I like film...(open thread)

[philipus]

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I'm afraid it wasn't me as I don't have a Pen (yet  )

 

.. you brought me back to the idea to use the camera ..
your pictures that you are magic with this little camera are great!

 

Wonderful Jean-Marc. Should be printed large and put on a wall.

les chaises volantes by JM__, on Flickr

 

Ilford Pan F 50 - M2 - 35 summicron v1

 

Really excellent Wayne. 

Imperfect

 

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

[stray cat]

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

 

Well the first mistake I made was trying to get my head around the concepts and ruminations in your fascinating response while listening to "Gesang der Junglinge". Naturally, sometime during that 14 minutes, I went completely mad and really should have been locked up. I'm OK now. I think.

 

That's rather an intense piece of music, isn't it? I imagine John Lennon may have listened to a bit of Karlheinz Stockhausen before he recorded "Revolution Number 9" but held back a bit for the sake of all our sanity. Thank you John!

 

However you did make mention of Red Desert (and Monica Vitti again!) for which I applaud you - that and having bought a propeller to adorn your wall over your whole career and beyond. Kudos. Red Desert - what a wonderful, wonderful film. What is that first scene, where they are walking through that poisoned industrial area, and the young boy asks Monica where all the birds are? Sends shivers down my spine. I must watch it again. And the master had the whole landscape painted so that the colours would be more hyper-real - a bit like using Rollei Red-(flip 'em the)-bird today. (He also reportedly had the grass painted green in Maryon Park to amp up the strangeness factor but I couldn't find any evidence of it when I went). We've talked in the past of anonymous landscapes and now of landscapes which might or might not contain shrouded banshees dancing around a pile of rubble in an urban wasteland. I wonder if anyone has ever tried to read Barthes while listening to Stockhausen? Good luck to them if they did.

 

I still have the three books of the "Dark Trilogy" close to hand and do often mull over the meanings of those adjoining images. Sometimes this goes well for me, other times the meaning completely escapes me. But all that means is that Gibson has ensured that these works have legs - were they too easily grasped then they would be of diminished value. I do enjoy the books though - always have. They have remained a treasure to revisit over nearly fifty years now. I'd also thought of Duane Michals when you were discussing the narrative that contiguous photographs make, whether consciously expanding a story (Michals) or lending us the opportunity to construct the narrative ourselves (Gibson). I once got an A at photography college for putting together a rather pale imitation of a Michals sequence, so of course I've always been a fan. Thank you for the heads-ups about Sara VanDerBeek - it looks like fascinating work. Also Rauschenberg's Dante work, which I didn't know. I studied "Waiting for Godot" in school and always found it fresh and original, and remember finding the dialogue between Didi and Gogo quite unlike anything I'd ever experienced before . And of course because it was described as something given as cool a phrase as the "theatre of the absurd" it was bound to forever ingratiate itself to the then 17-year-old mind. Thinking about it now, as you point out in the context of the times, it really does resonate that we were probably fairly open to accepting the nihilistic landscape that the play painted.

 

I think back, in this thread, to some of Steve Ricoh's and others'contiguous pictures taken on a half-frame camera and wonder that the technology sometimes leads our predisposition to tell stories.Certainly it could be argued that adjoining negative frames do this in any format.

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[Wayne]

Corner

 

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Rollei 16S, Double-X (still available in 16mm)

[djmay]

Madrid, Spain

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Test shot of 4x5 duplicated with Leica S 006

[christoph_d]

My first 6x17, clearly a newbie!

Tmax 100

Fuji GX617, 90mm Fujinon

Brooklyn Bridge at low tide (sunrise)

 

Not bad for a newbie ...

[A miller]

Not bad for a newbie ...

Thanks, Christoph. Nice hearing from you, hope all is well, and hope to see some of your latest photographs soon

[Ko.Fe.]

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So, you'll be buying a 21 for your M/LTM?

Gary

I have this idea for sometime, to get close and be wide.

[Hans-Peter]

fachleute.jpg

 

Rolleiflex F - Acros 100

 

 

Thank you for all the klicks.

[S/W]

Bavarian beer cooler

(Kreuth, Germany next to Austria)

 

Fuji GW 690 III * Kodak TriX * Kodak TMax 1+4 * Reflecta MF 5000

[Steve Ricoh]

Ektar, PentaxMX, Plustek Scan

 

Random Sh** by -Steve Ricoh-

[AntonioF]

les chaises volantes by JM__, on Flickr

 

Ilford Pan F 50 - M2 - 35 summicron v1

Beautiful!!!

[Ernest]

Well the first mistake I made was trying to get my head around the concepts and ruminations in your fascinating response while listening to "Gesang der Junglinge". Naturally, sometime during that 14 minutes, I went completely mad and really should have been locked up. I'm OK now. I think.

 

That's rather an intense piece of music, isn't it? I imagine John Lennon may have listened to a bit of Karlheinz Stockhausen before he recorded "Revolution Number 9" but held back a bit for the sake of all our sanity. Thank you John!

 

However you did make mention of Red Desert (and Monica Vitti again!) for which I applaud you - that and having bought a propeller to adorn your wall over your whole career and beyond. Kudos. Red Desert - what a wonderful, wonderful film. What is that first scene, where they are walking through that poisoned industrial area, and the young boy asks Monica where all the birds are? Sends shivers down my spine. I must watch it again. And the master had the whole landscape painted so that the colours would be more hyper-real - a bit like using Rollei Red-(flip 'em the)-bird today. (He also reportedly had the grass painted green in Maryon Park to amp up the strangeness factor but I couldn't find any evidence of it when I went). We've talked in the past of anonymous landscapes and now of landscapes which might or might not contain shrouded banshees dancing around a pile of rubble in an urban wasteland. I wonder if anyone has ever tried to read Barthes while listening to Stockhausen? Good luck to them if they did.

 

I still have the three books of the "Dark Trilogy" close to hand and do often mull over the meanings of those adjoining images. Sometimes this goes well for me, other times the meaning completely escapes me. But all that means is that Gibson has ensured that these works have legs - were they too easily grasped then they would be of diminished value. I do enjoy the books though - always have. They have remained a treasure to revisit over nearly fifty years now. I'd also thought of Duane Michals when you were discussing the narrative that contiguous photographs make, whether consciously expanding a story (Michals) or lending us the opportunity to construct the narrative ourselves (Gibson). I once got an A at photography college for putting together a rather pale imitation of a Michals sequence, so of course I've always been a fan. Thank you for the heads-ups about Sara VanDerBeek - it looks like fascinating work. Also Rauschenberg's Dante work, which I didn't know. I studied "Waiting for Godot" in school and always found it fresh and original, and remember finding the dialogue between Didi and Gogo quite unlike anything I'd ever experienced before . And of course because it was described as something given as cool a phrase as the "theatre of the absurd" it was bound to forever ingratiate itself to the then 17-year-old mind. Thinking about it now, as you point out in the context of the times, it really does resonate that we were probably fairly open to accepting the nihilistic landscape that the play painted.

 

I think back, in this thread, to some of Steve Ricoh's and others'contiguous pictures taken on a half-frame camera and wonder that the technology sometimes leads our predisposition to tell stories.Certainly it could be argued that adjoining negative frames do this in any format.

Oops, I should not have uttered Stockhausen without a caveat for asymmetrical compositions that we so embrace in photography. The mere suggestion of a Stockhausen/Barthes cocktail would certainly land any bartender behind bars, too! I love your sense of humor and such a good sport, too: sitting through "Song of the Youths!" Extra points on the scoreboard, here. Still, Stockhausen was certainly gifted and creative and brings back fond memories of my German classes. For "Pile of Rubble," we could have auditioned a Chopin sonata ("mit dem Trauermarsch") with Martha Argerich on piano, or something electronic from Brian Eno?

[Ernest]

Back, again, Phil. Computer was doing a "Open the pod bay door, Dave!" on me, so I had to hit the Post button.

 

Talking (or not) about Barthes, we realize he is motivated to articulate a semiology defining photography, so he is not on the same end of the lens as a photographer. My take-away is that we are all going to shoot our stuff our way and perhaps show something that isn't boring in the process. We can talk about Sontag later, but here's another non-photographer playing the academic articulation game. I do take exception with the language she uses to characterize Diane Arbus's subjects. Later.

 

Lucky you, getting Beckett so early on (Lucky is one of my favorite characters in Godot)! I'm doubtful audiences at the time it premiered had little more than an inkling of world annihilation. Audiences hated it in 1953, and I suspect they hung around in lobbies just waiting to boo Antonioni's L'Avventura in 1960. I guess that validates the dictum that it's not art unless people hate it. Ha, ha.

 

Amazon just delivered Ralph Gibson's "Political Abstraction"; the last sentence of the dust jacket description announces that Gibson shot all of the photographs with Leica Monochrom and M-P (Typ 240)! Yes, gone is the Tri-X granularity touch, though his signature deep blacks persist in both color and black and white. It's a very abstract statement, and it's a stretch to call it "political abstraction," which is ambiguous. In fact, the introduction titled "Synapse" wades in the muddy waters of ambiguity. Still, the pairings are a kind of pleasing puzzlement.

 

Cheers,

Rog

[MT0227]

Hi Gary.....really like the look of Tri-X here...shot and developed at box speed?

 

That sprocket again

SWC

Tri-X in R09 @ 1:50

Epson 4870

Gary

[MT0227]

Great capture Adam, really enjoy the the movement in the sky 

Some energy from New York City (from 5th Avenue across from the Guggenheim museum)
SWC, Ilford Pan F 50

[Ernest]

Ektar, PentaxMX, Plustek Scan

 

Random Sh** by -Steve Ricoh-

I don't believe you! This is not random. Perhaps you wandered to this location by random, but you selected an awesome composition that proves "Mick Loves Beckie!" (Or "Mick Heart Beckie" in the midst of a couple of other territorial graffiti scribblings.) How random is the little orange-red heart by the sweet little green cat? Who doesn't love little green cats? And the real kicker is that perfectly composed orange-red ball! Go-o-o-o-al! Yes, Mick Loves Beckie, and I love this shot!

 

Cheers,

Rog

[stray cat]

Thank you Rog. I'm just downloading Martha Argerich now (couldn't find mit dem Trauermarsch specifically (not for free anyway)) but the "legendary 1965 recording " of various Chopin sonatas. Otherwise, you are right, a little Here Come the Warm Jets would set off things nicely, and my brain could get back into better shape.

 

You mention 2001. Another seriously wonderful film:

I can tell from the tone of your voice, Dave, that you're upset.Why don't you take a stress pill and get some rest.

I look forward very much to hearing about what you think of Political Abstraction. I do wonder if perhaps Gibson developed a tendency to repeat himself (aaah - repetition!). For instance my brief look at L'Histoire de France made me suspect he'd simply moved the motifs of The Dark Series to a different country and gone to colour. But I haven't owned that book and it was just a suspicion. On the other hand, I did see his Black series at a gallery in London in 1980 and that was pretty amazing (and a departure from the Dark series).

 

My re-reading of Sontag will be interesting as I'd quite forgotten she'd taken to Diane Arbus' subject choices. My esteem of the work of Arbus only continues to grow (I was fortunate enough to see the exhibition "Early Work" at the MET Breuer in 2016). My esteem of the writings of Sontag does not. Still, it will be interesting to re-read her. She's packed away somewhere next to Barthes.

 

"It's not art unless people hate it." Brilliant! That makes me an artist!

[david strachan]

Hi Phil

Diane Arbus is showing here in the Art

Gallery SA...which I'm looking forward to seeing over next few days, (including the Impressionists travel pictures, also Cindy Sherman).

 

 

Maybe coming to Melbourne as well...just a heads-up.

All best...

[stray cat]

Hi Phil

Diane Arbus is showing here in the Art

Gallery SA...which I'm looking forward to seeing over next few days, (including the Impressionists travel pictures, also Cindy Sherman).

 

 

Maybe coming to Melbourne as well...just a heads-up.

All best...

 

Thanks a lot David - I just checked and... it was here! I missed it! Aaaaargh! Might have to wangle a trip to Adelaide! That will be an incredible exhibition - and even better with the extras you mention. Would be extremely interested to hear your thoughts after you've been. She is probably my favourite photographer.

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[david strachan]

Yes a tri-fecta...or a hat trick...

 

We are on hols to warm Qld next week...you'll have to hurry (free bed).

 

All best...