School starts back up on September 7th and for those of you who are debating whether or not to follow along this semester, here is what I’ll be taking. I’ve decided to to step outside of my photo comfort zone and learn more about video and performance art. I want to try to have as much new sensory stimulation as possible to help shape and inform my work. We’ll see how it goes!

History of Video Art 1965-1985

David Ross

What is referred to as “video art” has become a ubiquitous feature of 21st-century art practice, yet it is an art form whose emergence is still a relatively fresh aspect of contemporary art history. This course will explore the origins of video art, examining its sources in film, photography and performance art. Through screenings of key works; discussion with artists, critics and curators, and in directed readings, students will be exposed to important works and individuals associated with the first two decades of video. Special attention will be paid to an understanding of the cultural and social context that supported the emergence of video art. We will focus upon the evolution of video art from both a technological perspective as well as the development of a video’s critical and institutional framework. Artists whose works will be viewed and discussed include Nam June Paik, Jud Yalkut, Wolf Vostell, Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono, Peter Campus, Vito Acconci, Frank Gillette, Juan Downey, Joan Jonas, Chris Burden, Lynda Benglis, Stanton Kaye, Iras Schneider, Andy Mann, Martha Rosler, Allen Sekula, Shigeko Kubota, Bill Viola, Gary Hill, Mary Lucier, Woody and Steina Vasulka, Ilene Segalove, William Wegman, Tony Oursler, Klaus vom Bruch, Muntadas, Keith Sonnier, Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, Lynn Hershman, Dara Birnbaum, Ant Farm, TVTV, Videofreex, Marcel Odenbach, Thierry Kuntzel, David Hall, Dan Graham, Valie Export, Douglas Davis, Doug Hall, Marina Abromovic, Eleanor Antin, Richard Serra, Adrian Piper, Terry Fox, Howard Fried, Paul Kos, Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley and Ernie Kovacs.

Master Critique III

Patty Chang

Group critique seminars are the focal point of student activity in any given semester. Assisted by their peers, and guided by prominent figures in the visual arts, students will concentrate on producing a coherent body of work that best reflects their individual talents and challenges the current boundaries of their media.

Thesis Forms I

Penelope Umbrico

This course is required as a preparation for the second-year thesis. Students will finalize the central ideas for their thesis projects, and consider appropriate strategies for the form, presentation and distribution of these ideas. In a highly practical way, the course considers the history and features of various visual solutions available to photographic artists, depending on their audiences and goals. Books, exhibitions, installations, interactive presentations—the course helps students identify the questions each form raises, and work through them to find appropriate answers for their own projects.

Criticism & Theory: Critical Reading

Jan Avgikos

This course will combine a format of reading and classroom discussions aimed at providing critical perspectives on the issues that inform the practice of contemporary art and photography. Readings include texts by artists, writers and theorists of the past three decades that bear upon the practice of the students’ art-making today. Students will be required to develop a framework from these readings that is relevant to their own objectives. Discussion will be based on interdisciplinary study, screenings and exhibitions.

Share/Save

Museum Veteran Invites Artists to Reinvent the MFA

Beginning in the summer of 2011, the School of Visual Arts (SVA) will offer a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Art Practice, a low-residency, interdisciplinary program of study that offers experienced artists an opportunity to deepen their studio practice and to develop an advanced body of work under the guidance of some of the world’s foremost artists and critics. The program will be chaired by educator and art museum professional David A. Ross.

Ross has assembled a leading group of artists, curators, historians and critics to serve as faculty members, guest lecturers and mentors in the new program, including: Vito Acconci, Cory Arcangel, Dara Birnbaum, Liam Gillick, Terence Koh, Ming Wei Lee, Glenn Ligon, Stephen Henry Madoff, Robert Pincus-Witten, Gary Simmons, Andras Szanto, Carrie Mae Weems, Lawrence Weiner, and Terry Winters, among others.

Ross cites the fully-interdisciplinary approach to the MFA degree as an emerging trend in art education. “The MFA in Art Practice is based on the idea that increasingly artists do not wish to define their practice by a specific medium or discipline,” he says. “In this post-Conceptual era, artists often pursue their practice by engaging an idea first, which then may involve a combination of media, technologies and techniques.” Ross explains, “With the flexibility that a low-residency program offers, SVA will provide a new option for practicing artists–across the county and the world–to advance their careers while taking advantage of the remarkable range of resources available to students at SVA.”

The immersive 66-credit degree program is comprised of a rigorous curriculum with coursework structured to be delivered via a feature-rich, interactive online learning environment throughout the course of two academic calendar years, in addition to a series of three intensive 6-week summer sessions to be held at the College’s campus in New York City. During the summer sessions, students will further their body of work during dedicated studio time, while attending classes, seminars and critiques and engaging with the diverse cultural offerings and resources that the city of New York and the vibrant SVA community provide.

Required courses include: Art History: Exploring the Interdisciplinary, which examines the role of art history in preparing and developing one’s own artistic direction; Art History: Challenging the Conventional, which contrasts the canonical history of Modernism with emerging histories, offering a different reading of the social and political context of art history; Artists’ Writings, which looks at the interventions visual artists have made into the art criticism of their time via essays, manifestos, poems, letters, artists’ books and artist-run publications; Autobiography of Place, which investigates how artists situate creative practice in everyday life and how their communities can inform their work; Bases of Criticism, which delves into the prominent theoretical positions within past and present art criticism; The Journal: A Writing Workshop, where students produce a daily record of their work in writing or another platform; as well as workshops in Performance, Advanced Video and Sound Editing, Advanced Digital Imaging, Art Law and Art Business. During each term, students will participate in the program’s Graduate Seminar, as well as Studio Practice and Thesis Preparation courses.

An advocate for contemporary art and artists for the past 40 years, David A. Ross was director of The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Ross has been active in a curatorial capacity since 1971, when he was named the world’s first curator of video art at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York. A widely-published author and frequent lecturer, Ross has taught at the University of California, San Diego, the San Francisco Art Institute, Harvard University and Columbia University. Ross was one of the founders of Artists’ Pension Trust, a pioneering financial planning program for working artists. He has served as a juror and commissioner at numerous international shows and exhibitions. In addition to chairing the MFA in Art Practice Department, Ross teaches in the BFA Fine Arts Department and serves as a special assistant to SVA President David Rhodes.

Prospective students can request more information by contacting the Department via email at artpractice@sva.edu.

Share/Save

In Digital Imaging, we talked about HDR Images…you know, those weird, gimmicky, plastic looking photos that lots of people post on flickr. I’m not saying I would never use HDR, I’m just not working on anything where the technique would be in service to the project and not just tarting up a mediocre photo.

I’m open-minded, so if anyone has any examples of great, successful HDR images that show the careful, considered use of the process, shoot me an email.

——————

In History of the Book, we had to present a rough idea of our final projects. My project is comprised of four books containing photos I made in Azerbaijan. All four books have the same photos in the same layout, but each book contains appropriated texts from different sources: Government speeches and propaganda, human rights organizations, travel guides and finally, Azerbaijani poetry.

Click on the images to view larger:

james pomerantz

james pomerantz

james pomerantz

james pomerantz

——————

In Visible, Invisible we had our final class and students who hadn’t shared all of their projects yet had an opportunity to do so.

——————

In Right Here, Right Now the topic was death in images. Sadly, I was unable to be in class but I’m sure it was an upbeat, feel good subject.

——————

Like I said, a quiet week. So, news and reminders:

The New York Times Online Global Photo Project takes place on May 2nd. learn more about it HERE. It looks like a cool idea and I’m looking forward to seeing the results.

——————

I’m excited to be included in Fred Ritchin’s exhibition “Bodies in Question” at the New York Photo Festival taking place from May 12 – May 16.

Artists in the show:

Benjamin Busch
Robbie Cooper
Luc Courchesne
Raphaël Dallaporta
Tina Enghoff
Marc Garanger
Jessica Ingram
Alexandre Maubert
James Pomerantz
Joseph Rodriguez
Linn Underhill
Deborah Willis
Michael Wolf
Lim Young Kyun

Additionally, there are three other main exhibitions curated by Vince Aletti, Erik Kessels and Lou Reed. Learn more about the curators and artists HERE.

——————

This week, it’s more final projects and then next week I have my year-end review: I have to present my work from this past year along with a few paragraph statement about it to my crit instructor for next year and a few members of the faculty.

But, for all intents and purposes, for year one, we’ve just about come to the end of the road.

Share/Save

So that’s been a lot to handle too.

End of year work on my school plate includes :

- Write a 20 page paper or make a photo book (must be meta…a photo book that in someway addresses the issues we have discussed about photo books).
- Make 10 exhibition quality prints.
- Finish up a few projects for Visible, Invisible.
- Write a 5 page paper / design a syllabus.
- Write an artist statement and prepare work from this past year for year-end review.

So…that’s what I have going on. Moving forward to the past two weeks…

In Digital Imaging we had to create an image that used four elements provided by the teacher: a bowl, some fruit, a table, a table cloth.

I put the fruit in the bowl using masks and then put that on the flag which I made from the table cloth. I used the warp tool to bend it a bit. I used the table legs to make the barriers on the beach which I had turned into smart objects to scale and work with. All the other pieces are from the internet:

Fruitopia

———————————

In History of The Book Week 27, we talked about conceptual photo books. Readings for the week:

Badger and Parr “The Photobook: A History – Volume 2“, Chapter 4
From “The Photography Reader” ed. Liz Wells:
- introduction to Part Four, pp 148 -151
- Solomon-Godeau, Abagail, Winning The Game When The Rules Have Changed: Art Photography and Post-Modernism, pp 152 – 163
- Grundberg, Andy, The Crisis of The Real, pp. 1674 – 180
- Metz, Christian, Photography and Fetish, pp 138 – 147

Additional Readings:

- Schjeldahl, Peter. “Alien Emotions” The New Yorker (New York), May 4, 2009.
- Knight, Christopher, “Interview with John Baldessari” Interview from April 4, 1992 for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
- Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., et. al. Gerhard Richter. Atlas: The Reader
- A Good ArtInfo interview with Richard Prince
- Spector Nancy, Richard Prince, Guggnheim Museum catalog, read essays by Spector, Phillips and Brooks
- Lewitt, Sol, Autobiography, Multiples, New York, 1980 (find in SVA library rare books or at MoMA)
- Boltanski, Christian, Christian Boltanski, Phaidon, New York, 1997,
- Wolf, Sylvia, Ed Ruscha Photography, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1999

- Hoffman, Fred, Chris Burden, Locus + , New York, 2005
- Halbreich, Kathy, ed. The Last Picture Show, Walker Art Center, various authors and artists, Minneapolis, 2003

For Week 28, we each had to bring in a few examples of websites that we thought were in someway related to the future of photo books.

Some of the sites we looked at:

Flyp Media
MediaStorm
The File Room
We Feel Fine
ZoneZero
Natalie Bookchin
Lowfives
Oliver Laric
Bombay Flying Club

ZING!!!! – While writing this post, I have the tv tuned to The Colbert Report and there’s an interview with David Shields about his new book “Reality Hunger: A Manifesto” which is made up of uncited quotes. Shields questions being bound to 19th Century literary standards and why literary works are held to stricter standards regarding appropriation than visual arts:

———————————

In Visible, Invisible we have been given two additional projects:

1. TIME:

Address the notion of time, inspired by your: Vision, Experience, Understanding. How it resonates in your life. Any media can be employed, in time.

2. REALITY:

“Things are not what they seem nor are they otherwise.” – Buddha

“The True Mystery of the world is what can be seen and not the invisible” – Oscar Wilde

“Things are exactly the way they are meant to be” – Christopher Isherwood

A few of the images we’ve looked at:

Hyeres, France 1932. Henri Cartier-Bresson

Saut Dans Le Vide, 1960. Yves Klein (photomontage by Harry Shunk)

About “Saut Dans Le Vide” from Wikipedia:

Klein is also well known for a photomontage, Saut dans le vide (Leap into the Void) [4] , originally published in the artist’s book Dimanche, which apparently shows him jumping off a wall, arms outstretched, towards the pavement. Klein used the photograph as evidence of his ability to undertake unaided lunar travel. In fact, “Saut dans le vide”, published as part of a broadside on the part of Klein (the “artist of space”) denouncing NASA’s own lunar expeditions as hubris and folly, was a photomontage in which the large tarpaulin Klein leaped onto was removed from the final image.

Klein’s work revolved around a Zen-influenced concept he came to describe as “le Vide” (the Void). Klein’s Void is a nirvana-like state that is void of worldly influences; a neutral zone where one is inspired to pay attention to ones own sensibilities, and to “reality” as opposed to “representation”. Klein presented his work in forms that were recognized as art—paintings, a book, a musical composition—but then would take away the expected content of that form (paintings without pictures, a book without words, a musical composition without in fact composition) leaving only a shell, as it were. In this way he tried to create for the audience his “Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility”. Instead of representing objects in a subjective, artistic way, Klein wanted his subjects to be represented by their imprint: the image of their absence. Klein’s work strongly refers to a theoretical/arthistorical context as well as to philosophy/metaphysics and with his work he aimed to combine these. He tried to make his audience experience a state where an idea could simultaneously be “felt” as well as “understood”.

Paris, Fallen Man, 1967. Joel Meyerowitz

New York, NY 1962. Lee Friedlander

Sul Vaporetto, Venezia 1960. Gianni Berengo Gardin

Santa Barbara, CA 1977. Henry Wessel Jr

Fountain. Matthew Baum

Diagonal Composition, 1993. Jeff Wall

———————————

Rounding out the update is Right Here, Right Now.

Week 27 dealt with installations. Some of the artists/works mentioned:

From series Body to Body. Heliography on Sticks. Graciela Sacco

Julianne Swartz

Barry Underwood

Georges Rousse

Doug Aitken

Devorah Sperber

Pae White

Tomoko Shioyasu

Alfredo Jaar

Marcelo Brodsky

Ann Hamilton

And in Week 28 we looked at some artists from China:

Ai Weiwei

Unnamed Room no 2. Chen Wei, 2006

Red man. Chih-Chien Wang

Album of Literary Men. Hong Hao

Liu Zheng

Rong Rong

Wang Qingsong

Zhang Huan

We looked a bit more in depth at Zhang Huan, Rong Rong and the East Village scene last semester HERE.

And that is what I’ve been up to for the past two weeks!

Share/Save

In Digital Imaging, we looked at the images in which we had changed seasons:

Our next assignment is to make a composite image that includes 4 elements that the teacher gave us.

————————

In History of the Book, we talked about archives, indexes and memory.

Essays we read:

Chapter 9 of “The Photobook: A History – Volume 2” Gerry Badger and Martin Parr

Four essays from “The Photography Reader” ed Liz Wells:

“Evidence, Truth and Order: Photographic Records and the Growth of the State” John Tagg

“Photographs of Agony” John Berger

“Reading an Archive: Photography Between Labor and Capital” Alan Sekula

“Remembrance: The Child I never Was” Annette Kuhn

————————

Wednesday morning in Visible, Invisible we finished considering memory.

Shimon Attie

Ulrich Görlich

Silvio Wolf

————————

In Right Here, Right Now we talked a little about painting and photography:

Two Ways of Life, 1857. Oscar Rejlander

Beate Gütschow

Joel Sternfeld

Simon Norfolk

Collier Schorr

Vik Muniz

Roland Flexner

————————

I also registered for classes for next year:

Master Crit with Sarah Charlesworth

Thesis Forms with Marvin Heiferman

Critical Reading with Jan Avgikos

History of Video with David Ross

Photobook Studio with Kiki Bauer

————————

The highlight of my week?

The Marina Abramovic performance restrospective at MoMA. I don’t remember the last time I was so moved by an exhibition. If you are in NY in the next two months, you really should go. I’ll be returning several times before I take a seat across from her.

Visit the exhibition website HERE.

Share/Save

In Digital Imaging we took a quick look at Smart Objects:

————————

In History of the Book we had a chat about porn. A special guest, Lorelei Lee sat in and joined the discussion:

Essays we read for class:

“Pornography” by Andrea Dworkin

Master of Taboo: Araki

Nobuyoshi Araki : The PDN Interview

“How to Look at Pornography” Laura Kipnis from “Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America”

————————

Wednesday morning in Visible, Invisible we talked more about notions of time. Christian Boltanski’s work really stood out:

In Right Here, Right Now we went over to David Zwirner Gallery and had a gallery walkthrough with James Welling for his new show Glass House featuring photographs of Philip Johnson’s Glass House which Welling first shot for New York Magazine:

And that was Week 25. Coming soon: End of year review, thesis advisor choices and all sorts of fun stuff.

Share/Save

Digital Imaging:

Just before Spring Break, we had to take a daytime photo and turn it to nighttime. It was a fun exercise. I started with this:

I set up various masks for the water, sky, rocks and people and then tweaked all the colors and levels. I added a few color fill layers with gradients, threw in some stars and a little something to jazz things up a little…Bam!

It’s not perfect and could use more work, but I was pretty impressed with myself!

The next assignment, which is due next week, is to change the season in a photograph.

——————

I was not in History of the Book for Week 23 which covered post-war photo books (Frank, Avedon and Arbus).

Readings for Week 23 were:

Gerry Badger and Martin Parr: “The Photobook: A History – Volume 2“, chapters 5& 6

Karal Ann Marling, “As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s“,  chapters 3, 5, & 7

Martha Rosler, Decoys and Disruptions, “Place, Position, Power, Politics”

In Richard Bolton, “The Contest of Meaning“:

Carol Squires, “The Corporate Year in Pictures”

Sally Stein, “The Graphic Ordering of Desire: Modernization of a Middle Class Woman’s Magazine, 1914-39″

Esther Parada, “C/Overt Ideology: Two Images of Revolution”

This past week we watched two videos, one was an unreleased documentary about Mike Disfarmer. The other was Allan Sekula’s “A Short Film For Laos”

—————————-

In Visible and Invisible we were given our second assignment:

Express your physical, mental, symbolic point of view verbally/visually/acoustically/performing. Be true to yourself.

We also began to discuss the concept of time. Things mentioned:

Boulevard du Temple, ca 1838. Louis Daguerre

The Horse In Motion, 1878. Eadweard Muybridge

Behind the Gare St Lazare, 1932. Henri Cartier-Bresson

Bullet Through Apple, 1964. Harold Edgerton

Cinerama Dome, Hollywood, 1993. Hiroshi Sugimoto

Bill Viola, “The Quintet of the Astonished” (2000):

Kimsooja:

Yom HaShoah:

Fischli and Weiss:

—————————-

In Right Here, Right Now we looked at some abstract photography:

Attatonilco Series 0126 , 2009. Shirine Gill

Afterimage #10 (Lingering Green), 2008. Mikko Sinervo

Black Forest, Roland Fischer

HORIZON 13 - RED 2002, Silvio Wolf

Six Color Curl (CMMYYC: Irvine, California, July 18th 2008. Walead Beshty

Mandala #450, 2003. Bill Armstrong

Early Light/Sylvania AG/1B (C-819), 2008. Marco Breuer

Nicki Stager

Untitled #57, 1998. Richard Caldicott

Next week: Changing seasons in a photograph, a look at porn in History of the Book and time to register for classes.

Share/Save

In Monday’s Digital Imaging class we talked about skin tones. We were advised to work in CMYK and not RGB in the info palette for skin tones so that the info palette would display as percentages and not on a 0-255 scale. To switch to CMYK go to palette options drop down menu in the upper right of the palette.

Here’s a photo of some info from class:

Skintones. Click to view large

In CMYK, yellow should be your highest value followed by magenta and then cyan. The K in CMYK is for black and that value will be determined by whether or not the subject in the photo is black or not. This is just a starting point and then you can tweak as needed.

We also played a little with the history brush.

Tuesday’s class was cancelled which is a shame as Kiki Bauer was going to come visit and talk to the class about book design.

Wednesday morning in Visible, Invisible we talked about Antonioni’s film Blow-Up which has a lot to do with illusion, reality and point of view.

Plot via Wikipedia:

The plot is set in a day in the life of Thomas (Hemmings), a professional fashion photographer. It begins the day after spending the night at a doss house where he has taken pictures for a book of art photos he hopes to publish. He is late for a photo shoot at his studio with Veruschka, which in turn makes him late for another photo shoot with many other models later in the morning. He grows bored and walks off the shoot (also leaving the models and production staff in the lurch). Exiting the studio, two girls, aspiring teenaged models (Jane Birkin and Gillian Hills), ask to speak with him, but Thomas drives off to look at an antiques shop which he might buy. Wandering into nearby Maryon Park, he sees two lovers and takes photos of them. The woman (Redgrave) is nettled at being photographed, and Thomas is startled when she somehow stalks him back to his studio, asking for the film. This makes him want the film even more, so he misleads her into taking another roll instead. He makes many blowups (enlargements) of the black and white photos. These blowups have very rough film grain but nonetheless seem to show a body lying in the grass and a killer lurking in the trees with a gun. Thomas is frightened by a knock on the door, but it is only the two girls again, with whom he has a romp in his studio and falls asleep. Awakening, he finds they hope he will photograph them then and there, but he tells the girls to leave, saying, “Tomorrow! Come back tomorrow!”

As evening falls, Thomas goes back to the park and indeed finds a body, but he has not brought his camera and is scared off by the sound of a twig breaking, as if being stepped on. At a drug-drenched party in a house on the Thames River near central London, he finds both the French model (who tells him she is in Paris) and his publishing agent (Peter Bowles), the latter whom he wants to bring to the park as a witness. However, Thomas cannot put across in meaningful words what he has photographed. Waking up in the same, now stilled house at sunrise, he goes back to the park alone, but the body is gone.

Befuddled, he watches a mimed tennis match, is drawn into it, picks up their unseen, imaginary ball and throws it back to the two players. While he watches the mimed match, the sound of a ball being played back and forth is soon heard. As the photographer watches this alone on the lawn he fades away, leaving only the green grass as the film ends.

Here is the final mime scene:

In Right Here, Right Now we talked about heterotopias. Read Foucault’s essay about them HERE. We also briefly mentioned Beate Gütschow’s constructed landscapes (read an interview HERE) .

Beate Gütschow

Spring Break is next week. I’m heading out of town to shoot right after classes this week so things might be a little quiet on here. I’ll try and post a few things from the road, but no promises.

Share/Save

Digital Imaging: This week’s class was a lab class. We spent the time practicing using all the tools so far: pen, quick masks, channel masks. We were also told our next assignment. We have to take a photograph shot in daylight and make it look like it was taken at night.

————-

In History of the Book, we went to a screening of Soundtrack to War by George Gittoes. You can see it right here:

side note…History of the Book teacher David Ross was on The Colbert Report talking about Olympic Poster Art:

————-

Wednesday morning in Visible, Invisible we talked about eyes.

this is your eye

this is your eye and brain

IRIS (We Share Our Chemistry with the Stars) SO 200L (Dilated). Marc Quinn 2009 oil/canvas

Marc Quinn Installation

“You never look at me from the place at which I see you” – Jacques Lacan.

Giovane Che Guarda Lorenzo Lotto. Giulio Paolini.

Las Meninas. Diego Velazquez. 1656

Rovesciare i propri occhi (To Reverse one's eyes). Giuseppe Penone

Masato Seto

For next week we have to watch Julian Schnabel’s “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” – Buy it here.

——–

In Right Here, Right Now, we started to look at landscapes, but didn’t get into them in great depth. We did have to read Deborah Bright’s essay on landscapes “Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men”

——–

On Thursday, Joel Sternfeld came by the department for a little show and tell of his work. It was great to hear him talk about American Prospects, Walking The High Line, Sweet Earth and Oxbow Archive, but I was particularly interested in his recent cell phone camera photos from Dubai.

Glen Canyon Dam, Page, Arizona, 1983. Joel Sternfeld

Ken Robson's Christmas Tree, January 2001. Joel Sternfeld

Queen of the Prom, the Range Nightclub, Slab City, California, March 2005. Joel Sternfeld

February 28, 2007 
The East Meadows, Northampton, Massachusetts. Joel Sternfeld

In non-school news, I had a nice interview run in At Length.

Throw in some wedding planning and some shooting and it was a good week!

Share/Save

Monday in digital imaging I was introduced to the pen tool. I had never used it before as it had always intimidated me. Turns out it’s actually really, really useful and isn’t too scary once you get the hang of it. I’ve also been trying out using a tablet instead of a mouse. It’s great for some things but for others it feels like it’s giving me carpal tunnel.

Crit was fun this week. I’m going away to work on a project over spring break, so recently I’ve been making snapshots around New York of anything that jumps out at me that might relate or inform the  upcoming project. It’s basically a warm up to get my brain moving in the right direction.

Tuesday in History of The Book, we briefly talked about Japanese photo books. We didn’t have much time to discuss as we also each had to present our series of ten resequenced photos from a photo book. It was great seeing what other people came up with.

The readings for last week were:

Badger and Parr, The Photobook: A History, Vol. 1, Chapters 7 & 9

Vartanian, Ivan, Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s, Aperture Books, NY, 2009, p 11-22

Also in the same book, Interview with Daido Moriyama

Hosoe, Eiko, and Hijikata, Tatsumi, Kamaitachi, Aperture Books, NY, 2009  (a beautiful book worth buying)

Eiko Hosoe

Phillips, Sandy, Daido Moriyama: Stray Dog, SFMOMA, 1999

Also in the same book: Alexandra Munroe, Postwar Japanese Photography and the pursuit of consciousness

No class on Wednesday because of the snow, but I’m busy trying to figure out what to do for an assignment for my Wednedsay morning class: Visible and Invisible.

The assignment:

RESONATE

A) Interpret visually the words that resonate in the most from at least one of the following books:

Paul Auster – The Invention of Solitude
Roland Barthes – Camera Lucida
Italo Calvino – Six Memos for the Next Millennium
Eugen Herrigel – Zen in the Art of Archery
Andrei Tarkovsky – Sculpting in Time
Charles Traub – The Education of a Photographer

B) Interpret verbally the images that resonate in you the most from the works presented in our class.

George Rousse’s work resonated with me the most. See some in this post HERE.

—-

Next week: Joel Sternfeld comes to visit the department and History of the Book class field trip to a screening and discussion of George Gittoes’ movie Soundtrack to War:

Share/Save