Reservatio Mentalis

Steve Miller - Still Mirrors

Steve Miller, a recent photography student at Montclair State University, and emerging photographer, has a website of his work up.
Well worth a look.

LET02505_003
Originally uploaded by Steve_Miller.

Awards Scholarships etc

I'm lucky to have an arts related opportunities email sent to me every day, on top of whatever friends are sending me. I've started posting these into del.icio.us, and have added a page here which will draw that information into this website.

Hope it's useful to you.

Noah Addis

Briefly: interesting new site by NYC photographer Noah Addis. Beautiful large format photographs of suburban decay and sublime light pollution abound.

recent work

glass 7
Originally uploaded by blind sam.

Some recent work on glass and my first tentative steps at investigating the theme on the absurdity/impossibility of purification. My usual aiming high to fail in an interesting manner.

This is just an initial sketches, others are here, here, and here and elsewhere...

Recent images

hotel poznan 3
Originally uploaded by blind sam.

Here's a few images from my recent trip to berlin and poznan. I ended up in this quintessentially polish hotel, naturally by accident - the hotel I had 'booked' with hadn't gotten my reservation. (It was a last minute rush so I don't blame them all, plus I'm just lucky in these ways.) So, I ended in this somewhat second tier place, which mostly hadn't been moderized, and retained considerably more history than the rest of Poznan's hotels which where culturally buried under the perestroika explosion of typical global faceless accomodation.

Also in its favour as far as I was concerned , it had slavic sadness throughout, the bizarre harshness of eastern european architecture (which is every bit as generic as the corporate west, just less familiar) and a terrible silence - with the exception of my room's 'plumbing' which sounded like a lawnmower having a go at a wasp's nest for five or six minutes at a time.

Some other Images.

subway shots

subway with bluescreen
Originally uploaded by blind sam.

I'm not a fan of subway shots, there's something a little too easy about them and the alienation of the subway's invasive space a little too common and inarticulate. Even mr. Evan's 'many are called' portraits stumble into the banality of it, finding what is common rather than a greater truth or interest in it. That said, there is something interesting in that the character types and the attrition remain the same now as then.

Given this generally dismissive attitude I have towards the shots, I naturally present here, here, and here three of my own! Except the virtue of the ever-presentish document has been absolved as I try to composite away its unthinking self-righteousness. (Lies are far more interesting and open to a greater flexibility which, to me at least, makes them closer to something true than that bulldozer-like truth.)

bookshelf

bookshelf
Originally uploaded by blind sam.

Like most people's facades, a bookshelf is all too telling when read with sympathy, empathy and the terrible honesty of a cold eye.

This image is part of my continuing americanisation of what I do, a form of visual lateralisation - a thinning and widening of the remit of the instituted and internal discourse of the image, looking more at the US tradition of photography. Principally looking through the highly literary high priest of modern photography walker evans.

The picture is probably unfinished. I've yet to decided if its just a testimony to a recent personal event, part of a previous series or part of a newly formed series which the other large format pictures constitute. Stay tuned - but I warn you the thrill you'll get when I finally decide will not even register a flutter upon your heart on medicine's finest instruments.

If it isn't finished I may have to replace some of the images in the frames from being related to becki's (former significant other etc) to my own past, or another subject. Remember: this is in part a picture of the real world - I do enjoy the contingent meanings that accrue because of how the real world is coherent or at least richly layered, but also note that I'm not always slavish to it, and enjoy badly retelling other's jokes.

Mapplethorpe at the Guggenheim

The current show at the Guggenhiem in New York, Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical tradition: photographs and mannerist prints unusually displays it faults, virtues and idiosyncrasies clearly in the title (not entirely uninhibited by the serious scholarship soundingness of it). Its obviously an ambitious show - viably having the words 'mapplethorpe', 'classical', and 'mannerist' in the lexical petri dish isn't easy. Before looking at the central rationale of the comparison of mapplethorpe to a body of prints, lets momentarily pick at the use of terms classical and mannered.

Classicism, a idea which embodies the notions of harmony balance, order, but mannerism which, although not a total collapse of classical virtues is definitely a mutagenic order different. Mannerism emphasises drama in its composition and overwraught exaggeration in its figuration. This is quite clearly distinct, yet the title of the show is either trying to gloss over these differences, or perhaps reading more generously, point the viewer to a more heterogenous exhibition, where the various works of Mapplethorpe are placed somwhere along this line. No mean amount of Mapplethorpe's work viewed through these terms can be split into these two camps reasonably easily and with relative success. Some of his works such as this piece have all the hallmarks of a contemporary classicist in action: beautiful rendering of tone and skilled lighting, in its distribution of form, simplicity of composition, celebration of admirably athletic but not absurdly steroidal muscular bodies and so on. Its undeniably beautiful, and very clearly classical. As is this, as is this. Even when you get work such as this with its blend of acceptable clarity and oh, hello!, the member is positioned so precisely with the balls intersecting the line of the table, and the just-so-clean silhouette, activating the negative space around the little fellah and the legs, its hard not to see a basically classical sensibility at work. There's no pr0nish absurdity that you might associate with mannered composition, but a refined, and neatly timed, um, introduction. Yeah, sure its got the domesticated leather clad s&m thing going on, but that hardly swings either way on the classical-mannerist pendulum; and the some of the more obviously stylised propositions (par example), are, in this case, still determined by a careful arrangement of limbs inersecting, creating relations and selected harmony.

However, the basic conception of pitching the prints against the photographs is neatly done, albeit sometimes a little superficially. It works best when done very directly - in the first alcove-room up the ramp there are actual sculptures of mercury and so on compared with Mapplethorpes rendering of them, and the lack of pretense in this is really quite informative and enjoyable. Mostly its encourages the viewer to start to look closely because the comparison is undeniably transparent, and you can embrace working out how RM made the translation rather than working out if there's anything beyond the juxtaposition other than the trite "see - they're both circular", which was dangerously close to derailing my credulity into cynicism.

Both the seductive photographs and the florid prints are enjoyable unto themselves, and both benefit (here and there) from the comparison, although what stands out most is mapplethorpe's love of beauty and the mannerist confusion between a body's muscle groups and something with more undecided lumps than a Gehry reject.

google pedometer

google pedometer
Originally uploaded by blind sam.

Somebody has implemented a pedometer for google maps which allows you to track the distance that you've run or jogged.

Here's my bike ride from yesterday, and the permalink to have a nosey at the journey too, which is a really nice feature - so you could map your journey, or maybe discuss a route that you and your pack of joggers might take and so on. (But without all the terrible inconvenience of having to actually look at a real map, with the real people present - in other words you could do it whilst at work).

What's bizarre from my perspective is that is that last night, when I got back from my wander, I wanted to know how far I'd travelled and knew roughly, but as I got a little lost when coming back up the east side of the island and 'misplaced' the Greenway path and ended up cycling up 1st ave, across harlem and back up the west which I knew, I thought it'd be interesting to be able to plot my route. And then kazam in the morning the vestal design blog had posted this. Spooky.

dicomed problems

door 3rd attempt
Originally uploaded by blind sam.

I thought that I'd just point out this scan. Its a first, and hopefully just a really odd glitch. I'll think about it later.

There may even be a way to process this into some kind of reasonable shape. Its obviously got the information in there, but in a really mangled form.

This second image shows the more common scan line problem, which I can do nothing about. Perhaps I should just make sure I prescan the scene before every 30 minute scan, even, as in this case I don't alter anything...

I sort of like it really...