Category: photography

Lamar Dodd School of Art photography lecturer Marni Shindelman has an interesting new art project that has re-introduced art to social media:

An exhibition of the project, “Geolocation: Tributes to the Data Stream,” opened on Thursday at United Photo Industries in New York and runs through Jan. 28.

Ms. Shindelman called Twitter “a huge, vast sea of digital noise.”

“But it’s important that it exists,” she said, “and I think our work shows this. There are singular people posting things, not just millions and millions of tweets a day. They actually exist somewhere.”

The two artists see themselves as archivists and their project as a homage to the Twitter users whose posts they use. The statements are pithy — as they must be on Twitter — but often evocative, moving, even wise. Paired alongside the images, each one becomes poetic.

“Somebody felt this here and this is what it looked like,” Mr. Larson said. “These are the nuances that might have influenced what they felt.”

The pair, who live in different cities, met at a photo conference in 2007. Ms. Shindelman had been exploring Internet myths, while Mr. Larson had been looking into storytelling. They corresponded for a while (she from Rochester, he from Baltimore) and eventually decided to do a photo project about telepathy. “Then we started getting into social media as a way of getting to know what someone else is thinking,” Mr. Larson said.

Congratulations to both on this terrific project, news of which has been bouncing around the internet at terrific speeds. In addition to the New York Times Lens blog above, Geolocation has been written about, so far, at Wired, Business Insider, Yahoo! Canada, Gizmodo, The Verge, Fast to Create, Andrew Sullivan, PetaPixel, Wired Italian, Beautiful Decay and Animal New York. And that's probably just today.

Image: From Geolocation

In 2008, Minnesota-based photographer Alec Soth started his own publishing company, Little Brown Mushroom, and began releasing monographs of his images. On Tuesday Nov. 27 at 5:30 p.m., Soth will speak about his work at the Lamar Dodd Schol of Art:

The lecture, part of the ongoing Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture Series, is free and open to the public.

 

"Alec Soth is a photographic storyteller, recognized for his cinematic images of the American Midwest," said Michael Marshall, associate professor and photography area chair in the school of art. "Working with a large format camera, his photographs build a narrative of the heart of the country, engaging the banal and off-the-beaten-path places and people."

Soth's photographs have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the 2004 Whitney and São Paulo Biennials. In 2008, a large survey exhibition of Soth's work was exhibited at Jeu de Paume in Paris and Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. In 2010, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minn., produced a large survey exhibition of Soth's work titled "From Here To There."

The art of photography is indeed a moving target. The advent of digital photography has made us all photographers of one sort or another, documenting the quotidian as well as the surprising events of life. But the narrative elements of fine art photography continue to develop apace, and the Lamar Dodd School of Art is home to many faculty and students pursuing photography at many levels, in many formats and with an eye toward its highest ambitions as art. This level of activity will be on display early next semester in the work of a visiting artist, with the LDSOA Photography Fellow Exhibition by Chicago-based Kelly Kristen Jones. The opening reception will be on January 11 at 7 p.m. in gallery 101 and you won't want to miss it. Jones describes her work:

Each image represents a conscious exchange between subject and photographer. Photography’s "Othering" gaze is balanced by my personal relationship to the sitter. The camera allows me another way of engaging with my family and friends, but also with photography. I examine elements of uncertainty and power that underline the camera’s use and limitations. This is not about attempting to offer an unadulterated “truth”; rather, it is about a carefully composed portrait for the camera. The resulting photographs strike a delicate balance between giving and taking.

Image: from Our No Place by Kelly Kristen Jones.

One benefit, and there are many, of pulling together content for unit-level newsletters and soliciting news from faculty directly is that I find out about things they are doing that might normally escape (my) attention - professional activity that doesn't rise to the level of press releases, but a host of exhibitions, lectures, interviews and other work. There is a lot of this and it's too-often elusive at the college-level. But much of it is compelling, and some of it's even beautiful. Like this work by associate professor of art Stephen Scheer, featured in an online book about civic architecture of the outer burroughs and northern Manhattan. It's an extensive body of work involving photography, research and writing and it's quite enjoyable. 

Additionally, a career interview with Scheer can be viewed in two parts, here and here.

View of Moscow at sunrise from the top of the Peter the Great monument, from a photo gallery on Der Speigel. Kids in Moscow are taking to climbing up onto some of its highest building, statues and construction sites, and are appropriately adored by the Russian media as "roofers." A law student, the young man who took the photo said that he discovered 'roofing' after doctors told him he could not play sports because of a weak heart. One of his photos was a winner "Best of Russia" photography contest in 2011.

The Chronicles in no way condones climbing up on structures so high they would scare your parents.

The Lamar Dodd School of Art presents an exhibition by visual artist Thomas Dozol, in the Plaza Gallery through Feb. 22.

Here's an interview with Dozol I did before the show, talking about the inspiration and influences behind the work.