Glass Ceiling

“I’ve always had recognition,” she says, seated in her New York home. “But, being a woman, I’m not a big star somehow. You reach a certain point and there’s a glass ceiling.” –Michelle Stuart (last amazing artist on the page)

Stefan Ruiz’s amazing work, screengrabbed for your fair use and mine.

A friend posted this amazing NYT feature on artists gaining recognition late in life. I am still absorbing the vignette-synopses, and imagining the great backstories of this too-long unrecognized selection of artists who happen to be women.

And I’m thinking: Stefan Ruiz, you are one goddanmed HELL of a portraitist.

Also thinking: really, NYT? You couldn’t have come up with a woman photographer to make this amazing series of portraits? And for the love of god not Annie Leibovitz, not that she isn’t pretty great in her own right. She’s just not the only woman who takes pictures.

Architecture of Passage (Provisional)

Anyone else in gearhead world hearing a lot about Sigma lately?

Is it just me, or is Sigma making a move for the elite league of primary camera equipment aftermarket?

Before They Pass Away (A Critical Poem of Discovery)

Saw a reference to this body of work by photographer Jimmy Nelson on Facebook, and went down a little 20 minute rabbit hole

I also found this, an article about Photographer Jimmy Nelson’s “Before They Pass Away” portraiture, translated from the Russian

Here is my little short take on this:

These photos are

so produced,

so directed

so unreconstructed

so premodern

so unremittingly beautiful

so layered with brought meanings

so different depending on the context in which they’re presented

so “important”–

Yet… are they important?

(I would argue that, to the degree I speculate the pictures seek to all-but-deny the arrival of globalization in their subject’s lives, they lose most of their potential importance.)

ANd I guess it pretty much stops there for me, now that I think of it.

But back to the pictures to see if I’m misreading them.

They’re just so… slick

So self-consciously definitive

so humorless

they’re culture porn.

But then again,

why should this kind of photography

like the plainspoken wedding portrait in the American Gothic model

or the sonnet in poetry

be any less relevant today

than in the eighteen hundreds

Than when Edward S Curtis did it.

Or Ansel, for that matter, with his mountains?

People are still striving and considering that work

to be of an unattainable standard.

Oh! Duh! They’re Romantic. Shit, that’s what it is!

They’re just plain Romantic is all.

Like a good sturdy still life of food on a table, arranged Flemishly,

Its value is intrinsic (if generally finite).

This work won’t be received by the photography-as-art establishment.

Jörg Colberg and Jonathan Blaustien won’t be reviewing it anytime soon I bet.

So maybe it is what it is,

Maybe it’s a book to make a cable TV special about*

and a book to sell a ZILLION copies of

in the lobby of all the Barnes & Nobles in the world

for Now! Just! $29.95!, marked down from a $75 sticker**

with gold embossed print on the cover and the spine.

Did that sound bitchy?

Well I’ll tell you this, I wish I’d done it.

Sure, I would have done it differently,

But he’s the one that did it.

+++++++++++++

http://www.beforethey.com

*Oh SHIT, did you SEE that film? What a crazy thing! I didn’t see it until after I’d written this. What a festival of self aggrandizement! I’m trying to think, at any point in this whole film do we hear the voice of a single one of the supposed subjects?
** Maybe the book is a bit pricier than $29.95!

Some great storytelling

Totally stealing this. Alec Soth, man, that guy… Damn.

Alec Soth – Summer Nights at the Dollar Tree from Aperture Foundation on Vimeo.

Wanted

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lu1xp8uMM21qav5oho1_500.gif

This is my new job: a training tomorrow

I think Dwight Shrute works there:

+++++++redacted++++++++

Please note the following:

Ø We will be reviewing ___________ policy issues from 8:30 – 9:00am (coffee and donuts will be provided).

Ø The ___________ portion of this training will begin at 9am sharp and continue until 4:00pm.

Ø We have a full agenda which means minimal breaks and a working lunch.

Ø Please dress in layers…we don’t want you to fall asleep because you are too hot or irritated if you are too cold.

Ø Please carpool if possible and remember to park at the back of the building – leave the spaces closest to the entry available to the L________ R_____ tenants.

Ø BRING A CALCULATOR…we will be doing case studies.

+++++++++++Redacted+++++++++++

A singular talent

Read the story in the right column of the blog, then go down (and click back) through the pictures.

Vivian Maier, a genius ‘discovered’ only recently.

I can’t wait for the book.

Gearhead Hero

http://www.collection-appareils.fr/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=8822&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&sid=b8f83b174e52cdb471abc0c001280570&start=25