February 2011
83 posts
“While providing physical objects as incentives [for crowdfunding] is important,...”
– Bryan Formhals
January 2011
75 posts
“There is no going back now.”
– Yasmine El Rashidi
Banned in China
“The word ‘Egypt’ suddenly became a sensitive word on the Internet in China Friday. The word was blocked on all the main search engines in China, including the popular micro-blogging site, Sina. Some reports say the ban was lifted sometime Saturday. But an AP report said searchers on Sina typing in ‘Egypt’ on Friday were greeted with a message saying,...
Lady Gaga, Ke$ha and the German Hacker Heist
“A few young Germans have the world’s biggest record companies at their knees. After hacking into the computers of famous recording artists and their managers, they have placed unreleased songs by the likes of Lady Gaga and Shakira on the Internet. Two have been caught, but the others are still at work.” - story
The horror of large numbers
Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Was Worse?
Key quote: “Discussion of numbers can blunt our sense of the horrific personal character of each killing and the irreducible tragedy of each death. As anyone who has lost a loved one knows, the difference between zero and one is an infinity. Though we have a harder time grasping this, the same is true for the difference between, say, 780,862 and...
Thought of the day (and it's not even fully...
Why do photographers think their photographs are so precious, so holy? Why can’t we just break them up, crop them, fuck them up, do whatever it takes to make something else out of them?
(time to go to bed; more on this some other time, some other day…)
About handing out statements
I see this more often now that people will send me an email about their work, and they tell me about their work by asking me to read the statement. People! I’m not going to read the statement! As useful as the statement can be in some cases, it’s certainly a bad way to introduce your work.
This is especially true in portfolio reviews. In some of the reviews I attended, various people...
Just a thought
Damn, this is like a Catholic service, except with way more clapping, but no organ music.
Oh, and speaking about Kim Jong Phil...
It’s the Age of Facebook. We all are narcissists now. In fact, when Phil showed me some of the pieces last year, I immediately thought it was a comment on Facebook. It’s not. But it could easily be.
“With many books made through Blurb or Lulu I have the feeling that they are made...”
– Hans Gremmen
Ottawa gallery to rent out space for porn shoots
No really. (via)
So many possible comments…
Audience Engagement Grants
“The Audience Engagement Grant (formerly called the Distribution Grant) supports photographers to take an existing body of work on a social justice or human rights issue and devise an innovative way of using that work as a catalyst for social change.
“We are interested in well-designed projects that inspire audiences visually and create meaningful interactions with...
“Of course, it’s absurd to assign the blame to Palin. But even without...”
– Manfred Schneider
Visual Culture Blog
Check it out!
“We’re being forced into these things.”
– Col. Erik Gunhus, a spokesman for Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the Afghanistan war, about Afghan town Tarok Kolache
“‘It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”
– AP correspondent Peter Arnett about Vietnamese town Bến Tre, February 7, 1968
Your tax money at work
“An American-led military unit pulverized an Afghan village in Kandahar’s Arghandab River Valley in October, after it became overrun with Taliban insurgents. It’s hard to understand how turning an entire village into dust fits into America’s counterinsurgency strategy — which supposedly prizes the local people’s loyalty above all else.” - Spencer Ackerman/Wired
Good crappy and good crappy (which might be good...
There’s crappy, and there’s crappy. Or maybe there’s good crappy and bad crappy. These days, everything is bad crappy. Made in China, cheap, but mostly not quite the crappy that will give you great results.
Like, for example, those new Diana cameras (mind you, they’re not cheap) that don’t come even close to the actual old Dianas (which you can now buy for less...
So what is an Artist? (vs. an artist)
I’ve been very liberal with the use of the word “artist,” arguing I’d rather argue about the art itself than about whether or not someone is an artist. In the same fashion, I don’t like arguing about whether or not something is art, but instead I prefer talking about whether it’s good or bad art.
But now I’m thinking (of course that’s just semantics...
A few thoughts on Milton Rogovin
By now, you’ve probably heard that Milton Rogovin died today, and you’ve seen the various comments and obituaries. I am not so sure what draws me to his work has been covered by any of the various posts I’ve seen (certainly not mine, which was merely linking to another blogger’s post, busy as I was with the conversation with Hans Gremmen, which I published today).
...
Tumblr photos broken?
Am I the only person having trouble trying to upload photos on Tumblr today?
“In a world where practically everything and anywhere is aestheticized, and...”
– thingsmagazine
Detroit Ruin Porn and the Fetish for Decay
“I think Detroit ruin porn is so popular, and such a well-traveled visual avenue, in part because we want to be reminded that it could all fail. The voyeurism isn’t just gawking at the old buildings; it’s gawking at the possibility and the danger of death.” writes Kyle Chayka.
I don’t know whether we’re all that complex really. Maybe there is a little bit of that...
