Category Archives: Blogs

The Internet Archive joins The Commons | Flickr Blog

Welcome the Internet Archive to The Commons from the Flickr Blog.

Over the past couple of weeks, The Internet Archive has already been uploading content behind the scenes, and today we are very excited to officially launch them into The Commons.

The Internet Archive is best known for its historical library of the web, preserving more than 400 billion web pages dating back to 1996. Yet, its 19 petabytes include more than 600 million pages of digitized texts dating back more than 500 years. What would it look like if those 600 million pages could be “read” completely differently? What if every illustration, drawing, chart, map, or photograph became an entry point, allowing one to navigate the world’s books not as paragraphs of text, but as a visual tapestry of our lives? How would we learn and explore knowledge differently? Those were the questions that launched a project to catalog the imagery of half a millennium of books. [read more]

Hyperallergic blog has a great story about this as well.

 

about Selfies

[Reblogging] About Those Callous Selfies — by Michael Shaw, BagNews Notes

photo: Manu Fernandez/AP

You’ve seen them before. You’ve seen them in war zones and funerals, even. More often than not, they result in disdain — or head scratching, at least —  for the apparent soullessness and narcissism. This is just the latest I’ve seen. It appeared, in all it’s blasphemy, as the leadoff photo in The Atlantic “In Focus” Photos of the Week slideshow on Friday.  Documenting the perceived insensitivity, the caption reads:

Tourists take a “selfie” as demonstrators burn a trash container during a May Day rally in Barcelona, Spain, on May 1, 2014. Tens of thousands of workers marked May Day in European cities with a mix of anger and gloom over austerity measures imposed by leaders trying to contain the eurozone’s intractable debt crisis.

How dare these tourists (ugly Americans, perhaps?) denigrate the anger and gloom of tens of thousands of European workers?

Well, I’m not prepared to say that this photo or its innumerable cousins have any moral implications at all.  What is clear is that these types of photos need to be understood on two completely independent levels. [read rest of article]

 

Eva Respini (MoMA) and Mark Durant (St. Lucy) talking about Robert Heinecken

Great interview on the Saint Lucy blog with Eva Respini, curator of the MOMA exhibition on  Robert Heinecken

Launched in 2011 by Mark Alice Durant, Saint Lucy is devoted to writing about photography and contemporary art. He co-wrote  Robert Heinecken: A Material History in 2003.

They talk about much more than Robert Heinecken, but here is a taste of their thoughts on Heinecken:

MAD: Heinecken’s opposition to narrow definitions of what it meant to be a photographic artist manifested itself in many ways. One of them is this iterative process you talk about which I assume came from his training as a printmaker.  Looking at the show downstairs, one of the things that really strikes me, just how many layers we look through to the work.  There are frames within frames, there are palimpsest pieces, incisions, and interruptions in the supposed transparency of photography, which was embraced and canonized at MoMA and much of east coast photographers, critics and academics.

ER:  When I go through the show it still amazes me how unafraid he was in terms of using new technology, new materials, new processes and as you say, layering them on top of one another.  Anytime something came out, some new material or camera, Heinecken was experimenting with it immediately in such an uninhibited way. [ read entire interview ]

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Racism as Style: The Return of Blackface

Important read in BagNews Notes:
Racism as Style: The Return of Blackface — BagNews

by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa
(adapted from the Tumblr blog, The Great Leap Sideways)

Excerpt from essay > “On Tuesday of this week, the British creative arts website It’s Nice That published a feature on a photo-shoot by French multi-disciplinary studio Akatre entitled Tropical. The images consist of two young naked women painted entirely (and unrecognizably) black, stood in front of a brightly patterned tropically-themed seamless backdrop, or reflected in the smooth dark mirrored surface of a black table…” [ read more ]

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Happy to learn about thegreatleapsideways.com and greatleapsideways.tumblr.com, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, editor. The sites showcase contemporary photography with small and extended surveys of work by contemporary photographers alongside extended interviews, features, videos and extracts from texts that illuminate the practise of photography and its wider context. Looks like a great resource.

How to Create a Performing Arts Video Work Sample

How to Create a Performing Arts Video Work Sample Part 1 of 3: Your Video Is an Artifact • tips from NYFA.org – NYFA Current.
NYFA current is a great list to be on >  grant opportunities, artist profiles, professional advice, etc. This article about video documentation of performance (or installation) is very useful.

A video work sample is a tool you should probably have if you create work in the performing arts or make installations. Many grant applications and festival submissions require it, or even if they don’t, your application still may need one in order to be competitive…

A good work sample video draws you into the performance. It makes you feel like you’re there. And it compels you to keep watching.  read complete article

I will update this post when parts 2 and 3 are online.

This Tumblr User Shows Her Horrific Anonymous Messages In A Powerful Art Project

This Tumblr User Shows Her Horrific Anonymous Messages In A Powerful Art Project.

Bottos, a photography major and gender studies minor, runs a Tumblr page where she often uploads selfies as well as pictures of her work.

Since starting the Tumblr in 2010, she has received hundreds of cruel anonymous messages. Last week, she turned the words of hate into a feminist art project; Bottos screencapped some of the messages and posted them over pictures of herself. [link to project]

 

STILL SEARCHING | AN ONLINE DISCOURSE ON PHOTOGRAPHY

still searching

STILL SEARCHING | AN ONLINE DISCOURSE ON PHOTOGRAPHY.

Excellent blog from the Fotomuseum Winterthur – six different bloggers per year. The current blogger is Marvin Heiferman, author of Photography Changes Everything. I can assure you that his posts will be interesting and expansive.

Past Bloggers >