QOTD: Charlie Parker
“Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But man, there’s no boundary to art.”
—Charlie Parker
Re-framing Photo Books
When I think about photo books as a collection of frameable repro prints that I could cut out and hang on the wall, they seem like a hell of a deal. Rotating prints through a frame and getting to actually live with the work, for $40-150? By Grabthar’s Hammer!
“Real” print prices being what they are, the realistic maximum number of pieces I’d end up with from any given artist is one. As a viewer, if you want me to really experience your work by living with it, a book is a good way to go.
As an [f]artist, I’d be elated if someone did that to one I’d made.
QOTD: Kandinski
…lend your ears to music, open your eyes to paining, and… stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to "walk about" into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?
—Wassily Kandinsky, in On the Spiritual in Art, 1910
Photon Detector launches photography podcast
Most of the blog here was easy to publish because it was just links to exhibitions and news about equipment. Huge, tedious time suck, but not difficult.
The more interesting stuff was hard. Exploration, non-facts, obstacles… the actual art-as-verb parts. I never finished or published most of what I started writing about that. It’s hard and it never seems to come out quite right and the lexicon we have to talk about it feels clunky, inadequate, and annoying. I let the perfect become the enemy of the hopefully-better-than-nothing and didn’t do much with it.
I’m disinterested in expending more of my life being a human RSS filter for show & equipment news but the artmaking stuff is still compelling to me. I didn’t make perfectionist writing about this nebulous, messy shit work so I’ll flap my face-hole in front of a microphone instead. It won’t be perfect, but it’ll be something.
I’d like this to be a conversation. Comments, questions, thoughts, topic requests, whatever, please get in touch: nicolai at photon detector dot com.
Check out the Photon Detector podcast
Thanks to the just-launched Photograper Stories podcast for inspiring me to finally get off my ass and do it.
New photo podcast launched: Photographer Stories
Matthew Robert Joseph (aka fotodudenz on Flickr) has just launched Photographer Stories Podcast—"Stories by Photographers for Photographers or just about anyone really". It’s a conversational interview format and is off to a great start so far. Check it out!
Main site, photographerstories.com
Subscribe in iTunes
Listen on Stitcher
Katie Cookie in “Arrangements in Black and Grey” Show at Fox Talbot Museum
Photon Detector favorite Katie Cooke is showing some of her pinhole work at the Fox Talbot Museum:
Visit our upper gallery to see our current photography exhibition. ‘Arrangements in Black and Grey’ invites you to explore the relevance of black and white photography in the 21st century through a collection of beautiful images from six British artists, Anthony Jones, Deborah Parkin, Trevor Ashby, Nettie Edwards, Mark Voce and Katie Cooke.
Each artist approaches and uses monochrome differently, from the patient process of using a pinhole camera to producing work with only an iPhone to hand, there is more to these photographs than meets the eye.
The fine language of black and white focuses on texture, line and shape. By taking away the distraction of colour we are forced to look at the picture in a different way. The importance of light moves into the foreground and we start to understand the world in subtle tones rather than bold colour.
Show runs 12 April – 22 October, 2013 at the Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock, England
Katie Cooke’s "Balancing Act" pinhole show, Edinburgh
Relentlessly awesome photographer Katie Cooke‘s Balancing Act series of pinhole photographs opens 3 July, 2010 at Axolotl, Edinburgh, Scotland, and runs for the month.
Cooke writes, “This is a show of my long exposure self portrait pinhole photographs, mostly from the Balancing Act series that I made between 2006 and 2007, exploring the gain, loss, and regain of my ability to stand.”
Two prints from this series are hanging in my home, and they’re beautiful. Go see them in person if you can.
You can see more of her work at her web site, katiecooke.com, and here on Flickr.