Informed by the online debris of stock photography, many artists – including Aleksandra Domanović, Oliver Laric, Helen Marten, James Richards, Hannah Sawtell and the Yemenwed collective – are exploring the ‘off-world’ of digital imagery with a new fluency.
Negative Dialectics in the Google Era: A Conversation with Trevor Paglen
Feb 13, ’12
8:56 PM
In the last seven years, in a series of performances, publications, exhibitions, and installations, Trevor Paglen has explored the world of hidden military projects and infrastructure. One of his best-known series is Limit Telephotography, for which he trained lenses designed for astronomical photography on secret military bases in the U.S., using their very-long-range photographic capabilities to capture images that would otherwise be hidden to civilian eyes. These are the “limits” that lie at the heart of Paglen’s project: the limits of democracy, secrecy, visibility, and the knowable. He is one of many artists who have evolved new and various ways of engaging with the military and the secret state in the years following the declaration of the “War on Terror.” The work of these artists remains as apposite as ever, as the U.S. and its allies continue to bomb suspected enemies (and anyone else who gets “too close”) and to run “black” sites and secret gulags in which people are held (and tortured) beyond the reach of the law. Paglen has made works that raise fundamental questions about what can be known and seen, while simultaneously writing investigative exposés of the shadow state. This interview explores some of the relations and tensions between the two practices.
In Digital Age, Sourcing Images Is as Legitimate as Making Them | Raw File | Wired.com
Feb 13, ’12
8:50 PM
For decades, photographer Paul Shambroom has trained his lens on the infrastructure of America, from nuclear weapons storage facilities to manufacturing plants; local council meetings to emergency response teams.
His investigations require mountains of research and hundreds of thousands of miles on the road. Known for his large-format, purposefully composed photographs, Shambroom is a distinguished name. And yet, he is ready to put his approach and techniques aside for a joyride in the sea of online digital images.
“I love image making … but it’s something I know I can do. I just don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing the same things,” he says.
Instead, Shambroom is teaching students at the University of Minnesota about navigating images found on the internet and how image production and consumption are evolving. As he trades in his car keys for a keyboard, Raw File taps Shambroom’s thoughts about online imagery, the photographer-artists best swimming through the swell of images, Boolean searches and bombarding students with left-field assignments.
Architecture of Fear – a conversation with Trevor Paglen – we make money not art
Nov 22, ’11
6:22 PM
I suspect that there are very few places left on this planet that haven’t been discovered by intrepid explorers. Yet, Trevor Paglen has found and investigated territories that still need to be documented and exposed to the world. If you’ve never seen his photographs, i suggest you swing by the Z33 House for Contemporary Art Center in Hasselt, Belgium. They are part of Architecture of Fear, an exhibition that examines how feelings of fear pervade our daily life.
Afterall • Summer 2010 • Modernism, Postmodernism and Gleam: On the Photorealist Work Ethic
Nov 2, ’11
5:43 PM
Photorealism has been whittled down to something akin to proletarian 1970s folk art, and the strong whiff of nostalgia (for a long-lost, partly illusory idea of American-ness first and foremost) that infuses its low-key reanimation continues to exclude it from a standardised art history. With this essay, which does not (at least not in the first place) set out to analyse the various reasons why Photorealism has been considered such a minor art, I want to reconsider this movement as one of the truly emblematic ‘isms’ of the 1970s – much more so, perhaps, than many of the canonical forms of Conceptual art that now occupy our memory of that decade, and whose uncanny ‘other’ or mirror image Photorealism has so often been made out to be
Annotations – Triple Canopy
Aug 23, ’11
10:16 PM
A pixel is an abstract container that holds a value capable of being translated into any physical size. Of course, making it physical brings about certain material contingencies. I became interested in the structure that the camera overlays in the process of re-photographing. In certain of the “Aggregates” photographs the cells of the grid are really small, and some have over 50,000 color combinations. In these instances the camera sensor has trouble making out the edges of such a fine grid, and in turn creates a moiré pattern, which causes a cyan or magenta fringe at the edges of the gridlines. As I re-photograph and re-print the sheet, the fringe builds into a layer of color imposed by the camera itself. For me, the errors that occur as this rational system of computation breaks down offer some interesting possibilities.
The Facet Eye (2006) by Daniel Segerberg
Aug 19, ’08
12:07 PM
From Artist’s Statement:
A construction out of old windows.The inside of the windows is covered with roofing-felt with hundreds of small holes from which light comes through. Each hole is an upside down projection of the outside surrounding. The many small projections are caught by thin fine-meshed textile stretched on frames along the inside walls; a facet eyed camera obscura or like hundreds of “real-time-videos”. Outside, the darkened windows gives a clear reflection of the surrounding, but the different angels of each window distort the image.
Outside View
Inside View
Industrial Archeology by Jeffrey Milstein
Jul 3, ’07
11:51 AM
Read an interview today with photographer Jeffrey Milstein in CR blog and came across this ongoing photo project by Jeffrey Milstein exploring the declining industrial areas along the Hudson. His photographs capture the physical deterioriation and economic downslide of these once prosperous manufacturing sites. They also touch upon the concept of failure as discussed in the Informal Architectures exhibition.
