Photo Awesome

In addition to my normal photo-commentary-blog reading, I’ve been doing research for my thesis, which many of you know is about my wife Stacy (we got married four years ago at the end of this month, btw). In the past couple of months, I’ve come across several photographers doing some thematically similar work, such as Kate Hutchinson, who has been photographing her husband-to-be in a series with the best title ever, “Why Am I Marrying Him?“.

I then happened across the work of Jason Landry, an MFA candidate in photography in Boston, who is shooting his wife, Anne, for a series called “Close to Home“.

But tonight was the kicker. I was checking up with Museum School student Shane Lavalette’s blog /J (which you should all be reading) when I found his post about the work of Eric Weeks. Weeks has been photographing his wife Stacy, whom he married four years ago in a series titled “World Was in the Face of the Beloved“.

I swear, this is just getting ridiculous. Or maybe I’m just onto something.

There’s a new photo website that everyone should check out. www.artreview.com. You can upload photos, write/read reviews, see videos, events happening all over, etc. It seems pretty cool.

Photoshop Disasters is a compendium of user submitted pieces of really bad Photoshop. Funny thing is, people got paid to make these monsters, including my recent fave, Florida’s nipplegate.

Finally, a use for little kids. Also, this is brilliant.

Professional Photos Based on Children’s Drawings

I know everyone has played with a polaroid camera at some point. Well, if you have, and you didn’t really know what to do with the little things except tack them around your room, there is now a place where they can go forever. The Polanoid project is a website (and dedicated gallery www.polanoir.com) to preserving the exhibiting the art of the Polaroid. It’s kind of like a flickr page, except only for polaroids (and now analog film). The bonus is, if you get featured as the “Sited of the Day” there is a chance you can get shown in Vienna at the gallery Polanoir. check out the websites.

Polanoid
Polanoir

I found this website that just has photo pictures of historical photographers (i.e. Joel-Peter Witkin, Helmut Newton, Sebastiao Selgado, etc.) I thought it was pretty interesting. Check it out for yourselves. I might be alone on this one but I thought it was another way to remember photographers to reference while discussing contemporary works.

MADEinPHOTO.fr

Henry Horenstein—of the RISD photography program—runs a web site called TeachingPhoto.com, where a few different people post articles intermittently. The January/February issue (which, curiously, was just released) has an article on considerations when applying to grad school. I’d say it’s worth checking out before applying: Grad School Ruminations.

I got a new blog that includes art reviews. Travis is up first, Susan is soon to come…

The Arrival of Machete at Aliens Love Spaceships

- Carla

If you’re not familiar with New York gallerist Edward Winkleman’s blog, you should be. Along with Alec Soth’s (lately silent) blog, it’s one of my every day reads. He consistently provokes interesting discussion and gives a lot of insight into the Chelsea gallery scene. Check it out.

How did I/we miss this? Both our own Robert Gill (above) and Karen Williams (below) were featured on the Hey Hot Shot! blog this month.

Magnum has a story up about the underground photo studios of the Taliban. Really. Really. Amazing stuff.

Some of these are fantastic works of art. I suspect that the cover artists are underappreciated, as are many of the bands.

This is the story of how two stories met up tonight, on the all-knowing internet.

Story One: When we were on the New York trip in June, we had the opportunity to go to the Polaroid 20×24 studio and work with the lady who is partly in charge of the studio. Her name was Jen, but unfortunately, I never caught her last name (or else I did and forgot it, which is more likely). She was great with that crazy camera, and we talked a bit about internships down the road.

Story Two: Lately I’ve been on what seems to be a never-ending quest to figure out where (if anywhere) Stacy and I will move upon graduation. Dave and I had this conversation the other night, and we’re somewhat mindlessly throwing out cities because of various things we’ve heard or read. Boston’s obviously a top pick (Just one reason of many? More universities than anywhere else), and for me, Philadelphia is another (Much more affordable, closer to NYC). As a future adjunct professor, the number of schools in our general proximity is of the utmost importance, but if that were the only factor, Boston would probably win, hands down. Alas, it’s not that simple.

So I was doing research on other major cities with an abundance of schools. This isn’t as easy as it seems (at least, it hasn’t been yet). I try Google for things like “what are the cities with the most universities?” (I know this isn’t askJeeves or anything, but you never know what exact phrase will pull up a decent forum thread) and “most university cities”, “highest number of colleges”, etc. This really leads to very little, as it seems no one has compiled a list. There’s the “most literate” and “most educated” and others, but nothing that really hits the point I’m trying to find.

So I start guessing.

Stacy said something about liking the idea of the Midwest, and it’s certainly not something I’m opposed to. So after a couple of flops, I find Cincinnati, Ohio (which, no, I didn’t know how to spell correctly at first). Now, I’m not claiming here that Cincinnati is one of those cities. It could very well be a flop as well, but I stopped because I moved over to Cleveland, where I found The Cleveland Institute of Art. I went straight to the undergraduate photography page.

Where the stories meet: So I’m at this site and there’s a girl in a picture that looks quite familiar. At first, I didn’t even notice that the view camera in the photo was massive… perhaps a 20×24? Could it be? Clicking on Jen Trausch’s name brought up a PDF with a little information about her and sure enough, it’s the same person. Small world? I dunno. Maybe I really did get to the end of the internet.

But here’s the point: She’s freakin’ good. Look at her web site. All this is to say that, I don’t know why I’d never heard of her before. If I had, I probably would’ve been a complete distraction to her the whole time we were shooting that day.

Related Links:

• Interview with Jen
• Shane Godfrey’s Blog (he’s an assistant that worked with us at the studio)
• Jen’s work at Nelson Hancock Gallery

Hi everyone, I hope you all are having a great summer!

Walker, will we ever have the links to everyone’s websites added here?

“‘They wait for me to let my guard down, like predators,’ said Bilal, an Iraqi artist who has holed himself up in a Chicago gallery for a month with a paintball gun that people can shoot at him over the Internet, at http://www.crudeoils.us, 24 hours a day.”

Washington Post article Antiwar Art in a New Medium: Paintball-on-Web

Honestly, this is what one can call a super original project. Check it out!

(I, myself, have a handful of new little secrets unshared, thanks to photography…)

Post Secret

Enjoy!

Just relent and let the gospel in.

Open Letter

None of the teenboylust Larry Clark romance here. Check this guy out…

So Kael would like everyone to know about and check out this website:

http://mediastorm.org/0014.htm

And this is what she said about it:
This media publishing/production group is a project of a former schoolmate of mine from Missouri. He’s done a great job of marrying great documentary photography, short film and animation with web technology.

If you go to the site, be sure to check out the portraits by Michael Schoeller, the AIDS project by Kristen Ashburn, and the project on Chernobyl by Paul Fusco.

Saatchi has a “student art” site. It’s been described as a myspace for student artists. It’s got all that stuff, galleries, chat, “friends”, etc. Right now they’ve got a “showdown” going, sort of their version of american idol I guess.
Here’s my page. You explore to learn more.