playtime

homage: milton glaser

Less is not necessarily more.

Being a child of modernism I have heard this mantra all my life. Less is more.

One morning upon awakening I realized that it was total nonsense, it is an absurd proposition and also fairly meaningless. But it sounds great because it contains within it a paradox that is resistant to understanding. But it simply does not obtain when you think about the visual of the history of the world.

If you look at a Persian rug, you cannot say that less is more because you realize that every part of that rug, every change of color, every shift in form is absolutely essential for its aesthetic success. You cannot prove to me that a solid blue rug is in any way superior. That also goes for the work of Gaudi, Persian miniatures, art nouveau and everything else.

However, I have an alternative to the proposition that I believe is more appropriate. ‘Just enough is more.”

        — MILTON GLASER

amy stevens: obsessive absurdity and joy

Amy Stevens’s Confections series started when she turned 30.  She was having a go at baking birthday cakes for herself — 30 cakes, to match the birthday — and photographing them.  That was the premise of the project.

In 2002, when Amy began her baking journey, Martha Stewart was a big deal and the whole DIY concept was exploding.  Amy was intrigued by the notion that "you can make something beautiful, too" and she aspired to it.  So she ordered a cake decorating kit and charged forward, but it all went wrong.  Amy came to realize that her cakes were not going to look like the spectaculars she'd hoped to emulate.  She decided the whole effort would be much better if the cakes were made, photographed and shared in their exuberantly imperfect state — funny, wonky, over-the-top — glorifying their unconventional appearance to bring out their beauty.

:amy stevens confections

summer magic

During a quiet night in rural Japan, photographer Tsuneaki Hiramatsu discovered a field and a forest aglow in a strange green light.  Upon closer inspection, Hiramatsu saw thousands of fireflies illuminating the brush and the trees beyond.  Fortunately for us, Hiramatsu had his Nikon handy, and captured a series of stills that expose the fireflies in all their natural glory.

To make an image where you see hundreds, if not thousands, of small firefly lights, Hiratmatsu uses time-lapse photography, taking several continuous exposures and then combining those exposures in post-production.

But wait, there's more...
The Lampyridae are a family of insects in the beetle order Coleoptera.  They are winged beetles, commonly called fireflies or lightning bugs for their conspicuous use of bioluminescence during twilight to attract mates or prey.  The fireflies in Hiramatsu's images are the genji-botaru or Genji firefly.  Fireflies produce a "cold light," with no infrared or ultraviolet frequencies.  This chemically produced light from the lower abdomen may be yellow, green or pale red – with wavelengths from 510 to 670 nanometers.  You come here for the math.  I know.




:via digital photo

shhh.

I'm wondering if this happy little fella (above) knows about this place (below). Probably not.  Think of it.  That could be his Gramma and PePop – and Uncle Marty and Great Aunt Stella, among others – under the lovely acacia tree in the distance.  Ancestry.com, man.  As they say, "Discover what makes you uniquely you."  Go for it.



:rene roslev, lone zebra at dusk in pilanesberg national park, south africa; diana murphy, amnh

visionaries: sergei mikhailovich prokudin-gorskii

Now, where were we?  Ah, yes.

The photographs of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) offer a vivid portrait of a lost world:  the Russian Empire on the eve of World War I and the coming revolution.

Supported by Tsar Nicholas II, Prokudin-Gorskii completed surveys of eleven regions of Russia between 1909 and 1915, traveling in a specially equipped railroad car. His subjects ranged from the medieval churches and monasteries, to the railroads and factories of an emerging industrial power, to the daily life and work of Russia's diverse population.

Born in St. Petersburg and educated as a chemist, Prokudin-Gorskii devoted his career to the advancement of photography.  In the early 1900s, while the world was still shooting black and white photographs, Prokudin-Gorskii was busy inventing an ingenious technique for creating color images.  Credited with taking the only known color photograph of Leo Tolstoy, Prokudin-Gorskii's technique involved capturing three separate monochrome photographs of the same scene.  The same object was captured in black and white on glass plate negatives, using red, green and blue filters. He then presented these images in color in slide lectures using a light-projection system which reconstructed the original color scene.  Since the images were captured at different times, any subtle changes or shifts in the scene appear as ghosted images.

In 1918, after the revolution, Prokudin-Gorskii went into exile, taking with him only his collection of nearly 2,000 glass-plate negatives and his photograph albums. The collection was purchased by the Library of Congress in 1948 from his heirs.  Since 2001, many of Prokudin-Gorskii's plates have been scanned and, through an innovative process known as digichromatography, brilliant color images produced.

In 1948, the United States Library of Congress purchased 1,902 of Prokudin-Gorskii's photographs from his family.  Prokudin-Gorskii's entire collection of unrestored photographs can be seen on the Library's website.  Be prepared for a journey to visual wonderland.

:glass-plate negative title: krestʹi︠a︡nskīi︠a︡ di︠e︡vushki. [rossiĭskai︠a︡ imperii︠a︡].  title translation: peasant girls.  three young women offer berries to visitors to their izba, a traditional wooden house, in a rural area along the sheksna river, near the town of kirillov.

russia in color: a century ago

Emir Seyyid Mir Mohammed Alim Khan, the Emir of Bukhara, seated holding a sword in Bukhara (present-day Uzbekistan), ca. 1910.



Between 1909 and 1912, photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II and the Ministry of Transportation. Prokudin-Gorskii used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near-true color images. The high quality of the images, combined with the bright colors, make it difficult for viewers to believe that they are looking 100 years back in time. When these photographs were taken, neither the Russian Revolution nor World War I had yet begun. Collected here are a few of the hundreds of color images made available by (the miracle that is) the Library of Congress, which purchased the original glass plates back in 1948.




A chapel sits on the site where the city of Belozersk was founded in ancient times, ca. 1909.




An Armenian woman in national costume poses for Prokudin-Gorskii on a hillside near Artvin (near present-day Turkey), ca. 1910.





A view of the Nikolaevskii Cathedral in Mozhaisk, ca. 1911.




A man and woman pose in Dagestan, ca. 1910.




Metal truss bridge on stone piers, part of the Trans-Siberian Railway, crossing the Kama River near Perm, Ural Mountains Region, ca. 1910.



A boy leans on a wooden gatepost in the Ural Mountain region, 1910.




In this last image, Self-portrait on the Karolitskhali River (ca. 1910), Prokudin-Gorskii is seated on a rock beside the Karolitskhali River. The Karolitskhali is located in the Caucasus Mountains near the seaport of Batumi on the eastern coast of the Black Sea.


I'm enthralled by this whole Prokudin-Gorskii trove. Next post will offer more information on the innovative, ingenious process that Prokudin-Gorskii developed to produce these brilliant images.


:library of congress

i still have a dream

The night before he was murdered, Martin Luther King warned, in his famous "I See the Promised Land" speech in Memphis, that "if something isn't done, and in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed."





In "A Christmas Sermon on Peace," broadcast on Christmas Eve 1967 on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as part of the Massey Lectures, Dr. King acknowledged "that not long after talking about" the dream in Washington in 1963,
"I started seeing it turn into a nightmare."




He spoke of the nightmarish conditions of Birmingham, where four girls were murdered in a church bombing a few weeks after his speech. He spoke of the punishing poverty that he observed in the nation's ghettoes as the antithesis of his dream, as were the race riots and the Vietnam War. King confessed that while "I am personally the victim of deferred dreams, of blasted hopes," that "I still have a dream."




By 1967, Martin Luther King had stretched his dream to include the desire "that one day the idle industries of Appalachia will be revitalized, and the empty stomachs of Mississippi will be filled, and brotherhood will be more than a few words at the end of prayer, but rather the first order of business on every legislative agenda."





These speeches place Dr. King's dream in the broader context of his spiritual and moral evolution over the last three years of his life. Set free from the ideological confines of his "I Have a Dream" speech, King's true ethical ambitions were free to breathe through the words he spoke and wrote as he made his way to the promised land. Perhaps even more so than when he dreamed out loud in Washington in 1963, Dr. King's act of dreaming in 1967 was a courageous act of social imagination and national hope:

Yes, I am personally the victim of deferred dreams, of blasted hopes, but in spite of that I close today by saying I still have a dream, because, you know, you can't give up in life. If you lose hope, somehow you lose that vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream.

are you ready? here comes santa!

These boys are either on leave from flying duty this year, or they're lichen loading before their Big Night.

Merry Christmas!






:dmitriy nikonov, reindeer herder, siberia; via national geographic

nicole dextras: ephemeral fashion

For the past six years, Nicole Dextras has taken the native plants of the Pacific Northwest and turned them into elaborate dresses she calls "weedrobes."

Dextras’s art is made out of things found in nature: ice, grass, flowers and leaves. As such, they melt, crack, rot, disintegrate and return to their original composite elements. The dresses are beautiful, but Dextras has more than a pretty picture in mind. Her plant-based apparel is designed to confront important environmental concerns.




"I've had an ongoing interest in environmental art, and working in the theater as a clothes designer opened me up to the idea that the way people dress affects their psychology," Dextras says. "I want these dresses to open a dialogue to people about where their clothes come from."






On frames woven from flexible boughs, Dextras layers sturdy plant materials, such as yucca and eucalyptus leaves, stitched to the frames with hawthorn ‘pins’. Professional actors bring the costumes to life, improvising on themes of nature, such as Jordi Sancho’s memorable Eco-man or Nita Bowerman’s “Ivy” from the 2009 Invasive Species Show. The costumes are brought to Dextras’s back yard where the process of disintegration begins.












Dextras's studio is located on Granville Island in Vancouver BC. The artist divides her time between her art practice, teaching, casting editions for local artists and volunteering for art organizations such as the BC Book Arts Guild and the Artists and Artisans of Granville Island.

















Dextras has meticulously photographed all her pieces and the performances, on view at her flickr stream and on her website.







:nicole dextras, weedrobes summer series; artist statement; shop

triangle shirtwaist fire: march 25, 1911

One hundred years ago today, New York City's Triangle Shirtwaist Factory burst into flames, killing 146 garment workers and fundamentally changing the way America viewed its laborers. In the months after the blaze, dozens of workplace regulations were passed, helping to make factories much safer. The Triangle fire inspired a massive unionization push that paved the way for the development of America's middle class.






On March 25, 1911, a fire tore through the top three floors of New York's Asch Building (Washington Place and Greene Street), home of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. On the eighth floor, where the blaze began, garment workers and their supervisors quickly filed out. Two floors up, the company's owners — Max Blanck and Isaac Harris — were notified by telephone of the fire and escaped by jumping to the roof of a nearby building.

But on the ninth floor, there were no phone calls, fire alarms or other warnings. In fact, the 200 seamstresses who worked there — many of them new immigrants to America — didn't realize there was a fire until smoke began pouring in from the floor below. Within a half hour, more than half of those women were dead.






In remembrance of the tragedy, a special memorial meeting was held this morning at the factory site. A fire truck ladder was raised to the sixth floor, representing the highest story firefighters could reach during the tragedy.










:washington post article, "what the triangle shirtwaist fire means for workers now"; wnyc article, "remembering the triangle shirtwaist fire, 100 years later"

visionaries: shadi ghadirian

Shadi Ghadirian is a photographer who lives and works in her native Tehran.

Ghadirian's work is intimately linked to her identity as a Muslim woman living in Iran. In her Qajar series, Ghadirian questions the role of women in society at large and explores ideas of censorship, religion, modernity and the status of women. The Qajar series of portraits was inspired by old plate-glass photographs from Iran's Qajar period (1794-1925). "Until that time, portraits were forbidden in Iran for religious reasons," Ghadirian says, "so the impact of these photographs on 19th-century Iranians was enormous."

For her own Qajar portraits, Ghadirian asked a painter friend to recreate the elaborate 19th-century backdrops. She then borrowed vintage clothing in which to dress female friends, and reproduced the poses from the old photographs, incorporating her own twist. Ghadirian juxtaposes the traditional images with symbols of contemporary life.





Ghadirian studied photography at Azad University in Tehran. After finishing her undergraduate work, Ghadirian began her professional career as a photographer. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries across Europe and the United States. Ghadirian's photographs are in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. Currently, Ghadirian works at the Museum of Photography in Tehran.














:images shadi ghadirian

empire

From the Top of the Rock, mid-week, late February. The sunset, supported by a stunning cast of thousands, takes its rightful turn at showing off.








:images diana murphy

saturday fare: the metropolitan

Taking multiple detail shots of works of art satisfies me on several levels — not the least of which is that I can make my own postcards for later study and recall.* I've found (have you?) that museums no longer deliver on the extensive-variety-of-exhibition-postcards front. This makes me cranky, since I'm a compulsive postcard collector from way back. My solution has been to stop the moaning, just deal with it already and do it myself.

Case in point: Two or three (four? whatever) Saturdays ago, I took these photos of the Tomb Effigy of Elizabeth Boott Duveneck at the Met. I've seen the sculpture many, many times on Met visits — and I've photographed it before as well — but this time around, I wanted to move in and capture a sense of the rich patina and the artistry of the folds and deep relief. And so? And then? Well?
Me likey. Me not grumpy anymore. And for you, my dearest darlings, repros of these and many other swoond and beautimuse images (card-size, wall-size and in-betweens) will soon be available to order online.







About the artwork: After the death of Elizabeth Boott Duveneck (1846-1888), her bereaved husband, the painter Frank Duveneck, modeled a funerary monument with the guidance of the Cincinnati sculptor Clement J. Barnhorn. Reminiscent of Gothic and Renaissance gisant (recumbent) tomb effigies, the figure reclines peacefully, arms folded over her chest. The palm branch stretching nearly the entire length of her body symbolizes Christian victory over death. The original bronze is on Elizabeth Duveneck's grave in the Cimitero Evangelico degli Allori, the Protestant cemetery on the outskirts of Florence.















* Many thanks to all of you who have inquired about prints, cards and large-scale reproductions(!) of my photos. I've responded to most of you individually, but I want to make sure you know that you'll soon be able to place orders online. As ever, thanks for your visits and support. Mwah! and again, Mmmwah!!











:all images diana murphy; tomb effigy of elizabeth boot duveneck, 1891; this cast, 1927; gilt bronze; the metropolitan museum of art, new york city