5/30/2013

LES RENCONTRES D'ARLES 2013




Ever since I become a photographer I wanted to go to the Photofestival in Arles (France). But for the last 30 years I never was able to do. During studying  I couldn't effort it, afterwards I never could find the time to go. But this year, finally, I will be there from July 1 to July 7. And I am really looking forward to join the festival, to participate in the portfolio review, to meet fellow photographers - and to experience again the beautiful landscapes of the Carmargue and the Provence.
Have a look at the festival's program yourself - and maybe we will meet in Arles ;-)
FACES

Some more impressions from the "Step Forward" Festival in St. Petersburg. Keep in mind that all of this artists have some disabilities - blind, deaf...








5/23/2013

LIFE IS GOOD...

Yesterday I met a boy. Five or six years old. Bright, high spirited. Can't resist a piano, when he finds one he at once sits down and starts playing. And he likes to sing. He is full of music. And he is blind...


And this blind boy is sitting on the stage and is singing "Life is good".





One has to reassess his own priorities from time to time...

5/22/2013

NEXT STEP FORWARD

This "Step Forward"-Festival in St.Petersburg is really fascinating. All this Masterclasses, Workshops and Concerts they organize for children and young people with disabilities. And one sits there and listen to the beautiful music and almost forget to take pictures...


At the Masterclass...
...and at the concert in the evening at the St. Petersburg Philharmonia


5/21/2013

TIME OUT
(at least a little bit...)

The not-so-tough schedule of yesterday's festival program gave us the opportunity for sightseeing...

In the Palace Gardens of Peterhof











P
PETERHOF 
series of palaces and gardens, laid out on the orders of Peter the Great, is sometimes called the "Russian Versailles". The palace-ensemble along with the city center is recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

In the Palace Gardens of Peterhof


PAVLOVSK
In 1780, the fashionable Scottish architect Charles Cameron was made responsible for construction the Grand Palace of Paul I in Pavlovsk. His Neoclassical design for the Grand Palace was approved by Paul two years later. Around the palace a huge English park was laid out, with numerous temples, colonnades, bridges, and statues.


[cd]

5/20/2013

A STEP FORWARD...

The first day of the festival was quite chaotic ... As usual - so that later everything is going well, it was needed to lose sometimes the addresses; getting lost in St.-Piet's streets a couple of times, scaring off the (illegal) parking attendant; argueing with security, irritateing a little bit the orchestra conductor...
And as a result there are a lot of wonderful pictures of absolutely amazing and very talented children who sparkled today on the stage of the Great Hall of the S.-Petersburg Philharmonie. Here are some of the kids - all three of them are 100% blind...

Ekatherina Zaharov, Violine. 











5/19/2013

ST-PETERSBURG or MEANWHILE IN RUSSIA...

Early-early at 6 o'clock in morning of 18th we started to drive from Moscow to the  cultural capital of Russia - Sankt-Petersburg.
Spending only 2 hours for first the 100 km, we arrived there after 9-10 hours without any  further adventures ...

The aim of our trip is to photography, assist and just look to lovely children coming from all over Russia to participate at the Festival 'Fist Step', organized for the sixth time by Valeria Socolovskaya - a wonderful and very pretty woman.  But this is another story...

St.-Pit greeted us unexpected - with nice girls taking sun bathes in the middle of Nevsky Prospect...
[vp]



Рано-рано в 6 утра,
стартовав из Москвы, потратив только 2 часа на первые 100 км пробок, через примерно 9-10 часов пути, полностью лишенных приключений,
оказались мы в культурной столице России г.Санкт-Петербурге...

Приехали мы фотографировать, ассистировать и смотреть на замечательных детишек со всех концов России, приехавших на фестиваль "Шаг на встречу", который уже в шестой раз организует замечательная Валерия Соколовская, о которой нужно рассказывать отдельно.

Питер всретил нас совершенно неожиданно и очень весело - очаровательными девушками, возлежащими на мостовой прямо посередине Невского Проспекта...

Мы решили, что это - добрый знак и надо будет как-нибудь самим такой досуг повторить... Осталось только уговорить Криса одеть мини-юбку...

5/17/2013

THINK ABOUT IT...

Just found this blog entry (its from 2006, but imho still very up to date...). It is really worth reading, especialle for those who think they have inventied photography... ;-)



"...during the latter half of the 20th century, one of the distinguishing factors between "famous" and "who cares" was representation in New York galleries and publishers."


5/12/2013

PINHOLE PHOTOGRAPHY AT ITS BEST

Sometimes one can find real marvels browsing in older photo-magazines. Like this pinhole photo objects by Jessica Ferguson.





Jesseca Ferguson is a pinhole photographer, living, working and teaching in Boston, MA. Find more of her work at her website.


The poetic aspects of pinhole photography are what draw me to it. Although the pinhole camera is ‘blind,’ because it has no viewfinder or lens, I find that it ‘sees’ in mysterious ways. The pinhole camera’s ‘sight’ grants infinite depth of field to the object and images before it, thus allowing us to see the camera’s pinhole vision, which is characterized by the odd clarity of dreams or memory.

Working in my home studio and using only natural light, my exposures often take several hours. I then contact print my images on artists paper using 19th century processes. Often I collage my pinhole images onto antique book boards, incorporating snippets of text and time-stained papers. The resulting ‘photo object’ alludes to the passage of time, and to that private interior library which I believe serves as a paradigm for collective and personal memory.

My work is slow, hand-built, and cumulative, rather like the layering of dust or memories over time.“







A pinhole camera is a simple camera without a lens and with a single small  aperture – effectively a light-proof box with a small hole in one side. Light from a scene passes through this single point and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box.
[cd]

5/11/2013

IN EUROPE AGAIN...


and the 'Welcome' was quite nice... ;-)


At Zurich Airport

Next two days i will do some preparations for my trip to St. Petersburg. 
I am going there by car -  so: m. t. c.

5/10/2013

GLASS FLOWERS 

  Amazing collection of glass flowers at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.
More then 3.000 models of various plants, entire made of glass made from 1887 through 1936. The life-size models include 847 species, with remarkable accurate anatomical sections and enlarged flower parts.

Yes, it is glass...
[cd]
NUDE IN PHOTOGRAPHY 1950s - 1960s

Very nice article "Naked woman on photos 1950-1960s years"
15 Photographers with their vision of the beauty
Article is in Russian, but "Only the picture contains the message" as Chris Dematté said :)


Lucien Clergue

" After the war the 40s reflected even in pictures of naked girls that, the world was waiting for romantic, light-heartedness and love...
At this time the photography is divided into documentary photography (which captures the real world around through the lens of a photographer), fine art photography (working with abstractions and illusions), and the applied photography performing a specific function.
In nude stile happened the same but with some exceptions. There are almost documentary photography, such as by the Dutch Sanne Sandnes, and experiments that represent the female body as a geometric or sculptural piece, like by Ica Philander, or made using innovative techniques and methods as pictures by Lucien Clergue, and applied photos for magazines, postcards, advertisements, such as Bert Stern's photo shoot with an almost naked Marilyn Monroe for Vogue. The last category is increasing because of grow up popularity of pin-up images, the development of the celebrity cult, and especially after the appearance in the 53. issue of magazine Playboy, formally legalized the whole direction of erotic photography..."

Good week end start for everybody! )

v.p.

5/09/2013

DEFINITELY...

...no way in.

...out of order.

...not Marlboro Country anymore.

...needed sometimes. ;-)

5/08/2013

MULTIMEDIA - OLD STYLE

Yesterday I have been to an event hosted by Boston's Photographic Resource Center (if you ever come to Boston, have a look at their website before, there are always interesting events, workshops and lectures). At this event, an auction of rarely seen portfolios and prints from the PRC vault, I discovered a portfolio of a photographer I never heard about before: Todd Walker. It was a portfolio of 21 prints from 1980, called "Fragments of Melancholy". I was immediately fascinated by the mixture of different art technics he used. So I did some research to learn more about him and his work (and no, I was not able to purchase the portfolio at the auction - couldn't compete against the Bostonian upper class people at the auction ;-)).

So here is a little bit I found out:
Todd Walker (1917-1998), an American photographer, printmaker and creator of artist's books, is known for his manipulated images and his use of offset lithography to produce individual prints and limited-edition books of his work.

An innovative technician with a continuing interest in alternative printing processes, Walker played a role in the late 1960s and the 1970s in expanding the prevailing attitudes about creative photography, pushing against the conventional boundaries of the practice. For the last thirty years of his career he was also a devoted educator at a number of universities.

From the colophon of the Portfolio:
The type, handset Garamont & Bembo, roman and italic, with a little Century expanded & Bankscript, was proved on a Vandercook 215 proofing press. From my original camera negatives, either film transparencies or silver prints were the first visual step. The halftone negatives are of 200 lines per inch. Each of the twenty sheets was printed from four to eight times an a 'Zenobia', my Royal Zenith 14x20 single color offset lithographic press. The inks were hand mixed on the press as each color was to be printed. All phases of the conception, preparation and printing were done by Todd Walker.

This mixture of different kind of typesetting, photographs and paints, is what fascinated me. Unfortunately i couldn't find any pictures from the portfolio "Fragments of Melancholy", but here are some other examples of his work - and just remember: this has been done long time before Photoshop...




If you ever learn about some of his portfolios for sale, please let me know...

5/07/2013

CITIZEN KANE

Can Anybody remember the brilliant movie "Citizen Kane" from 1941 by and with Orson Wells? Well, I can - and so my first association seeing this dinner was with this movie...
Playing around with some Color Efex Pro Filters...




5/06/2013

NYC Impressions

Some quick editing...







SUNDAY IN NYC

Before returning to Boston I spent a lazy sunday in New York - together with most of NYC inhabitants, as it seemed...

Bildunterschrift hinzufügen

Two of NYC's icons: "New York's Finest" and Yellow Cabs

No Barking anytime

5/05/2013

IF YOU CAN MAKE IT THERE...


Arrived around noon with Amtrak from Boston. New York is one of my favorite places. I was just walking around, visited an exhibition at the International Center of Photography, played around with the little Fuji...
Here are some impressions:

The shadow of the Empire State Building 


At the ICP
Fightclub
At Tom's Diner
The city that never sleeps

 m.t.c....


5/04/2013

BOSTON STRONG II


Today I visited the locations of the two bomb explosions on April 15, which killed three persons (amongst others an eight year old child) and wounded almost 200 others. On previous visits to Boston I have been many times on Boylston Street and Copley Square. Shops and restaurants I have visited earlier are still out of operation. On Copley Square there is off-the wall memorial.


Several hundreds of running shoes - donated by participants of the Boston Marathon








We will run again...
Memorial for the death of the Marathon bombing and the MIT-Policeman killed during the hunt for the assassins

5/03/2013

WORLD PRESS FREEDOM DAY

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."


Today is the World Press Freedom Day. According to "Reporters Without Borders" until now in 2013 19 Journalists were killed and 174 imprisoned.
More at the website of Reporters Without Borders...
BOSTON STRONG I

After about eleven hours in planes, I have finally arrived in Boston. With six hours time difference (from Austria) my inner clock is already set on friday - so only a short input today. 

Traveling light has a great advantage: Everything fits into one bag (a Think Tank Retrospective 40) - camera (Fujifilm X 100s), computer (MacBook Air 13"), external drive...and still space enough for personal things.

At Munich Airport - after eleven hours in planes maybe not so a bad idea...


but first a light dinner. ;-)
m.t.c....

5/01/2013

GO WEST


Boston, MA




Tomorrow I will fly to the USA (again). Travelling light this time. No big backbag full of photographic equipment. Just one small camera with one lens (a Fujifilm X100s). So it will be a new experience for me.
Going to Boston (which is, from my past experiences, a very open and liberal city) after the bombings of 15/04 - what has changed?

Looking forward visiting some exhibitions there (e.g. Bruce Davidsons's look at the life in 1960s Harlem at the MFA) and strolling through the galleries.

m.t.c....