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I like film...(open thread)


Doc Henry

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Imperfect

 

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Agfa Ambi-Sillete, 35/4 Color Ambion, Ektar

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Two more Provia 100F:

(well, one of them, anyway)

 

 

That reminds me of a couple of Kodachromes from 1979, taken with an Olympus Pen FT on the UCL Sinai Expedition in search of scorpions and solifugae:

 

41600836930_b560db2bea_c.jpg

Sinai Sunrise by chrism229, on Flickr

 

43360757762_50e18d388e_c.jpg

Sinai Dusk by chrism229, on Flickr

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How appropriate. I have just started Solzhenitsyn's "From Under the Rubble;" behold..........a pile of rubble.

 

Thanks, Phil.

 

Wayne

 

That's an interesting coincidence Wayne. I hope it adds to the "texture" of the book. I don't know that book - please let me know how you find it.

 

 

Two more Provia 100F.
 
 

 

 

 

That reminds me of a couple of Kodachromes from 1979, taken with an Olympus Pen FT on the UCL Sinai Expedition in search of scorpions and solifugae:

 

 

Sinai Sunrise by chrism229, on Flickr

 

 

Sinai Dusk by chrism229, on Flickr

 

 

Excellent stuff from the desert, Edward and Chris. Those colours, coming from those pristine environments, are spectacular.

 

My first 6x17, clearly a newbie!

Tmax 100

Fuji GX617, 90mm Fujinon

Brooklyn Bridge at low tide (sunrise)

 

attachicon.gif2826E0B1-CB62-4218-8EF1-E58D0C1CEE95.jpeg

 

 

attachicon.gifDF8CDD19-414A-4FBF-9EB0-FF8132069FEC.jpeg

 

A newbie? Are you kidding? If you never take a better picture with that camera you're already ahead. Love the balance provided by the logs in the foreground - this is what wide-angle photography is all about. Superb.

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Rog, I always love reading your discourses on the pictures before you. Simply put, you add value to the pictures (at least you do for me). I find out so much about the art-historical and cultural context of a picture (your thoughts on Adam's pictures surely come to mind here) and contextualize what is presented before you into a wide spectrum of otherwise barely (or not at all) considered territory. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it; it adds an entirely new dimension (read: universe) to my consideration of even my own pictures.

 

And now a question for you. These series of high-art juxtapositions of colour that you so kindly present here. My suspicion is that there is yet another level of abstraction at work with the choice of the fascinating emulsion called Rollei Redbird. As I (further) suspect that it somehow alters or distorts certain colours - how do see that as playing into your framework of creating "evidence" - at once recognizable as quotidian ephemera but also alluding to a higher purpose, a nod and a wink to high art?

 

I must admit I also thought of you when I posted "Pile of Rubble" because I thought the background building might well have been one that Antonioni may have chosen for one of his buildings. Oh, and on Antonioni - you mentioned the film that made me interested in (OK besotted with) photography in the first place - Blow Up. Ten or so years ago Sue and I were in London and, having done my research, I headed down to Charlton to Maryon Park where the park scenes in that wonderful film were shot. To my amazement (and absolute delight!) I found the park to be exactly the same as it was when the film was made - the tennis court is still there, all the paths and steps are the same - even the area up top where Thomas hid behind trees (still there) photographing Vanessa Redgrave and later discovering (or did he?) on his negatives that he'd witnessed a murder.* Anyway, so enraptured was I that time slipped by and I got locked in!** I wish I had pictures but I was using digital at that time and of course that disk got destroyed and the evidence of my visit there no longer exists - a bit like Thomas found with his pictures!

 

* Sadly, the antiques shop where he bought the propeller was bulldozed and is now a Tesco supermarket - not quite the same thing really.

** I had to scale a wall to get out. I skinned my knee.

Thanks, Phil, for your Antonioni notes on Blow Up Maryon Park in London! Very cool!

 

Here are some of my continuing reflections on “Pile of Rubble”: it’s the haunting draped tarpaulin of the pile that has me coming back, again. This is the sort of subject matter that a landscape painter struggles with to keep it from looking like contorted bodies embracing the mound. Then there are the shadows that make us conscious of something outside the frame: a telephone pole, perhaps? You seem to have a penchant for these enigmatic mounds. A photograph dowser, perhaps? If I were to add a soundtrack of Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Gesang der Junglinge,” to this pile of rubble, sleep would be difficult. Of course, Stockhausen is difficult, anyway. Then forget the soundtrack, altogether, and we have Antonioni! Red Desert. Monica Vitti, no music, except for the music of her hair in the wind. Where is my Starbucks and a toehold on reality.

 

Thanks for the nod to Godard and the Alphaville Soixante computer in my color constructs. I think there is a tinge of Tarkovsky in there, too. I continue to experiment with Rollei Redbird and its bias for red and orange is a stranglehold; and, ADOX Color Implosion is so Chernobyl it’s radioactive (thanks to Adam). There is Portra 400 and others, but I managed to score a couple of rolls of Kodak Ektachrome slide duplicating film 5071 (thanks to philipus) , so I am curious to see how this sticks to the wall. I am not religious about keeping to the color fidelity but rather interested in adding “tubes of color” to my painter’s palette that I can mix at will. This way, I can hopscotch and with luck stumble on some happy accidents.

 

It is a little more than awesome that you and Sue found your way to Maryon Park where the pivotal scenes in Blow Up where shot. A pity that the antique shop where Thomas bought the propeller is now a Tesco supermarket. The first thing I put on the wall when I moved into my office at the college was a 4-foot wooden propeller that I bought on eBay, homage to Antonioni. I retired five years ago, but I still have my propeller.

 

I want to come back to some thoughts regarding Roland Barthes, Ralph Gibson, and others prompted by your photograph. Overlook my thinking out loud, but it helps me navigate my own path, as well.

 

For Barthes, a photograph is subject to a “civilized code of perfect illusions,” or must be confronted “in the awakening of intractable reality.“ In other words, he consigns the photograph to either illusion or reality. For him, the photograph is only evidence of “what has been.“ It fixes the eye on the past so “every photograph is a certificate of presence.” Notice that he doesn’t say “certificate of the present.” Considering Chris Marker’s La Jetee we’ve been discussing, the paradox is that we have a futuristic film comprised of still photographs that live, so to speak, as artifacts of the past but are played in the ongoing present of the motion picture.

 

In Barthes’s semiological approach to photography, he defines what he calls “studium” as the vast arena of photographs, only some of which disturb him by “punctum”—stinging, piercing, or pricking. Here, the photograph assaults and “wounds” him, “bruises” him.

 

What Barthes seems to overlook is how seemingly disconnected photographs or images in series connect by virtue of the perceptual narrative constructed to fill the gaps between the images. The architect of this visual construction is, of course, initially the photographer/artist, but then the viewer/audience becomes a secondary architect who constructs a secondary unique narrative. This narrative may trace a simple causal, even chronological relationship of images, or it may be abstract in the juxtaposition of content, colors, tone, texture, text, rhythm, composition, and sound. In Duane Michal’s surrealistic photo narratives, sequential images are to be “read” from beginning to end. Ralph Gibson publishes his photo images keeping in mind the recto and verso of each page and how these images inform each other in a more abstract way. For example, in his Déjà-Vu (84-85, Dark Trilogy) there are two disconnected photo fragments on the recto and verso pages: on the right, an ambiguous image of what may be a woman standing on a pier, mostly out of frame to the left; and, on the left is a hand holding a cocked pistol.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/1a/43/28/1a4328ca3c3f0b6f8ba65f69bd99d32f.jpg

 

We cannot tell whether the hand is male or female, but chances are that it is female, judging from the bracelet, and what’s more, we can’t tell whether it is a real gun or a cap pistol or even if the hammer is simply cocked or is in the process of firing. The point is that the two photographs read as one diptych; each photograph taken alone is one thing, but taken together suggests a narrative.

 

Three years ago with his publication of “Political Abstraction,” Gibson returned to the notion of diptychs he had explored somewhat in “Overtones,” only now he pairs black-and-white with color photographs. I just ordered a copy, so I will get back to you after it arrives by Amazon drone (don’t they wish) on Monday. Anyway, this is just another example of gap filling with photo fragments in an abstract dialogue.

http://cdn2-www.mandatory.com/assets/uploads/2016/01/16-17-e1453764110937.jpg

 

https://thephotobook.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/ralph_gibson-political_abstraction_1.jpg?w=1000&h=728

 

In my spring 2011 issue of Aperture, there is an informative essay, “Sara VanDerBeek Compositions,” that discusses a four-panel work Vanderbeek exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art 2009 exhibition “New Photography.” Her work titled “A Composition for Detroit“ is “A meditation on time and entropy,” according to reviewer Brian Sholis, “with its inclusion of careworn photographic reproductions and its spacing across multiple panels.“ The point that I want to emphasize here is that VanDerBeek’s work cannot be adequately considered within the constraints of Barthes’s semiology.

https://d1lfxha3ugu3d4.cloudfront.net/images/opencollection/objects/size2/CUR.2010.32b_DAmelio_Terras_Gallery_photo.jpg

 

https://d1lfxha3ugu3d4.cloudfront.net/images/opencollection/objects/size2/2010.32a-d_composite_PS6.jpg

 

VanDerBeek further illustrates how even the sacrosanct flatness of the page can be reinterpreted in sculptural constructs and three-dimensional collage, as well. She re-photographs her own images, as well as photographs by other photographers to be included in her photo construct.

 

Also concerning gap filling, we can reference Robert Rauschenberg and his “Dantes Inferno” series of innovative solvent transfers from found photographs in newspapers and magazines, the dialogue of images he juxtaposes on an 11 x 14 composition.

https://sep.yimg.com/ay/artbook/robert-rauschenberg-thirty-four-drawings-for-dante-s-inferno-11.jpg

 

Even photographs that are replicated in series say something other than a single photograph that is not replicated. Consider Andy Warhol and the Campbell soup can silk screen, for instance, and the repetition in Samuel Beckett’s plays and fiction—Not I, Come and Go, Waiting for Godot, and on it goes. What it says. Martin Esslin first defined Beckett’s work as “theater of the absurd.” Then there is the realization that when “Waiting for Godot” premiered on stage in 1953, it was a time when Man achieved the capability of annihilating every living thing on the planet with the atomic bomb. How absurd!

 

Cheers,

Rog

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Lev Tolstoy continues his tour or American Midwest.....Very impressed with advances  in zero turn radius lawn mower technology.

 

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Rolleiflex D, 2.8 Planar, Ektar

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Orange Strip Slider Diptych

M-A APO-Summicron-M 50mm LHSA Rollei Redbird

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Viridian Strip Triptych

M-A APO-Summicron-M 50mm LHSA Portra 400

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I'm intrigued by 21 on M or LTM. Decided to try today how is it. Canon EOS 3 with Canon 18-35 f2.8 and old Kodak 50D in Rodinal.

 

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Many thanks, Phil and Gary. This was taken with a rented 6x17. At $125 per rental I don’t think that I will be renting for very much longer :)

 

Verticals are very challenging woth this extreme format. But i can tell that they can very rewarding if you hit it just right. I am not sure i did that here, but it will be good to see it in a full res print.

 

 

Looks splendid Adam. Rented, or did you take the plunge? Not literally of course.

Gary

That's an interesting coincidence Wayne. I hope it adds to the "texture" of the book. I don't know that book - please let me know how you find it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Excellent stuff from the desert, Edward and Chris. Those colours, coming from those pristine environments, are spectacular.

 

 

 

A newbie? Are you kidding? If you never take a better picture with that camera you're already ahead. Love the balance provided by the logs in the foreground - this is what wide-angle photography is all about. Superb.

 

I like this a lot, Wayne.

 

Lev Tolstoy continues his tour or American Midwest.....Very impressed with advances in zero turn radius lawn mower technology.

 

 

attachicon.gifimg159-2.jpg

 

Rolleiflex D, 2.8 Planar, Ektar

Edited by A miller
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