ALL BELOW TAKEN FORM ASX -
Stripper-stretch marks and desert-devil-dust… Mexican-Men and Tequila-Worm-Lust… jiggling breasts and white men roars, sticky palms and sticky floors… booze-boars and bottle-breath, broken-teeth smiles and flailing-fist-death… curse and crawl, stumble and fall… warm wind blows through desert-window holes, pitiful views, men and rage, coming in two’s, alcohol-slaves. Dangerous dusty towns, jukebox-caves, neon sex-comin’ in flesh-filled waves… livin’-lost f-k’s, can’t be saved, drink some more, find-a-whore… hear ‘em roar.
Dark shadows, big-truck-monster-men, testosterone-smackdown-fears. This is photography.
For Roswell Angier and your gift. Thank you.
Regards,
Doug Rickard
This article was taken from the Vice magazine website. A great interview and some fascinating work. The above image is superb in my humble opinion, very reminiscent of Francis Bacon in particular. The below article is well worth following the link to read more.
Born in Marseilles in 1961, D’Agata left France in the early 80s. He later studied at the International Center of Photography in New York alongside Nan Goldin and Larry Clark, with whom he shares a fascination for the seamier side of things. D’Agata has lived a murky and nomadic life. He regularly immerses himself in his subjects, which typically tend to be prostitutes and other marginalised misfits, often throwing himself into dangerous, drug-addled and sex-fuelled situations. We spoke with him about photography as art, honesty, morality and what it’s like to be addicted to the drug ice while living with Cambodian prostitutes.
From The Whitechaple Gallery
“The films and photographs of British artist Gillian Wearing (b. Birmingham, 1963) explore our public personas and private lives. This Turner Prize winner’s remarkable works draw on fly-on-the-wall documentaries, reality TV and the techniques of theatre, to explore how we present ourselves to the world.
Wearing’s portraits and mini-dramas reveal a paradox, given the chance to dress up, put on a mask or act out a role, the liberation of anonymity allows us to be more truly ourselves.
The exhibition begins with the artist herself, dancing in a shopping mall, blissfully unaware of her bemused audience. The idea of performance continues with works including Wearing’s 1997 masterpiece, 10–16. Adults lip synch the voices and act out the physical tics of seven children in a captivating film which moves from the breathless excitement of a ten year old to the existential angst of an adolescent.”
For the past two years the once-loquacious Mr. Richardson, 46, has stopped giving interviews, telling friends that his work should speak for itself. But his reserve subsided over breakfast as he described an evening photo shoot in the late 1990s for the British fashion designer Katharine Hamnett, during which he rounded up some friends who were models and photographed them in various states of coupling as they wandered between his apartment and clubs of the East Village.
“When I got the contact sheets back there was this one image, two frames,” Mr. Richardson said. “There was a shot of a girl, with her legs open, she had white panties.” Then he noticed that her pubic hair was visible. “When I was shooting her, I didn’t see that,” Mr. Richardson said, adding, “It’s like a happy accident.”
The affordable high res Digital SLR which changed the game with the introduction of HD video, amongst other features, has, at long last, got its update. The New Canon 5d has been shown off at a canon lanuch event in Shanghai. The features look interesting, the 61AF focus for example, but, I must say, rather disapoiningly the mega pixel remains pretty much the same. My concern here is with the development in printing standards for outdoor going from 8 to 16 bit in many places, the mega pixel of the 5d III leaves it slightly shy of the needed quality.
Canon 600ex Flash
Perhaps a more interesting development may be the new top range canon flash. The canon 600ex is the first flash to feature radio technologies. It will be interesting to get testing these and see how they compare to pocket wizards and pixel kings.
And what a vast and varied collection it is. An interesting slice of life and the news from the last 57 years.
From the LA Times
Really interesting piece on Luis Sinco and Cpl. James Blake Miller. The video piece in particular is very much worth a watch.
November 11, 2007
Times photojournalist Luis Sinco documented the Marine’s assault on Fallouja, Iraq, in November 2004. While capturing the ferocity of the conflict, he took a photograph of Lance Cpl. James Blake Miller. Weary from battle, the Marine lighted a cigarette, and Sinco’s shot of that moment became an icon of the Iraq war. But the connection between Sinco and Miller runs deeper. After Iraq, Miller tried to return to his previous life but found his nights haunted by images of war and his life fractured by depression. This is the story of how Miller struggled to heal his scars of war. But it is also a story of how two disparate lives intersected on a rooftop in Fallouja, and how they both continue to struggle with what happened. Sinco’s work was a 2005 Pulitzer finalist for feature photography.
“The young marine lighted a cigarette and let it dangle. White smoke wafted around his helmet. His face was smeared with war paint. Blood trickled from his right ear and the bridge of his nose.
Momentarily deafened by cannon blasts, he didn’t know the shooting had stopped. He stared at the sunrise.”
Lise Sarfati ‘On Hollywood’.
Interview by François Adragna
François Adragna: What is a photographic series?
Lise Sarfati: It is a set of photographs which are linked to each other and which create a whole. Something which shuts us in and in which we cannot find the exit. It is also a way of thinking. A form.
FA: Is ‘On Hollywood’ a series?
LS: On Hollywood is a series. But each photograph can be looked at individually. It is a series because the images interrelate and reinforce the photographic form.
FA: When did you start this series?
LS: I started it in 2009 and finished it in 2010.
FA: The colors and texture of your photographs have a particular quality. What film did you use?
LS: I worked with Kodachrome 64 transparency film. The rolls were sent to Kansas in the only laboratory which still developed this film. I never saw the results immediately. I realized that this element of not seeing, not knowing, was a determining factor. This situation : where I had to wait and did not know brought me back to the mystery I felt when I discovered photography at the age of 13. A revelation, but after the fact. This Kodachrome film stock is also the one used in Hollywood movies of the 1940s. I wanted to complete the loop and end the story of Kodachrome film on Hollywood. I used this outmoded film stock in the context of Hollywood, which is at the peak of technological advancement and colossal production costs.
I was not part of a huge Hollywood production but on a boulevard where I photographed real women (without paying them, this I insist on in my work) who are considered outsiders. Their weaknesses became their strength, raising them to the rank of anti-heroes.
It is true that film, photography and video have surpassed painting and sculpture and that it may seem odd to return to Kodachrome slides when analog film, photography and video have been overtaken by the digital format. But it is precisely this paradox which interested me.
One often wrongfully compares photographs to paintings. This is nonsense. The image does not refer to painting but to something alive through which passes silence…
Lovely review, lovely book. Nice.
Dust Book
photographs by
Aline Diépois and
Thomas Gizolme
Dust Book is one of those wonderful genre-defying, hybrid-style books that arrives on the scene unexpectedly. Part photobook, part travel journal, part hallucinatory fantasy and stream of consciousness, this book purports to be the record of a trip made by two French photographers through the Arizona desert wilds.
One of the authors shoots with a Leica. The other with a Polaroid. Both indulge in drugs, alcohol and other substances while they encounter a very strange cast of characters in remote communities and random encampments of outcasts and misfits, real or imagined.
Early in the book we have a long rambling rant against William Eggelston (“poor dumb fuck”), which later evolves into a sort of hero worship. There’s also a rather long segment of fiction in the middle touching on drugs, alcohol, guns, rape, incest, murder, and the effects of extreme desert heat on people who live in small remote trailer parks. It is bizarre and disjointed, but somehow it seems to fit in the flow.
Well, what can one say… When Charles Saatchi is complaing about how uncouth the art buying world has become, you get the felling that we have indeed perhaps drifted into the realm of the un-well… Interesting read but to be taken with a huge pinch of salt.
“Being an art buyer these days is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar. It is the sport of the Eurotrashy, Hedge-fundy, Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard. They were found nestling together in their super yachts in Venice for this year’s spectacular art biennale. Venice is now firmly on the calendar of this new art world, alongside St Barts at Christmas and St Tropez in August, in a giddy round of glamour-filled socialising, from one swanky party to another.
Artistic credentials are au courant in the important business of being seen as cultured, elegant and, of course, stupendously rich.”
(Source: Guardian)
