Month: February 2007

Last day for early registration discount for f295 Symposium on Lensless, Alternative and Adaptive Photographic Processes!

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Don’t delay, act now! This thing is gonna rock!

This is a reminder concerning The f295 Symposium on Lensless, Alternative and Adaptive Photographic Processes. If you’re planning to come to Pittsburgh in April for the most exciting photographic event of the year today is the LAST DAY to register at the ‘early-bird’ discounted rate of $100 (students w/ valid ID: $70).

Tomorrow the rate rises to $120 – still a bargain but less of a bargain than today!

You can register by phone by calling:
Carnegie Mellon University
Conferences & Event Services
Phone: 412-268-1125

Registration includes:
Admission to the 8 lectures and 2 round table discussions held in conjunction with The Center for the Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon University. They will take place in McConomy Auditorium at the University Center as part of The Perspectives on the Arts in Society Series from 9am-5pm on Friday 27 April, as well as a name badge, coffee, tea, water, and snacks during breaks, a program of the days activities, and access to the sale of books by symposium speakers.

Speakers and Topics include:
Jo Babcock- Contemporary Pinhole Photography and it’s Place in
Photographic History
Craig Barber- Photography and Memory
Barbara Ess- Reality, Representation and Lo-Fi Image-Making
Alan Greene- Steps Leading to ‘Primitive Photography
Patricia Katchur- Back to Basics: The Renaissance in Alternative and
Historic Photographic Processes
Terry King, FRPS- Retro-Invention: A Revolution in Gold and Blue
Tom Persinger- Introduction: ‘Simple’ Methods in a Complex World
Mike Robinson- The Daguerreotype: Past, Present & Perfect

All workshops and other events must be registered for separately with the corresponding hosting organization. Links and phone numbers may be found on each of the corresponding web pages.

Complete symposium information: www.f295.org/wordpress

Catering to a Lebanese cliché: 2006 World Press Photo of the Year cock-up

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The World Press Photo of the Year 2006 shows upscale young Lebanese men and women visiting a bombed-out Beirut neighborhood like disaster tourists — or at least that’s what everyone thought. Bissan Maroun, one of those featured in the photograph, told SPIEGEL ONLINE the true story.

Time to bust out the "assume" trichotomy again. On the other hand, you have to assume something when looking at reportage photography… I guess we just need to keep an open mind and not address those assumptions as fact.

Continue reading at Spiegel Online

Via Conscientious

Get vertical

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I just snagged an Olympus Pen FT from fleabay. The Pen F series are half-frame 35mm SLRs (what actually used to be "full frame", the size that 35mm cinema frames still are… what we today call full frame was originally called double frame!).

Square composition definitely shook my world up, and I’m excited to see what composing with a vertical viewfinder does to how I see. I can also see how getting 72 shots per roll could go either way: a blessing if you’re shooting a lot, and a curse if you’re casually taking a shot here and there over the course of a week.

New Holgaroid (Polaroid back for Holgas) shoots current pack film!

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Freestyle Photographic has the new Holgaroid back! Here’s their product description:

Turn your Holga into the most unique instant camera you’ve ever seen with the new Instant Film Back! It’s custom-built to fit both all Holga and Woca cameras, installing easily onto each of them within seconds. It comes with a Polaroid type film back, a mask to hold batteries in place in a Holga 120FN or 120 CFN camera, built-in tripod socket a .3x diopter which adjusts the Holga’s film plane to accommodate the Polaroid back and newly designed plastic viewfinder (included).

This film back will accommodate Polaroid T-80 series films [still available but no longer in production] as well as 690/669 size films [still available and in production].

Note: T-80 series films result in a full frame image. 690/669 type films images are slightly off center.

Price is $129.99.

Via Randy Smith of holgamods

CPOPportunity show, Detroit, MI, US

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Photographer Katie West writes:

I will be showing two images in the show that opens March 10th and runs until April 9th. The press release should come out soon but I wont’ be in the country next week, so I thought I’d post this now. It’s a juried exhibition, with four of the participating artists being selected to participate in the "CPOPportunity Showcase", their own group show in July 2007. Over 100 artists will be showing their work from all over the world: LA, Calgary, Chicago, Brooklyn, the UK, Denmark, Oklahoma, Montreal and Italy.

All artwork will be for sale and the artists get 90% of the sale price, which is pretty amazing. If anyone can make it out, that would be really cool, as this is a great opportunity for me and I’m very excited.

If you’d like to check out the Cpop website, it’s in transition at the moment, but you can look at it anyway, www.cpop.com. Or for more information on the show, you can look here: www.myspace.com/cpopgallery (which also has the history of the gallery as well as people who have showed there: Iggy Pop, Dee Dee Ramone, Mark Ryden, H.R. Giger to name a few).

"Lightleaks" toy camera photography show, Melbourne, AU

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Australian photographer/neuroscientist Hamish Innes-Brown writes:

Me and 11 other people (some from this Flickr – fotojux, mikelefevre, artpunk, maybe others?) are in a show that opens this Thursday night called LIGHTLEAKS [not the magazine]. It is called this as all the images are shot on dodgey crappy cameras with useless lenses and hideous light leaks. Sound good? Come along, they’re all for sale!

The show runs 23 February – 8 March, 2007, at Kerala Gallery, 283 High St., Northcote, Melbourne, AU.

Opening at 6:30pm 23 Feb, be there!

Art is mystical shit

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Stuart Davis is an artist who kind of defies categorization: he’s a [kick-ass] musician, painter, potty-mouthed mystic, and a bunch of other shit. He wrote:

I was conversing with this intelligent presence (no body, no form) which was fluent in Is (the language I’m constructing). It was quizzing me, basically, saying "au-VAIH-sool, what does that word mean? do you remember?" I was like…

…

au-VAIH-sool would be more like Insight-Eureka-Enmorphature (?), a subject released from a bind or chimera (physical / emotional blocks, mental patterns, spiritual limits) by dying into its next-self-birth (the one slightly bigger, slightly more inclusive). It’s perception at new depth, discovering anatomy which was previously undetected (due to insufficient awareness), and this newly accessed item facilitates un-stuckness (the difference between dhukka, or stuck-wheel, and sukkha, or un-stuck wheel). But the critical thing here is that the Insight-Eureka-Enmorphature is never repeated, never duplicated, so even though the subject arrives at a deeper depth, a higher level of being through au-VAIH-sool, one cannot simply repeat the formula at the next level of course.

I don’t want to jack his entire post on the subject, so go finish reading it, paying particular attention to the sentence about the safe. Then think about how this applies to making art. It’s short and worth it.

Katie West on a group show gone horribly wrong

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Have a look at photographer Katie West‘s account of a group show of erotic art gone pear-shaped. Misguided show publicity, admission fees, stolen work… it’s all here.

I started getting messages from people who had seen the flyers in the strangest places, like Toys R Us, and The Childrens Place. I thought to myself, wow, those are strange places to advertise an erotica show…

It gets worse from there. Continue reading in West’s Flickr photostream.