Painting Emulation Progress III

I do believe these are the final images I have created for our painting emulation project. Any comments before I go to print?

Painting Emulation Flickr Photo Set.

ARTHOUSE

It's the eve of ArtHouse! I hope you guys can make it!

I have a few works up, including my rockin sculptural piece. You can watch people react to it live at the event, or on this webcast.

Painting Emulation Progress II

More dioramas for today. Again, I need to take photos of them that are actually good, these are just snapshots. I got a new bulb, I should have some shooting done Sunday.

Painting Emulation Progress

I've decided on a concept, which took me forever and ended up evolving into a tongue in cheek, almost satirical, first grade aesthetic, and have constructed two of the four dioramas that I wish to make. I snapped off a couple shots, just to provide a proof of concept. I will retake them with better lighting and the such like, as soon as I get a new bulb for my busted lamp. It casts a nice light. That and a flashlight, with a long exposure and some trickery, should provide interesting results, though part of me just wants to make really crummy snapshots, in the spirit of the thing.

What I have so far:

Links and Things III

From what I can tell, this lovely photo is hosted on this Russian photo site, and perhaps you might be able to find other gems if you look a little.

Audubon wrote an interesting article about "faking" wildlife photographs, and how it effects the industry.

Non-photo related, but I rather like this site I found, that offers a lot of video demonstrations for various art techniques.

Blind With Camera is exactly as the name implies - it is a gallery of photographs taken by blind people.

Pictory, a rather nice photo site, offers a gallery called "The One Who Got Away," featuring photos and stories about lost loves.

My non-artist friend's facebook reads like this:

**** just looked up the photographer Terry Richardson. It is a offense to art and taste that this man is famous.

This is Terry Richardson's website.

So my friend's opinion of this photographer is obviously very poor. Is it good art? I am not sure. It certainly says something. It also says something that my friend, not being an artist, knows who he is and is aware of his work. Is that, then, successful for this person as an artist? I could run circles all day talking about what makes art "successful" and not really get anywhere. But it is an interesting case in point.

Also, on a side note, I was sick today, and missed class. Ugh. Had to have a friend fetch my photos that weren't accepted in the student show, otherwise they would have been thrown out.

I've been an awful person and not gotten enough work done over the break.

For now, some inspiration for my current project...

Here are some more links I found. This may or may not be better and or worse than my prior posts. My life has been pretty hectic of late, and I'm doing my best to manage it all.

Scott Pasfield's work deals with gay men in America, and he spent many months and many miles documenting gay men in every state. While pretty much unrelated, it still makes me think about Forrest's work a little.

Here is a Daily Mail article about a photographer who stayed submerged in an African watering hole for three months to get shots of the wildlife. The photographer ended up catching Bilharzia, multiple cases of malaria, and several kinds of parasites, but he believes it was well worth it.


Here is a set of photos taken in New York in the seventies, and recently scanned and uploaded to Flickr. Alternately, here is a set of photos shot recently, but made to look like older photographs, usually from the fifties. For some reason this latter set reminds me a little of our current photo project.

Going even further back, here are some color photos from 1880's Japan.


Here are the winners from the 2009 National Wildlife Federation Photo contest, and the winners of the World Press Photo of the Year Contest 2009.

Brooke Shaden posted an interesting exposition about planning photographs for a square composition - and working out, not cropping in.


Polaroid is releasing a new instant film camera.

I remember during the critique having a quick talk with Forrest about why students seldom used photoshop and photocompositing in their work. I told him, I thought it was our rebellion against a rising generation of people who immediately pick out computer edited work, and sort of part of the huge debate about what "counts" as photography. Here are some interesting links related specifically to this topic: An article from the guardian, a digital "dissection" of a Victoria's Secret image (which I find fascinating), and a New York Time's commentary.

Tidbits

I wasn't able to get my crummy prints redone for critique tomorrow, so I will just have to go with what I currently have.

I had a very random idea the other day. Instead of doing the elaborate fairy tale based idea, I could make these still life versions of famous paintings, with sort of "ghetto" carboard backdrops, like how we used to make dioramas when we were kids. Maybe use ridiculous objects, like fruits, cloth, thimbles and boxes, instead of people, as well as hand drawn elements. Is this a better idea, do you think? I am not sure if it would take more or less work to do, which I suppose is not altogether a significant factor, but one to think about. I really just want to make work that is good, whatever that takes.

Also, I am thinking of submitting my final from last semester into the student show at the CAM. I can only hope its good enough to be accepted. The pictures need remounting, but this is a minor detail.