationships between isolated events. no wonder they look tortured. they’re drawn to numbers, believing they hold a certain metaphysical weight, like light, like faces that reflect.

Video

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 20:18:32 -0800

Photo

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 20:16:11 -0800

stopping points

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 20:14:10 -0800

stopping points

Spacious cities: Berlin and Oakland

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 19:47:00 -0800

Sissel Tolaas, my scent heroine, as summarized in Now Smell...

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 15:05:00 -0800

Sissel Tolaas, my scent heroine, as summarized in Now Smell This:

‘In many of her interviews, she introduces herself as a “professional in-betweener,” and a “provocateur” and I can think of no better way to summarize her. She is a chemist who participates regularly in major art exhibitions, and a globe-trotting Norwegian fluent in nine languages who now resides in Germany, when she is not in New York, Paris, Seoul, Tokyo, or Mexico City. Her Berlin lab is funded by International Flavors & Fragrances, and she has created scent logos (who knew there was such a thing?) for Adidas, Ikea, a credit card company — they wanted their cards to smell of money — and the couture line Maison Martin Margiela, but she has also used head-space technology to capture and bottle the scents of male fear, air pollution in Mexico City, the Cold War, and her own body.

She sometimes wears the latter (the ultimate bespoke signature scent if there ever was one) and describes smelling it for the first time as a shocking, fascinating, and ultimately revelatory experience that allowed her to discover herself as a human being. Then again, Tolaas is the sort of person who enjoys dressing up for a party — she’s a striking woman, tall and leggy with a chic platinum bob and bright red lipstick on her full mouth — and then spritzing on the scent of male sweat for the sheer nervy disjuncture of it. One evening, she told Mono.Kultur, disgusted by the sycophantic behavior at the premier parties of a Berlin film festival (“the small talk and ass-licking—licking, licking like small dogs”) she decided to “be a skunk” for a night, and applied a combination of accords so noxious that they created a comfortable circle of free space around her for the night.

Tolaas herself was immune to the stench because she has trained herself to tolerate even the most extreme odors. It wasn’t easy. (“I put myself through hell,” she declared passionately at a presentation I attended a couple years ago.) But she believes that our aversions to smells are learned, and that they are at the base of all our worst cultural prejudices and bigotries. Confronting those aversions — analyzing the invisible in order to transform avoidance and ignorance into acceptance and curiosity — is at the core of her most interesting work.’

Read the rest of the article here