This image is from Michel Gasarian’s “Cellule” series of photographs documenting the images that adorn French prison walls. I was struck by the way the photograph’s crumpled appearance adds to the poignancy. This is vernacular creativity in extremis. Found via Ashley Benigno.
Some great photos of the Bronx at Satan’s Laundromat
Photoblogs has had a site redesign – much cleaner, much more navigable. The addition of a ‘most popular’ list is good too.
Number one there is Brownglasses.com – and deservedly so, it is just scrumptious, as is shutterbug.
What I find interesting about photoblogs is that they are often published by people who are professionals from related creative fields (design, architecture, whatever) but that technically they are amateur photographers. So you get these really quirky and quite unselfconscious photographs presented in stunning design contexts. And the reverse is also true – a lot of professional photographers’ sites are poorly designed – and although content is king, design is still queen on the web.
And then there’s the joyously lowbrow cabinet of visual curiosities Photosynthetic Molecules, to which I am proud to contribute.
Satan’s Laundromat is “a Brooklyn-based photolog with an emphasis on strange signage, urban decay, and general weirdness.”
To my mind collecting these urban fragments is a beautiful use of the photoblog format – as much as I like cats. via new home-away-from-home Photosynthetic Molecules.
How exciting, I’ve been invited to join the sociobiological fun at Photosynthetic Molecules, a new collaborative photoblog with a great title. Don’t quite know why I’ve been included as I am so verbal (and hopelessly parenthetical, not to mention long-winded, as well). But I’m looking forward to it. Just for the sake of jumping right in, I have already made my first post.
Toycamera.com is too, too cool (and a powerhouse of vernacular lofi avant-garde artiness as well). Here’s their opening blurb:
We’re all about Plastic Cameras. Cameras called ‘Holga’, ‘Diana’, ‘Dories’, ‘Debonair’, ‘Lubitel’, ‘Banner’ ‘Snappy’ and ‘Yunon’. They’re cheap, maddening, fascinating plastic pieces of crap. Many people hate them, they think they’re junk, worthless, a waste of time. But we love them. We can’t stop talking about them. We like the lack of sharpness, we appreciate the light leaks, we find the poor viewfinders amusing.We think it’s cool that they’re only 15 bucks each.
The site has articles, tips and tricks, photgrapher profiles, images, and a forum.
Photo buffs in BrisVegas might like to pop into the Brisbane Powerhouse and check out Freelance, an exhibition by photography students at Southbank Institute of TAFE.
Opening: Friday 17 Oct 2003 7.00pm Spark Bar
Exhibition Times
Mon – Fri 9am – 5pm;
Sat 12pm – 4pm
(and 2 hours prior to performances at other times)
Exhibition closes 2 November
I write a lot about the proliferation of digital production and its effects on concepts of creativity and aesthetic value in established music subcultures – and I have often thought that the resurgence in analog synthesis/retro music technology is connected somehow to the availability of digital production tools to the “masses”. It’s not a phenomenon that is especially unique to music, though. The retro aura is not restricted to the Roland TB-303 or the Moog, but extends to Polaroid cameras (from the 1970s), Super-8 film, and even, I discovered via lorbus, the etcha-sketch. 
Similarly, photographers are increasingly turning back to obsolescent technologies to fuel their creativity: witness the growing interest in hand-altered polaroid images and pinhole photography.In many ways, the process of producing an etcha-sketch image from a manual sketch is the antithesis of digital imagery: one mistake can mean the sudden death of hours of painstaking work – there is no undo button! And it is my theory that this is precisely the attraction for the artist – the process requires enormous skill, the result is impermanent and unstable, and it is clear that the image has been produced unaided by “technology” – and yet, it requires the use of technology whose obsolescence has been reversed consciously by the artist. That’s what makes it cool, but also what makes it very interesting from a cultural studies point of view.