blog.imagemlatente

“Nas utopias que até hoje se imaginaram faltou sempre imaginar o que aconteceria depois. Que se imagine uma vida em que se realizasse tudo o que se desejasse. Alguma coisa faltaria ainda em tudo em que já não faltava, e não saberiamos o quê. É isso que não sabes que é fundamental.” (Virgílio Ferreira)

I like to consider photography as an incursion into a place somewhere between essence and existence without ever being quite sure which happens first, located in the greater kingdom of intuition and uncertainty of knowledge. For every given place on this planet where you have day, there is another one where you have night. If you try to dig up into the messed up thing I just wrote (if it does ever even make any sense) you will inevitably arrive at a place where subject, narrative or documentary have become unrecognizable.

From all the art forms, the one I like to see closer to photography is music (why do you think cinema married orchestra?), and from all the musical forms the one that relates the most to the previously referred place is improvisation, which happens whenever the photographer - the com(poser) - seizes to exist.

Few days ago there was a post at Magnum’s blog featuring two new nominees and open for questions. I asked what were their premises without exactly knowing how to answer my own question. This might be it:

“From all the imagined utopias up to this date there was always missing imagining what would happen after. May it be imagined a life in which everything desired would be accomplished. Something would still miss in everything in what it wasn’t already missing, and we wouldn’t know what. It is that thing you don’t know that is fundamental.” (Virgílio Ferreira)

O - K - enough - mushrooms - tonight.

My current and only 35mm camera is a borrowed Lomo LCA from my friend João Varela. It is an artwork in itself - several parts which threaten to fall apart are held in place by lots of scotch tape, and all frames are slightly tilted and partially overlapped by each other but all in all, it works. You know what they say about cameras, “old enough to pee…”.

So for the record I’m using a Lomo because that’s what’s available at the moment, period. Oh and João told me Mrs Cha has actually touched this camera, literally. I screamed hysterically.

And so I’ve read yesterday in a famous leet Austrian art blog something about there being little passion in such a thing as photography, as opposed to for instance dancing. It reminded me of Sir Alec Soth complaining on the seductive and immersive (think it was the latter word he used) powers of cinema compared to photography. You just cannot compare apples with oranges. Different mediums, different experiences. If one might call cinema “immersive”, another might call it “totalitarian”, in the way it easily takes care of all your senses - especially if you like popcorn.

The camera is an extremely simple and accessible tool to use, only beaten perhaps by the pencil and the brush but what these gain in simplicity they lose in implied technique - they are so so much more laborious. In photography there is very little distance between concept and final product, it is extremely concentrated and versatile - that’s what limits it so much but it’s also the reason for its success.

Yesterday arriving home with the Ricoh GR loaded with 2GB worth of pixelgraphs I was thinking (happens sometimes) that in a future alienesque tech world the perfect digital camera would be a Leica M2 which you could plug a USB cable into allowing instant high-res scans download to your Mac (remember, perfect world) for preview purposes.

You would then select the best pictures and perfect 6 frame cropped stripes would come out of it SX-70 style with all sorts of embedded exif and metadata, ready for your precious enlarger. Forget that, you would just fine tune your negscans and prints would sublimate into your filled-with-dry-neutol-tray via bluetooth.

Samsung just made a shy breakthrough towards that alien world:

Samsung TL9 (via musicthing )

 

A perfect future with USB cables, yea, right…

Ah, here are some color pixelgraphs made with the lovely Ricoh GR in the backyards, streets, interiors and peripheries of Évora.

The backyards look like delightful war zones full of dead bodies, which are the lemons of course, but without the war. Oh, look, someone left a window open which is odd because with near 40C outside you don’t want to open the windows except of course if you have beautiful curtains and the heat is always a great excuse to make more lemonade.

Welcome to Sociedade Harmonia Eborense, a very old club in the very center of the very old Évora. These machines have seized to have a purpose since a surprise ASAE inspection issued a shut down order. ASAE is like a modern portuguese SS which is exactly what Portugal needs. They love shutting down stuff, especially obsolete traditional stuff. All in the name of health, order and progress, of course.

Kid making a surprise inspection (ASAE’s orders).

You can find more lovely pictures made with pride and love and joy at my lovely ETSY shop. Things seem to be flowing in a different direction, so expect more pixelgraphy soon. In the meanwhile be careful with the evil global warming and always make sure to replenish those precious bodily fluids. 

adapted from a Frank Chimero work (via a cup of joe )

“Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.”

still from “House of Cards” by Radiohead, directed by James Frost (via lensculture )

As someone who worked full time with 3D visualization for a couple of years this really made me shiver (that’s really not the right word but whatever).

Unlike with regular digital photography/filmography it doesn’t simply try to emulate what film already does so much better. This actually reaches out to a digital territory of its own right. Truly remarkable, the creative use director James Frost made of an already standard technology developed for purely technical purposes.

If you take a peek behind the scenes you’ll realize what I mean. It’s such a counterintuitive/non-fluid tool to work with that it makes the gap between film and digital workflow look ridiculously small. One thing that instantly hit me was how the final output looks so “mathematical”. It might appear you like a natural byproduct of the technology but it isn’t - if you take a look at 1:24 you’ll realize all the distortions, aberrations and the final raw look of it is very deliberate. It’s actually quite funny how they’re trying to trick the 3D scanners into being less accurate. Lomo 3D scan?

Usually 3D visualization is used in the same manner of digital photography, making as precise and neutral as possible copies of reality, usually with rather dull and flat results.

Radiohead making history. Again.

 

/update

@horsesthink

Speaking of self promotion and just because I hate all things hand made I’ve decided to open an ETSY shop. Listing prints at zero profit/free shipping as a shop opening special offer. I win a dynamic shop (hopefully?), you win a terrific art investment.

Do you like our owl?

in “The Rat Story” © Bruce Gilden

I’ve once read Bruce Gilden has never experienced a really aggressive reaction while photographing in the street. That was a bit of a mystery because in a couple of years only I’ve already had my fair dose of… well… “events” - sometimes coming even from people I wasn’t photographing.

I’ve solved the mystery today. The secret is in the hat. If you wear a hat like that who will even be upset with you?? Genius, Bruce!

Now you know the true secret behind such pearls.

still from “WNYC Streetshots: Bruce Gilden” © WNYC

“The Rubberband Man” © Joe Wigfall

Of course there’s too much photo-chop involved, of course there’s cliché and yes of course reading there’s a “rembrandt-etching feeling for tonality” will make you giggle. And oh sure, we all could have won had we even bothered to participate in the first place and wasn’t WYNC so biased because, hey - each one of us is better than everyone else.

FLASH NEWS:

If you put all that little frustration and envy aside for a second you will have to admit there’s indeed something to be learned from Joe Wigfall, winner of the WNYC Street Shots Challenge. There’s something in that video (look “Joe Wigfall”) worthy of a Winongrand - perhaps even a certain Morpheus quality - and something so many of us even non-photographers will relate too. If we will.

(ok… giggle a lot)

“Can’t buy the film you want any more? Just make the stuff! In this set you will find random photos and information on a project a friend has undertaken - a machine to make his own camera film. Plastic and goop go in one end, and camera film comes out the other end. This is not a trivial undertaking.“

Homemade film coating machine © Dark Orange

Does it include trix-flavoring option? Could you now do the polaroid-t-zero-minator… oh please?…

I foresee the beginning of the open source film movement.

(via photondetector )