Try Harder,

Jason Lazarus, one of the artists I interviewed last semester, just sent me one of his Try Harder posters, and I'm so excited about it!  He's working on an ongoing project where he sends motivational posters to anyone who wants one (just send him the postage!) and in turn posts images made by recipients of the posters in a spaces that needed motivational advice.

 

 

My wall is becoming extremely motivational now!  Lazarus' poster added to the beautiful photographs of your own making! Left to right on my wall, images by: Sarah Moore, Mandie Lousier, Tom Owens, myself, Barbara Vonderhaar, and myself again, plus some exhibit postcards of shows I've seen (Colin Matthes, Amy Stein, America Now, Henry Horenstein, Lisa Olson). 

Many exciting things are about to happen for me, but I don't want to jinx myself and talk about them before they happen...so you'll just have to wait in suspense.  I find myself focusing on so many things other than classes, but I feel like I'll get way more out of those other things in the long run.  I'm trying to get a hold of a voice recorder to start recording some of the artist talks I hear and post them up on here.  We'll see how that pans out...

Rose

Artist?

Ok, so tonight... I realize it is 4 in the morning, but I feel like I need to share...

























I was in a roughly 3 hr debate with a drawing major, a video major, and my self (photo), I'll just not say who they are. Anyway, we talked about "what is "art"?"... huge...central idea...different mediums...technology...time...ON AND ON...

I think we came to a conclusion, at least I thought, (there was alot of debate and drunkin yelling), that "ART" is... "the way one perceives reality or wants to protray reality through ones own thought and ideas and the conscious decisions that make it in that way"...I might have messed it up a little, but it was something like that.

I know this is very vague, but does it make sense? I mean to think about "art" not just as photography or just one medium? Isn't this what we should all want to achieve?

I guess what we were trying to define is, should it be so defined? or should it be different form lets say: drawing/painting to video to photography Etc. ? Should it start here and branch off?

It might be hard to have a "debate" on here but let me know what you think.
Good food for thought.


Is this what junior year is about???


~tom

Musing,

 

© Emmet Gowin

Why aren’t there more circular images out there?  This is an idea I’ve been considering for a long time but am finally starting to get fed up with.  The fact that I cannot create documents in Photoshop (or really any program that I know) that aren't rectangular bothers me immensely.  And I don't mean fisheye lenses or sneaky editing maneuvers; I mean a straight, more traditional angle photograph with traditional (or contemporary, whatever you'd like to let it exist as) associations in a non-traditional geometric format.  Why can’t photographs exist outside of the box they live in now?  No matter what we can’t escape it, cameras capture photographs the way we originally made them to, in the shape of a sheet of paper.  We’ve tried to get around it by cropping out the edges, only allowing the viewer to see parts of an image, but viewers are never fooled.  They’ve been trained to understand the format of a photograph, the reality of the rectangle.  They see our attempts as false.  Why aren’t there any circular films, either?  Why can’t we exist organically instead of within this man-made box?

I’ve found few examples of circular photographs, coming from creationists (not in the fundamental sense) such as the AES group’s heavily manipulated Last Riot series and pinhole photographers like Thomas Hudson Reeve and the random unknowns like Dipploid, who we view as experimentalists.  The origins of photography hold a few circular photographers, but it seems that idea was abandoned quickly.  I came across an entry in Alec Soth's Archived Blog where he speaks to these ideas and gives some particularly great examples of circular photographs.  He quotes Emmet Gowin after he came to the realization he could leave the circular images the way they are without cropping them into a rectangle:

"Accepting the entire circle, what the camera had made, was important to me. It involved recognition of the inherent nature of things. I had set out to describe the world with my domain, to live a quality with things. Enrichment, I saw, involves a willingness to accept a changing vision of the nature of things – which is to say, reality. Often I had thought that things teach me what to do. Now I would prefer to say: As things reach us what we already are, we gain a vision of the world." 

I’d like to attempt to make my own non-rectangular photographs sometime.  At the moment I won’t because it’s not something that my photography needs for expression, it’ll be without meaning if I do it now.  Someday, perhaps.

© Dipploid (image from a pinhole camera made from a pine nut)

Apart from my rant, today was impressively full of education for me.  I learned how to drum scan!  And oh my goodness is it labor and time intensive!  I have pages and pages of notes on how to scan one black and white, 35mm image.  It took hours for the process to get to a point where beautifully unedited files existed on the hard drive, waiting for Photoshop.  If anyone wants to know the process, I'll definitely detail it, I had no idea what it was all about until today.

Rose

Katie Kmet: Progress.

Loss of Dependency ©Kathryn Kmet

I've been struggling for the past 2 years trying to figure out what I'm truly interested in. I am exploring the struggle of self image of males and females. With this progression, I am expressing myself, and my past and present. I feel I am finally excited to continue with a subject.

Tom Owens: work in progress.

Here is what I have been working on lately. I havent been able to shoot nearly as much as I would like, but you know how that goes... 

 

© Tom Owens

this is kind of the latest artist statement.

In this unfamiliar industrialized area everything around you seems to be in some sort of decay or wear and tear. Expensive metal equipment and big structures begin to fall to nature’s strengths over time. This equipment is either frequently used or completely forgotten. All these things are sure evidence of man, but the absence of life during these hours in these vast spaces almost creates an eerie and unsettling feeling.

I am interested in the transformation that happens at night when nothing is being used and every thing looks lifeless. This industrialized area, to me, becomes almost surreal, creating a vast space that has no end. Taking away any form of human presence and using the colors of the night almost like a mask, my intention is to create beauty out of deterioration.

Tom Owens

I dont know, I still think its a little cheesy, especially at the end there... I think that deterioration should be part of it, but maybe not that strong. I dont know. I've been talking with Larry quite abit. My work is really consistent but I just need to work out the thinking part. I guess many of us have that problem. I have been trying to read alot of interviews of night photographers (alot s actually not that many, they are hard to find), but larry thought it may be a good idea to look at "daytime" photographers that work in the same "style", or use the same type of "lighting" or something like that. If anyone has any suggestions, on the work or photographers to look at, please let me know!


Thanks

Work,

 © Rose Tarman

I'm putting this up for crit on Wednesday in my Word & Photographic Image class.  I'm sure where it's heading yet but I'm liking it thus far.  I'm still formulating what I'm trying to get at with it, for Wednesday it'll have text with it (not a statement or anything, creative text) but I'm not done with that yet.  Any thoughts or suggestions?  I know it's difficult because I haven't explained it, but I need some feedback without my associations I think.

It'll take several of these for me to figure out what I want them to be, I need to make more.

Rose

Inspiration,

I've been thinking a lot about inspiration.  The other day I was asked to bring something in to class that inspires me, something non-photographic.  I completely froze up.  That should be easy, right?  But I can't bring in something cheesy like a photograph of friends of family or a boyfriend, that's not me.  I can't bring in books because I don't have any with me and honestly books are just a bunch of words that pass through me, some stick and some don't.  Clothes don't inspire me so that was out of the picture.  I was stuck, I barely brought anything with me to Boston.

I considered what it really means to be inspired by something.  I was set on this heavy, mind-blowing awe that comes over you, something that makes you DO and THINK. That has to be inspiration.  Then I thought over all the things that I have in my life, things I've experienced.  But inspiration doesn't always strike down like lightning, if at all.  It's little things, all around that group together and feel a certain way. It isn't material goods that inspire me.  It's something more abstract, something that I find in true friends, the way the light reflects on my window, the way I can almost feel my mind expand when I'm told something amazing, the way my heart explodes sometimes.  How could I ever capture that and bring it in to class?

What is inspiration particularly supposed to do anyway?  My photographs don't come out of some particular event, a book I read or a person I spoke with.  I can't be inspired by something and make it what I constantly think about for a project, it doesn't make me do anything immediate or substantial.  I work more organically than that, things come together with pushes and pulls, accumulation of experiences help me grow and stretch my process. 

I suppose none of this is actually coming to a point.  I guess I just freaked out.  When asked that question I felt like I should know exactly what to bring, what it meant to me and what to say about it.  I don't know if that's possible for me.

I think my answer is this:

I find inspiration in accumulation.

I think that's all I could really tell people.

 

© Rose Tarman 

Rose

Jen Davis

© Jen Davis

I was just taking a look around Jen Davis' website and stumbled on her new work in progress. And I must be honest, I fell in love with it, it is incredibly personal, revealing, and intimate in such a strange way. It also surprisingly for myself in some way was very uncomfortable, which is hard to do. I think about how honest this is to love that exists today, perhaps through meeting a stranger and falling in love or perhaps having a long distance relationship and how we use technology to be able to connect, so we can have the love we want as close as possible.

-Autumn Elizabeth Clark

Rose is still at MIAD!

You bet, used my phone, classic blackberry pics

I dont think these will move from the wall. If they do, heads will roll!
haha.

Magda Biernat

I found this on conscientious. Its really interesting work, click on a series, then the artist statement. I really like "inhabited" and "quietly forgotten".
She talks about the series "inhabited" and that between 2007 and 2008 she traveled around the world to like 17 countries! damn that would be sweet! Anyway, hah,






















© Magda Biernat

I like this part in the statement alot- "The world's cultures may be very different, but when seen through a consistent lens in terms of simple geometry, the complexities of cultural variation fall away. Here I turn my camera onto the ordinary details of everyday life, past the complexities of race, religion or cultural differences and onto the similarities of the mundane."

© Magda Biernat

I think that the part about the "consistent lens" is very interesting and important to the way we all photograph. Making things cohesive guess you could say.


~ Tom Owens

Realfake,

 

Website Screen Capture © David Lindsey Wade & Lyndon Wade

I thought some of you might enjoy this, especially Sarah and Deb.  On Feature Shoot today I read about the Wade Brothers out of Kansas City (represent!) and their mother Judy Rush's retouching company Realfake.  It's astounding, Realfake's "Cases" gallery shows the steps to the final Wade Bros. advertising and fashion images as they go through major retouching and digital collage.  Take a look, I find it fascinating.

Rose

New work, Touch

Touch IX © Autumn Elizabeth Clark

This a series I have been working on since November,

its an idea and a process I have been working through though for quiet some time.

I feel closer to where I need to be lately with this series,

and I keep on shooting and seeing where it will lead me next.

Neil Drabble,

Untitled © Neil Drabble

In my Visiting Artist Seminar yesterday we had a visit from Neil Drabble, an English artist. He's a jack of all trades and works not only in photography but also painting, sculpture, installation, video, graphic design and performance. He's all over the place! Neil gave this gigantic presentation to us and went on for almost two full hours! In the beginning I was captivated but after an hour I was fading fast. He showed a massive amount of images!

The most interesting part of his lecture was definitely when he showed us commercial portraits he does. He takes no equipment with him other than a camera and a light meter and only maybe a tiny on-camera flash and travels all around the world making photographs of famous people. The photographs were nice but honestly I found that his descriptions of the events were much more interesting. With so many of the portraits he talked about what happened when he was making it, some crazy event that occurred. During a shoot in Italy of filmmaker Gore Vidal he ended up skinny dipping with the writer he was with who got stung by a wasp in his nose as he was jumping into the pool and they had to rush to the hospital soaking wet! Stories like the ones he told were so interesting that I found myself being more eager to hear the next one than to see the next image.

Jackie Chan © Neil Drabble

He told another story about shooting Jackie Chan after a day of filming. When they got back to Jackie's hotel room Neil found a scene of washed underwear surrounding him, Jackie apparently wants to wash his own underwear by hand instead of getting it washed with the rest of his clothes, and he drapes underwear all over his hotel room to let it dry. I think the knowledge of this surrounding the photograph makes the photograph more interesting.

I suppose with something like commercial photography the backstory tends often to be more interesting than the image, but I don't think it should. It's something that can happen in fine art photography as well, and it's a dangerous zone.

Untitled © Neil Drabble, from American Sculpture

Anyway, take a look at Neil's website, he's a really interesting guy with so many facets and is worth a look. Perhaps some of his other artwork will appeal to some of you as well. His series American Sculpture is pretty interesting in concept, as they're all photographs.




side note: Every day I encounter this and I can't get over it. People here call their photographs 'pictures'. I know it's such a small thing but I feel like there's a huge difference between the two words, that the word pictures isn't at all serious. There's a level of professionalism and self-confidence that comes with saying These are my photographs. But here everyone says oh my pictures this, my pictures that, I took some pictures yesterday...It's so strange. Do any of you think that's as strange as I do? Hm...

Also, I got an internship! Finally! It's with this man Bill Morse who runs a scanning and printing shop for photographers and artists, does his own photography and is in the process of making a monogram of his grandfather's photographs of 1913 urban China. I'm so excited, I really feel like I can learn a lot from him. He wants to teach me how to do marketing better, which is great. Also there's an event like Gallery Night here but it's called First Friday and happens the first Friday of every month, and he said I can have a space in his studio to put up my own work during the opening! Every month! I'm so excited about it! It's a great opportunity, the building his studio is in is made up completely of artist studios and galleries so hopefully I'll get some good publicity because of it.

Rose

More recent work. I am really interested in distortion and haze lately, and I'm trying to figure out why. Are my photographs really little worlds I am carving out for myself, or is there something else I just can't quite grasp yet?

The reason I was making my artwork last semester was to create an escape for myself mentally. I feel like things in my life are changing so that I am slowly needing that escape less and less. I wonder if I will ever be free from needing it and how my photos will shift if/when that happens.

What I'm working on currently.

Stephen Shore,

Oh my goodness! I just read that Stephen Shore was only 14 when MOMA bought three of his photographs. That's crazy! I tried to find those photographs online but couldn't, I'm curious as to what they were.

South of Klamath Falls, Oregon © Stephen Shore, 1973

Rose

America Now Exhibit,

This yesterday, the 4th, I made the long trek 25 miles north of Boston to Beverly, MA where the Monsterrat College of Art was hosting the opening reception of their new exhibit, America Now. This show takes into account the main geographical zones of America and combines them into a spectacularly varied visual expression. Photographers Ben Huff, Alec Soth, Shane Lavalette, Zoe Strauss, Daniel Cheek and Laura McPhee contribute to the mix and bring some fantastically articulated views of the regions they explore.

Walking into the gallery space I was slapped in the face by this image by Laura McPhee, printed perfectly and gargantuan parallel to the entrance of the gallery. Online images do it absolutely no justice, its physical presence is awe-inspiring. Beside this gruesome scene of a sucessful hunt lies a Birch tree with a name and a year carved on it, reminiscent of the childhood obsession with making your mark on school desks as well as the adolescent romantic act of inscribing names on a tree. Those words are oddly juxtaposed by a hunting knife sticking rod-straight out of another tree and the scene of carnage enveloping it. The textures of the flesh are beautifully mirrored by the peeling Birch bark. It all is presented so close to the viewer, especially through such a large print, that it's completely real and tangible. Lining another wall McPhee has three more prints of landscapes, all equally as beautiful.

Zoe Strauss, who I had the pleasure of meeting and speaking with that night, has an impactful contribution to the walls as well. Her site-specific installation shows the down and dirty lifestyle of the Philadelphia inner-city. Her images are hard to stomach most of the time, I have a hard time being settled while exploring them. My only beef with the presentation of her images were the TACKS. Yes, tacks. Those silver, academic billboard stamps we've all come to know so well. They were stabbed completely through the prints in all four corners to affix them to the wall. I was appalled. I suppose she tends to go about things in a pedestrian way much of the time, so it was fitting, but I was so distracted by those damn pushpins!


I'm so glad I was able to see Shane Lavalette's photographs in person! He was also at the exhibit, I was finally able to meet him, along with his girlfriend Allison Beondé, who sells handmade books as Black Pine Books. As you might remember I interviewed Shane last semester for Kevin's class, and I've kept in touch with him. He lives in Somerville, MA, which is pretty close to where I spend most of my time here. He's a wonderful photographer and I hope to see him around more while I'm in Boston. His photographs looked fabulous, and included my favorite image of his (the first featured in the interview I linked to).

Alec Soth's four images his representative gallery presented to the show were ones we've seen before, from his series Sleeping With the Mississippi. I found myself noticing new details within their boundaries, the more I looked. It made me really think about how differently we experience a photograph outside of the internet, in person. I wish I could see everything in person, honestly. I have a better appreciation of it when I do.

Coming into the show I wasn't particularly familiar with either Daniel Cheek or Ben Huff's photographs, but I'm definitely interested in them now. Especially Ben Huff and his photographic series The Last Road North, about Dalton Highway in Alaska. I definitely recommend checking them out on his website. I appreciated Daniel Cheek's images but I felt the display wasn't fitting. They were all probably around 8X10 prints, matted in white and framed in a constricting grid pattern. Many of the images are darker and since they are printed so small they lose much of their ability for impact. I found myself sticking my nose into them to understand them better. They're much more interesting on his website, even.

Overall it was an ambitious show and I applaud it. A diverse and strong group of photographers and

Check out the artist's websites, they're most definitely worth a look:

Ben Huff
Alec Soth (+ Little Brown Mushroom if you haven't seen it already)
Shane Lavalette
Zoe Strauss
Daniel Cheek
Laura McPhee


Rose

Website,

I finally put up my website! Take a look, it's rosetarman.com. I'm open to suggestions if any of you have some.

Rose