Category: photography

  • folk/art/vernacular border dispute

    From Tom Lubbock’s review of last year’s exhibition Folk Archive: Contemporary Popular Art from the UK, which discusses the politics of determining which forms of folk culture get to be art (among other things), and actually uses the term ‘vernacular creativity’, this is a great list: I write about things that appear in art galleries,…

  • the gendered act of reading

    There is much to enjoy at Kristine Steenbergh’s blog Earmarks in Early Modern Culture, but today I especially noticed the gender of reading (lots of great images, too). It draws out in longhand what Jeanette Winterson sketches in breathtaking shorthand for Marylin, reading Ulysses in the sun. But I wonder how this other image of…

  • tilt-shift

    Josh told me about the photoshop fake tilt-shift technique, so I had to try to it over the weekend. I got kind of addicted for a day or so, and this is one of the results.

  • transit point

    The weather turned cooler this morning: autumn is finally here. Thank you, god. Every year, this transition works on me like the beginning of spring does on normal people – it’s the moment when fogginess and torpor give way to bright clarity. This time last year I was doing my PhD confirmation and getting ready…

  • Fetishising DIY

    The perverse lo-fi, lo-tech aesthetic of DIY tech objects – and a very particular ‘mastery of technologies’ discourse – is showcased here: and here… and here Friday is for…flickr-ing.

  • Urchin box

    This image (in context on flickr and in a personal blog) is a nice example of time-binding, remediated vernacular creativity – a grandmother’s shell collection repurposed and introduced to new publics through a granddaughter’s daily photographic practice. Heaps more at the department of me, where the dignity of ordinary specificity is everything.

  • found and homemade and other things

    Around the traps lately: Feeding my growing and almost-totally-phd-related obsession with the seductive mystery of vernacular photography and the curation and exhibition of the found photograph (not always the same thing, but both concepts that have begun to operate as magnets for popular enthusiasm and interest lately): the abandoned photo museum, BigHappyFunHouse (‘found photos. free…

  • A New Pluralism: Photography’s Future (Conference announcement)

    This looks pretty interesting: Society for Photographic Education 43nd National Conference A New Pluralism: Photography’s Future March 23-26, 2006 in Chicago, Illinois For fifty years we have been living in a world inundated and defined by photographic imagery while photography has been taught in relative isolation in academia. SPE members recognize the necessity to address…

  • //cellBYTES

    While flickr is more modestly a “cool photosharing thingy” and textamerica is slightly more ambitiously a “camera phone moblog community”, //cellBYTES is not only sophisticatedly punctuated, it’s also: a virtual community of digital artists interested in handheld technology + public works. As mobile phone technology advances //cellBYTES will be a contemporary + archival reference of…

  • flickr tags

    Currently in love with the following flickr tags: squared circle, pink, type and stencil.