Capture Brooklyn

powerHouse held an exhibition, "Capture Brooklyn," as part of the NY Photo Festival last weekend. They had about fifty photographers on display, and it was pretty awesome to see. New York is a difficult place to photograph even for New Yorkers, and I think photographers who live here would understand what I mean by this, whether or not they agree. However you're instinctively drawn to photograph the place where you are in the moment you're in it, you're conscious of the fact that it might have been (or definitely has been) photographed thousands of times before. Which sometimes leads to brilliant new perspective (see the last post on Jonathan Smith) or to repetition (see Flickr). But better still it leads photographers to dig out corners that most people haven't seen, and the reason why "Capture Brooklyn" was great is because it was a collection of great photographers and also great explorers.

Here are a few highlights. I found Carol Dragon's work and then found her website: She lived in Red Hook for a year in the '80s, left without being very interested in the neighborhood, and then four years later returned and has been photographing it since. You can see her work on this on her site. She has also taken some wonderful photos in the area around Stillwell Avenue in Brighton Beach, including of the annual Polar Bear club that jumps into the (freezing) water at New Years. Here is one that I love:


And Massimo Cristaldi, an Italian photographer who does amazing night photography.
He has mostly done this in Italy but has photographed Brooklyn as well, and you can see his photos of this on his site


Nathan Kensinger, is a New York photographer who is obviously devoted to exploring all unseen things in general. His site is kind of an encylopedia of cool historic buildings in New York's outer boroughs, and also across the country. I love this one, which was taken inside of the Domino Sugar Factory...




...looking out on the bridge. Which is a reminder that every landmark has a million viewpoints, and the point of perspective is what's important. Which is more or less what Capture Brooklyn was. The exhibit (I think) ended with the festival, but the participating photographers are still listed on the site.

Untold Stories

Maybe it's from being raised on Raymond Chandler novels, but I am perpetually drawn to all things steeped in noir: my bedroom is wallpapered with printouts of Crewdson, Atget, and Michael Wolff's "Transparent City." And, as of this week, with photographs from Jonathan Smith's Untold Stories, which opened last Thursday at Rick Wester Fine Art in Chelsea, and are on display through November.


I had the chance to interview Smith for the October Pop Photo last month, not for this series but for his Bridge Project. (The article's not up online yet, but the issue is on the stands.) The Bridge Project, as Smith described it, was an archival task: rather than capturing New York City Bridges themselves, he was interested in their context, from different viewpoints in more obscure locations, as an unchanging backdrop to the city constantly in flux. They're fascinating from this perspective partly because you rarely see bridges captured in this way, but more so because of their voyeuristic component. You're conscious of the photographer traveling through the city, documenting scenes as a detached witness: such as a wedding, kids playing on a sandhill, an anonymous residential garage.

Untold Stories is more suggestive, with its cinematic stills of nightlit strangers posed in uncertain settings, an underpass, through the window of a motel. But it also includes photos that are in their way archival, city-at-night, viewed from obscure vantage points; capturing a certain aspect of New York which is, always, a city of voyeurs, whether by choice or accident.

I'm posting a few of my favorites below, but if in the city, it's far better to stop by the gallery and wander around, paint in the narrative, and fill in cracks. The gallery is located at 511 West 25th Street.

The Psychology of Dream Analysis

I can't exactly remember how I found this video, but it must have been while reading about Rian Johnson's upcoming film Looper. Saved it, loved it, watched it, watched it again, and am sharing it here even though it's two years old. It's like Woody Allen meets Bunuel meets Amelie-era Jeunet, with a Raymond Chandler ending. Enjoy:

The Psychology of Dream Analysis from rcjohnso on Vimeo.

[And for more Raymond Chandler endings, listen to Robyn Hitchcock's take.]

J.G. Ballard, David Pelham, and the Glory Days of Collaborative Art in Book Publishing

This is a bit old of a posting, but I'm reposting a link to it nevertheless. I found it at one of my favorite sites, Ballardian.com. This site is great to dig around in if you're a fan of Ballard's work. Not just because there are tons of great essays on his work itself, but because it features a lot of great pictorials of art that's been inspired by his writing. (Too many to post links to even all my favorites, dig around and you'll see.)

I'm reposting a link to this story about his collaboration with early publisher David Pelham for Penguin because it's a kind of testament to this. Pelham only plays somewhat into the the essay itself, which delves somewhat deeper into the visual aspects of Ballard's work and its influences. But the part about Pelham alone is interesting. I'll quote, since it's near the bottom:

"For Ballard the images of surrealism[...]informed one aspect of his fiction but they were not its raison d’etre[...]to capture this required something other than reproductions of surrealist paintings on the covers of his books. This was the challenge facing David Pelham, the art director at Penguin Books from 1968 to 1979, when, in 1974, four of the five Ballard titles in Penguin’s back catalogue came up for reprint. Pelham was responsible for numerous covers at any one time and would often commission other designers and illustrators to produce the artwork, but the Ballard covers he designed himself."

The essay describes that Pelham's friendship with Ballard was one reason he chose to design them, but the fact that he came up with these designs, which have become icons in their own right, says something about worthy about the spirit of collaboration in earlier book packaging. Ballard's style is, as the writer points out, intensely visual; this is one of the reasons why Ballard-inspired visual art is nearly ubiquitous and almost an art subculture in its own right. (And so often so, so good.) But it's rare now, even with bestselling books, that you see that kind of iconic cover art.

(You will, though, read stories like Alec Soth's recent blog about a book publisher who, when turned down by Soth to use a much-redesigned version of one of his photos for a cover, went ahead and used the redesigned version anyway. Is that forced collaboration?)

The more important message is how Ballard's writing style has influenced so many other forms of visual work. Book covers may become irrelevant with the advent of Kindle, much like how Peter Saville declared, a few years ago, that album covers are dead. But I don't think that the actual "spirit of collaboration" is going anywhere, and if anything is just getting more interesting, since there are more mediums to work with it in.

So if a bit sad that we don't get as iconic packaging with contemporary writers we like (not that there are not good book covers--Joseph Sullivan had a cool blog on the NYTimes site about this which is now sadly defunct), the digital plus is that now sites like Ballardian.com are able to post scans of the originals online, for those of us who don't have actual copies. So we can print out hi-res posters instead, and stick them on our wall, along with our old Factory records.

Experiments with the Dreamachine

In my last post I wrote about the experience of seeing "Inception" and how the theater experience of it seemed to have a persistent lucid-dream ripple effect. More recently (Thursday) I went to see the Brion Gysin exhibit at the New Museum, and I have been thinking about that more.

Gysin might be known most for his close friendship with William S. Burroughs, and his development of the cut-up technique in literature and art that Burroughs later utilized in his own writing. (He was a mentor also to Keith Haring and Patti Smith, and also friend to Genesis P-Orridge.) But Gysin's body of work spanned decades, starting with his involvement with the Surrealists in Paris (though he was expelled from the group early on), throughout the '40s and '50s when he began developing the use of Japanese calligraphy techniques, and then finally with the Beat movement, and he was prolific in virtually every medium. The New Museum has curated a comprehensive exhibit of his interdisciplinary work, and walking around it gives you at least a nebulous idea of how interesting it must have been to be inside Gysin's head.

It includes: his painting, his photographs, his painting-photograph cut-up collages (several of the Centre Pompidou being erected), his notebooks, his poetry, collaborations with jazz artists, drawings, films, slide projections. What made Gysin so constantly relevant as an artist is that he didn't stick to one medium so much as he mastered it enough to draw upon it while he was working on an idea. Contemplating the erection of Pompidou outside his window in Paris, mentally working out the time-sequence of a building in construction, he would fill in a painted blueprint of the scaffolding with small cut-outs of photographs of the scaffolding in visual context.

He was an experimenter, and he was also a mental cartographer. So many of the ideas behind his work are not about communicating one concept but communicating the different levels, stages, that a concept goes through before it's applied in material form. The psychology of creation. With his camera, pencil, paper, easel: testing, testing, and charting the territory. One pointing on display, as my friend pointed out, looked a lot like the graphics in Pro Tools when you're arranging a song; and we wondered whether the developers of Pro Tools had seen this work when they were creating the visuals of the software, or if it's just another example of Gysin being ahead of his time.

But the most interesting work on display is something that he invented in the early '60s called the "Dreamachine." (You can read more about it here. There was also a documentary about it made in 2008.) It sits within a small dark chamber. Inside, a tall cylinder with a lightbulb mounted at its base, with concentric slits on all sides, spins at 78 rpm on a turntable. Kneeling on cushions around the "machine," you are encouraged to hold your nose about 6 to 8 inches from the spinning cylinder, and close your eyes.

Gysin developed his machine after reading (along with Burroughs and mutual friend Ian Sommerville) the book "The Living Brain," by neurophysiologist W. Grey Walter, on brain waves and their corresponding functions. Sommerville developed a prototype: Gysin turned it into a machine and eventually patented it. In experiments rather than museum visits, the experience is described as: flashing lights first behind closed eyelids turn to patterns and mosaics; after more extended time, the patterns turn into vivid landscapes and shapes.

It's difficult to have this experience at the New Museum. There's no closed door to the exhibit, and the background noise can be distracting. It's physically a bit uncomfortable; you have this sensation that your eyes are pulsing behind the lids, like you're blinking constantly even though your eyes are closed, and once or twice I had my fingertips at the sides of my eyes like I needed to shut the lids closed. Nevertheless the visual experience does have a trajectory. Mine began with: blinking lights; bright lines of color, wavering, like lines on bad satellite TV connection. I didn't see shapes, exactly, until in the last of five minutes, when something like a ferris wheel started revolving around the center of my eyelid-canvas.

At the entrance to the exhibit you learn that software developers in more recent years have created computer applications that mimic the experience of the Dreamachine. (An interesting parallel to the recent news explosion about i-Dosing. Parents are concerned that their kids are having a drug-like experience using just internet--you'd think they'd be grateful, when it's way less toxic than sniffing glue.) There are a few that are free on the web, and I've been experimenting with this one. [Note: again, not for epileptics.]

I find it works better if you close your eyes as soon as you press start. It's a lot less powerful than Gysin's dreamachine at the exhibit, though optically it's more comfortable. Sitting still, nose near the screen, and closing your eyes, you have the sense that you're about to do something like meditate, but the experience isn't actually like that at all. With the speed of the lights and the reflexive moment of your eyes, you're too engaged optically in what's happening in your eyelid-tapestry.

LCD as light source, there's less colors to have "kaleidoscope," and I haven't gotten into the sense of light turning into shapes. But it is a lot like lucid dreams. Optically, your eyes are reacting too fast to allow your mind to lull, but after a few minutes, for me, anyways, my eyes will tune out and other images will slip in for split-seconds; like someone's profile or the exterior of a building. Until my eyes twitch and the still-illuminated menu bar at the bottom of the screen will slip in instead, a static white line of noise in the lower-quarter of the tapestry.

And it is like lucid dreaming. The speed of the lights tricks you also into having the sense that more time is passing than is. When your cell-phone alarm goes off and you open your eyes--you wake up.

The Virtual Reality Experience of "Inception"

Yesterday I went to see Christopher Nolan's "Inception." I haven't been to the movies much lately, and I blame Netflix, and the internet in general. There's something awesome about having masterpieces of film instantly available and accessible. You're bored on a Sunday night, and boom: Tarkovsky, Bresson, Jodorowsky, with a few clicks on a laptop. It isn't as if I've forgotten the importance of a movie theater experience--it's just that there seems to be so much waiting for me on my laptop.

But I've been hearing about "Inception," and all of the buzz: how supposedly it was the greatest film of the year recently, how it was like what everyone wanted but didn't really get from Avatar. I'd read A. O. Scott's essay in NYT about the interesting conflict among critics, and a few other reviews, such as Matt Goldberg's excellent piece over at Collider, and an interesting story about its technology may be available to us.

Late that afternoon I was at a friend's apartment, and, trying to decide what to do with ourselves, in a roundabout way we started talking about films. "Inception" came up, and so did BAM Rose Cinema, which isn't far away from where we live. When we looked up the schedule and found that it was playing there in an hour, we hopped on our bikes and rode down. We made it into the theater just as it was beginning. And this was, in a way, perfect. It was better being dropped immediately from outside into the film, without previews, and have the sudden exchange of realities.

Nolan doesn't guide you slowly through his strange dream world. You know immediately that you're in a space where time and memory don't have the same dimensions, and the logic is a game of catch-up. Within ten minutes there are several realities presented to you; as each passage reminds you that none of them will truly be real, it transitions so fast into another that you don't exactly have a question of suspending disbelief. You can only follow events and try to make sense of the explanation behind them, spit out rapid-pace. Mechanics paired with theoretic complexity, such as the science of something like a "kick" that spurs a dreamer in and out of a dream state; the sudden appearance of a new dimension that the dreamer accepts immediately, wondering only about lost time.

Part of what suspends your belief is the dazzling visuals. Nolan has gravity collide landscapes on top of one another like an MC Escher drawing. Staircases continue into nowhere, physics works backwards, and the space in mirrors gains living dimension. And while there are Matrix-like fight-scenes continually throughout the latter part of the movie, often all of this is voiced over by dialogue about all of our questions about memory: such as the importance of olfactory psychology and landmarks, or the way our imagination can be more powerful than reality even when we're awake. How we'll project memories onto living things, or how familiar people and places will sometimes seem unfamiliar for no apparent reason.

As a result, while part of your brain is focused just on the trajectory of the film, the other part is mulling over the implications of all of these concepts: no easy task when everything in the film is happening so fast. It's like trying to solve a particularly complex math equation while you're running to catch a bus that you absolutely have to take. Tension builds and builds until suddenly: everyone wakes up. Credits come on, so do the lights, and you wake up too.

I'm sure that part of the experience depends on how you come into the film. How clear your mind is, and how willing you are to be suspend disbelief. It might not work as well if you're on a first date, for example, or if you're a film critic, knowing that you have to be conscious of technicalities. My friend and I had both had a surreal-seeming afternoon to begin with, and as a result I think neither of us were quite sure if we were fully awake when we left the theater. Wandering down the red carpet to the door, wondering if when it opened we'd find Lafayette the same as we left it, or a new Fort Greene instead, one filled with crumbling skyscapers and beachfront.

And instead, of course, it was a little bit of both. The space and dimensions were relatively the same, but at this point the sun had set, and the lighting and shadows on the street were different, as was the traffic crawling down from the BQE. Which might be another important point of the movie: in daytime hours, we rarely notice slow change, but in those three or four seconds between waking and sleeping everything seems to change at once. Memory and time are both concepts that we can intellectually theorize or contemplate when we're awake, but we only have that same jarring sensation of lucidity and uncertainty in time and memory when we're dreaming--or when we're immersed in something that draws us out of our reality, such as with film or art. And I do think that "Inception" is both.

As we were riding our bikes home, my friend said, "I feel as if I've just had some extreme psychedelic experience. I think that will take a few hours to wear off." We both agreed that it felt as if we were in the theater much longer than two hours. Days, even. Neither of us had a very clear sense of direction back from Fort Greene, and we shouted back and forth about how we kept expecting cars in the street to suddenly blow up. Instead of going to grab a drink or dinner the way we might have, we both decided to go home and work on something creative; she to draw or paint, and I went back to my darkroom.

I can't offer a critic's review of "Inception," but I definitely think that it's worth seeing, with an open mind. On a lesser note, I also think that I'll be making a point to watch movies in theaters more often.

Vivian Maier and The Lost Art of Secrecy

Doing research for Pop Photo earlier, I ran across a site on Vivian Maier.

It was a fascinating post for two reasons: first, because Maier's street photography (circa 1950s through 1990s) is excellent and humorous; second because it's been posted, Found magazine style, by John Maloof, who picked up the prints and negatives from an estate sale after Maier had passed away.
Maloof writes that these photos inspired him to pick up his own photography again, and he's not only posting the prints to the website but processing and archiving the undeveloped rolls. An homage to the photographer who did not live (nor would have) to see her small internet fame.

I'm interested in this story partly because it's an interesting engagement in the photography/internet dialogue, on a few levels. Since the advent of internet and sites like Photo.net and Flickr, the emphasis for personal photography by amateurs is often about being part of a community. People have been in camera clubs for decades, but the internet changes exposure; it widens the world of what might inspire us.

It lets you find technique and styles that you wouldn't find otherwise. You find more things off the radar that are creative and super interesting. I spend a lot of time going through Flickr for stories for Pop Photo, especially for the My Project department.

But on the other side (there always is one), is that it seems that a lot of people these days are too quick to share with strangers throughout the learning process. When you post your images online, you're not posting them just to a small community; you post them to the world at large. There are good and bad things about anonymous feedback. One is that you might get more honest critical feedback; another is that you get more criticism you might take too seriously. It's good when it's tech-related. When it's style-related it gets iffy. The photograph you want to make is not always going to be the one that everyone wants to see, and enough opinions one way or another may persuade you into adopting a style rather than creating what you want to create.

I love Flickr because it's a source of inspiration and access--much like camera clubs, which have been around for ages, but on a much larger scale. I love the internet, because it allows people to show photographs they might have otherwise kept in closets.

I'm happy that the internet and documentarian John Maloof have made it possible for us to see the images of a street photographer who would otherwise go anonymous. I also kind of think it's cool that she shot in her own way, for a collection that was hers only.