Saturday, June 26, 2010

9:07 AM

.
The Kills "Black Balloon" from Midnight Boom (2009) directed by photographer Kenneth Cappello. See also: thekills.tv

Friday, June 25, 2010

Quiet Time

.
The unmistakable color of vintage National Geographic photos...

from Shhh..., a seemingly short-lived blog dedicated to the topic.

Click here for more.

Thanks to Ann at
Still Dottie for the link.

Cool & Deadly

Graphics from baggies on display as part of the Heroin Stamp Project, an exhibition at White Box Gallery in New York City focused on the branding of heroin.

Curators Liza Vadnai and Pedro Mateu-Gelabert picked up hundreds of baggies all over the city for the show. It's interesting to see how systems of naming and branding develop... especially with something like this, which is essentially marketing the line between life and death.

Graphic identities have a way of developing organically, no matter what the subject matter.

Read an article about the Heroin Stamp Project at nytimes.com and get more info at
White Box.

Your Weekly Mr. Littlejeans

.

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Image of the Day

.
Still from Martha Colburn's One and One is Life, 2009 (16mm film converted to DVD with sound, 5 minutes) – currently on view at Ambach & Rice gallery in Ballard. I haven't seen the show yet but Emily and I saw Colburn's Myth Labs at James Cohan in New York awhile back and it was mesmerizing, so I'm gonna go ahead and recommend it. Visit Ambach & Rice and marthacolburn.com for more.

7:12 AM

.

Kanye West "Can't Tell Me Nothing" from Graduation (2007)

Woke up with this song in my head for whatever reason. The vocal sample is dope, as is the pinging bell thing, it drives it forward in a way I find quite cracking.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Image of the Day

.
Joe Deal Laguna Beach, 1978. From the Beach Cities Series. Image via the California Museum of Photography.

Photographer Joe Deal died last week at the age of 62. In his obituary at the New York Times, William Grimes writes that along with Robert Adams and Stephen Shore, among others, Deal "rejected the sweeping romanticism of Adams and Edward Weston in favor of a jaundiced, dry-eyed inspection of the modern American landscape." Click here to read more.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Image of the Day

.
Jane Birkin photos by Tony Frank, from a project I'm working on for Light in the Attic Records... more later.

We Break Hustlers Hard

.
When I went to Parsons I used to purposely go an hour early on trash pick-up days so I could stroll through the West Village and see what cast-off treasures people would leave on the sidewalk. Furniture, books, clothes, an amazing selection of vintage magazines... some of the spoils of those expeditions are my prized possessions. You don't see as much of that in Seattle (which I guess is fine, I have too much stuff) but this morning when I walked out of our apartment, someone had left a pretty good stash on the corner. I picked up a vintage Indian-made pith helmet like the one TR is wearing in the photo above, and a big stash of worthwhile VHS tapes including Blow Up, Weird Science, Scarface, and the one I'm most looking forward to watching:


Fuzz (1972) starring Burt Reynolds, Raquel Welch, Jack Weston, Yul Brynner, and Seattle's own Tom Skerritt.

Finding good junk is the best way to start a day.

All Over the GD World

.
Henri Cartier-Bresson. Juvisy, France. 1938

New Yorkers have one week left to see the Henri Cartier-Bresson show, The Modern Century, at MoMA. I am a big fan of Cartier-Bresson and yet I thought about him in a new way when I read Peter Schjeldahl's review at The New Yorker.
Cartier-Bresson has the weakness of his strength: an Apollonian elevation that subjugates life to an order of things already known, if never so well seen. He said that the essence of his art was “the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event, as well as the precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.” Too often, the “significance” feels platitudinous, even as its expression dazzles. Robert Frank, whose book “The Americans” (1958) treated subjects akin to many in the older photographer’s work, put it harshly but justly: “He traveled all over the goddamned world, and you never felt that he was moved by something that was happening other than the beauty of it, or just the composition.” The problem of Cartier-Bresson’s art is the conjunction of aesthetic classicism and journalistic protocol: timeless truth and breaking news. He rendered a world that, set forth at MOMA by the museum’s chief curator of photography, Peter Galassi, richly satisfies the eye and the mind, while numbing the heart.
Huh. I mean, I'll buy that. On some level, I've always thought of Cartier-Bresson as essentially a graphic designer – Paul Rand with a camera. There is an element of surprise, the decisive moment or trigger that makes the shot, within a rigorously chosen frame, and that's what makes it great. Depending on your point of view, though, that could also make it a little pat, like the visual chuckles or preciousness I often hate in design. Either way (or both), there's no argument that Cartier-Bresson remains one of the greats, with endless influence on photographers who followed him.

Visit newyorker.com to read Schjeldahl's review and MoMA for info about the show. (If, like me, you can't make it to New York this week, there's an exhibition catalog available, and I also recommend a collection of Henri Cartier-Bresson's own writings which Emily gave me several years ago, The Minds Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers.)

Monday, June 21, 2010

Family Slideshow Part 2

.
Some pics from our rainy second day of mini-vacation a few weekends ago on Whidbey Island – hiking up beautiful Mount Eerie, on to Anacortes for lunch, and later to near-empty Fort Ebey State Park.

Click here to see pics from day one.

Image of the Day

.
Temporary storefront posters by CMRTYZ (at the corner of Denny & Olive, Seattle).

See more of CMRTYZ' work at their website and at RARE Gallery in NYC through July 24.

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Image of the Day

.
Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, c.1912 [click to enlarge]

On June 20, 1863, West Virginia became the thirty-fifth state in the Union.
The land that formed the new state formerly constituted part of Virginia. The two areas had diverged culturally from their first years of European settlement, as small farmers generally settled the western portion of the state, including the counties that later formed West Virginia, while the eastern portion was dominated by a powerful minority class of wealthy slaveholders. There were proposals for the trans-Allegheny west to separate from Virginia as early as 1769. When Virginia seceded from the Union in 1861, the residents of a number of contiguous western counties, where there were few slaves, decided to remain in the Union. Congress accepted these counties as the state of West Virginia on condition that its slaves be freed. "Montani semper liberi," "mountaineers always freemen," became the new state's motto.
Read more about it at the Library of Congress. The image shown above is from the Library's collection of panoramic photographs.