Our pal Ruthie Hauge got outta BHS in ’01, and has worked as a photojournalist for some time now. She’s been on the blogroll on your right (my left) for a while, but her blawwg deserves your attention now: it’s her diary of working in post-earthquake Haiti.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magazine/09babies-t.html?ref=magazine
…sublime. Happy Mother’s Day.
J. Shimon and J. Lindemann are artists and teachers who understand that the past lives on in the present. You can sign on to be a part of their typology. The following text is a smooshed version of what they present online.
“Journey to Manitowoc, Wisconsin and stand on the black tape line on our studio floor. We expose hand-cut sheets of 2 ASA orthochromatic film, a smooth-grained film similar to what was used 100 years ago to make postcard negatives. The exposure is made with a large silver reflector and strobes to replicate the traditional pre-electric daylight studio. Thus there is little depth-of-field and little space in the narrow vertical postcard format frame. Any change of posture or stance effects the composition and focus due to the large aperture. The film is hand-processed and proofed in our darkroom. We contact print the selected negative in palladium hand-coated on Bergger Cotton 320 gram, then exposed by UV light for minutes to hours. There is no retouching. After processing through a series of chemical baths, the print air dries. Realizing the negatives using these processes deliberately critiques the meaning of realizing the lowliest, democratic folk photographic form–the real photo postcard–using the most extravagant photographic “fine art” materials still available in the 21st century.
“We mail one postcard-size print (5.5″x3.25”) to each person we photograph. A handwritten note on the back of each print completes our exchange with the individual. The postcard print migrates to the person’s specific geographic location–often far away from our studio. The small, dark objects are stamped, imprinted, manipulated by postal machines. Each postcard is delivered by the hand of an unknown postal worker: Mail Art in a time when the mail itself seems like a doomed information delivery system that goes back to the 18th-century. We wet scan the film negatives at high resolution and post .jpgs on [our] blog to produce a digital object viewable by a large audience. We also include hyperlinks to the web presence of each individual (if searchable) or a map of the place from which they traveled to come to our studio. The portraits replicate and turn up on facebook profiles and elsewhere.
“Deciding the time is right to be photographed is an aspect of collaboration not often critiqued. There is always a reason, an occasion and impetus to commission a portrait and it is fraught with complexity and we know them well but have rarely taken the time to list them. Almost every commission portrait becomes evidence of coming to grips with: mortality, sentimentality, nostalgia, humility, utility, vanity, self-conception, identity, metaphysics and the overwhelming cultural compulsion to smile for the camera. All are encapsulated in an ephemeral performance of self standing on the black tape line in silent acknowledgment of the eventuality that we too, like the 100 year old nameless people in the real photo postcards we are also posting on our blog shall pass into anonymity.
“The project pays homage to the “real photo postcard” – a way for isolated people in small Midwestern towns to show-and-tell something about their existence to family and friends in far-away places a century ago via the mail. Mail was delivered several times a day and a postcard was an easy way to dispatch a message within the city, to the next town or across the country. The post office was just about all there was. The new-fangled telephone was just getting started. Thus the post office provided the earliest and most accessible “efficient communication network” bringing information quick-and-easy to rural areas. The postcard provided a brief line of news and a photograph, a format that continues to this day in the guise of facebook and the culture of sharing mania now part of our everyday life. A photograph on the front with a personalized, handwritten message on the back could be mailed for a penny. Postcards traversed space and time more efficiently than any other communication technology of the period. We’ve been accumulating early-20th century RPPC studio portraits (circa 1904-1930). Viewed en masse, they form a typology of humanity betraying aspects of class and social status, gender construction and fashion sense, access to manufactured goods and services, mobility and world view. Additionally, the monochromatic abstraction of the person standing before the camera becomes a melancholy document reflecting the subtleties of gesture, clothing or prop choice and nuance of facial expression. Contemporary viewers are given insight into the social decorum and fashion their counterparts a century ago if they pause to take the time. The full-length portraits, disembodied from their own history, were typically made by anonymous photographers in small towns sometimes itinerant. Only rarely is the subject identified and then only with a handwritten note on the backside often in pencil or fountain pen. The old anonymous postcard portraits are free-floating fragments turning up at estate sales, rummage sales, thrift stores and vintage stores, examples of a form that connects to an ongoing cultural effort, an evolving tradition, to record the individual. They are printed on manufactured silver gelatin paper with a preprinted “post card” back. We scan the old cards we collect and post them on the blog juxtaposing them with contemporary individuals as a meditation on time and space. From gods and goddesses to saints and kings displayed on cave, castle, cathedral or museum walls to the recent sassy arms-length self-portraits routinely posted on flickr, facebook and myspace, the early 20th-century postcards survive as fragile paper monuments from a technological moment when photographic postcards of individuals were made by the millions. They survive in a continuum of portrayals in all media reflecting the existence of specific individuals at specific times existing in specific places.”
See and learn a lot more about RPPC: http://realphotopostcardsurveyproject.blogspot.com/http://realphotopostcardsurveyproject.blogspot.com/
(Thanks, Vicky.)
Ten or fifteen years ago I began to get brochures in the mail from the Festival Musique Actuelle in Victoriaville (somewhere between Montreal and Quebec City); they must have profiled me as a likely attendee. It’s the wrong time of the year for a Huge School art teacher, so I hope the affair continues after I retire (like that’s gonna happen). Still, I know many of you would be interested in this annual festival of experimental and improvised music, which often includes jazz, so here are some highlights from this year’s schedule:
One hundred electronic Nabaztag bunnies in choir formation, lighting up, wiggling their ears, and playing back music following a sophisticated score inspired by Cage, Reich, Ligeti, and Nancarrow.
Montreal guitarist Sam Shalabi goes back to his Egyptian roots. Land of Kush is the large ensemble project where he rethinks Egyptian pop music in terms of experimental groove. Five singers and twenty musicians or so, with a blend of rock and Arab instruments.
Lydia Lunch, the queen of no-wave… sings/reads her sordid tales backed by the noise music of Strings of Consciousness’s Philippe Petit, who works with prepared sounds and turntable mistreatments.
Les Momies de Palerme, two young and mysterious ladies playing ghostly and ungraspable music – a blend of Gothic drone and ethereal songs.
Three Norwegians and a Frenchman… a gamelan-like soundworld.
Tanya Tagaq has reinvented traditional Inuit throat singing, turning it into something modern, experimental, and incredibly sensual… she delivers a performance where song meets improvisation, past meets present, and rock showmanship meets bold creativity.
Erick D’Orion: Six pianos from different eras are reacting to the impulses of unbalanced motors attached to their structures. The pianos transform into vibrating surfaces.
Composer and choirmaster Andre Pappathomas has enlisted the participation of local choirs to create a virtual choir of voices from Victoriaville. He met several singers and recorded them individually. These tracks have been assembled and orchestrated to compose “La vie mode d’emploi,” a never-heard-before sound installation set out right onto the bicycle trail, near the bandstand, where passers-by will be able to stroll around and, in some cases, recognize their own voices.
American free jazz legend Bill Dixon presents, for the first time ever on stage, his “Tapestries for Small Orchestra” project, an all-out exploration of the sonic capabilities of the trumpet. Music that is composed yet improvised, strictly laid out yet free, filled with people yet strangely open and roomy. (Includes Chicago trumpeter Rob Mazurek.)
“With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North strong and free!”
*Rostromedial Prefrontal Cortex
P.S. Neil Young tonight!
Mitch Epstein’s presentation last Thursday evening at Columbia College so well-attended that the overflow crowd was seated in the Museum at a large video monitor. The next morning I discovered that an identical lecture was “preserved” on video last fall in New York. You can witness it in its entirety (in six segments) on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qff4g1KGkks&feature=PlayList&p=56559E499E072D26&index=0&playnext=1
The phrase that’s been sticking in my rostromedial prefrontal cortex lately is “Prioritize heavily.”
http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/01/29/an-argument-for-quitting-facebook/
Creative Camerawork 
