By Lorette C. Luzajic

The film was boring, moving at a snail’s pace, and devoid of the kind of crazy scandals of excess or intrigue that make art documentaries interesting. Legendary artist Gerhard Richter, while gracious and polite enough, was a reluctant subject for scrutiny. There were no salient revelations about the meaning of life. Even the most mundane and pedestrian personal details necessary to flesh out the basics of biography were missing in action. Still less was said about the history or importance of the artist’s vast and varied body of work.

But that said, there was something inexplicably compelling and charming about the documentary. I went in expecting to learn a great deal more about Richter and his ideas about art. This curiousity went unfulfilled, however, yet what happened in this understated gem was  more important and more rare- the audience became witness to process. There were no lofty discussions and dissections pitting art world elites over clamouring hopefuls. There were no hard-to-swallow claims about why a few accidental splotches were measures of genius or how muddy canvases demonstrated masterful strokes and composition. Instead, Richter freely confessed the joy of arbitrary application. He copped to the fact that “finished” was subjective, purely dependant on whether he liked the random results. Far from planning the placement of every drip and saturating it with supposed symbolism, he admitted the art works did what they wanted.

The film touched on Richter’s work in different media, including astonishingly realist paintings. But the appeal the film had was to be found in watching Richter work on his abstracts. Viewing this process made us itchy to get our hands wet and hair dirty, to view painting as an action verb. We painted vicariously through the artist, immersed fully in the plasticity and tactile sensory experience of wet paint. Witnessing the sounds of the brushes and squeegees, the hesitations between applications, the transformation of texture, was extremely liberating. I am most certainly not the only one who rushed to my studio after the movie to play until the wee hours of the morning.

Lorette C. Luzajic’s website Idea Fountain.

This gorgeous piece can be seen on the corner of S 6th Street and Kent Avenue in Brooklyn, N.Y. If anyone has more info about this piece please drop a comment.

Examples of her recent paintings…

Across the Nile

Eau de Parfum

Gloomy Sunday

See more of Mia Araujo’s on her website Art By Mia or on her Flickr and check out the exhibition.

Samsonite 1960 via

Jantzen 1950′s

Westinghouse 1954

1960 – Radiation Therapy – Vanadium Corp. of America

Source

Bell Telephone 1961

Western Electric 1960

Western Electric 1959

Source

AAA World-Wide 1967  via

Dodge Dart 1968 via

Chef Boy-Ar-Dee 1960 via

Lifesavers 1960 via

Kitchen Craft Pancake Mix 1960 via

Pink Dove 1960′s via

Ultra Brite 1967 via

Klopman Mills 1961 via

Red Ball Summerettes 1961 via

American Tourister 1968 via

New York Tourism 1960 via

Reddi Wip 1956 via

This ad is quite interesting. It promotes consuming Campbell’s Soup in a unique way…as a drink. Beef Broth mixed with water, add a large splash of lemon juice and voila…a Frisky Sour.

Campbell’s Soup 1962 via

This Computer Augmented Portrait series was chosen to be part of the Royal College of Art’s Paradise exhibition in Milan’s Ventura Lambrate district.

Visit John Rainey’s website to learn more about him and his artwork.

via we heart

Click here to view the embedded video.

Shot with two Nikon D5100 and
Sigma 10-20/3,5
Nikkor 35/1,8
Nikkor 70-300/4,5-5,6
and some ND-filters

Learn more about this project at Time4timelapse. The site is in Swedish.

This is all that is left

Finding Home #1

Finding Home #2

The show runs through June 11, 2012. Visit Mariell Amélie’s website to see more of her work.

Of Greek origin, Dimitra Tzanos was born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa and currently lives in Athens. You can see more of Dimitra Tzanos’ illustrations on Behance.

You can purchase this lovely conversation piece on Etsy.

Death Valley is a dark comedy/mockumentary TV show which follows a group of police officers as they try and quell the rise of vampires, werewolves and zombies that have appeared on the streets of California in the San Fernando Valley.

Credits:

Advertising Agency: McCann Erickson, Belgrade, Serbia
Creative Directors: Vladimir Cosic, Jana Savic Rastovac
Art Director: Nenad Dodic

Images from Death Valley:

Police Force

Death Valley Zombie

Via: adsoftheworld and MTV Serbia

Check it out…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Every time you buy from Good Books, all the profit goes directly to fund projects in partnership with Oxfam.

Extra Credits:

String Theory in New Zealand presented the script and Antfood added the audio stylings.

by Lorette C. Luzajic

It’s a question that has vexed me for decades now, but I’ve come to I accept it won’t be answered. If you are an artist or an art aficionado, it has probably plagued you, too: “Why am I profoundly drawn to some works of abstract art, and not at all to others?”

Planetary Chaos 2012 – Lorette C. Luzajic

This cannot be answered with the usual platitudes about pleasing composition and masterful use of colour. These may play into our responses, but the way we experience abstract art is more visceral than this. Art is always subjective, and despite centuries of scholarship and millions of pages and countless brilliant, creative minds,  the answer to why some people like some art and others don’t and vice versa remains elusive. Still, what we like and dislike about abstract art is itself abstract. “I like the colours/textures/lines/patterns” becomes meaningless when another piece with similar favourite colours or patterns falls completely flat.

In Understanding Abstract Art, Frank Whitford talks about judging abstract work. “…Pollock, far from relying only on chance while painting his pictures, exercised a high degree of control.” By contrast, he argues, the work of a monkey named Congo  featured only “daubs.” This work showed, “a monotony about the kind of mark he made and a lack of discrimination about the colours he used which reveal a lack of intelligence. Pollock’s works by contrast are carefully considered.”

Painting by Congo the Chimp

I’ve always been mildly irritated by Jackson Pollock’s work. I find them monotonous and unchallenging and they lack pleasing symmetries and the colour combinations don’t work for me. Clearly, many disagree, some enough to pay millions of dollars. I didn’t mind Congo’s creation and did not find a “monotony of mark.” I found a pleasing, positive energy.  I don’t believe that Congo “carefully considered” his work. Thing is, I don’t think Jackson Pollock did either.

Those who are moved by his art cite its dynamism and high paced action. His work is physical; it is flinging, pouring, moving. That energetic quality is interesting or exhilarating. It’s not remotely similar to the detailed, meticulous work that marvels in scenic watercolours or oil portraits. It’s powerful for other reasons.

The Weight of Secret – Lorette C. Luzajic

Still, the question remains- why don’t  other highly original, energetic pieces appeal in the same way? And why do I prefer the gestural strokes of Franz Kline over the constellations of paint that Pollock created? Arguments that some applications of abstract work are more controlled, more sophisticated in skill level, more considered and careful, are sometimes  preposterous and usually miss the point- that the imagination, emotion, experiment and the tactile elements engage the viewer. The audience participates, it could be said, with the paint and other materials. It is true that anyone can make an abstract painting, and anyone who says otherwise is also missing the point. But it is also true that whether or not anyone likes it is a precarious blend of emotion, attraction, and being in the right place at the right time.

The infamous experiments that occasionally resurface use monkeys or children  to create artworks; then, the images are judged blindly by some combination of random population, art intellectuals, artists, etc. Sometimes school kids’ work has been submitted to juried competitions, etc. The point of such experiments is to prove the accusation often leveled at artists and critics along the lines of, “even my five year old can do that!”

Time and time again, the art world is caught with its pants down, so to speak. For me, it is futile to try to prove that there is a specific, measurable answer to what makes abstract art good or bad art. Feigning elite skill sets rather than exuberant (or vicious) creativity sets us up for these embarrassments. Abstract art isn’t about the same levels of drawing, perspective, practice, control. It is about pushing these boundaries and standards to the side in favour of play, in favour of temper tantrums, in favour of dance, gesture and movement. Abstract is about creativity, emotion, and purely subjective aesthetics. Acknowledging these things and not trying to puff phony academic life into the purity of abstraction would be a wiser strategy. The popularity of abstract art speaks for itself. A better defense came from pop artist Iaian Greenson, who was once challenged with the old “anybody can do it” line. Yes, anybody can do it, but they didn’t. This simple acknowledgement captures the essence of abstract art- the doing. It may well be that only an idiot would buy it, and it may well be that the work is given way too much emphasis and analysis in art theory. But those are separate concerns from the making and the audience response. Make your own- it’s fun, you’ll see.

At a recent Salon for Artists, a meetup I’ve started hosting in my neighbourhood, we talked about an abstract piece on the cover of a local art magazine. It consisted of two pieces of cardboard box, each painted with only one small red circle, created by Micah Lexier. An art professor at the discussion suggested that the artist may have laboured for hours considering at what exact point he should place the circle. This, he argued, might require as much consideration as studying to play the flute, for example. One of the attendees was a very accomplished musician in classical music as a flutist.

Things Exist – Micah Lexier

I didn’t think there’s any comparison- painting a red dot versus learning a sophisticated symphony. Not all efforts are equal. For me, this was too much like denying that everybody can be an artist, when clearly, anyone can put paint on canvas and open themselves to this liberating, cathartic world of imagination. The difference, as Greenson wryly stated, is that some do and some don’t. As an artist, I know that not every dot I lay down is a skill or stroke of genius- and that hardly matters in the context of abstract. Art is also about imagination, invention, aesthetics, and the about the audience itself.

If it did take him hours to place that circle, I felt, it shouldn’t have! Curiously, though I didn’t think this work should cost anything or that it merited making the cover, in truth I really liked it.

Later, the art teacher was thumbing through my book. He came across an ancient piece, an abstract with rhythmic scribbles on a red background. Behind the lines, just a bit blurred from view until one focuses, it reads “fuck you people.” When he said, “You have made the same painting as this cardboard and dot,” I was instantly able to understand what he saw in Lexier’s work, and why it appealed to him enough to defend as he had.

But this gets tricky, too, because we don’t know if the artist’s intention was “fuck you” since it’s not clear- it’s abstract. We don’t even know if the artist’s intention is “open to audience interpretation.” For all we know, the piece might be about communism, or menstruation.

Exposure – Doug Trump

Rollicking debates abound all the time on the merits of even the great geniuses of all time- Shakespeare, Michael Jackson, Tolstoy, Van Gogh. In this little list, there is one I worship who blows me away, one I’ve always loved, one whom I respect with every fibre of my being but find boring unless I have help, and one I find tedious and think is a jerk. You too, have your ideas about each one. If such magnitude of talent and oeuvre is received with inexplicable subjectivity, how indeed can we hope to pin down an abstraction?

Art theory is filled with phony intellectualism and I abhor the kind of academia that purports to a deeper understanding but is actually a bunch of lofty bs. There are many who purport to an answer; critics who will find it obvious that someone who doesn’t like or “get” Rothko knows nothing about art. Of course, this is just a conceit, since along comes a spider- some Ivy Leaguer who expounds on why critic A is an uneducated fool.

Scarecrow – Clark Mitchell

We also know about science and reason, how symmetry and ratios make appeal scientific. This is what artists refer to when they talk about the Golden Mean.  It’s evident of course in human biology, the hourglass woman and triangular male torso and the fact that most people find people with more symmetrical faces more attractive or trustworthy than people with other kinds of faces.

But even here, this doesn’t account for the constant variations in taste. There are thankfully a few men who prefer chubby women, and lucky for me, some of them are wonderful or hot and some are even both. Even a miniscule variant in percentage for taste yields countless numbers who disband from the majority. Why am I obsessed with Adrien Brody, for example, who is gangly and all nose? The Freud in me says it’s probably because some of my earliest “special feelings” in adolescence were for, ahem, Barbra Streisand. But there are literally millions who hanker for Brody while millions more prefer the more scientific prototype of Brad Pitt. I highly doubt they shared my early awakenings via Funny Girl.

Untitled – Monique Mouton

So the mathematics and proportion of symmetry and composition certainly play a big part in how we respond to abstract art. But it still can’t explain why its very opposites are often more appealing, or why we might suddenly like the use of green even though we usually dislike green, or why we like Harold Town’s abstracts more than Walter Yarwood’s. And it can’t explain why the dull graphics of Jack Bush are always a wise investment.

One thing I notice in my own response is that money and market change for me the meaning of the work, and I have to keep the banking distinct from aesthetic. I don’t mean some things aren’t worth selling- I want all artists to sell anything they can. Sell what you want, buy what you want. To any artist who can earn income from applying paint to a paper or canvas (or glue or pastel or ink or whatever), I cheerlead you for living happy and for making space for me. What I mean is that I have to judge, for example, the cardboard dot piece separately from its price. If this kind of thing, or a giant “red” canvas or something, is billions of dollars, then I feel the whole thing is a joke. Most certainly I can make my own polka-dotted cardboard box and avoid going bankrupt.

Leap on Blue  - Jack Bush

But if money isn’t discussed, I judge work not on whether someone would or should pay but on whether I like the aesthetic or emotion. Maybe I love a giant red square and think it would look great on a white wall or in a modernist room.

Of course, this opens new philosophical paths. What’s a reasonable price? And is using a red square to furnish a room “art” or just decorating? I don’t think decorating is a bad use of art, either- but I don’t think wallpapering or painting a wall is “art.” Yet, the imagery on wallpaper might be art, no? And if I throw paint at the wall, like Pollock did on his canvas, would it then be art? And would the answer depend on whether I liked how it turned out or not?

There are many answers I could close with, since you want to know what I discovered about taste and subjective attraction and the appeal or lack thereof of art to various individuals. The Golden Mean, the “consideration” of Pollock which Congo lacked, the symmetry of biology, the seduction of beautiful.  All of these answers are true, but they are all dishonest. Why are some lines and dots more beautiful than others? And why does that conclusion change between two people of similar background or even the same genetics, with one finding your beautiful ugly?

Alas, there are no answers. The best I can come up with over my lifetime as, like George Costanza, an art adorer, and also as an artist, is that I’ve accepted that there is no answer but that these discussions are still worth their ink and oxygen.

That’s because reflection and lively conversations and rigorous disagreements are invigorating and they change the way we see things. Mulling over art and the meaning of life has constantly inspired both personal expansion and societal revolution throughout history.

It’s sometimes hard to share with someone an elusive thought- words may fail, or maybe words are to no avail because you both speak a different language. Pictures help convey what we see, and in turn, we can look at how another sees. Art, abstract art, and talking about it literally helps us to “see eye to eye.”

It also helps us “get in touch with ourselves.”  In still another abstraction, I think that abstract art helps us accept our own taste, to come to terms with our quirks and peculiarities and embrace them. It helps us grow to trust ourselves, to believe its okay to tune out some claptrap about “subtle brushstrokes” and dismiss something, or to respond positively to something unpopular because it evokes emotions that we cherish.

Maybe there’s little point to waxing poetic about such things, but every time I view art with a friend or stranger, I come away knowing so much more about both of us.

Lorette C. Luzajic

Avocado Ear Studs

Taco Pendant

Rainbow Cake Charm

Ham and Cheese Necklace

Cream Puff Pendant

Chocolate Bobka

Gingerbread House

Cauliflower Ring

Barbeque Platter

Not only are they impeccably designed, they make great gift ideas for chefs, foodies, and miniature enthusiasts. All are available for purchase on Aaron’s Etsy site.

Alexander Lukashenko

Fidel Castro

Tagline: “50 years together with you cutting down the voice of oppression”

Credits:

Advertising Agency: Euro RSCG, Prague, Czech Republic
Creative Directors: Pavel Sobek, Eda Kauba
Art Director: Jakub Kolarik

via

by Lorette C. Luzajic

My photography is full of mistakes. And I use the most basic, generic of cameras. I don’t know how to use Photoshop. I do use some touchup and cropping tools in iPhoto. I’m not philosophically opposed to alteration or technology as part of art. I’m all for it. But my enhancements are minimal regardless, because my technical skills are rudimentary.

Becoming a photographer was, itself, an accident. I’d only meant to pick up a cheap digi cam in order to give my editors  helpful snapshots with my writing assignments. Then I thought about collecting “found images” for my collage image bank. These found images would be ones that had not been frozen into ink and paper yet, images I might see on the streetcar or in a meadow but not be able to tear out of a newspaper or scan. With this tool, I’d be able to nab even more options to use in my collage work.

Oscar 2011

A collagist is always looking, always deconstructing and reconstructing. From dentist waiting room magazines to church hymnals to Renaissance religious masterpieces at the museum to nightclub flyers, my mind is constantly snipping, juxtaposing, gluing over, scraping back layers, recontextualizing.

A digital camera meant that the image bank I could work with would be limitless. Curiously, it never occurred to me that photography would appeal to me in its own right. Like all of the best and most traumatic love affairs, it blindsided me and changed my direction and added dimensions to my life that I could never have imagined.

What attracted me most at first was the digital camera’s ability to satisfy my manic desire for mass production, for “lots.” Being able to whir through countless pieces meant instant gratification.  I’m an impatient artist with a constant flow of new ideas.  I get bored working on one subject or project and crave variety. My creativity is torrential, my thoughts are fast, and the best way to relieve the pressure from within is to let the floodgates open. The greatest strength of my collage work is how crowded and busy and full it is. This is also its greatest weakness.

There is truth to the adage about “quality over quantity.” There’s something studious and essential about the subtle, careful, finely tuned attention to a masterpiece. But it ain’t me, babe.  Nor do I concede that the quality over quantity mantra is more important than it’s less quoted inverse. One can come up with valid arguments about the experiential aspects of quantity, about that manic process of absolute creative upheaval. No matter that some output from those tortured, ecstatic experiences should be crumpled and tossed. All of life will be crumpled and tossed, in time.

And so, I was trigger happy from the outset, elated at the sheer volume of imagery I could produce with this thrilling little machine. The first rush came to me as I realized that a memory card could hold some 700 photographs or more- for the low grade one! Had I even taken 700 photos in my whole life? Here, I could load results to my screen and assess and weed out and choose little gems; instantaneously directing traffic through hundreds of rivals, ruthlessly deleting, thrilling at the swift transfer of colour and texture and portrait from my visual findings into trimly polished, vibrant pieces.

The Boot 2011

I reveled in the vast quantities, in the instantaneity, in the immediacy. It was a different kind of mania from the maddening, exhilarating mess of tempura paints and Chinese ink and piles of paper and clippings and glue. And before I ever got to the scissors and paste, I saw I wanted to leave many of the pieces in tact, not to add to them or take anything away.

The next aspect of the appeal in this medium was the opposite of the first. For all its quantity, there was something pared back in this version of my visual expression. I had never done anything pared back. The utter simplicity of finding an image and leaving it untouched by scraps and layers was new to me. These were singular images of experiences, a kind of “one at a time” record of what I saw.   All of my art and writing has been about seeing, but now I was actually looking at- dissecting- the way I saw. Resisting the urge to add and subtract and cut and paste, I found this streamlined expression deeply satisfying. A good photograph takes only a second to make. Yet each photograph actually took one’s whole life to get to it.

It took a bit of courage to start identifying with photography as a main medium like writing and collage. As I often joke, I don’t even know how to use a camera! More and more often, colleagues and clients have started to identify me with three media of expression. It’s true that David LaChapelle had no qualms about convention. “I didn’t have enough credits to graduate,” he said, “so I just went to New York and started calling myself a photographer.” I do not have David’s outrageous spirit or greatness in me, but still I took inspiration from this. Who says? is something I’ve always said. My “self-taught” studies have always been far more intensive than my official scholastic ones, and so I began them.

First I looked at photography magazines and got lost and a little angry because every photo was clinically broken down into technical jargon about camera type, number, setting, etc. It was way beyond me, and it depressed me since my personal point and click seemed so insignificant. I desperately wanted a DSLR, or at least something with more buttons and thingamajigs. But for now, such a step was out of reach. I knew I could best learn by getting out there and just taking thousands of pictures, discovering what worked and what didn’t. “The greatest education in the world is watching the masters at work,” Michael Jackson said. And so I also began studying the photography of said masters and learning about their lives.

Soon I started getting a question from time to time. It offended me at first. “What kind of camera do you use?” people asked. I would cough and mumble, “just a little point and click.”

Not long after, I had a revelation. It’s not the camera.

It’s not the camera. I am the camera. The eye is the camera. That’s all the camera is, an eye with a recording device. It’s not the camera. It’s me. The camera is incidental.

Now I have second thoughts about upgrading to a good camera. What if my lifetime oeuvre of photography is an exploration of what I can achieve entirely with the most basic of tools? While I desperately want to experiment with exposure time and wide angle lenses and super zooms and so on, the idea of a limitation or handicap to spur creativity is fascinating. I became a collage artist because I could not draw, and have made a thousand pieces that I would never have made or thought to make if I didn’t have that particular impotence. I might have a whole lot of bowls of apples or landscapes. Instead, I forged through a serious impediment to find unexpected expressions. The “who says, just do it” ideology has been ultimately liberating for me, now in photography so far as well as in my other forms of art. I have never felt the need to wait for a better camera before starting to take pictures. Indeed, taking pictures, and looking at pictures, is more elemental, more fundamental in importance, to all the other aspects of the art.

At a Groupon workshop, the instructor explained to a roomful of amateur photographers his ideas about all cameras being the same. He said that from the first daguerreotype equipment to the most sophisticated modern technology, a camera is a camera is a camera. He asked everyone to introduce themselves and talk about their pieces. I was embarrassed to be the only attendee with a point and click. When asked why I chose this model, I looked down and replied that it was “under fifty bucks” and it was the “pink one.”

After everyone had had a chance to brag about their cameras, the question changed. “How many of you took your camera to work today, and out to walk the dog last night?”

Well, that was a given. I held my hand up high. Then I hastily took it down, since no one else had theirs up.

Then the instructor began to glow with a holy light. And he said, “The best camera is the one you have with you.”

You plan to have a camera with you if you’re hunting for photos or staging a shoot. But many of the best pictures are accidents. They are the things you see when you aren’t looking for anything in particular. The truth is, beauty and curiousity often come about when you least expect it.

One day I was returning with milk and apples from the grocery by my house and went to press the crosswalk button.

Butterfly 2011

And perched there, also poised to press the button, was a monarch butterfly. The sun was bright, the button and butterfly were both orange, the light was perfect. For a sinking second I realized I hadn’t brought my purse for the five-minute excursion to the store. But the fear was short-lived- my camera was in my coat pocket.

Snap, snap, snap. Got him.

As my image collection grows, I get the question more and more often. “What kind of camera do you use?”

I recognize it as a compliment. “It’s not the camera,” I say now “Thank you.”

And the camera’s great, but so many times, it’s just because I saw something interesting and I wanted to save it, by any means necessary. Sometimes the things I saw, I saw by mistake. The camera is there to record it, that is all.

One Easter morning, my very beautiful, precocious niece came into the kitchen in her little-girl finery. The bizarre light through the waffle door haloed around her. She was holding her six-toed kitten. The light was all off but I knew taking her outside would mean we’d lose the kitten. The picture came out technically awful- yet it’s one of the  favourite photos I’ve taken. My niece looks like a poster for a creepy horror film, The Orphan or The Innocence or something of this ilk.

Girl with Cat 2011

Pink Paint

On another occasion, I got off the streetcar at the wrong stop. There was an ugly magenta  building with peeling paint- another “found composition.”

Then, strolling through the same cemetery I visit regularly for walks, I saw something I’d never noticed before- a grave called “Cheer.”

Cheer 2012

One day I was hurrying along to an appointment and thank my lucky stars I took one side street and not another. There was a construction site and a truck. The truck said, “Mammoth Erection.”

Mammoth Erection 2012

This is how we learn to take great pictures- you’ve got to live with your eyes open. Colours and textures are everywhere. There are uncanny juxtapositions, funny or surreal tableaus, stunning pockets of beauty, everywhere you go.

Scrapyard 2011

One of my favourite photographers is Walker Evans. I was writing about him when I came across a reflection by Walker’s colleague, photographer Bruce Jackson. “People keep asking me what kind of camera I use,” Bruce reports his friend saying back in 1974. “I tell them it’s not the camera. It’s this.” Walker pointed to his eye.

Well, that was validating. One of the greatest photographers of all time had espouses my exact philosophy long before I’d heard of him.

There’s a similar story about Walker that has become legendary, recounted slightly differently by a number of sources. Once upon a time, Walker was asked what kind of camera he had used for a particular shot.

His disgruntled response was something along the lines of, “that’s like asking a writer what kind of typewriter he used to create his stories.”

The Image Fountain

Lorette C. Luzajic’s first coffee table book is a collection of her photographs called the Image Fountain. Visit her at www.ideafountain.ca.

If that doesn’t make sense…watch the video…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Mind-bending!

If you’d like to see the card unfolded check out Kelli Anderson’s notes on the card on her blog.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Beautifully executed and hauntingly surreal!

Credits:

Drool (2011)

Directed by Jeremiah Kipp

Produced by Laura Lona / Mandragoras
4 minutes / B&W

Notes from the director Jeremiah Kipp: My friends at the Mandragoras Art Space wanted to make an experimental short film with me, and I had become interested in making low-tech horror movies with special effects made from household objects, in this case condiments. It’s an incredibly simple narrative, meant to provoke something in the viewer. The drool in the movie can stand in for whatever you want: addiction, amniotic fluid, something sexual, something demonic. When you complete a film, it no longer belongs to you; it belongs to the audience.

by Lorette C. Luzajic

Photography is a way of seeing with a third eye, of looking at that which is not before you. Who has not spent a part of their youth, chopping and gluing with stubby fingers images from National Geographic? Reassembling these strange pictures, we created panoramas in dreamtime. These photos showed us beaches and deserts and strange dances and colourful streets that nourished our imaginations. Even now that we are used to a proliferation of photography, images still have the power to transport us to another time and place.

It is difficult for anyone living today to imagine a world without photography. It is so ubiquitous that we take it for granted. Magazines of every possible interest arena are liberally illustrated with their subjects, from baking to kayaking to haute couture bridal to pets. The news is not the news without photographic documentation. The weekend is not the weekend without movies.  It is inconceivable that we have a birthday, get married, bury a loved one, or go through a holiday without snapping souvenir memories of every event. And coffee table books are simply a curated collection of photographs about a particular theme, from trains to Princess Di, that invite browsing with a cup of coffee or a glass of red wine.

But before 1839 – and really, for the average person, before mid last century – there was no way of seeing the world beyond. Never could a friend show you what their sweetheart looked like, and never could you hold precious photos of a deceased child or mother. You could never see their faces again! The descriptions of historical, political, and cultural events sound corny when we read them today, so heavily laden with descriptives desperate to impart a sense of being there with only words. Catalogues of products used simple quaint graphic illustrations, now a gold mine for collage. Upon reflection, the impact of the absence is staggering- how much could be hidden, denied; and how much we would simply never be exposed to.

Jill Krementz - E.B. White

Naomi Rosenblum’s seminal A History of Women Photographers is in a sense, a record of secrets. Like any collection of good photographs, it thrills with the joy of looking that is so integral to human curiosity. But as with other fields and histories, women were, as Rosenblum points out, “scanted in the general histories of the medium from which most people gained their knowledge of photography’s development.” She prefaces the volume with a listing of significant texts on photography’s history and notes the paucity of information and visual reproduction. Listing texts of record and study, she shows that the representation and documentation does not come close to parallel with the actual work of women in the field, who have been “actively involved with photography ever since the medium was first introduced in 1839.”

Nelly (Elli Neraidari) – The Russian Dancer

Rosenblum seeks to restore balance and repair omissions in the record. But this is not an attempt of homogenizing women’s work or showing a “female gaze.” Perhaps it is quite the opposite. Men and women are not the same: the idea that we are was fashionable only briefly; wishful thinking that has been firmly discredited by science. We are not blank slates who happen to differ only because of different coloured paint used in our nurseries. Still, it is equally as preposterous to compare men’s and women’s perspectives, as if there are only two points of view, as if all men perceive things in one way and all women in another. Here, the only thing the represented photographers have in common collectively is that they are female and that they are photographers. It is the variety of vision that matters here most. The stunning selection ranges from portraiture, photography as art, the feminist vision, photography as information, and more, with very diverse perspectives within each framework.

In addition to filling in some of the blanks about the history of photography, such a collection fills in blanks in history itself. Logically, it follows that if women’s photographic work has been shorted from the record, then the imagery on that work has also been less visible and even invisible. These stories – of the photographer and of her subject- have sat in wait of revelation for too long.

Belle Johnson – Three Women

Anyone who studies this collection will conclude that women have a superior sense of composition to male photographers because with almost no exception, every photograph is a lesson in the art of composition. The rule of threes and the breaks in said rule that are interesting; the balance created by intrigue and movement in shapes and contrasts; the seemingly intuitive weight of centering and off-centering of subjects; the perfect harmony that flows through photo after photo. But I suspect it is not every woman photographer who has this flawless sense of composition: I go out on a limb to suggest it is Naomi Rosenblum, who has curated impeccably with an instinctive eye for the best. I look forward to acquiring her other tome, A World History of Photography, to see for myself.

Lisa Fonssagrives – Penn & her son, Tom, 1955

Beyond the consistency of quality of every single photograph, there are also surprises on every page – women in burkas running down the street in Alexandra Bouat’s Looters In Baghdad; Lois Greenfield’s Untitled depiction of motion and male physical form that easily surpasses the power of any Mapplethorpe; Sally Mann’s provocative Jessie at Five which renders the viewer almost uncomfortable under the powerful and sensual gaze of her daughter; the absolute beauty of an elderly woman asleep in Judy Dater’s Consuelo Cloos; portraiture that veers from tradition through upshots like Lisette Model’s Singer, Sammy’s Bar and profile duo like Kathryn Abbe’s Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn and Her Son, Tom; the exquisite  contrast of  diaphanous tableau and graceful motion with the fierce, solid lines of the dancer’s body in Nelly’s (Elli Seraidari) The Russian Dancer; the eerie trilogy of another century’s women, all with hair past their waists, in Belle Johnson’s Three Women. Perhaps my favourite photograph in the book is completely uncharacteristic of my usual attraction to busy, ornate images- Jill Krementz’s portrait of E.B. White. With the Charlotte’s Web author seated in the corner of an empty shack, there is nothing in the photograph but the subject, his typewriter, an ashtray, and the contrasting lines and angles and shapes of the boards, a window, wooden table and barrel. Its starkness is somehow moving; the simple, lonely work of writing feels like an emotional all its own.

Sally Mann Jessie at Five

In conclusion, Rosenblum’s book is invaluable as a documentary that seeks to provide missing links in the record of the history of photography. But as an act of curation quite apart from scholarship, it is indeed something of a book of secrets. I have spent countless enchanted hours here roaming back and forth in time, transfixed by so many ghosts.

Humans have a penchant for seeking magic, dabbling in all kinds of experiments that might bring them closer to understanding the puzzle of existence, the mystery of it all. We flock to sold out stadiums where some charlatan will say, “I sense the letter M.  Did someone lose a loved one whose name starts with M?” We try to decipher meaning and information from the pattern of entrails or the lines in our hands. I spent much of my life trying to decode such messages myself, seeking enchantment, seeking ways of understanding the great mystery. What escapes devotees of such inane and primitive rites is the real secret, that true magic is obvious, not shrouded or available only to a chosen few. Art has always come closest to the divine as anything, and with photography, the marriage of art and science provides us with a direct link, literally, to other worlds and back in time. Photography allows all of us to be shamans.

It is astonishing how many “ghosts” we have at our fingertips. Photography has allowed us these past couple centuries to begin documentation of humanity, of ordinary individuals as well as kings and great beauties of time. I shudder to think how much magic we would all be robbed of if Marilyn Monroe had been born before the camera! Preserving stories, faces, surroundings, customs, happenings, in portable two-dimensional formats that anyone can share- the magic of this actually boggles the mind. Here, this is my father, this is a house before it was bombed to the ground, this is Billie Holiday, this is a flower that withered a hundred years ago, all captured in a lens, preserved forever, made out of paper and light.

Visit Lorette C. Luzajic at www.ideafountain.ca to see her photography, books, and art.

P blue and purple composition

Composition in red and turquoise 2011

20 gauge 2011

Front facing beige composition

To see more of this series please visit Lorette’s Flickr page. You can also see more of her work on Idea Fountain.

Through his dynamic structures, Kielnhofer invites the viewer to an intellectual debate and to philosophical and intellectual stimulation. This work is based on philosophical thinking patterns that are complementary with social impact through application and interaction. Variables such as materials and urban positioning, give the work of art a unique versatility and applicability.

Whether moving, static, bright, swimming, driving, busy or isolated freestanding – the action itself defines the fine line to use artistic design, or art-oriented design to use. ”The moment you try the artwork in my thoughts and words to capture, one realizes that this task almost limitless variations, offers viewpoints and approaches. Kielnhofer redeemed by shape and material, resulting in an avalanche of application functionality and solutions / results on different levels of perception.” Artist Manfred Kielnhofer will appear in the upcoming issue 9 of EYES IN Magazine.

Visit Kielnhofer.at/blog to see more of his contemporary design works.

Images provided by Kielnhofer.at/blog and Technik Design