Reservatio Mentalis

Steve Miller - Still Mirrors

andrew atkinson — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 06:01:00 +0000

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

andrew atkinson — Sun, 05 Feb 2006 19:08:00 +0000

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.

recent work

andrew atkinson — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 05:24:00 +0000

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...

Noah Addis

andrew atkinson — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 05:25:00 +0000

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

Recent images

andrew atkinson — Sun, 25 Sep 2005 03:48:06 +0000

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

andrew atkinson — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 01:44:00 +0000

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

andrew atkinson — Mon, 15 Aug 2005 00:45:00 +0000

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

andrew atkinson — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 14:36:00 +0000

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

andrew atkinson — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 12:58:00 +0000

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.

Basement image again

andrew atkinson — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 00:36:00 +0000

Another basement photograph. Heck, I'm still happy taking them, and the camera's got the range to deal with the situation - unlike my SLR. In fact it doesn't even exploit the full dynamic range.

Its strange how you relate to the world through something as laborious as this - I went up three stories to my apartment window to check on what the clouds were likely to do - and consequently what kind of variations were likely in the light; I cursed the helicopters flying too close - the vibrations of the blades could be clearly felt on my skin, and I was unnerved that they were likely to wobble the slightly rickety camera that I'm using; the wind has a strong effect on the rendering of the foliage; the shape of the lens' viewpoint was clearly innured in my sensorium, I could see the cone shape and what was going to fall within and without of the lens' purview.

In these regards the photograph is the centre of a process, the pulpit around which the dialogue revolves in symbolic and other visual linguistic ways but also in terms of the reality of the shooting circumstances. In this sense the photograph opens up a world, demarcating and revering, recording in spite of itself, in spite of its impotence.

Beyond the image there is also a clear relation between the technology and, in this image, in the rendering of the penumbra on the floor, the rich way with which it handles the transition, and the discreet clarity of various elements in the image. I don't want to talk about that 'though. 'Art and technology' is an old old argument - look up techne and heidegger - and I can't do it justice, although the first link's a pretty good summary of techne, but suffice it to say that old mr contentious' philosophical position is very useful for artists, as it rearranges an old problem by giving the total artwork primacy and not fragmenting and relegating the artwork to other questions: 'what is it about', 'what is it a picture of' and so on.

dicomed problems

andrew atkinson — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 01:33:00 +0000

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...

more of the same

andrew atkinson — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 04:07:00 +0000

I'm afraid its the inevitably of producing the same sort of thing, but in a different context. I'm perfectly aware that I seem to gravitate towards images of a form of transcendence, or more readily of the failure to transcend. Its unfortunate, but that seems to be the lot that I've granted myself. So:

It might be just what I read into this though... You know: glowing gates hidden behind other gates...?

On a more prosaic note, as I'm scanning these images straight from reality in 16 bits, or rather a 12-bit image wrapped unneatly in a 16-bit file format, photoshop seems to get confused. Don't get me wrong, photoshop does a good job of handling most things that you throw at it, and handles this well enough too. As the images aren't colour space nor bit depth processed - and are in that sense raw - but aren't RAW data, just raw data, which everyone knows isn't so fashionable. It also means that because the data is 16-bit, and your screen is 8-bit, its having to make some fairly blunt decisions about which data to represent. Normally this isn't a problem, photoshop handles 16-bit RAW with a degree of aplomb, if not a degree in aplomb (i.e. it stinks in most areas, but mostly in the areas that you have quite happily lived without for quite a while and will hand over cash for later on), but when dealing with some of the curve processing (see gamma) that is necessary with the dicomed's 12-bit in 16-bit data photoshop doesn't render on the fly so well. If you apply those curves to the base data through flattening the layers of an image, then no problem, no posterising, no weird generalised guesses. However, you lose the flexiblility of a curves adjustment layer. A nice an' quick go around to this (which is useful for other reasons too) is the athletic keyboard shortcut of command/control + shift + option/alt + 'e' when you have an empty layer targeted, which merges visible layers and pastes the result into the empty layer leaving the original data free but the rendering engine seems to prefer it. And you'll prefer to, if for no other reason than it gives more concentration on the 'um, why did i take this shot' aspects of an image, and less on the 'what is the computer doing again?' aspects. Its a small battle won against the leering hordes of disorder but worthwhile I assure you...

Staircase and noise

andrew atkinson — Sat, 23 Jul 2005 01:31:00 +0000

Another new image, from the scanback, from the apartment block. I love the shape of the building and its light, its quite seductive and gentle, and the mixed daylight/flourescent lighting gives interesting colour. Apart from that and the typical compositional 'escape!?' conceit (up the stairs and, boom!, you're thrown out the picture top right, only to be dragged back in through one of the closed doors dammit), I've yet to discover what these images are for or about. Maybe its just that.

Throwing meaning aside, technically, this one was a bit of a disaster. I took three scans but the dicomed crashed at the very end of the third - it often sort of crashes giving a 'serial communication error' box, but retains the image anyway, but on this occasion, confirming to tradition, its lost the data. The image is still the composite, or averaging, of two images, the idea being that you get better information in combining the two images. Within any photograph there is information and there is noise. Noise is principally increased when you increase the ISO, and inversely with the tonal value - there's more noise in the shadows. (This is a much bigger problem with digital cameras than film, but present nonetheless.) However, noise is transient - noise will vary from image to image, and sometimes usefully, if you're taking pictures of the same thing. So, with an utterley static image, if you take the image twice and combine the two images you get an increase of 1.4 of the information to noise ratio and with four images you get double the information.

Unfortunately, I think that I must need at least 4 images to get the image that I would like. I'm not talking about the information to noise ratio particularly, that is just a bonus for me, but the banding problems that are happening because I'm shooting in flourescent light. Flourescent lights vary in their brightness and in their colour temperature - and they are particularly bad in the blues. Consequently, I'm getting massive colour variation in horizontal strips across the image, which get better - or more realistically less worse - with each successive scan that you add into the mix.

Finally, here's a concise and clear tutorial on noise reduction through averaging in photoshop.

basement image

andrew atkinson — Sat, 23 Jul 2005 00:34:00 +0000

The first image from the new scanback of the basement of my apartment block.

Formally, the dicomed gives wonderful detail - through having one pixel scanned by each of three channels rather than interpolated as it normally is, and through the fact the it can register eight stops of light in tonal latitude. (This is compared to seven for regular negative film, five for digital cameras and four for slide film.) Because of this there is more sensitivity in high contrast scenes, for example when you are pointing the lens at a light source. Unfortunately, the sensor - I think - doesn't have any anti-blooming gates on it, which means that when the sensor gets far too much light, the excess of light 'pours' into the next pixel contributing to the colour and value that. The result, which I've doctored out, is a big smear across the image from goes from the light source to the right.

Handling the camera is a very beautiful experience. Large format photography slows the photographer down to a crawl, the investment in time then reflects in the consideration of the image, in the subtle nuances that can be played. Also, the size of the image, and the nature of the lens give a very different play between the focus and the depth of field. There isn't the same dramatic jump from one to the other as there is in 35mm wide aperture photography (nor the inconsequentional depth of closed down apertures in 35mm), its more of a gentle almost invisible shift, it slowly, genteely but quite inexorably guides you around the various parts of the picture. Through it, everything seems more and less real. The detail begs you to believe in the particles of the world, a world built from atoms up but the subtle shifts which seem slightly different from and alien to our own natural vision question this and question overly simplistic empirical veracity.

The process of taking the shot becomes illusionary: as you look through the ground glass screen compares with the psychological experience of being in a camera obscura. The image floats in the glass, upside down, dim and very quickly fades away from the centre whilst you hide underneath a dark cloth. You need to continuously adjust your position to see different parts of the image, and to an extent composite them in your mind more consciously than with other types of camera. After basic composition, and whilst looking through a lupe this effect is intensified - you're dragged into a tiny fraction of the image, laterally scanning the flat tenuous image captured on the glass of a supposedly four dimensional world, hunting for the image.

Along with the eye moving the body engages with the scale of equipment, the continuous changes in environment - under the cloth, in plato's cave, and at the moment sweating in the horrendous heat - out of the cloth in the reality that looks similar but is disconcertingly distinct - and disembodying most of yourself to narrowly concentrate in the digital realm of taking the scan. After only a few adjustments the process of taking another 30 second 'polaroid' prescan becomes a symbol of the investment into the image - this shot took 30 minutes of setting up, 'exposure adjustments', colour balancing, recomposing, and digitally checking the focus before commencing on a 20-30 minute exposure.

Another photography portfolio

andrew atkinson — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 02:07:00 +0000

Another day, another portfolio to look at, this time from a student of mine who is striving to find his voice and succeeding often enough for me to feel that I'm saying at least something right. Ivan Asin has been following people like Wolfgang Tillmans and has a similar sense of colour and levity of touch which I feel will bode him well.

However, please bookmark, or del.icio.us, his URL (or URI if you are so inclined) because his address is almost as cryptic as the DaVinci Code, and unfortunately about as memorable...