Tickle Your Fancy #43
Welcome back to our forty third post in our new section ‘Tickle Your Fancy’. ‘Tickle Your Fancy’ includes a round-up of between three to five links to articles from around the internet that have specifically interested us during the course of the week. Ones that we feel are relevant to your interest in photography and art.
Just to explain the title for this section ‘Tickle Your Fancy’ is an English idiom and essentially means that something appeals to you and perhaps stimulates your imagination in an enthusiastic way, we felt it would make a great title for this new section of the site.
This week we look incredible firework photographs made without a camera – yes really. We then view a series of portraits by Jim Goldbergfor his series Rich and Poor, who then asked his subjects to comment on their photos. Their reflections are poignant and painful. We look at a five year series of ‘new motherhood’ in images – fascinating. We go to a wonderful new series on Time Lightbox looking at ‘Photographs that made me’ this week including Steve McCurry. Finally, we take a look at previously unpublished images of swooon Marlon Brando at LIFE, don’t miss this.
I really hope you enjoy these articles over the weekend…
Firework Photos Made Without a Camera
‘Big Bang #16’ Ross Sonnerberg
Well, this is incredible, to make the Color Bang images, Ross Sonnenberg closes his garage door and seals it from all light. lays out the paper face-up on the concrete and lights the fuse. Through trial and error, he has conjured some beautiful abstractions from the unassuming environment of his suburban home. The results remind him of constellations and galaxies.
At the mercy of volatile trajectories, Sonnenberg’s experiments with fireworks—which are illegal in his state—often result in images that don’t turn out. He’s had to move away from conventional processing.
“The color temperature of fireworks are so high I have to develop the work in trays and not send them through a processor which makes it even more difficult,” he says.
Read more here
The Photographer who caught the Heartbreak on both sides of America’s social divide
Jim Goldberg took hundreds of portraits of San Franciscans for his series Rich and Poor, then asked his subjects to comment on their photos. Their reflections are poignant and painful.
Rich and Poor looks at the social divide in 1970s and 80s America in Goldberg’s now characteristic style – black-and-white portraits accompanied by handwritten texts from the subjects. The use of ephemera is central to his way of working. “There’s a thread that runs through all the work that is to do with bearing witness. The photographs are about asking questions, though, not answering them. I’m not a politically radical person. In fact, I’m much more interested in being radical aesthetically”, he said in 2009. By giving his subjects a space to share their thoughts about their situation, Goldberg avoids many of the nagging questions straight photojournalism prompts: is the subject being exorcised or romanticized? Is the viewer desensitized by constant images of suffering? In Open See, many of the asylum seekers and illegal emigrants Goldberg photographed wrote short, heartbreaking paragraphs about their personal sense of displacement and longing for home.
What does new motherhood look like?
Jenny Lewis’ photographs of mothers with their newborn babies capture the elation and intensity of the first few hours. It’s been a long while since I have been a ‘new mother’ but I remember each (of the three) experiences with acute clarity. Each birth was very different, as each baby was very different.
This series by Jenny Lewis has taken five years to build and she has now made almost 130 portraits. Titled One Day Young, the series grew out of Lewis’s own experience of giving birth. Mother to Ruby, eight, and Herb, five, she says she “knew nothing of giving birth and being a mother before I did it, except that it was going be horrendous, the most pain I was ever going to feel. I don’t think one person said, ‘Believe in yourself, get on with it.’” But then she had Ruby. “I thought, ‘I’m OK, I’m still me.’ And I did it again, this time at home, and again it was fine. I suppose I felt angry – why didn’t I have that positive message? I wanted to get my story out.”
Very interesting, read/view more here
The Photo That Made Me: Steve McCurry, Mexico City 1972
Love this new series on TIME Lightbox, this week Steve McCurry talks about the photograph that he believes jump started his career.
Life With Brando: Early Photos Of An Icon In The Making
Ooooh Marlon Brando, ticked a few boxes for me 😉 This is the 10th anniversary of Brando’s death and Life.com has presented a number of Photographer Ed Clark’s images – many of which were never published in LIFE – at a time when the actor was just beginning to forge his Hollywood career.
Joanne Carter
Joanne Carter, creator of the world’s most popular mobile photography and art website— TheAppWhisperer.com— TheAppWhisperer platform has been a pivotal cyberspace for mobile artists of all abilities to learn about, to explore, to celebrate and to share mobile artworks. Joanne’s compassion, inclusivity, and humility are hallmarks in all that she does, and is particularly evident in the platform she has built. In her words, “We all have the potential to remove ourselves from the centre of any circle and to expand a sphere of compassion outward; to include everyone interested in mobile art, ensuring every artist is within reach”, she has said. Promotion of mobile artists and the art form as a primary medium in today’s art world, has become her life’s focus. She has presented lectures bolstering mobile artists and their art from as far away as the Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea to closer to her home in the UK at Focus on Imaging. Her experience as a jurist for mobile art competitions includes: Portugal, Canada, US, S Korea, UK and Italy. And her travels pioneering the breadth of mobile art includes key events in: Frankfurt, Naples, Amalfi Coast, Paris, Brazil, London. Pioneering the world’s first mobile art online gallery - TheAppWhispererPrintSales.com has extended her reach even further, shipping from London, UK to clients in the US, Europe and The Far East to a global group of collectors looking for exclusive art to hang in their homes and offices. The online gallery specialises in prints for discerning collectors of unique, previously unseen signed limited edition art. Her journey towards becoming The App Whisperer, includes (but is not limited to) working for a paparazzi photo agency for several years and as a deputy editor for a photo print magazine. Her own freelance photographic journalistic work is also widely acclaimed. She has been published extensively both within the UK and the US in national and international titles. These include The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Popular Photography & Imaging, dpreview, NikonPro, Which? and more recently with the BBC as a Contributor, Columnist at Vogue Italia and Contributing Editor at LensCulture. Her professional photography has also been widely exhibited throughout Europe, including Italy, Portugal and the UK. She is currently writing several books, all related to mobile art and is always open to requests for new commissions for either writing or photography projects or a combination of both. Please contact her at: [email protected]
