Open Land

Editorial Concreta: Sobre creación y teoría de la...

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 19:45:00 +0100

Editorial Concreta: Sobre creación y teoría de la imagen

http://www.editorialconcreta.org/

lionskeleton: Urs Fischer

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 21:21:01 +0200

lionskeleton:

Urs Fischer

Katherine Wolkoff on New Orleans.

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:46:42 +0200

Katherine Wolkoff on New Orleans.

"Photojournalism is neither photography or journalism. It has its function but it’s not where I..."

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:41:25 +0200

““Photojournalism is neither photography or journalism. It has its function but it’s not where I see myself: the press is for me just a means for photographing, for material – not for telling the truth.””

- Luc Delahaye

The photographer Robert Polidori describes his experience...

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:38:08 +0200

The photographer Robert Polidori describes his experience depicting the loss and pathos of a civilization in chaos in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

"Where are the people?" by Alec Soth

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 23:59:00 +0200

"Where are the people?" by Alec Soth:

Alec Soth on Katrina-related bodies of work such as Polidori’s After the flood, Chris Jordan’s In Katrina’s Wake and Wolkoff’s New Orleans and the need of human presence.

Comments are equally valuable. Keep reading.

"My work has often been criticised as somehow lacking integrity because I transgress ethical..."

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 23:46:01 +0200

“

My work has often been criticised as somehow lacking integrity because I transgress ethical principles by rendering tragic or violent situations as artificially “beautiful”. This “aestheticising” is considered to be conceptually disturbing since, some argue, it brings a viewer to an experience by which realities and their causes are ultimately trivialised and misrepresented.

I certainly didn’t feel any shame while photographing these sites. I simply attempted to portray things as they appeared to me. I never once attempted to execute any embellishments. For this reason I felt surprised and puzzled when criticisms arose. How could I answer the challenges? If I had made these images intentionally ugly would my critics have looked at them more carefully or generously? Likely not. And besides, since when was pathos morally inadmissible in the photographic arts?

I feel nothing when I make these types of photographs. I feel before and after, but while executing them it is my belief that there is only time to accurately act and react. In the few short moments of pause when self-reflection becomes possible, I think of myself as performing some sort of photographic rite of Extreme Unction by commemorating the life trajectories of habitats that were permanently interrupted by cataclysm.

”

- Robert Polidori

This film by Guy E. Debord is based on his 1967 book of the same...

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 21:05:42 +0200

This film by Guy E. Debord is based on his 1967 book of the same title both of which convey ideas about the consumer capitalism’s mode of production and the effects on everyday life. Though both sources use a different means of communication they both powerfully convey the ideas of the situationists. The structure of the film itself is a series of shots from Hollywood films to soviet ‘collective hero’ film experiments to soft-core porn (nothing past topless) to archival footage of historical events (e.g. May 68 revolt in France) and representations of everyday life. The way in which the scenes are manipulated work well with the voice over commentary reinforcing the ideas while hitting emotional notes. The Music also contributes well to the emotional sentiment which the director wants to be associated with different ideas and issues. The technique used reminds me of Wagner, how he used the structure of music to convey hopelessness and the philosophy of Schopenhauer in “The Ring” covering over the once socialists allegory for the contradiction of modernity. Debord and the situationists used their music to convey of the feeling of hope and the spirit negation (the negation of capitalism and the creation of a new ‘totality’ of ‘situations’). Debord during this film highlights the influences of the ‘situationits’ in the agitation for May 68 (the largest general strike in history). Henri Lefebvre criticized Debord on this point expressing the view that the situationists greatly exaggerate their influence on events. Other then the self-pampering which is small fraction of the film it is a well done piece of radical documentary both in form and content (style and ideas, though this dichotomy is to come degree false) which is quite interesting just for those uninterested or hostile towards Revolutionary Anti-Capitalism.

www.imdb.com

Un pesquero fantasma del tsunami de Japón llega a Canadá

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 20:50:45 +0200

Un pesquero fantasma del tsunami de Japón llega a Canadá:

Un pesquero fantasma, arrastrado hace más de un año de las costas de Japón por el tsunami, ha sido visto frente a las costas de Canadá, según las autoridades locales. “Parece bastante entero y tiene herrumbre de haber estado un año ahí fuera”, declaró a la CNN Marc Proulx, coordinador marítimo del Centro de Coordinación y Rescate de Victoria.

List of disaster films.

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 23:57:08 +0200

List of disaster films.:

This list of disaster and doomsday films represents over half a century of films within the genre. Disaster films are motion pictures which depict an impending or ongoing disaster. The films typically feature large casts and multiple storylines and focus on the protagonists’ attempts to avert, escape, or cope with the disaster presented.

3:34 Terremoto en Chile, 2011

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 23:49:23 +0200

3:34 Terremoto en Chile, 2011

All alone in the night.

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 23:45:44 +0200

All alone in the night.

Rebuilding Japan: Memory Salvage Project

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 00:16:00 +0200

Rebuilding Japan: Memory Salvage Project:

750,000 lost photos were found after the disaster. Volunteers have taken on the task of returning the lost pictures to their owner. They call it the Memory Salvage Project.

Click on the title to check the video!

"The indignity of speaking for others”."

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 09:17:00 +0200

““The indignity of speaking for others”.”

- Michel Foucault

Beautiful Suffering: The Image of Catastrophe

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 09:14:15 +0200

Beautiful Suffering: The Image of Catastrophe:

25 October, 2011
Professor Emerita Abigail Solomon-Godeau, University of California, Santa Barbara

Professor Abigail Solomon-Godeau discussed the issues that arise when contemporary artists and photographers take as their subject the topic of catastrophe. Taking as examples the work of Walid Raad, Sophie Ristelheuber, Alfredo Jaar, and the 2006 exhibition “Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain,” Professor Solomon-Godeau considered some of the ethical and political complexities that attend the making of art – especially that which employs photography within it – from catastrophic historical events. Insofar as such practices appear to have become more frequent, there is reason to examine the complex problems they may raise. Such considerations require an awareness of the distinctions between the “need” to represent, and the “right” to represent.

Abigail Solomon-Godeau is Professor Emerita in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her fields of research include photography, feminist theory and criticism, contemporary art and 19th-Century French visual culture. Her articles on these subjects have appeared in numerous journals, anthologies and exhibition catalogues. She is the author of the books Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (1991), Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (1997), Birgit Jurgenssen (co-authored with Gabriele Schor) (2010) and the forthcoming The Face of Difference: Gender,Race and the Politics of Self-Representation.

Refrigerator on Franklin Avenue, New Orleans “In...

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 00:50:48 +0100

Refrigerator on Franklin Avenue, New Orleans

“In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster” 2005 by Chris Jordan

On Frank Golhke's "Aftermath"

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 00:44:34 +0100

Terrain.org: You’ve explored both beauty and natural disaster in your photographic and written work, from a tornado-ravaged neighborhood in Wichita Falls to the aftermath of the 1980 eruptions of Mount St. Helens. 2011 seems a particularly active year for natural disasters across the globe; yet photographers such as Chris Jordan are also using the medium to showcase the beauty and horror of long-developing manmade disasters, such as the impact of ocean-borne plastics on albatross populations in the Midway Atoll. No doubt photography is an essential and imperative tool for bringing these perils to the foreground of the global conversation on such issues as climate change and urbanization. What role does photography play in giving you hope in this age of natural and manmade environmental disasters—or does it? Do landscape photographers have a particular responsibility to use their art to help create better, more livable places? In effect, does art equal activism? Should it?

Frank Gohlke: Photography has great potential for creating the conditions that lead to change; photography by itself changes nothing. I doubt very much if showing Lewis Hines’s compelling photographs of child workers to the owners of the mines and mills would compel them to change the conditions the pictures documented. What the photographs could do is to inform those whose consciences were open to being provoked into action to do so and to strengthen the resolve of those who were already committed to the struggle. The same considerations apply today.

Art can be both a choice and a compulsion; activism can be both a choice and a compulsion. Sometimes they coincide, sometimes they don’t. I don’t believe activism is an obligation for anyone, but being an engaged citizen is just good sense based on self-interest. I applaud and admire those who use their art to foster awareness and change; but a sense of responsibility to make a certain kind of work that explicitly addresses particular issues is not a charge I would lay on anyone, and I certainly don’t want it laid on me.

There are many ways to meet the demands of one’s conscience; being an artist does not obligate anyone to turn their work in that direction. I had more than enough in the late 1970s and 80s of self-righteous adherents of one or another theoretical persuasion telling everyone else what they ought to be doing. It was entirely too reminiscent of the methods of my Calvinist upbringing; guilt is an injury to conscience, not a spur.

Globe at night.

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 00:38:00 +0100

Globe at night.

Frank Golhke: “Aftermath” The Wichita Falls, Texas ,...

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 00:22:00 +0100

Frank Golhke: “Aftermath” The Wichita Falls, Texas , Tornado No. 4A and 4B - Southmoor Manor Apartments, looking south, 1979/1980

Wonder Works calls itself ‘Central Florida’s only...

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 21:43:00 +0100

Wonder Works calls itself ‘Central Florida’s only upside-down attraction, an amusement park for the mind featuring over 100 interactive exhibits for the entire family to experience’, with a mild focus on the didactic character of nature’s freak-show smorgasbord. It also has a Tennessee subsidiary, which is an even more state-of-the-art affair: it has its own so-called Disaster Zone, meant to recreate the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, ‘one of history’s most renowned earthquakes, which stopped baseball’s World Series and collapsed a freeway’;Tennesee’s Wonder Works, which is a relatively safe distance away from the deadly seriousness of actual natural hazards such as earthquakes and hurricanes respectively, also has a Quake Café and Hurricance Hole.