Greta Gerwig ...

"I love that movies are a reverse magic show. I think magic is always about making something appear that wasn't there, like making a bird come out of a hat or a bunny or something. And what I love about movies is it's all this weight, like cameras and sound equipment and people and lighting and costumes and makeup and it's all this weight and all this stuff and all this effort and then it disappears into 90 minutes of flickering light, and that's a reverse magic show. It takes the physical and makes it spirit, which makes me sounds crazy, but that's how I feel."

http://www.littlewhitelies.co.uk/features/interviews/greta-gerwig-31350

"...wishes she could talk again with 'that photographer lady'..."

What happened to the 9-year-old smoking in Mary Ellen Mark's photo?


"This photograph raises a lot of questions and leaves me with a slightly uneasy feeling," says Jeff Jacobson, a New York photographer and a friend of Mark's. "That, I feel, over and over again is the hallmark of her best work."

Tintype for celebrity portraits

http://www.boredpanda.com/vintage-photography-sundance-celebrities-tintypes-2015-victoria-will/

Great portraits - intimate but not intrusive...

Mobiles pics from Sony World Photography Awards

From the HuffPo:

"Sony on Tuesday announced the winners of the Sony World Photography Awards' Mobile Phone category.

Mobile is just one of many categories in the competition. Others include Professional, Open and Youth.

There were more than 96,000 entries across the Youth, Open and Mobile categories. Mobile alone saw 10,200 photo submissions, and winners in the category were chosen by an online vote from a shortlist of 20 photos. The entry that won first place got 6,718 votes, Sony says."

Sony photography competition - mobile

Interesting article about war photography

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/08/the-war-photo-no-one-would-publish/375762/

"Not every gruesome photo reveals an important truth about conflict and combat. " This is true of course but different things resonate with different people.  The photographer in this case says that he could “see clearly how precious life was to this guy, because he was fighting for it. He was fighting to save his life to the very end, till he was completely burned up. He was trying to get out of that truck.”  

Being able to look at the face of death is surely more powerful for some than scenes of corpses which become almost abstract, so desensitised are we.

Creative constraints of 15 seconds or less...

Creating a compelling commercial was never an easy task. But the continued shortening of message formats and increased user control over ad-viewing has agencies facing new creative challenges: how to lure consumers into watching a commercial they can easily skip, and then tell them an interesting brand story in 15 seconds or less.

http://digiday.com/agencies/15-seconds-less-creative-constraint-short-video-ads/

Sound effects

Interesting piece here about sound effects. It reminded me of the Berberian Sound Studio, which I wrote about six months ago and has stayed with me for all that time.

scraping dry ice across a contact microphone and combining it with a woman's high scream recorded backwards... the sound of dog food being slowly sucked out of the can... a pistachio nut being destroyed by metal plating... the cries of the pigs, slowed down to sound unearthly

In a more cheerful/less traumatising way, it also put me in mind of this, which always makes me smile...

When Tom Waits released the album Blood Money in 2002, the pre-release notes mentioned a mouse tambourine and a journo asked about this in an interview:

"Instruments utilised include piano, cello, pump organ, hand bells, circular violin, spring drum, marimba, calliope, timpani and mouse tambourine. l ask about the mouse tambourine and he laughs. 'Oh, you know what,' he says, bending over and rolling up his right trouser leg 'See these boots here, they have this buckle,' He wiggles a small silver buckle at the top of his black motorcycle boot. 'Well, during most of the songs I was tapping my foot and there was a lot of room mics in the studio, and so when we listened back to all the songs my wife's going, "What the hell is that?! That *tsk tsk tsk...*"' We just couldn't figure it out. Finally, she said, "Dammit it's those boots. I told you not to wear those boots. It's on everything!" And she got so upset!' He laughs. 'We tried to get rid of it and couldn't, so finally we just had to call it the mouse tambourine." ("Conformity is a fool's paradise" Time Out London (UK) by Ross Fortune. February/ March. Published: April 24 (- May 12), 2002)

Sourced from the Tom Waits Library: http://www.tomwaitsfan.com/tom%20waits%20library/www.tomwaitslibrary.com/percussioninstruments.html

I also love this: "On 'In The Colosseum' we used the Conundrum. This was an instrument that was built for me by a neighbour of mine who's a sculptor and a welder. It's just an iron cross with a lot of metal hanging off of it. it sounds like a jail door closing behind you."

Matt said he has video of our friend Pascal, who is a wizard with stringed instruments, tuning our ukulele. Just down the street there were some construction workers smashing a lot of glass and it created a great effect. I would like to explore this idea but with more subtlety - and a point to it - so I will have to think about that more.

Wildfire wedding photo

Glad they made the most of this opportunity:
http://www.stylist.co.uk/life/as-wedding-is-evacuated-married-couple-pose-for-incredible-wedding-photos

Tom Waits and mise-en-scène

http://noisey.vice.com/blog/what-tom-waitss-movies-taught-me-about-style-2014

More on context...

http://themetapicture.com/famous-photos-from-a-different-angle/

Context

This seems kind of relevant to what I will be thinking about for my course this weekend:

http://www.boredpanda.com/funny-unexplainable-wtf-pictures/

Copyright debacle

Oh good grief! http://petapixel.com/2014/04/21/band-responds-worst-way-possible-stealing-photographers-work/

The band responds saying "all forms of digital art should be free".  

Unbelievable.

Short film about scottish folklore and superstitions

This is wonderful:

http://aeon.co/film/scottish-folklore-and-superstitions/

Taylor Wessing winner

http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/news/2306586/spencer-murphy-wins-2013-taylor-wessing-photographic-portrait-prize

Emin, Murray procrastinations

This did entertain me (it is a few years old, I know) although I can't help liking some of Emin's work. She actually always strikes me as being a true artist to the core. I just wonder how much the money machine and the marketers add to the apparent tawdriness of it all. The art world is no country for old men anymore.

But now for some completely different:  a Bill Murray tribute!

I really should be studying.

Across the Ravaged Land

Absolutely beautifully composed images by Nick Brandt from Lake Natron in Tanzania....

Across the Ravaged Land by Nick Brandt

Brandt's website

Interview with Frank Ockenfels

"It was all natural light. There’s nothing to it. I teach classes and I teach people not to overthink things. People get nuts and think they need all these lights. I’ll have people show up to my classes and they’ll tell me all these things they want to do, and I’ll tell them to go over to Home Depot and buy a light. They say, “That’s only 12 bucks!” Or, I’ll say use your cellphone. There are a million things you can do that doesn’t require a truckload of equipment. "

http://www.popphoto.com/how-to/2013/08/interview-photographer-frank-w-ockenfels-iii-shooting-breaking-bad?src=SOC&dom=fb



http://fwo3.com/

Virgin Media Shorts

Some superb short films in the Virgin Media Shorts competition. I particularly liked this one as it builds intrigue and has a lovely punchline:

Vivian Maier

Wow - this is just amazing....

http://www.messynessychic.com/2013/02/18/found-at-auction-the-unseen-photographs-of-a-legend-that-never-was/

The woman in the red dress - Istanbul

Interesting thoughts on visual culture and the protests in Turkey: here