resurrection of documentary . . .

Los Angeles based artist William E. Jones has created this visually frustrating animation from rejected negatives. The photos were originally taken by Farm Security Administration photographers to document the American depression. FSA head Roy Stryker performed the editing with a hole punch. Watch the video below and click here to read more.

Punctured from The Paris Review on Vimeo.

ichat portraiture . . .

Take a look at Laura Sackett's images of young teens iChatting with their friends. She thinks of her work as a new kind of portraiture. Click here to see more photographs and read about her concept.

is there such a thing as privacy? . . .

Philip-Lorca diCorcia talks about shooting his "Heads" series. Watch as he describes his simple lighting set-up and discusses the existence / non-existence of "privacy" in our contemporary world.

julietta cervantes . . .

Frequently, photographs of cemeteries and gravestones fall into the category of "cliché. But take a look at these pictures taken in Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery by Julieta Cervantes, an accomplished photographer who has received numerous awards for her images of dancers. She uses multiple hand-held flashlights as her light source. Read more here in the New Yorker's Photo Booth column, and you be the judge . . .

street photography . . .

"defenestration" . . .

This piece is part of a John Baldessari retrospective coming to The Metropolitan Museum of Art on October 20, 2010. He is a master of conceptual photography. It will be there through January 9, 2011, so if you're in NY be sure to check it out. Fun stuff!

John Baldessari (American, b. 1931)

Floating: Color, 1972

Six color photographs; 11 x 14 in. (27.9 x 35.6 cm) each

Collection Mario Bertolini, Breno, Italy

© John Baldessari

Baldessari once remarked that a large part of his work "arises from a single word, a chance phrase, or an overheard comment or part of one." For Floating: Color it was "defenestration"—the act of throwing something out a window—a word the artist liked, "because it had a limited meaning, specific to a particular act." Deciding that he should throw colors instead of objects, and basing his sequencing on the simple order of the spectrum, Baldessari jettisoned large sheets of colored paper from his window and captured the process on film. (quote from Met web site)

take the haiku review challenge . . .

Can you summarize an art exhibition in a few words or sentences? A haiku, a sonnet? Click here to read more. Check out these examples . . .

Haiku Review: Allen Ruppersberg’s decades-long text-and-(found)-image project into memory and reconstruction has taken many practical and strategic turns. The latest, “No Time Left to Start Again,” is one of the most accessible and, perhaps for that reason, most affecting. This time Ruppersberg is acting the avid record collector, documenting early rock ‘n’ roll through its recordings; the amateur magician, researching spells; and – returning to his own salad days – a topical historian of “LA in the ‘70s,” and who knew whom and how.

Allen Ruppersberg. Honey, I rearranged the collection asking myself the question—Who is the founder of conceptual art?, 2010. Silkscreen and collaged photographs on paper

38-1/4 x 50-1/8 inches

Image courtesy of Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles

Photography by Brian Forrest

Copyright Allen Ruppersberg

(Margo Leavin, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., W. Hywd 90069, thru Oct. 23.)

Haiku Review: Ron Rizk and Cindy Kane are both masters of a kind of meta-still life. Rizk describes observed objects with exacting precision within gently weathered framing structures (actually painted illusions) while Kane wields a somewhat looser brush in her intimate rhapsodies of objects enlivening the covers of art and other magazines. (Yes, the New Yorker.)

Ron Rizk, Time Exposure, 2010. Oil on panel 28 x 22 ”

Courtesy of Lora Schlesinger

(Lora Schlesinger, Bergamot Station T3, S. Monica 90404. Thru Oct. 16.)