Everything And Nothing

We like to watch

 

Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillnce and the Camera Since 1870 is a new show organized by the San Francisco Modern Museum of Art in partnership with London's Tate Modern. It opens Oct. 30 at SFMOMA. The show tracks photography's role in breaching the boundaries of public and private.

Works by major artists, including Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Nan Goldin, Lee Miller, Thomas Ruff, Paul Strand, and Weegee, will be presented alongside photographs made by amateurs, professional journalists, and governmental agencies, exploring the larger cultural significance of voyeurism and surveillance technology.

“Human hunger for seeing the forbidden has not changed,” says curator Sandra Phillips from SFMOMA. “This show explores invasion and the rules of privacy.”

At work with Annie Leibovitz

"Things happen in front of you. That's perhaps the most wonderful and mysterious aspect of photography."
~Annie Leibovitz

I just finished Annie Leibovitz's At Work. I expected it to be much more of a picture book, but it delves more into her creative process in planning her portraits and other photo shoots (which is right up my alley).

But, now that I'm done with her book, she's left me a list of many other photographers to study:

• Eadweard Maybridge's motion studies
• Harold Edgerton's development of the strobe
• Weegee's pictures of crime scenes
• Cartier-Bresson's photos of Giacometti running in the rain
• Barbara Morgan's photos of Martha Graham
• Melvin Sokolsky's models in a plastic bubble
• Alfred Stieglitz's mude portraits of Georgia O'Keefe
• Edward Weston's nudes of Charis Wilson
• Robert Mapplethorpe's early studies of Patti Smith
• Imogen Cunningham's nudes of her husband on their honeymoon on Mt. Rainier
• Weston's nudes of a dancer, Bertha Wardell
• Irving Penn's photographs of artists in old age (Colette, Picasso, de Kooning)
• Alexander Liberman's photographs of artists taken while working

And she added to my Reading List Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others.

Watching you, watching me

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner, who previously released three books of his photos (most recently, I Hope You Are All Happy Now), now  has his own photography exhibit at Fuse Gallery in New York City through Sept. 19.

His photography is an interesting take on the gazed upon gazing back into the void...

(And I feel an accordance with Nick now that The Yeah Yeah Yeahs "Maps" is the one song I always get to do on Rock Band - even when others are fighting for the microphone. 100% vocal performance score every time, baby!) ;)

One-A-Day in August

To catch me up:

Today's Pic of the Day

Yesterday's Pic of the Day

My morning cup of coffee (in my morning coffee cup)

The day before

Zeppelin takes a cat nap

I cheated the other days and didn't take a picture. I actually didn't realize it was August - as I had signed up for the Pic a Day Challenge in July. (Fittingly, my son asked me this morning if there was anything I had never forgotten - after I forgot to pack his lunch for the second day in a row. Just wait. He'll understand ONE day!)

But I will faithfully post my Pic of the Day here for the rest of the month. Unless, of course, I forget. ;)

To see all of the August One-a-Day photos on Flickr, click here.

Underwater Exposures

The Liquid Image Underwater Digital Camera Mask has a built-in digital camera that lets you take photos or video underwater. See video of the camera in action here.

Think Small

Photographer Lori Nix creates dioramas out of wood, found materials, foam and acrylic gel. She creates epic scenes in very small scale. Cool Hunting recently went behind the scenes in Lori's Brooklyn studio. They also posted an interview with Lori here. See more samples of her work online here.

Art in Mississippi: Lyle Bongé

"An ordinary thing, cleaned of its context, can have strength of form, exquisiteness of texture, and hanging in space, become magical."
~ Lyle Bongé

Lyle Bongé was born in 1929 in Biloxi. He was the son of two local artists, Arch and Dusti Bongé. While doing graduate work in anthropology at the University of Mexico, he bought a camera to record the trip. He served in the U.S. Army in Korea and ran a darkroom there for two years. When he came home to Biloxi, he began renovating houses for a living and began his photography career too.

Lyle is most well known for a series of photographs taken at New Orleans Mardi Gras celebrations from 1955 to 1981. The photos were collected in Sleep of Reason. “Shooting film in the French Quarter, 1964 was best for me,” Bongé said in his book. “Photographers were few and ignorant of what they saw. The streets were thick with people and the participants outnumbered the gawkers.”

In addition to photography, he is a metal sculptor, metal worker, and boat builder.

The Photographer's Eye

This book, long out of print,is based on MoMA's landmark 1964 photo exhibit. John Swarovski, a curator, gives readers a foundation for interpreting images. Celebrated works by such masters as Cartier-Bresson, Evans, Steichen, Strand, and Weston are juxtaposed with vernacular documents and even amateur snapshots to analyze the fundamental challenges and opportunities that all photographers have faced.

Read an excerpt here. (PDF)

Creature Feature

Photographer Andrew Zuckerman's Creature is a collection of 175 astonishing studio portraits of wild creatures from baby leopards to parrots, bears, mandrills, and many more.

Lots of sample pages and images are available here.

$37.80

Terra Incognito

Richard Sexton's black-and-white images of the marshes, forests and bayous of the American Gulf Coast are captured in his new book, Terra Incognita.

In the early 90s, Sexton moved from San Francisco to New Orleans and began making black/white landscape photographs of the Gulf Coast. Over the years, he slowly added to this body of work that began in the coastal regions of Walton County, Florida, and eventually encompassed landscapes in and around New Orleans, in other areas of the Florida panhandle, southwest Georgia, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

A limited edition of the book will be published by Chronicle Books and available through Richard Sexton's galleries and select booksellers. The gallery edition includes a linen covered clamshell case and an original signed quadtone pigment print of the cover image. The gallery edition is limited to 200 books.

$400

See sample inside spreads here.

A major exhibition of the photographs from Terra Incognita opened at The Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans on October 6 and will continue through January 2, 2008.