This month, two Coilhouse photographers – Lou O’Bedlam and Allan Amato – launched two very different Kickstarter projects – This is Us, Together and Illuminate Parkinson’s. Both Lou and Allan have been contributing to Coilhouse since Issue 01, and each has a project that’s worthy of your attention and support.
Lou is good at photography and, it seems, bad at relationships. In the cute Kickstarter video, Lou’s ex-girlfriend appears to tell you all the ways in which Lou really, really needs help in the love department: apparently, he’s not a good communicator, doesn’t take criticism well, and thinks that the “silent treatment” is an effective way of talking about problems. To remedy these issues, Lou has decided to embark on a 30-day journey to visit 12 cities to interview as many couples as he can about what makes their relationship work. In the process, he will document the couples he meets, learn from them, and produce a beautiful coffee-table book. The Kickstarter has only 38 hours to go; support his efforts here!
When Coilhouse cover photographer Allan Amato learned that his friend Becky has had Parkinson’s Disease since she was 29, he was shocked. Like many, he was under the impression that Parkinson’s was something that only afflicted the elderly. Allan began to create portraits of other young Parkinson’s sufferers. Artists including Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, Terry Gilliam and Kevin Smith have teamed up with Allan to create a series of images to “illuminate Parkinson’s,” as can be seen above. He now hopes to take his portrait series of Parkinson’s sufferers on the road, and recently launched a Kickstarter page to help with the costs associated: making large prints, shipping, and creating a book.
At first glance, this haunting collodion print looks like an aged Victorian carte de visite. If you look closely, you’ll notice something odd: the dress is trimmed with scraps of paper with typewritten notes. This is a papier-mache sculpture titled Storydress II, designed by artist Christine Elfman. The dress is made of stories recorded from her great-grandmother’s autobiographical reminiscences. On her site, Elfman elaborates on the process and motivations behind this piece:
Finding unknown relatives in my family photograph collection, and noticing old photographs of anonymous people in antique stores, I was taken by how many people were forgotten regardless of photography’s intention to “Secure the shadow, ‘ere the substance fades away.” The older the picture, the more forlorn the subject appeared to me. Holding their image, I was impressed with their absence. Storydress II tries to show this underlying subject of photographic portraiture. The 19th century cabinet card is turned inside out, revealing the presence of absence in a medium characterized by rigid detail and anonymity. The figure of reminiscence, cast in plaster, parallels the poetic immobility of the head clamp, used in early photography to prevent movement during long exposures, aptly defined by Barthes as “the corset of my imaginary existence”. The life size cast figure wears a paper mache dress made of family stories: recorded, torn up, and glued back together again.
“Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, was a New York city freelance news photographer from the 1930s to the 1950s. Here he talks about his career and gives advice to those wanting to become news photographers.”
Weegee’s a phonetic version of Ouija. The cigar-gnawing Fellig earned his nickname “because of his frequent, seemingly prescient arrivals at scenes only minutes after crimes, fires or other emergencies were reported to authorities.”
Crassly manipulative at times, and an unapologetic opportunist, Fellig also claimed (as heard in the interview above) to be a humanist at heart. As questionable as some of the paparazzo’s methods might have been, the human pathos of his imagery, whether it features tenement fire survivors, public drunks, murdered gangsters or smooching space cadets (seen below) is unquestionably powerful indeed.
Spring, in many places, is slow in coming this year to the Northern Hemisphere. Until such a time as the land is restored to a state of verdancy and the flora and herbaceous things start to flourish again, why not immerse ourselves in the works of Margriet Smulders? Her hauntingly elaborate floral tableaux are narcotic, intoxicating things– both ethereal and sensual, dark and glowing.
Of her “Endless garlands of flowers” images she says:
You can see a whole world in my flowers. Lush and strangely erotic tableaux entice you into another dimension. Huge mirrors, elaborate glass vases, rich draperies, fruit and cut blooms are used to make these ‘paintings’. As Baudelaire says “Get drunk: on wine, poetry or virtue”. Imagine lingering and languishing in these fresh, sultry and lucid landscapes. I love this sensual state. To lose myself, to deliver myself as in a love affair. Reality doesn’t matter. When making photos I get lost in the scenes as if the flowers were caressing me in the gulfs of the sea.
There are worse states in which to languish while we wait for spring than to lose ourselves in such delights, n’est-ce pas?
Ingrid Nelson’s series Pavement Trees feature surreal landscapes reflected in puddles of water; using the texture of the pavement, the painted lines, and rainbow slicks of oil floating on the water’s surface to great effect, turning these dirty pools of water into little scenes from another world:
Last summer I started shooting concrete and parking lots and dividing lines, fading paint and patterns. Alongside my compulsive inclination to take a photo of every tree branch I see, this contrast to the natural world was a break from the norm. With all the rain this winter, my eye was drawn into the glistening cement and of course…puddles. I am fascinated how my two worlds seem to magically intersect and become one dimensional galaxies both in reflection and in print. It’s almost like tree trapping … yet transient as we know that summer is just around the corner and these accidental worlds will exist no more.
The controller uses a computer graphics technique called “Structured Light” to build a depth map of the field of view. This allows the Xbox Kinect camera to discern shapes and ultimately build a skeletal model of the person standing in front of it. It does this by projecting a grid of tiny infrared dots across the room, and reading the position of those dots with another camera. Those infrared dots show up really well on an IR camera as they’re quite bright. Projected against a person, they create interesting contours and patterns.
A community of Bay Area artists, models and makers came together to pose for this series, working together in pitch darkness to craft these images. Penven describes the experience:
As a photographer I am most interested in the nature and quality of light: how light behaves in the physical world, and how it interacts with and affects the subjects that it illuminates. For this shoot my models and I were essentially working blind, with the results visible only after each image was captured. Together, we explored the unique physicality of structured light, finding our way in the darkness by touch and intuition. Dancing with invisible light.
Prior to releasing this shoot, Penven posted some early experiments combining the IR camera and the Kinect. The haunting early sketches have the air of sci-fi surveillance footage, and are just as fascinating as the final product.
More images after the jump, and many more in large format on Audrey’s Flickr page. The opening reception at Pictopia is on April 1st from 6-11pm, and will feature a musical performance by Doctor Popular and vegan cupcakes by Idle Hands Baking. See you there!
I’m a bit behind the curve on this, but the image above is too arresting not to post here. Last month The World Press Photo jury announced their winners for best press photos from 2010. The overall winner was the image you see above by nine time winner Jodi Bieber, a photographer from South Africa, and was shot for the cover of Time. The back story is just as horrifying as you probably imagine:
Her winning picture shows Bibi Aisha, an 18-year-old woman from Oruzgan province in Afghanistan, who fled back to her family home from her husband’s house, complaining of violent treatment. The Taliban arrived one night, demanding Bibi be handed over to face justice. After a Taliban commander pronounced his verdict, Bibi’s brother-in-law held her down and her husband sliced off her ears and then cut off her nose. Bibi was abandoned, but later rescued by aid workers and the American military. After time in a women’s refuge in Kabul, she was taken to America, where she received counseling and reconstructive surgery. Bibi Aisha now lives in the US.
Juror Ruth Eichorn said of the picture:
It’s an incredibly strong image. It sends out an enormously powerful message to the world, about the 50% of the population that are women, so many of whom still live in miserable conditions, suffering violence. It is strong because the woman looks so dignified, iconic.
Gynoids. Pleasure models. Fembots. Bionic women. Borg queens. Stepford wives. Sometimes they’re hot. Sometimes they’re fierce. And yet sometimes, they all start to look the same.
When’s the last time you saw a female robot who didn’t appear to have a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7? Other than Rosie, the robot maid from The Jetsons. This powerful portrait of London-based plus-size model Bea Sweet by digital artist Benedict Campbell (previously on Coilhouse) confronts that question head-on.
It’s great to see a sexy, strong robotic woman who isn’t rail-thin, to imagine a future where robot designers craft something other than Barbies and Kens, or one in which robots design themselves in a way that discards the expectations of their human forbearers. And yeah, loving this doesn’t mean letting go of a deep adoration for Bjork’s All is Full of Love, or, for that matter, Takashi Itsuki’s bruised bondage robot amputees. There’s room for all those things.
“We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.”
“A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction.”
“The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.”
“Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.”
“It is no accident that the symbolic system of the family of man – and so the essence of woman – breaks up at the same moment that networks of connection among people on the planet are unprecedentedly multiple, pregnant, and complex.”
“The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code.”
Striking, innovative photography is, apart from chocolate and comics, Belgium’s national treasure. Even the Royal Family themselves once commissioned Dirk Braeckman – an expert in depicting murky, disturbing interiors and their mostly undressed inhabitants – to take a series of portraits with a goth feeling. How appropriate for a country which gave us Les Disques Du Crépuscule and Front 242.
Another sensational creator of wondrous Belgian photograph is Koen Demuynck, who reveals very little about himself, letting the pictures express his uncanny imagination. His daring, surrealist approach to commercial photography quickly made Demuynck every art director’s dream associate and one of the busiest advertising photographers of today.
The heavily manipulated, weird landscapes and the most unbelievable juxtapositions make one curious to take a look inside his mind. Seeing gnomes constantly tripping on acid there wouldn’t be a surprise at all. Cats watering plants? Check. The secret of Stonehenge revealed? Check. A dog sorry for peeing on your house’s wall (how cute!)? Check.
A few years ago, the French photographer Sacha Goldberger faced a distressing problem. His 91-year-old Hungarian-born grandmother, Frederika, felt lonely and depressed.
His innovative solution was to turn “Mamika” into a larger-than-life superhero and photograph her. According to a post in My Modern Metropolis, “Grandma reluctantly agreed, but once they got rolling, she couldn’t stop smiling.”
The story went viral, even leading to talk of a movie deal. It’s easy to see why. Goldberger’s pictures convey the warmth and sense of wonder that made many of us love the superhero genre in the first place.
Additionally, the images are a reminder that for such a seemingly superficial thing, unique personal aesthetics can have a lot of power. It does everyone good to be a character, if just for a little while.
Of course, there’s also this:
Frederika was born in Budapest 20 years before World War II. During the war, at the peril of her own life, she courageously saved the lives of ten people. When asked how, Goldberger told us “she hid the Jewish people she knew, moving them around to different places every day.” As a survivor of Nazism and Communism, she then immigrated away from Hungary to France, forced by the Communist regime to leave her homeland illegally or face death.
Costume or no, heroes are in the most unexpected places. More photos, below the cut.
