All year I look forward to taking our Xmas photograph and when the time finally comes, we’re so busy that it either never happens, or it does but looks pretty half-assed. I had imagined lots of tinsel, maybe some snow, and certainly antlers for all three of us. However, as it turned out, it was difficult enough to get Tony to look at the camera.

Anyway; we’re off to Nebraska tomorrow morning for the break, and are looking forward to seeing friends and family. It’ll be nice to get away from the city for a few weeks.

Happy whatever-you-do-this-time-of-year to everyone!

Here are some incredible clips of time lapse photography made with Bryan (”Crackpot Inventor”) Mumford’s Time Machine.

via Boing Boing

A dead plant photographed in the rain through a window from afternoon to evening

There is this chalkboard at school in the room where one of my classes meets. Over the last semester, there has been something compelling (and occasionally coincidentally relevant) written on this chalkboard by a professor - Dominique Nahas - who uses the room the day before my class meets. This morning, I was greeted with some surprisingly relevant text:

“Aura” depends on two factors:

1. Presence of a tradition (stable framework of experience in which an object is embedded)
2. The continuous existence of a unique object across tradition

Okay - so it’s an art school, and it shouldn’t really be all that surprising to find notes on Benjamin’s writings there - that’s not actually coincidental at all. However, I was just thinking about the aura last night, and now have to reconsider my silly bottled water analogy.

Oh - and the video doesn’t have anything to do with anything (unless you count the fact that YouTube employs object and embed tags in the HTML they give their users for posting videos).

The Pond - Moonlight, 1904, Edward Steichen

Paige over at Flux-Rad links to a post on blogs.photopreneur.com highlighting the most expensive photographs ever sold. Paige writes:

Perhaps this means that photographs are subconsciously considered more valuable when they enter the world of high profile art dealers and the like?

I’m pretty sure that everything automatically becomes more valuable once handled by a high profile art dealer. The process is probably similar to the idea of bottled water: it’s readily available, and at an incredibly low cost, but once packaged and marketed in the right way, it becomes a product able to command a price per gallon nearly twice that of gasoline. Paige continues:

…I know a lot of really talented photographers (and follow the work of a few online as well) who can sell a gorgeous Polaroid for $5,000 but are likely overwhelmed by the list at Photopreneur. Is there that big of a difference between the works?

Good question. And given the amount of art work being produced right now all over the world, there is probably not that much of a difference between the aesthetic quality of a Steichen and some grad student’s work produced in an alternative processes class. Maybe the difference is in the aura. (And so, would that mean that bottled water has an aura that tap water lacks? I would guess, at least in the US, that yes - we seek that aura (or brand) in our efforts to discover (or rediscover) an authentic experience by way of an inauthentic process.) (Talk about your simulacra!)

Anyway; I was happy to see Steichen’s photograph there, as it’s one of my favorite images. In fact, the list of highly priced photographs was very well-rounded - where else would you see Richard Prince included with Gustave Le Gray?

And speaking of Richard Prince, his practice of appropriation is discussed with one of his appropriatees in an article at the nytimes.com.

Last weekend, I attempted to document Michael’s latest installation. He’s got a bunch of it (though not, as of yet, any of the photographs I took) up on his portfolio website. His recent work deals with models (but not the hot, sexy, wearing-nothing-but-sultry-expressions kind) and is worth looking at and thinking about. Talk about your simulacra!

And, speaking of models (yes, the hot, sexy, wearing-nothing-but-sultry-expressions kind), check out Aaron Cansler’s portfolio site. I ran into Aaron at a subway stop the other day, and totally ignored him because I thought he was someone who merely looked like someone I knew, but wasn’t. (But he was.) (Sorry, Aaron!) (Talk about your pseudo-simulacra!)

Also, in other new work (not related to models or simulacra): theplasticfactory.us just finished another website, for Suejin Youn, a fellow Pratt photo MFA student. Her work deals with newly acquired domesticity, and her prints are absolutely gorgeous. Keep an eye on her work!

Keeping in line with the previous post, there are some good things at the galleries in Chelsea right now that are dealing with “truth” and photography.

At Silverstein Photography, there’s a very interesting exhibition of images from Nicolai Howalt and Trine Søndergaard called How to Hunt, capturing the participants and environment of a hunt in the Danish countryside. From their artist statement:

Each image is composed of multiple negatives from the same fixed p.o.v. The same frame repeated to reflect the movement of people and animals across the landscape, here represented simultaneously thus extending the photographic moment beyond a single click of the shutter. This visually condenses the period of the hunt, but also gives a far more interpretative representation of the entire experience than a single image.

Also, at Luhring Augustine, an exhibition of images and videos by Yasumasa Morimura called Requiem for the XX Century: Twilight of the Turbulent Gods, in which the artist stages a reenactment of an event or poses as cultural icons or from the last century - Hitler, Lenin, Einstein, Guevera, et al. The images are both funny and horrifying, and the show was almost like watching some sort of demented cartoon. These photographs take their form from other photographs, and thusly become as much about our understanding of photography - and how it colors our perception of world events - as they are about the people and events Morimura mimics.

Ben pointed to an article on Newsweek (linked to from aphotoeditor.com) about the possible “death” of photography. The article actually makes the case that photography has merely lost its tentative grip on the “truth”-telling abilities it once had (kind of), and that it is now mostly painting without the manual touch that paintings have.

Okay. How important is all of this now? I don’t think these distinctions are helpful or useful anymore. Even whether or not something is art has become an awfully tired discussion. So why are people still talking about it? Why do I still think about it? Maybe it’s our need to classify that which we take in and observe… or maybe it’s the only way we can understand something that is otherwise impossible to understand. (Can we even understand art without a cultural context? Can we understand it in the same way that we can understand food? Maybe art is closer to love than it is to sleeping or eating?)

So maybe it’s not all as melodramatic as all that. I guess if the conversation has hit Newsweek, then maybe it’s time for the rest of us to get on with it and come up with something new to talk about.

This would be looped, I think.